EMAIL DETAILS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/09/AR2010120906515.html

John E. du Pont, heir to family fortune who killed Olympic wrestler, dies at 72

John E. du Pont, an heir to the DuPont Co. chemical fortune who was known as a generous if eccentric patron of amateur wrestling before he inexplicably shot and killed Olympic gold medalist Dave Schultz in 1996, died Dec. 9. He was 72.

The Associated Press reported that Mr. du Pont was pronounced dead at a hospital in Somerset, Pa., after being found unresponsive in his cell at Laurel Highlands state prison. The cause of death was not disclosed.

Mr. du Pont was the great-great-grandson of E.I. du Pont, a French industrialist who founded the company that introduced the world to now-ubiquitous modern materials such as nylon, Teflon and Lucite.

Mr. du Pont's fortune was said by Forbes magazine to be about $200 million, which he had used to indulge his twin passions: natural history and athletics. He built a museum in Delaware to house his collection of 66,000 birds and 2 million seashells and spent millions of dollars to promote sports, including swimming and the pentathlon.

His foremost passion was wrestling, and he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to USA Wrestling, the sport's governing body.

He also spent generously to aid the efforts of top individual wrestlers, paying them a monthly stipend to live at Foxcatcher, his sprawling estate near Philadelphia, and train at a 14,000-square-foot facility he had built there.

He called the wrestlers he supported "Team Foxcatcher" and envisioned them filling the roster of the 1996 U.S. Olympic wrestling team.

Schultz was one of Mr. du Pont's beneficiaries. Having won Olympic gold in 1984, the 36-year-old father of two was living at the du Pont estate, hoping to qualify for the 1996 games in Atlanta and serving as a Team Foxcatcher coach.


On Jan. 26, 1996, Mr. du Pont drove to the guesthouse where Schultz was living with his wife and two children. The heir fired three shots from a .38-caliber handgun out the window of his Lincoln Town Car. Schultz lay in the driveway, dying in his wife's arms.

Mr. du Pont barricaded himself in the steel-lined library of his three-story Greek-revival mansion. SWAT teams descended as negotiators tried to persuade Mr. du Pont to surrender.

Mr. du Pont, who was known to have an arsenal of high-powered weaponry, held police at bay for 48 hours until he was tricked outside to check on a faulty heater, which officials had disabled in an effort to freeze him out. He was taken into custody without any shots fired.

The case captured the nation's attention. The question was never who had killed Dave Schultz, but why?

Stories circulated in the media and at Mr. du Pont's trial about his increasing instability in the months before the killing. Always odd, he had begun to frighten employees and wrestlers at Foxcatcher.

He said that he was the Dalai Lama of the United States, that the trees on his property could move and that tooth marks made by horses in the barn were communiques from Martians. He had blown up a family of newborn foxes on his estate, ordered wrestlers to help chase ghosts out of the walls and drove a car into a pond - twice.

He had razor wire installed in his walls to keep intruders out, threatened one wrestler with a machine gun and evicted three others, all African American, from his property.

"It was part of his madness," Kanamti Solomon, one of the evicted wrestlers, told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996. "He thought he was dying and didn't want anything black to be near him."

In 1997, a jury deliberated for seven days before convicting Mr. du Pont of third-degree murder. The jury rejected his claim that he was legally insane at the time of the shooting but ruled that he was mentally ill.

He was sentenced to 13 to 30 years in prison for the killing. He expressed remorse in court, saying that he was "very sorry for what happened" and that he was "ill" at the time of the murder.

He later lost repeated attempts to appeal his case on grounds of insanity. In 1999, Schultz's widow won a $35 million settlement in a civil suit against Mr. Du Pont.

John Eleuthere du Pont, who was born in November 1938, was one of four children raised on the same Pennsylvania estate where he lived as an adult. He grew up mostly with his mother after his parents divorced when he was young. He was voted both "laziest" and "most likely to succeed" at the private Haverford School near Philadelphia.

Mr. du Pont swam on the varsity team at the University of Miami, where he received a biology degree. After realizing that he was a good but not world-class swimmer, he turned his sights on qualifying for the Olympics in the modern pentathlon, which includes horseback riding, fencing, shooting, swimming and running.


He built a 50-meter pool at his estate, which became the venue for the 1968 pentathlon championships. Mr. du Pont did not qualify for the Olympics.

He was married for a year in the mid-1980s to Gale Wenk, who later accused him in a lawsuit of choking her, pointing a gun at her and trying to push her out of a moving car. Other survivors could not be confirmed.

Mr. du Pont, who was among hundreds of heirs to the family fortune, said he became enthralled with wrestling despite his family's feeling that it was a sport for "ruffians."

In 1986, he founded, endowed and insisted on running a wrestling program at Villanova University in Philadelphia. After two years, the school eliminated the program and ended its relationship with Mr. du Pont, who was accused in a lawsuit of making unwanted sexual advances toward a Villanova coach.

The suit was settled for an undisclosed sum. The following year, Mr. du Pont published a book of essays, "Off the Mat: Building Winners in Life."

"As a member of a prominent American family with wealth," he wrote, "all my life I have tried to demonstrate - probably because I had to - that I could achieve and win on my own as though my last name weren't du Pont."


Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC
1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Suite 705
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com
P Consider the environment before printing this email.