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Podcast: Commonwealth Club of California Podcast
Episode: Who Killed Jane Stanford?
Description: Penetrating the fog of the coverup surrounding the murder of Stanford University's cofounder, historian Richard White deftly sifts through the evidence and reconstructs the full story. In 1885 Jane Stanford and her husband, Leland Stanford, co-founded Stanford University in memory of their deceased son. After Leland's death in 1893, Jane steered the university and its policies into eccentricity and controversy for more than a decade. When she died in 1905, her vast fortune was still the university’s lifeline.To foreclose challenges to her bequests, Stanford's president and his allies insisted it was death by natural causes. But it was a...