Jane Stanford's death contains an unusual paradox.
The medical mystery is not particularly mysterious anymore.
The identity of the murderer is.
The Honolulu physicians saw symptoms strongly associated with strychnine.
Chemical testing detected strychnine.
The bicarbonate contained strychnine.
Jane had survived another strychnine exposure only six weeks before.
A coroner's jury explicitly found that poison had been introduced with criminal intent.
Modern Stanford historians and museum materials now describe her death as an unsolved poisoning rather than simply a heart attack.
What remains uncertain is who placed the poison there.
That distinction matters.
For decades, the uncertainty about the killer was turned into uncertainty about whether murder occurred at all.
Those are not the same question.
Jordan's natural-death narrative blurred them together.
If nobody could identify the murderer, perhaps there had been no murder.
Modern scholarship separated them again.
The evidence for poisoning can be strong even when the poisoner's identity cannot be established beyond doubt.
Richard White believes the strongest answer is Bertha Berner.
Other historians remain more cautious.
David Starr Jordan had motive to benefit from Jane's absence, but lacked direct opportunity to poison her in Hawaii.
Bertha had opportunity in both locations and possible motive and means, but no confession, definitive physical evidence or criminal prosecution ever established her guilt.
Other household members had access during portions of the timeline.
The exact moment when the poison entered the bicarbonate bottle remains unknown.
The murderer died without being publicly identified.
The more certain story concerns what happened afterward.
Jane's death removed the most powerful individual influence over Stanford University.
Jordan remained.
The institution moved forward.
The murder narrative faded.
A version of the university's own historical website would continue presenting heart disease as a plausible explanation long after researchers had made the poisoning evidence public.
Only decades later did Stanford begin openly examining the contradiction.
Today, the university itself hosts discussions titled Who Killed Jane Stanford?
Its historians write about the poisoning.
Its museum presents objects connected to Bertha Berner and David Starr Jordan.
A current Cantor Arts Center exhibition explicitly describes Jane's death as an unresolved murder mystery involving strychnine.
That transformation may be one of the most interesting parts of the story.
Institutions often preserve history.
They can also shape it.
For decades, Stanford's institutional memory softened the death of its own co-founder.
Now Stanford scholars are among the people dismantling that old story.
And the object at the center of the mystery remains almost absurdly ordinary.
A bottle of bicarbonate of soda.
Today it is called baking soda.
People keep it in kitchen cabinets.
They bake with it.
Some people use it occasionally as an antacid.
Online, it is frequently promoted as a supposed “miracle remedy” for all kinds of conditions, many of those claims greatly exaggerated.
But baking soda did not kill Jane Stanford.
That distinction matters.
Someone allegedly used an ordinary container as a delivery system for something else.
Strychnine.
The harmless-looking powder gave the poison a place to hide.
That is what makes the final evening at the Moana so effective as a mystery.
Jane was already afraid of poison.
She had already survived once.
She had fled California partly because she believed someone there wanted her dead.
She had crossed an ocean.
She was staying in a hotel.
She was surrounded by a much smaller group of people.
And she still could not escape.
Return to January 14.
Nob Hill.
Jane reaches for the Poland Spring bottle beside her bed.
She drinks.
Bitter.
Immediately wrong.
She forces herself to vomit.
The bottle goes to a chemist.
Strychnine.
Someone tried to kill her.
The attacker failed.
Jane leaves California.
February 15.
A ship pulls away from San Francisco.
Jane believes distance might protect her.
Across the Pacific.
Honolulu.
The Moana.
Picnic.
Warm weather.
A pleasant afternoon.
February 28.
Back at the hotel.
Jane asks for bicarbonate.
Bertha retrieves the bottle.
A spoonful is prepared.
Jane eventually takes it.
She goes to sleep.
Then wakes in terror.
Her body no longer obeys her.
She calls for Bertha.
A doctor comes.
Her jaw tightens.
The spasms begin.
Jane understands before anyone has completed a chemical test.
It has happened again.
This time she cannot force the poison back out.
Within minutes, she is dead.
The doctors preserve the glass.
The spoon.
The medicine.
The contents of her stomach.
The autopsy follows.
The poison is found.
The coroner's jury reaches its verdict.
Someone deliberately placed strychnine into the bicarbonate.
Unknown person or persons.
Then David Starr Jordan arrives.
The story changes.
Heart failure.
Indigestion.
Natural causes.
The poison becomes inconvenient.
The murder investigation disappears.
The university survives.
Bertha receives her inheritance.
Jordan keeps his position.
And Jane Stanford is buried beside the husband and son whose deaths had inspired her to create the university in the first place.
No arrest.
No trial.
No conviction.
More than a century later, we can identify the poison.
We can identify the container.
We can identify who was in the room.
We can reconstruct the previous attempt.
We can document the effort to discredit the murder verdict.
We can even identify the person one leading Stanford historian believes most likely responsible.
But we still cannot cross the final distance between suspicion and proof.
Someone tried to poison Jane Stanford in California.
She survived.
She traveled nearly two thousand miles away.
And six weeks later, someone reached her again.
The first dose failed because she tasted it.
The second was hidden inside something she trusted enough to swallow without fear.
And perhaps the most chilling detail of all is that Jane Stanford spent her final seconds knowing exactly what had happened.
She had escaped the poison once.
She knew its attacker was still somewhere around her.
And as her body began to seize in a Honolulu hotel room, she realized the person had finally succeeded.