But the most intriguing aspect of the case is Jane Stanford’s personality, and its warping effect on those around her. White doesn’t psychoanalyse her, but it seems clear that her growing horror of sex was closely bound up with her neurotic attachment to the dead. She couldn’t bring back her lost child, but she could dissolve the boundary between this world and the hereafter, at least in her own mind. ‘My husband or son are with me all the time,’ she told a reporter, adding with the blandness of the truly cuckoo: ‘They never come together, but in turns. Their stay is limited to within two weeks’ time.’ She had the pharaonic means and will to project her delusion onto the world she ruled over, imposing a regime of sepulchral stasis in which no change was to be permitted, and certainly no procreation: stop all the cocks! Among other things, she informed Crothers that she intended to continue working for the university after her death. He can’t have been surprised to hear it.
Prolonged exposure to Jane turned Jordan from an idealistic scientist into an embittered, vindictive bureaucrat. ‘If someone wanted to make a macabre joke,’ White observes of Jane’s funeral, ‘they could not have done better. Leading her procession to the grave were people suspected of her murder, people who covered it up, and those she despised and wished to fire.’ Jordan belonged in all three categories, but it seems fair to say that it was Jane who twisted him into this abject parody of himself. In the enigmatic Bertha Berner, Jane’s effect was more subtle, if possibly more deadly. Berner was one of those figures of uncertain status beloved of 19th-century novelists – tutors, governesses, impoverished relatives – whose combination of refinement and powerlessness makes them perfect instruments for registering their benefactors’ humanity, or the lack of it. Despite ruptures between the two women, the written testimony of both suggests a surprising degree of affection on both sides. Jane described Berner’s love as ‘god-giving’, and never for a moment suspected her of tampering with her Poland Spring water in Nob Hill, or – in the brief time left to her after consuming it – her bicarbonate of soda in Hawaii. For her part, Berner, under suspicion after the murder, sounds as tender and innocent as any wronged Victorian heroine with nothing but her own true heart to defend her: ‘I base my trust for final vindication upon the knowledge that I have not done anything to my dear Mrs Stanford for which I need to reproach myself.’