It's a storyline straight out of Agatha Christie: Jane Stanford, founding matron of Stanford University, is poisoned with a fatal dose of strychnine.

The university's ambitious first president -- whom Mrs. Stanford was planning to fire -- embarks on a cover-up, hiring a shady doctor to label the death a heart attack.

Rumors about Jane Stanford's death have percolated for almost 99 years. Now a new book by a retired Stanford medical professor claims to conclusively prove she was murdered -- and that former president David Starr Jordan hid the truth for decades.

Dr. Robert Cutler's book, "The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford," shies away from fingering a suspect. But the book already is provoking some debate about Jordan's place in Stanford history.

"It seemed pretty clear to me, a neurologist, that she died of strychnine poisoning," said Cutler, who spent 18 months reviewing records of Stanford's death and of the key players involved.

After reading Cutler's book, which was released Aug. 5, a man who traces his lineage to the Stanfords wrote university president John Hennessy to demand that Jordan's name be wiped from campus memorials.

The school is standing by its man -- more or less.

"Dr. Jordan was one of Stanford's finest presidents," said Gordon Earle, vice president for public affairs. "He deserves to be remembered and memorialized."

But Earle, who has not yet read Cutler's book, also said Jordan's role after Stanford's death "should be open to historical debate."

The most recent interpretation comes from Cutler's book:

Jane Stanford, remembered as a steely and spiritual dynamo, was sipping her evening glass of mineral water on Jan. 14, 1905 when she tasted what she later called "the bitterest thing in the world." Frightened, she forced herself to vomit, then sent the water to a pharmacy for analysis.

The conclusion: The water was laced with rat poison by someone unknown.

To calm her nerves, Stanford left her San Francisco mansion and set sail for Honolulu's famed Moana Hotel. On the night of Feb. 28, she called for help.

"I think I have been poisoned again," cried Stanford, 76, who had asked for a bicarbonate of soda before bed. Doctors ran to the scene to find Stanford convulsing. Within minutes she was dead, contorted in a spasm.

To Boyd Stephens, San Francisco's chief medical examiner, the description of Stanford's death was textbook strychnine poisoning. "It's pretty hard to imagine mistaking it," said Stephens, who reviewed Cutler's manuscript for the publisher, Stanford University Press.

A Honolulu coroner's jury reached the same conclusion in 1905. After weighing witness testimony, the autopsy report and toxicological findings, the jury ruled that Stanford was killed by strychnine-spiked bicarbonate of soda.

But Jordan, arriving in Honolulu to recover Stanford's body, saw things differently, Cutler's book recounts.

Jordan had been hand-picked in 1891 by Jane Stanford and her husband, former California Governor Leland Stanford, to be the first president of the school they founded on a horse farm to honor their late son, Leland Jr.

Jordan had become president of Indiana University at the ripe age of 34. At Stanford, he devised the curriculum and recruited faculty who boosted the school's reputation.

But by 1905, Cutler writes, Jordan was on the outs with Jane Stanford, who had taken charge of the university after her husband's death in 1893.

"It's well documented that she intended to fire him," said Cutler, who reviewed correspondence from people close to Jane Stanford.

Cutler's book surmises that Jordan feared a murder scandal would tarnish the fledgling university -- or worse, that suspicion would fall on the president due to the rift with Jane Stanford.

According to Cutler, Jordan hired a young Honolulu doctor named Ernest Waterhouse, who had been in private practice for just over a year. Without examining Stanford's body, Waterhouse produced a four-page report that concluded her symptoms didn't match strychnine poisoning.

Instead, Waterhouse wrote Stanford had a heart attack caused by indigestion and stress.

Jordan paid Waterhouse $350 for the report, Cutler said -- a hefty sum then.

The doctors who treated Stanford were outraged. But when Jordan returned home, he announced that Stanford had died naturally. The strychnine, he said, either was taken for medicinal purposes or planted by the hotel doctor.

And that's how things stood until 2001, when Cutler stumbled across an account of Stanford's death while researching another book.

Cutler, who taught at Stanford from 1974 to 1996, found that his medical school colleagues also hadn't heard of the alleged murder. He wrote a speech about the case for a faculty luncheon, but scrapped it when colleagues thought the tale reflected badly on Jordan.

Cutler kept digging. He said he learned that the doctors who tried to save Stanford -- far from being the backwater quacks Jordan had claimed -- were esteemed physicians.

"I think it's the definitive work," said Dorothea Buckingham, a Honolulu librarian who has studied the case and compared notes with Cutler. "He's a bulldog."

Cutler, 70, says friends have told him they were "amazed" the Stanford Press would publish the critical book. Cutler said campus officials did not discourage his work, nor have they reacted to it so far.

Cutler said he avoided making whodunit claims so the book would be "a fairly scholarly representation of what could be gleaned by facts."

The book does note that a possible suspect was Stanford's secretary, Bertha Berner, the only witness to both poisonings. Berner inherited today's equivalent of $100,000 after Stanford died.

At the time, there was little reason to suspect Jordan, Cutler said.

But Stephen Requa, a Stanford alumnus who said his great-uncle was Leland Stanford's nephew, has long believed that Jordan was involved somehow.

"Jordan did cover up a murder and obstructed justice," said Requa, who wrote the letter calling for Jordan's name to be purged from campus. "He shouldn't be a university icon any more."