True Crime Campfire - Foxcatcher: The Unhinging of an American Heir

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Imagine growing up in a spectacular mansion, with access to the kind of wealth and connections most of us can only dream of. But although you’re surrounded by material riches, you’re in a social vacuum—eating alone in your bedroom every night, wandering the grounds of your family estate with only the wildlife as company. This was the life of John Du Pont, the youngest heir to the famously wealthy family who founded the DuPont chemical company. He grew up cut off from the kind of social warmth most of us take for granted. His solution to that was to immerse himself in the sport of Olympic style wrestling—and to gather some of the world’s greatest athletes in a little utopian community he named Foxcatcher Farms. His dream was to create the best team of wrestlers in the world. They lived on the property, trained on the property, became like family to each other…all under the watchful eye of their wealthy benefactor, John. To the athletes, it sounded like a dream come true. But they didn’t realize that John DuPont was already on a paranoid downward spiral that would leave everything he’d built in ruins—and take the life of one of wrestling’s most beloved champions.Sources:Time Magazine, 1996: "Blood on the Mat" by John Greenwald: https://time.com/3586290/blood-on-the-mat/Documentary "Team Foxcatcher," 2016. Directed by John GreenhalghAll That's Interesting, Mark Oliver: "John DuPont, Dave Schultz, and the True Story of 'Foxcatcher'": https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-du-pont-dave-schultzWikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_du_Pont#:~:text=John%20Eleuth%C3%A8re%20du%20Pont%20(November,the%20murder%20of%20Dave%20Schultz.Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Imagine growing up in a spectacular mansion with access to the kind of wealth and connections most of us can only dream of. But although you're surrounded by material, riches, you're in a social vacuum, eating alone in your bedroom every night, wandering the grounds of your family estate with only the wildlife as company. This was the life of John DuPont,

the youngest heir to the famously wealthy family who founded the DuPont Chemical Company. He grew up cutoff from the kind of social warmth most of us take for granted. His solution to that was to immerse himself in the sport of Olympic-style wrestling and to gather some of the world's greatest athletes in a little utopian community he named Foxcatcher Farms. His dream was to create the best team of wrestlers in the world. They lived on the property, trained on the property, became like family to each other, all under the watchful eye of their wealthy benefactor John. To the athletes, it sounded like a dream come true. But they didn't realize that John DuPont was already on a paranoid downward spiral that would leave everything he'd built in ruins and take the life of one of

wrestling's most beloved champions. This is Foxcatcher, the unhinging of an American air. John DuPont's childhood basically reads like Chapter 1 of the instruction manual how to create an unhinged individual. In fact, given DuPont's scientific cred, I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up finding out that his entire upbringing was some kind of ghoulish psychological experiment on the results of emotional neglect. Allegedly. Please don't sue us, DuPonts. We have no money. It would just be sad. Trust me. John was born in Philly in 1938, the youngest son of the wealthy DuPont family, and he grew up more or less in a gilded cage. John was the baby of the family by quite a few years, and his siblings were all wrapped up in their own stuff. He was basically a non-entity to them. They

pretty much just ignored him. John's parents divorced when he was just two years old. His dad was away most of the time and his mom was really into horses and poured her energy into that, raising thoroughbreds on their 800 acres of land. Little John rattled around in the family's gigantic mansion with only the smallest, most awkward amount of human contact. Until he was in his teens, he didn't even eat dinner with other humans. A maid brought him his food in his bedroom and he ate it alone. So it's probably not going to shock you to hear that John could be a tad socially awkward. What did his parents expect, raising him like one of the kids in a V.C. Andrews novel, minus the creepy incestuous sex, thank God.

Minus the other people, really. It was just kind of him. He did have a best friend for a while, the family chauffeur's son, but then he found out his mom had paid the kid to pretend to be his friend, which Jesus Jones, that's sad. Like, I'm surprised that Sarah McLaughlin song from the SPCA commercials. doesn't start up any time somebody mentions it. There were perks to being the son of one of the richest families in the country, of course. John had access to as many resources as he wanted. He had an interest in natural history, and he'd spend hours wandering around the family property, bird watching or studying the wildlife.

It was an interest that stuck with him all through high school, college, and into graduate school, where he got his Ph.D. in natural sciences. He even founded the Delaware Museum of Natural History. But he was one of those people who just never felt like he fit in. He'd always wanted so, so badly, to be one of the cool kids. You'd think with the kind of money he had, that would be easy to hook up, but you'd be wrong. John was, as the more polite people around him put it, eccentric. The less polite ones would probably say he was a freaking weirdo.

