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JANE STANFORD, wife of railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, achieved wealth

fame.  However, her life was not easy.

 

She and Leland traveled by wagon from their east coast home to Sacramento, California in 1856. Several years later, she returned to help take of her mother while Leland continued working his profitable mercantile business.

 

Jane and Leland had not been successful in producing any children. 

Was it the stress of living in a frontier California town or the anxiety from Leland running for (and winning) the California governor’s office in 1860?  

 

Then, in 1864. Leland joined with C.P. Huntington and others to start the Central Pacific Railroad, a very risky investment.  

 

By 1868, thanks to Chinese workers, the Central Pacific conquered the Sierra Nevadas and was building across Nevada.

 

For nearly 18 years, the Stanfords were barren. Then, the miracle they’d prayed for happened. Jane, at 39 years of age, produced a son.

 

Leland Stanford Jr., born in 1868, was all the Stanford’s could hope for. Leland Jr. was intelligent, an excellent student, and was destined for great things.

 

He accompanied his parents when they vacationed on their numerous trips to Europe.

 

As Leland Jr. approached his 16th birthday, Jane and Leland planned a Grand Tour of Europe. Not long into the trip, though, young Leland fell ill. While in Athens, he was diagnosed with typhoid and sent to Italy for treatment, but doctors could do nothing to aid him. He died, two months shy of his 16th birthday, on March 13, 1884.

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The Stanfords approached Harvard offering to fund a  building in honor of their son.   Reportedly, Harvard declined their offer adding "we don't want your West Coast money".

 

Thus, Leland Stanford told his wife. "The children of California shall be our children,” And, with that, they established Leland Stanford Jr. University, a most fitting memorial to their son.

 

The school opened in 1891 with Jane and Leland governing the school. Two years later, Leland Stanford died, joining his son in the family mausoleum on the university campus. Jane was left alone to run the school and the family estate.

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The school immediately rose to become a top university, especially with women.  In fact, Jane Stanford had to limit the number of women students.

 

Although tremendously popular with the students, Jane Stanford was rumored to sometimes clash with the university’s board of trustees. 

 

There were even murmurs that some members of the board would prefer

to run the university without her influence, a wish they were granted

in 1903 when she transferred all rights as a co-founder to the board.

 

In 1905, Jane, age 76, chose to retire from her administrative role citing a desire to travel.

 

A few days before her departure for Honolulu,  Mrs. Stanford reported she had drank some water that nearly choked her.  She stated that It burned me so that I ran my fingers down my throat and threw it all up.

 

One month later on February 15, 1905, Jane suddenly left her San Francisco Nob Hill mansion for Hawaii. People speculated due to her ill  health, others her low spirits.

 

Then, shockingly, rumors began to circulate that someone had tried to murder her.

 

When news of the possible poisoning broke, she’d been at sea for four days. In her stead, Stanford president Dr. David Starr Jordan gave an emphatic statement to reporters.

 

“The fact is that Mrs. Stanford was threatened with pneumonia and her physician advised a warmer climate than San Francisco,” he said. “It was for this reason alone that she started on her trip. She did, however, tell me a month ago that she had been served with a bottle of mineral water which had a peculiar taste, but she did not drink it. She did not think for a minute that any attempt was being made to poison her, and I do not believe there was.”

 

Mrs. Stanford was not quoted in the story, nor was she ever reached for her thoughts on the poisoning. 
 

“I have got no control of my body,” Stanford reportedly said. “I think I have been poisoned again.”

 

Bertha helped Mrs. Stanford back to her room, by which time she was undergoing full-body spasms. A doctor also staying in the hotel was called.

 

Mrs. Stanford gestured to me and said. “Tell the doctor what happened.”

 

Bertha took her to mean the earlier poisoning attempt, and she informed the doctor of it. He had a stomach pump fetched, but it was too late.

 

Mrs. Stanford’s body twisted with back-breaking convulsions for three straight minutes. During a brief break in the suffering, she groaned, “What a horrible death to die!”

 

At 11:30pm, Jane Stanford shuddered once more and died.

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As the rest of the hotel guests slept on, police descended on the crime scene. In Mrs. Stanford’s room, they found a bottle of cascara capsules — a laxative — and the glass of bicarbonate of soda, a common treatment for indigestion.

 

Police speculated one or both were poisoned with strychnine and had them bagged up to be analyzed by a chemist. An autopsy was also ordered.

 

“The [Honolulu] officers are satisfied Mrs. Stanford was poisoned,” the Press-Democrat reported, “but whether it is murder or suicide they are unable to solve.”

 

Tests done to Mrs. Stanford’s organs revealed the presence of strychnine, and an analysis of the laxative pills also showed the poison. When asked for an official cause of death, the coroner confidently stated it was strychnine poisoning.

 

At the end of the inquest, the jury didn’t take long to come back with its verdict: They concluded Mrs. Stanford had been murdered.

