In 1885 Jane Stanford and her husband, Leland Stanford, co-founded a university in memory of their young son. After her husband's death in 1893, Jane Stanford steered the university and its policies into eccentricity and controversy for more than a decade. She died in 1905, her vast fortune the university's lifeline. To foreclose challenges to her bequests, the Stanford president and his allies insisted it was death by natural causes. But it was a murder, by strychnine poisoning, and the culprit walked.
Deftly sifting the evidence, Richard White reconstructs the full story of Jane Stanford's murder and its coverup. Against a backdrop of San Francisco's machine politics, corrupt policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White's search for the murderer draws us into Stanford's main domains--her imperious household and the tumultuous university. There we meet several who had motives and opportunity; of these one also had the means.