Besides natural history, John's main interest was sports. Specifically swimming, pentathlon, which he was good enough at to get a place on the 76 U.S. Olympic team, and wrestling, quote-unquote, real wrestling, not the showy kind with the gold lamay and spandex. Yeah, no dramatic plot lines either, just plain old, boring sport. Yeah, I think they call it Olympic-style wrestling. John had never been allowed to do contact sports when he was growing up. I guess his rich parents thought they were for the poors or something. Yeah, they thought wrestling was for the riffraff.

So, of course, he was obsessed with it, teenage rebellion for a kid who came out of the womb gnawn on a silver spoon. right plus he might have had a bit of a complex because of a horseback riding accident he'd had when he was younger that robbed him of both his testicles and i'm not sure exactly how and i don't think i want to know but god dang like that hurt me to my soul to think about ow so sports might have been a way for him to overcompensate a little on the whole masculinity thing and wrestling i mean what could be more masculine right a bunch of sweaty men and tight uniforms all up in each other's business seeing who can pin who to the ground with the most dexterity and brute strength? Yes, ma'am, I can smell the testosterone from here. Hooie! So in 1985, John decided to use some of his ample financial resources to bring wrestling home to him. He opened Foxcatcher Farms Training Center for wrestlers on his family property. Why he called it a farm or farms, I have no idea, but it kind of fits based on how he felt

about his wrestlers, as you'll soon find out. Yeah. Foxcatcher Farms on its face was an athlete's dream, a 14,000 square foot facility with all the best equipment. The place cost a million dollars, and that's an 80s money. So, you know, multiply that by three, probably. It had three giant wrestling mats, a wait room, a locker room, offices, everything you could possibly dream of.

And at the helm, John himself, a guy who. who was obsessed with the sport and ready to pour money into it like his plane was going down. Oh, yeah. He'd already put over 3 mil into USA Wrestling, the governing organization, for the kind of wrestling that doesn't involve somebody going, are you ready to rumble? Do you smell what the rock is cooking? You know, that kind of thing. He said his goal was to, quote, teach the youth of America to not only be championed.

in sport, but champions in life. Yes, John, you're nothing if not a champion in life. If that ain't the sad refrain of a nepo baby for you right there, I'd expect the next words out of his mouth to be something like, well, why can't you start your own business? All you'd need is like, I don't know, a lousy million dollar loan from your parents? Lazy ass. Yeah, John might not have been the biggest champ in his own life, by the way.

In 1983, he was married to a woman named Gail Wank for a grand total of 10 months. She left him, allegedly, because he pointed a gun at her and tried to shove her into the fireplace. And in 1988, DuPont was sued for making improper sexual advances to an assistant wrestling coach at Villanova University. The suit was settled out of court. So, you know, domestic violence, sexual harassment, standard loser behavior. Yeah. But John loved wrestling. and he was so desperate to be one of the cool kids.

He was determined to gather the best wrestling talent in the world at Foxcatcher Farms. And one of the guys he wanted was David Schultz. Schultz was a champion wrestler, and he looked like one, too, sporting cauliflower ears and athletic physique. But unlike his meathead brethren, Dave was kind of a hippie. In the documentary teen foxcatcher, his wife Nancy said living with Dave was an adventure. When they first met and she asked what he did, he just said, I wrestle. Didn't elaborate.

But then she saw his collection of trophies and medals and photos from all over the world, and she was like, oh, you don't just wrestle, you're good. Dave smiled, shrugged, and said, yeah, like it. Well, I should say so, my dude. You won the gold at the 84 Olympics. Nancy soon became Dave's number one fan and supporter. She supported him in every workout and on every trip. relationship goals, right? Dave's fellow wrestler Eric Deuce described him as, quote,

super mellow, unassuming, underdressed always, but you know, a genius freak when it came to wrestling. I love that, a genius freak. I want that on my headstone someday. And Dave always took the time to help his fellow wrestlers, which isn't super common in individual sports. He loved Russia, mostly because the Ruski's loved wrestling. At the time, the Russians had 40 or 50 World Championships and they only joined competitive wrestling in the 50s. They had some of the best coaches in the world. So Dave decided to learn Russian in order to, A, help him immerse himself in the culture, and B, hear what the Russian coaches were saying because they were so good. And Dave wanted to learn everything he possibly could about his sport. One of the reasons why the U.S. wasn't dominant

in wrestling was that it didn't pay. Wrestlers would basically age out of the sport and have to go get real jobs, while Russia and other Eastern Bloc countries bankrolled their athletes. But then came John DuPont and Foxcatcher Farms. John offered wrestlers a stipend and a state-of-the-art place to train. Soon, the best wrestlers in the country were being invited, one by one. Dave Schultz told his wife Nancy about the call he got from DuPont, and they agreed. This was an amazing opportunity. And soon, they were moving in at Foxcatcher Farms.

