Leeland Stanford Jr.

Leeland Stanford Jr. is the son of a wealthy New York couple who believed they could talk to ghosts. When he dies as a teenager, his parents travel around the world looking for ways to contact him. They come back and decide that they're going to build a university which will educate what they call the children of California. But it's really David Star Jordan's agenda that wins out and he may or may not have murdered Jane Lathrop Stanford to get that agenda instantiated.