The jury's quick verdict was to prove controversial. 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 may have been coached on what conclusion to reach. 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, a "medically preposterous" diagnosis given the dramatic and highly distinctive symptoms of strychnine poisoning that she had displayed.