Dave's goal, he said, was to be world champion in 1991, Olympic. champion in 92 and then quit, quote, before all my hair falls out. And as an Olympic gold medalist, Dave quickly became the face of the Foxcatcher program, not John DuPont for all his money. He wasn't John's first choice, though. That had been Dave's brother Mark, also an Olympic gold medalist, which is just bananas. Like, imagine having two Olympians in your family. Holy shit. It's like the, it's like the Kelsey brothers being both going to the Super Bowl. It's crazy. It is. It's wild. had come to Foxcatcher thinking it would be a fantastic opportunity, but it didn't turn out that way. Mark clashed with DuPont almost from day one. Mark got the unsettling feeling that John felt like

he was bought and paid for, and Mr. DuPont didn't appreciate it when one of his pet wrestlers started acting defiant. We were his newest trophies, Mark Schultz told writer Mark Oliver. If you didn't want to be displayed on his wall, he threatened to ruin you. Sounds like fun, right? It's ironic. It's almost like he had his wrestlers in a gilded cage, just like the one he grew up in. You could have everything you wanted materially, or in the wrestler's case, materially and opportunity-wise, but you're miserable, nevertheless. But sometimes the wrestlers found ways to rebel. According to writer Mark Oliver, Mark Schultz says he intentionally took a dive at his trial match for the Olympics just to keep John DuPont from, quote, getting the satisfaction of the win. Which, die, I have no

idea if this is true but if it is this is a level of petty that most of us can only aspire to like making the petty choice even when it takes you down with the ship you got to respect it I guess I mean damn so anyway it didn't work out

between John DuPont and Mark Schultz so John moved on to the other brother Dave and as one of the best wrestlers in the world at the time Dave attracted others to the farm all in all there were more than a dozen 12 wrestlers and one pentathlete They all called John Eagle, which I kind of suspect he came up with himself.

And y'all know what we say about nicknames. If people just start spontaneously calling you Eagle, awesome. You start calling yourself Eagle? Cringe. Just please know. So that's why you laughed at me when I asked you to call me mad dog? Yeah. One of the other wrestlers who came to live at Foxcatcher was a Bulgarian guy named Valentin, Jordi.

one of the world's best in the sport. Everybody called him Volo. Despite being kind of wiry and small, Volo was a powerhouse on the mat. Strong as a damn ox. He could lift bigger guys straight up in the air like they didn't weigh anything. And he and Dave were really close buds. Living at Foxcatcher, their sons Yancho and Alexander became close too. Volo didn't speak great English, but Dave spoke Russian,

and the Jordanovs and the Schultzes became kind of like one big family. All the wrestlers were invited to move to the farm with their families, so it was like a little neighborhood, a sports utopia, as Nancy called it. That was the vibe at Foxcatcher. Yeah, it seems like the wrestlers all considered each other family, which is pretty common with athletes working together. Like, I was in volleyball, okay? I played it for most of my life.

I can count on one hand, the teammates I played with that I still talk to now. But when we were on the same team, we cared about each other, even when we were giant assholes to one another. But there was a fly in the Bengay. John DuPont could be difficult. He'd always been eccentric, which is basically just the rich people word for weird as hell. He liked wacky hats,

and as Mark Schultz already knew, he could be imperious with the wrestlers on his payroll. But he could also come across as disturbingly intense, even a little unhinged sometimes. In the documentary Team Foxcatcher, you can see a haunting home video taken by one of the wrestlers on a private jet to Istanbul for a tournament. The wrestler asks DuPont what he thinks about the trip,

and DuPont says, without a trace of a smile, onto the world championships and to win, kill, kill, kill. Yikes. Another time, he drove his Lincoln Continental into the pond, just right into the pond. Why? Who the hell knows? But obviously he fucked his car up six ways from Sunday,

so he got a loner car from the repair place. The next day, he offered a. take some big cheese from the wrestling world on a drive or on the property. And with this dude in the car, he just drove right into the pot again for no discernible reason. And it's a testament to how bizarre this man actually was on a daily basis that everybody's reaction was like, oh, that's weird. Huh. Rich people, man, they get away with behavior that would land the rest of us in jail on like day one or a padded room one. Mm-hmm.

