[5][6][2]: 504  She took a strong position on the issue of academic freedom when she sought and ultimately succeeded in having Stanford University economist Edward A. Ross fired.

[a] She traveled to London in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, in hopes of selling her rubies and other jewels to raise funds for the university, but was disappointed in the prices offered and returned home with most of her jewelry intact.

[7] In 1905, Jane Stanford directed the university trustees to sell her jewels after her death and use the funds as a permanent endowment "to be used exclusively for the purchase of books and other publications".

However, David Starr Jordan, the then-president of Stanford, immediately went to Hawaii, where he suppressed the report of poisoning and insisted that she had died of natural causes.

[15] (Richmond had worked in Britain and had reportedly regaled Stanford's domestic staff with tales of English aristocrats being poisoned by their servants.

[13] The agency learned that the mansion was a hothouse of petty staff jealousies, graft, and intrigue,[14] but it could not come up with evidence pointing to a culprit or a motive for an attempted murder.

[13] Depressed by the conviction that an unknown party had tried to kill her and suffering from a cold, Stanford soon decided to sail to Hawaii,[17] with plans to continue on to Japan.

At the Moana Hotel on the island of Oahu on the evening of February 28, Stanford asked for bicarbonate of soda to settle her stomach while in her room.

[13][d] At 11:15 p.m., Stanford cried out for her servants and hotel staff to call for a physician, declared that she had lost control of her body, and believed that she had been poisoned again.

Whereupon she was seized by a tetanic spasm that progressed relentlessly to a state of severe rigidity: her jaws clamped shut, her thighs opened widely, her feet twisted inwards, her fingers and thumbs clenched into tight fists, and her head drew back.

"[15] The testimony revealed that the bottle in question had been purchased in California (after Richmond had been let go), had been accessible to anyone in Stanford's residence during the period when her party was packing, and had not been used until the night of her death.

A March 11, 1905, dispatch in The New York Times stated that the verdict was "written out with the knowledge and assistance of Deputy High Sheriff Rawlins" and implied that the jurors had been coached on the conclusion to reach.

[27] The controversy was largely stoked by Stanford University President David Starr Jordan, who had sailed to Hawaii himself and hired a local doctor, Ernest Coniston Waterhouse, to dispute poisoning as the cause of death.

He then reported to the press that Stanford had in fact died of heart failure,[17][i] a "medically preposterous" diagnosis given the dramatic and highly distinctive symptoms of strychnine poisoning that she had displayed.

White concludes that the first poisoning may have been intended to be non fatal and that Jordan and the San Francisco Police likely suspected Berner but covered up the murder to suit their own interests.