 

She died from strychnine poisoning, the signed verdict read, “said strychnine having been introduced into a bottle of bicarbonate of soda with felonious intent by some person or persons to this jury unknown.”

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Back home in the Bay Area, Stanford officials and San Francisco police were already feverishly disputing the police findings. When reporters asked President Jordan about the inquest, he dismissively said he knew “all about them and their work.”

 

Mrs. Stanford had died of natural causes, President Jordan assured the public. 

 

Despite exhibiting no known symptoms of a heart condition, his analysis of the autopsy report led him to conclude that the layer of fat around her heart — exacerbated by the full meal of picnic sandwiches and treats earlier that day — had killed her.

 

For the next century, Dr. Jordan’s opinion became the official story. Talk of her poisoning quieted, people forgot, and all accepted the university’s stance that Mrs. Stanford had died of heart failure while on vacation in Hawaii. 

 

Her murder only re-entered the public consciousness in 2003 when retired Stanford neurologist Robert Cutler published “The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford.” 

 

In it, Cutler lays out the case for her murder and the subsequent cover-up by Stanford officials.

 

“From clinical grounds alone there can be little doubt that Mrs. Stanford died in the suffocating grip of a tetanic spasm characteristic of strychnine poisoning…” Cutler writes. “The conclusion that Mrs. Stanford was murdered is difficult to avoid.

 

“It seems remarkable today that the considered opinions of the attending and autopsy physicians, the toxicologists, the Honolulu police department, and the coroner's jury could be so easily dismissed on the basis of a brief declaration by President Jordan.”

 

Although the book makes a compelling case for her murder, it leaves the greatest mystery of all unresolved: Who killed her and why?

 

Without a thorough police investigation — and with all the participants long dead — the unsatisfying truth is that it’s impossible to know for sure.

 

Although there’s no doubt Dr. Jordan orchestrated the cover-up, it seems unlikely he had a hand in the actual murder. 

 

Rather, he was hoping to keep the young university from descending into scandal. They’d recently endured several highly publicized spats with faculty members and losing their founder to a grisly murder was hardly the press they needed. 

 

By whitewashing her gruesome end, maybe Jordan also hoped to preserve the memory of the school’s beloved founder, free of sorrow and controversy.

 

The most obvious suspect — really, the only one — is Bertha Berner, Mrs. Stanford’s longtime personal secretary and the only person present at both poisonings.

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As Mrs. Stanford’s secretary, Berner accompanied her on business and pleasure trips, helped run the household and maintained a close personal friendship with the solitary widow. Unmarried and childless, Berner’s world revolved around Mrs. Stanford.

 

After Mrs. Stanford’s death, the papers announced she had left $15,000 to Berner in her will — almost $400,000 in today’s money.

 

“I give and bequeath to Miss Bertha Berner, secretary and devoted friend to me through nineteen years of trial and sorrow, the sum of fifteen thousand dollars,” the will stipulated.

 

With the money, Berner built herself a lovely two-story home in Menlo Park; she lived there until her death in 1945.

 

Over the years, Berner's story changed multiple times, both in interviews with Hawaiian and San Francisco police and in public statements. 

 

Her final written account of Mrs. Stanford's last day included the claim Mrs. Stanford ate four Swiss cheese sandwiches, two tongue sandwiches, two lettuce sandwiches, two or three large pieces of gingerbread, two cups of cold coffee, and 12 or 14 pieces of French candy at lunch, a dubious-sounding justification of the "heart-failure-by-overeating" theory.

 

There is no question Berner had the means and ability to commit the murder. She filled Mrs. Stanford’s prescriptions, had unrestricted access to her food and drink, and could come and go in her private quarters without suspicion. Her motive is more mysterious. Berner was already living comfortably with Mrs. Stanford. Perhaps, in a moment of weakness, Berner grew impatient for the payoff she knew was coming.

Poison does, after all, have the reputation as a woman’s weapon.

 

A decade before her death, Berner published a biography of Jane Stanford. It was not particularly well-received. A review in the San Francisco Chronicle criticized its lack of detail, especially when dealing with the circumstances around Mrs. Stanford's final weeks.

 

"That over 200 closely packed pages of incidents, dates and names could go almost completely without blessing of comment or observation is a credit to the author's reputation as a secretary," the Chronicle wrote, "but unfortunately not as a biographer.”

 

Berner concluded in the work that Mrs. Stanford died of heart failure, brought on by overeating at the afternoon picnic. Of her own role in the mystery, she had nothing more to say.

 

"It seems a tragic waste of such a wealth of memories," wrote the Chronicle. "... Incident after incident simply cries out for elaboration while the readers is left with curiosity aroused and unrelieved.”

 

It seems only appropriate, in the end, that Bertha Berner's last tribute to the woman leaves us all eternally wanting.