Pentathlete Mike Gostigian said in the documentary, quote, he just had two sides sometimes where, you know, there was the normal John and then there was the John that's just, you know, you don't know what you're going to get that day and people would walk on pins and needles not knowing what to expect. It was very much the case of if Daddy ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. On a good day when John was feeling good, morale was high. But when John was having a bad day,

Down or acting shaky, as one of the trainers later said, it could get real bad, real fast. Everybody would try and give him a wide birth to avoid his wrath. At first, the good days outweighed the bad. Since John's family was anything but close, Dave and Nancy Schultz and their kids became his family. John resented his dad. According to the documentary, he once told wrestler Robbie Calabrazi, You're lucky you can talk to your father. If I wanted to see my father, I'd have to set up an appointment.

and half the time he wouldn't see me anyway. Ugh. John had always been more of a mama's boy. She was the one person in his life who could sort of keep him on track. When she passed away in 1988, he was rudderless. But with the Schultz's, he had a new family. He'd invite them to spend all the major holidays with him at the mansion. Dave's wife, Nancy, said that one Christmas he called her up to make sure she knew he didn't have a high chair at the big house.

Make sure you bring one, he told her. Nancy was touched. John didn't usually call her directly, and it meant a lot to her that he wanted to make sure they had a nice holiday. There was something inside of him that was really trying to connect, she said in Team Foxcatcher. It was true. John had his issues socially. He was desperate to fit in, and he could be a bully when he didn't get his way. But he could also be generous and fun. He was never happier than when he was in the gym with the wrestlers, doing the same training exercises they were doing. Which could get a little cringe.

I mean, the guys had to humor him. He was their benefactor, but he was a 55-year-old dude, not in the best shape, wanting to wrestle with all these beefy young dudes. Wrestler Trevor Lewis said, you'd wrestle with him, let him score a bit. It's kind of like play wrestling,

and in his own mind he's like, yeah, I'm hanging with these guys. In one home video, DuPont is wrestling with Robbie Calabrese, who has him pinned, And John says to the camera, I'm afraid to hurt Robbie, you know. He looks happy as a clam. Oh, honey, bless your heart. Any one of these dudes could grind your bones to make his bread.

They're Olympic athletes. For God's sakes, you're not going to hurt him. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, everybody was happy. Everybody was getting what they wanted. John was living his fantasy, getting to hang out with a bunch of hot, muscle-bound dudes all day. And the wrestlers had the resources they needed to stay in the sport. wrestling with John was just play for the athletes, but John didn't seem to get the memo on that.

He thought he was really getting good, so much so that he asked Dave Schultz to start coaching him, and started entering tournaments himself. Problem with that was, of course, Madud couldn't actually wrestle. Put him in an actual tournament, and he's going to get his entire ass handed to him with a pretty bow on top. But John was not to be deterred by his early failures. When you have gobs of money, you can just start your own tournament, and that's what John did. the John DuPont Masters World Tournament for wrestlers in their 40s and 50s, not a super crowded division, as you can probably imagine.

They'd put on staged events where, in the words of Team Foxcatcher pentathlete, Mike Gostigian, you have these guerrillas coming out to wrestle John and then rolling on their back, and, you know, John's the champion, and people are cheering his name. It was completely absurd. They'd pay off the losers. And John thought it was real, which, oh my God, that is so embarrassing. I'm going to die right here. yeah it feels kind of shitty to me like kind of cruel for sure i mean it is like this guy's out there

making a fool of himself and these folks are enabling it because basically it was smart for them to stay in his good graces but i do think there's blame to go around here i mean it's it's definitely on the people who were snickering behind his back but it's on john too like for god's sakes it's like something they do to mac on it's always sunny in philadelphia or something so yeah For a while, the good outweighed the bad at Foxcatcher Farms, but as the years went by, DuPont's good days became fewer and further between. He'd probably never been on fully level ground mental health-wise, and when his mom died, he started on a downward slide. He was getting harder and harder to work with, to reason with. He was paranoid, convinced the property was

under surveillance. Allegedly, he was drinking a lot and using cocaine during this time, and that made it much, much worse. Everybody was grateful to have Dave Schultz around to help manage the situation. Dave had a huge heart, and in a lot of ways, he was the perfect choice to lead the way at Foxcatcher farms. He'd grown up with dyslexia, and he took some bullying about it as a kid, so he had a soft spot for anybody he perceived as an underdog, and John DuPont fit the bill. Despite his bullying and increasingly bizarre behavior, Dave always saw the good in John, and he was usually the only one who could talk the boss man down from his manic episodes. If one of the athletes needed to bring up a touchy subject with John,

