Overview

In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband's death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner's jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university's lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked. Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford's murder and its cover-up. Against a backdrop of the city's machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White's search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford's imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means.

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[An] account of Jane Stanford's final years and violent death, all set against the seamy San Francisco carnival culture of the era. -- New York Times A detective story with more twists and turns than a Dashiell Hammett novel...White has done an astonishing job of sifting through the available clues and turning up an impressive array of new details. In this fascinating 'whydunit, ' he makes a convincing case for why Jane Stanford's murder was covered up for so long. -- Wall Street Journal White uses his historian's rigor to answer a detective's question. -- New Yorker

Author Information

Richard White, winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Parkman Prize, is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. Christopher P. Brown is an audiobook narrator whose passion is using his scripted theater and improvisation training and experience to bring stories and characters to life. He holds graduate degrees (MA and PhD) in literature, linguistics, and leadership studies. Chris is also bilingual, with professional proficiency in both Spanish and English, and can tackle narration projects in either language, or both of them. Chris grew up in western Michigan, and has lived in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Washington DC area, and now resides in San Diego, California.

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