In Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University (Norton, May), White solves a century-old murder mystery.
When Jane Stanford died of strychnine poisoning in 1905, the details were suppressed. Was covering up the murder of a wealthy and prominent victim unprecedented?
At first it did strike me as out of the ordinary that Jane Stanford would be killed, and that the investigation of her death would be suppressed. Then, as I investigated, I found that it was not that unusual. The founder of Rice University was also murdered. There were attempts to murder other rich people in early 20th-century United States. Rich people made a lot of enemies, and because there’s so much money at stake in their estates, covering up crimes against rich people could benefit their descendants, their heirs, and others.
What was the motive for the cover-up in Stanford’s case?
In Jane Stanford’s death, it was not so much an interest in protecting any particular murderer, but in protecting Stanford University. If an investigation of Jane Stanford’s death could lead to a defense of the murderer, pointing out all the things that Jane Stanford did, all the unusual opinions she had, all of the ways in which she might not have been mentally competent to make wills and grants, Stanford University was going to suffer. So the real danger is whether Stanford University will survive, and the survival of the university becomes more important than catching the killer.
You refer to drawing “meaning from what has vanished and what has been displaced.” Can you talk about what you mean?
For any historical problem, evidence vanishes. But what struck me about the Stanford case was that so much of the evidence that vanished was precisely what the university had based its case on that she died a natural death. Thing after thing just disappeared. So what I was faced with is a whole set of absences. But my contention as a historian is that you can’t erase everything. You can begin to fill in the spaces, and then you begin to get an even deeper suspicion as to why these things vanish. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes there are conspiracies by the rich and powerful in which they seek to make things disappear.
Did something really surprise you beyond the cover-up?
Yes, how sketchy and shaky an institution Stanford University was at the beginning of its history, when it was accused of money laundering. And there was some evidence that if Jane Stanford had lived, Stanford University might have ceased to exist.