they'd have Dave talk to him for them first. He'd defused a lot of situations over the years. In addition to the wrestling, there was also quite a bit of goose hunting done on the Foxcatcher property, which is normal in the states. Sometimes people with big estates will allow hunting on the premises, usually for a fee. At Foxcatcher, the hunting was monitored by the Newtown Square Police Department. They even had a sergeant who lived right there on the estate to deal with,

this, you know, goose hunter and goose hunting related issues. You know, the goose guy. And in keeping with his deep yearning to be one of the guys, TM, John was all over that shit. He applied to be a reserve police officer, got paid a dollar a year for it. He owned a helicopter that he'd loan out to the cops if they needed it, and he had his own uniform. Got to do a ride-long every now and then, just like Dwight Shrew. I'm sure he felt like Billy badass. It was probably the best day of his life every time he got to do it. And of course, John had his very own shooting range on the property, as if the place wasn't already drenched in testosterone. John liked to hunt by shooting from his own moving car. You know, perfectly normal

behavior. I mean, it's highly illegal, but who cares, right? John correctly, it seems, assumed that his money and connections with law enforcement meant he could do whatever the hell he wanted on his own land. And to make the point stick, he even had a foxcatcher farm's flag made, which he flew above the American flag on the estate. Yeah, that ain't something. Subtle, now is it? My point is, this man had a lot of guns and not a lot of regulations on his own behavior. It's funny because John used to complain about the downside of being rich that you could never be sure if people actually liked you. I mean, remember his little friend that had to be paid to be friends with him when he was a kid?

Or if they just wanted your money. But it seems like he wasn't shy about flexing his wealth and connections when he needed to or wanted something. He was paranoid about people, though. He'd have episodes where he'd be preoccupied with the idea of, that people were using him for money, and it didn't stop here. Sometimes he'd convince himself there were people in the woods watching him. He'd stand outside the mansion, videotaping the woods for hours. Then he'd play it back for people and say,

okay, look at that. Do you see something moving there? When they'd say no, he'd get frustrated. Some wondered if he was just testing them to see if they'd lie to appease him. That was something he would absolutely do. One wrestler talked about John looking into a field full of deer and saying, those are really people dressed as deer, or those are mechanical deer planted by someone. And when the wrestler would say, I'm sure you're right, John, he'd go, no, they're not.

They're really deer. Different wrestlers had different ways of dealing with John's weird delusions and paranoia. Some would go along with him just to try to keep him happy. These tended to be the younger ones and the ones who weren't in John's inner circle of favorites, so they felt pressured to appease him. and a lot of the athletes thought he was just eccentric. That word again, because again, rich people aren't mentally ill. They're eccentric.

But Dave Schultz would never appease John. If John said, look at those mechanical deer. Dave would say, John, those aren't mechanical. They're real. He tried to keep his friend grounded as much as possible. John demanded a lot of his friends. He was a needy person, especially with his favorites. The Inner Circle at Foxcatcher Farms used to take shifts to spend time with John,

trying to get them to dry out from all the drugs and drinking, according to a 1996 Time magazine article. It worked, for a while. The inner circle was Dave Schultz, Robbie Calabrese, Dave's best bud, Volo, Jordanov, and Dan Chade. Each of those guys had periods where they were John's favorite. And the last and possibly most golden favorite was Volo. Whenever they were all hanging out at the mansion with John, if Volo was about to come over, John would kick everybody else out.

Like, oh, Volo's coming over, time to go. Eventually, John started sponsoring the Bulgarian team and announced to everyone that he was a Bulgarian descendant from one line or another, and that's why he'd identified so deeply with Volo. Which, I mean, dude, DuPont is about as aggressively French as it gets as names go. My mom's maiden name is similar.

Might as well be omelette du frommage. John seemed jealous about Dave's friendship with Volo. Volo told the team fox catcher film crew that the tension was palpable in the last year. In one home video, Dave and Volo are speaking in Russian, and John looks visibly annoyed by it. He turns to the camera and says, fuck the world. I'm going to kill them all. And Dave laughs and said, oh, this is going to be a dark, bleak trip. Yeah, and everybody in the video seemed to think it was a joke, but it did not feel like one to me watching it.

I mean, and it makes me wonder, was John jealous of Dave's charisma? His easy way with people, the fact that he was so deeply respected and admired by all the other athletes, I don't know for sure. But he was definitely jealous of how close Dave was to follow, and the jealousy started to mix with the paranoia that had already been building in John's increasingly unwell mind. Possibly fueled by speed and alcohol, John's mental state was deteriorating fast at this point. He became convinced that Dave and Robbie Calabrese had a machine that could control the weather. He became fixated on the idea that there were secret tunnels in the mansion

and that Dave was creeping around them at night, messing with him. He believed that Dave and others were in the walls, watching and listening. And it wasn't just Dave he was paranoid about. He thought there were mechanical trees on the property that his father had installed as props for garden parties. The trees could walk, he insisted. They'd just pull themselves up out of the ground and prowl around the estate at night.

He told people he could see Disney characters in the woods, too, hiding in the trees. One day he started frantically shooting at geese because he thought they were casting some kind of evil spell on him. Another day, he insisted that all the treadmills be taken off the property. Why? Because they were making time go backwards. John hired a security firm to come out to the mansion and search the walls and floors for hidden tunnels and to look into some threats John had allegedly received and found out about from the Secret Service, which I have no idea if these threats were actually real or another one of John's delusions. John definitely took them seriously. He hired a full-time security outfit staffed with ex-CIA and feds.

But it didn't make him feel any better. If anything, the security guys lurking around only made the paranoia worse. they did as they were paid to do they investigated every one of john's fears they dug up the yard brought in radar brought in equipment to look into the walls it wasn't their job to question the head of security later said but again this didn't help matters it only validated john's paranoia and made it worse he decided that black was the color of death so everything black had to be removed from the property shirts were stowed cars and horses were sold and worst of all the black athletes were fired. Now that seemed to jostle some of the athletes. They were like, dude, what the hell? This is racist. But John insisted it wasn't about their race. It was about their color. Which, dude, what? Black people aren't literally black. Like, what the hell are you talking about? If the color of death had actually been white, would you fired all the white dudes? Ew. One of the athletes he fired was Kevin Jackson, a world and Olympic champion in his weight class. He was shocked. Kevin was just one of five men who were removed.

because of their race, and they desperately wanted someone to hold John accountable, but Bubkus. Nothing happened. And the black athletes felt, rightfully, I think, betrayed by the men that chose to stand behind John after this. No matter how much money you have, you can't treat people like that. Some people have said that this should have been the turning point, a warning that DuPont was headed over the edge in a major way, that this wasn't eccentricity, it was something a lot deeper and darker. But life at Foxcatcher Farms went on. Meanwhile, John was barely sleeping, allegedly fueled by cocaine. If somebody pointed out a piece of furniture they liked, John would talk about the bugs in the wood grain.

He thought there were bugs under his skin. He'd scratch himself raw. In one super creepy home movie, John, apparently by himself, shakily points the camera toward a glossy wooden boat. Zooming in on the wood grain, he says, Whether you know it or not, your little slime bug friends have added to the golden gloss that has. It would not have it had it not been for them. Then he points the camera to the reflection of the light from the ceiling and says suspiciously, what is this thing? He started wearing loose red clothing and claiming he was the Dalai Lama.

He also claimed to be Jesus Christ and a Russian czar at various points. And as Dave Schultz became more and more aware of DuPont's spiraling mental state, he started to worry a lot about John carrying guns around, especially after the incident with the geese. John was packing some kind of weapon most of the time now. By this point, the athlete started avoiding the mansion. They thought of the estate like the solar system, one said later, with John's house as the sun. The saying was, the closer you got to the sun, the more likely you were to get burned.

But Robbie and Dave were brave. They'd go up to the house sometimes and try to talk to John about his paranoia. John got angry and accused them of not believing him. At one point, John decided he wanted, wrestler Dan Chade off the property, and he had an attorney contact Dan about it. When Dan initially hesitated, John got a U-Haul and parked it in front of Dan's house. Dan ignored it. John walked into the wait room carrying a tech nine, a semi-automatic version of a military submachine gun. He beeline for Dan Shade, leveled the gun at Dan's chest, and said, don't you fuck with me. I want you off

this farm. Shocked, Dan lowered his head and held his arms out, saying, John, I don't know what this is all about, I've only tried to be your friend. And after a tense moment, John backed off, put the gun down, and ran back to the main house. Dan called the police about the incident, and they just laughed it off. Oh, we've known John forever. He's always been like that. What? What? Yeah, as bonkers as it is, this was often people's reaction to this kind of unhinged behavior from John DuPont. It's like, oh, he doesn't mean it. That's just John. He's extended. He says weird shit. He does weird shit, but you know, he's a good guy. He doesn't mean it. It's really unfortunate. Nobody saw the danger coming. The next warning, the house next to Dan's burned down.

That was the last straw for Dan. He flew out to Colorado to meet with USA Wrestling and told them, look, this guy is off the rails. You need to get these men out of there. USA Wrestling said later that this was the first thing that gave them pause about the Foxcatcher situation. They had a conference call. Some people at Foxcatcher did want to take steps to separate themselves from John, but Dave Schultz said, I have my family and children on the farm. If I thought for one moment they were in danger, I'd pack up and leave. That clinched it for the wrestling organization. They didn't have to do anything. Well, it was probably more like, let's wait till the Olympics, but yeah. But Dan was ready to go. He went back to the farm and packed up his house. The tension was thick enough to eat with a spoon, but Dave tried to reassure him.

Dan, look, it's just John being John. When Dan left his van at Dave's house, that seemed to stoke John's paranoia even further. The night Dan moved out, John got drunk slash high, and went over to Dave with a rifle looking for Dan. Dave stopped him, took the gun away. You can't come in the house like this. John was so drunk he could barely stand up, and on the way back down the driveway, he fell and hit his head. He had to have stitches. The next morning, John didn't seem to remember what happened.

His head was swollen and bruised. And when he asked Robbie Calabrese what happened, Robbie said, it looks like you got hit in the head with a bat. John latched onto that phrase and decided that Dan must have assaulted him. So he called the police. When they came out to take a report because that's worthwhile instead of the other report, Dave told them what actually happened and John was furious. He felt like Dave had betrayed him and sided with Dan over him. things were getting bad enough now that Dave and Nancy were arguing about staying at Foxcatcher

Farms. Dave wanted to stay till after the Olympics, which were just six months away at this point. Dave was about to turn 37. He felt like this was his last chance to win a gold medal. And I think this makes the situation a little bit easier, at least for me, to wrap my head around. The proximity to the Olympics. I mean, that was what they'd all been training for, day in, day out. The stuff with John was just kind of in the background most of the time for most of the time, for most of the for most of the people, I think, and it's not like he was like this all the time. With 2020 hindsight, you can see the red flags a mile off, but everybody was so focused on their training, you know, and Dave didn't realize how fixated John was becoming on him, how he'd become both an object of

adoration and an object of rage for his boss and friend. John loved Dave, and he hated him, and he was becoming the main focus of John's paranoia. He was more sure than ever that Dave was spying on him, hiding in the walls, conspiring with others against him. On January 26, 1996, Dave trained as usual. He walked into the training arena with the word kids written on his forehead and marker, so he'd remember to pick up the kids from school, he said. His trainer joked around with him, you don't seem like the type to look at yourself in the mirror much.

You sure you're going to see it? Dave smiled and said, yeah, that's why I wrote it on my hand, too. Was the last thing he'd ever say to his trainer? Shortly after that, he left to go home and join Nancy. for lunch. Around the same time, John DuPont summoned one of the Foxcatcher Farm's security team, a guy named Patrick Goodale. He wanted to show the guy where some trees had fallen down from a recent snowstorm, he said. But when Patrick arrived, John came out of the house to meet him with a gun. Weird? Why do you need a gun to show me some down trees? But, eh, whatever, John and his

guns. Patrick hopped in the passenger seat and John got into the drivers and they headed out. Not long after, John pulled up to Dave and Nancy Schultz's house, where they were eating lunch. Dave waved and went out to the car to say hi. But John wasn't there to say hi. He picked up his gun, pointed it out the window, and shot Dave three times. Panicked, Patrick Goodale tried to unbuckle his seatbelt and get out of the car, but John didn't give him a chance. He reversed the car and sped away back toward the mansion. As Patrick Goodale sat there, still stunned by what he just witnessed, John rushed back into the house. The police will be coming, he said to his staff, don't let them in. Back at the Schultz house, Nancy called 911, then ran out to her husband and rolled him onto his back. Dave was doing that breathing thing, athletes do, to help them through a particularly tough lift. Nancy said she thought he was trying to keep himself alive, but then he stopped breathing. She said, I love you, and kissed him on the forehead. And he died moments later, the love of her life.

After he was pronounced dead at the hospital, Nancy had to go straight to the police station to give a statement. Her kids still had no idea their father was dead. SWAT met at the property and started preparing. They knew John had weapons, and a safe room with a vault door. This might not be easy. Word spread fast, but as is so often the case, nobody really knew what had happened. They thought maybe it was an accident, that maybe Dave was okay, that maybe nothing had changed. Valo sped back to the property, praying that Dave would still be alive. He tried to go to the hospital to see his best friend, but Dave was already gone. Meanwhile, the standoff with SWAT was in full swing. John told the negotiator, his holiness is under siege, and demanded that they leave before refusing to negotiate.

The standoff lasted from Friday into Sunday. At one point, John told the negotiator he was going to bed, which he was allowed to do for some bonkers flippin' reason. The police turned off the heat to the estate to try to get John out. John called the negotiator and demand it that it be turned back on. The negotiator said he could see about getting a maintenance guy out there, but John asked if he could go out there and fix it on his own, and they were like, hmm, sure. So, John went out, unarmed, dressed in all black, and after a tense few minutes where he didn't seem like he was ready to comply, they tackled him. The remaining wrestlers were shell-shocked. From the documentary, it seems like everybody kind of felt that they shared some of the blame.

Some people felt like Dave had stayed at Foxcatcher, at least in part, to protect the other wrestlers' futures. Yeah, but honestly, with something like this, like, did people miss warning signs? Yes, absolutely. Should they have tried to get this man some help? Maybe. But by the time the murder happened, trying to help John DuPont was like trying to hug a cactus. I feel like, you know, put the blame where it belongs. This man was clearly mentally ill. There's no question about that.

And, you know, it seems like he was most likely making it worse with drugs. But he had such a long history of doing and saying weird, you know, eccentric stuff that you can kind of see how people weren't sure what was going on until it was too late. Right. And then you have like the people with authority, the police saying, oh, that's just John. That's just John. Yeah, we pulled a gun on you. Yeah. Big deal.

That's normal. So like I can see how people would be like, oh, okay, if the police aren't worried. Yeah, absolutely. And like we've said a hundred times, your mental illness is not your fault, but it is your responsibility. Fantastic quote from Marcus Parks of last podcast on the left. Most people in John's situation would never murder anybody. Wouldn't hurt a fly. Absolutely.

Like we've said so many times, you know, you're more likely to be a victim than a perpetrator if you're mentally ill. And that's just a provable fact. So I think this is a case where you have a perfect storm of circumstances. You've got a guy who didn't learn any social skills growing up because he was so isolated. and because he had so much money that people tended to just be yes men around him. You had a huge power imbalance between him and the athletes at the farm, right? And then when the mental illness kicked in and he started to get paranoid, he had this pre-existing sense of entitlement.

Like, I get to do whatever I want. And a whole history, like you said, of local cops enabling that. Yeah, do whatever the hell you want on your land. And it all just culminated in this horrible murder. And then Dave Schultz's kids never getting to see their dad again. John's defense, unsurprisingly, submitted a not guilty by reason of insanity plea, and John was initially deemed unfit to stand trial. But eventually, after some time in a mental hospital, he was deemed fit. Many of the wrestlers and staff were invited to meet with the DuPont's attorney

at his office. They wanted to start Foxcatcher up again. Some people were disgusted. Some decided to stay. Volo, for example, felt like he couldn't go back to Bulgaria, where there was a lot of unrest at the time. Sadly, that was the end of his family's relationship with the Schultz family. Meanwhile, trial began for John DuPont. The normally clean-shavened John appeared in court, bearded, unkempt in a new wheelchair. Oddly, neither the prosecution nor the defense really put forth a motive, but after several days of deliberation, the jury found John DuPont guilty but mentally ill, which just meant that the sentencing would be up to the judge. I think that's probably the correct sentence?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, I think so, too. She could sentence him to anywhere from five to 40 years in prison. She opted for 13 to 30, and John settled into prison life. From there, he ordered that all the houses on Foxcatcher Farms' estate be painted black. They still sit there today. Empty and overgrown. Their black paint chipping.

Nancy Schultz filed a wrongful death suit against John, which settled for around $35 million. In 2010, John DuPont died in prison of C.O.P.D. He was 72. Dave's daughter, Danielle, was on a plane when she saw the headline about DuPont's death, and she told the documentary crew that it made her kind of sad, because everybody seemed happy about it. When her dad died, people mourned him. But John DuPont, who might never have experienced real love in his life, was having his death celebrated. It's a really sweet, moving moment in the film. John was buried in his red foxcatcher wrestling singlet.

I'm sure it's what he would have wanted. I wish for his sake and everybody else's that his story hadn't ended this way. I wish David lived to win that last gold medal at the Olympics. Most of all, I wish his wife and children hadn't had to go on without him. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire.

And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Drew, Momo, Jessica, Maggie, Frankie with an IE, Lisa, Marley, Jennifer, another Lisa, and Melody. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes even two, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin while supplies last at 10,

virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash truecrime campfire. For great TCCC merch, visit the True Crime Campfire Store at Spreadshirt.com. And check out our website, truecrimecampfirepod.com.