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On a frigid January day in 1996, Olympic gold medalist and former world champion wrestler Dave Schultz was navigating his snow-laden driveway in Newton Square, Pennsylvania. His goal was to install a new radio in his car before heading out to collect his children from school.
While he worked on the dashboard of his blue Toyota Tercel, an unexpected arrival interrupted him. A Lincoln Town car pulled up, and although the face behind the wheel was familiar, it was far from friendly.
The driver, John du Pont—a multimillionaire and owner of the Foxcatcher gym where Dave had been employed for nearly ten years—rolled down the window and revealed a .38 caliber revolver.
Despite the frantic efforts of his wife Nancy, who dashed outside and then hurried back inside to call 911, the legendary US wrestler succumbed to his injuries in her embrace.
This tragic and inexplicable outburst from du Pont sent shockwaves through the American sports community, leaving an indelible mark on its history.
John du Pont, the heir to his family’s chemical-company fortune, killed a wrestling icon in 1996
Former Olympic and world champion Dave Schultz (pictured) was fatally shot by du Pont
Almost two decades later, the troubling story of du Pont’s state-of-the-art sports center, obsession with athletes and fateful relationship with Dave was retold on the big screen in Foxcatcher, the award-winning movie starring Steve Carrell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo.
A decade before the murder, du Pont, an heir to his family’s billion-dollar chemical-company fortune, embarked on a bid to establish himself as the biggest wrestling sponsor in the country. Despite being a passionate fan of the sport since his childhood, the scrawny, awkward boy from Pennsylvania was never cut out to be a professional athlete himself, so the next best thing was to buy his way in.
A year after inheriting $46million from the family business in 1985, he launched a wrestling program at nearby Villanova University and quickly sought out the finest talents money could buy – which included Dave and his younger brother Mark.
The Schultz brothers – who were the only sibling pair ever to capture world and Olympic championships in the sport –Â were regarded as wrestling royalty at the time. They had swept up more titles than any American brothers in wrestling history.
Du Pont initially got Mark to join his program with the offer of a $24,000-a-year job and a home on his 800-acre Foxcatcher Farms estate. After winning the world championships in 1987, Mark persuaded Dave to join him there.
By the time the elder Schultz arrived as both a wrestler and a coach, having accepted a similar offer to his brother, du Pont had transformed Foxcatcher into a remarkable $25million sports facility for amateur wrestlers, swimmers and pentathletes to flourish in. The space featured a four-mat wrestling room, weights room, swimming pool and more.Â
The pull of the Schultz brothers meant that many more athletes followed.
They would reside on the farm in old-fashioned, 1800s-style houses – there were roughly 30 of them in total – and train every day under du Pont’s watchful eye while taking wages from the eccentric tycoon, who also donated more than $3million to the US Olympic wrestling team.
The multimillionaire built his own $25million, state-of-the-art sports center in the late 1980s
Du Pont’s bizarre and tragic story was retold in the 2014 movie Foxcatcher, starring Steve Carrell (left) as the eccentric tycoon and Mark Ruffalo (right) as Schultz
Channing Tatum played Mark Schultz while Carrell played a deranged du Pont in the years leading up to his chilling 1996 murder
The Pennsylvania man used his vast fortune to buy his way into the wrestling community
It seemed like a dream setup for any aspiring wrestler – or in Dave and Mark’s case, for seasoned talents looking to ply their trade. However, bubbling beneath the surface was a sinister paranoia inside du Pont that would slowly unravel after the death of his 91-year-old mother, Jean Liseter Austin, in 1988.
Kurt Angle, the future Olympic gold medalist, world champion and WWE icon, joined Team Foxcatcher in 1993 after penning an exclusive contract to train under Dave at what he describes as ‘the greatest wrestling club in the world.’Â By that point du Pont’s alarming behavior, fueled by increasing drug use since his mom’s passing, had become apparent.
‘Listen, John was always good to me,’ Angle tells the Daily Mail. ‘But he was a little odd, I’m not gonna lie to you.’
He recalls ‘an instance where I was in his mansion and we were in his trophy room watching TV, and he kept leaving and coming back. He was real paranoid.
‘He went upstairs in the upper part of the mansion, came back down and he was doing this thing with his nose, like he just sniffed some cocaine, and he had a gun with him.
‘He says, “Hey Kurt, I need you to leave.” So I go to leave and he stops the other wrestler that was there and says, “Robbie, I want you to come with me.”‘
The other wrestler in question, Rob Calabrese, was taken down to a basement, where du Pont had discovered tunnels that led to other houses in the estate. His family had installed them during the American Civil War in case they needed to hide while under attack.
Schultz and his younger brother Mark (right) were quickly added to his Foxcatcher stable
Kurt Angle, a future Olympic and world champion, later followed them to the team in 1993
‘John found one and it was only 4ft high,’ Angle continues. ‘He told Rob to get in the tunnel and John got in underneath behind him and he had a gun pointed at Rob’s a**. And Rob had to walk 600 yards with du Pont’s gun facing his a**.
‘All he’s doing is praying the whole time the gun didn’t go off. But fortunately it didn’t, and he made it through.
‘So John was even more paranoid now that he found these tunnels, and he thinks people are going through these tunnels to get to him.’
Du Pont’s paranoia continued to worsen.
On one occasion, he demanded that all the treadmills be removed from the Foxcatcher gym because he was afraid they were taking him back in time. Another saw him order all Black wrestlers to leave the facility after deciding that black was the color of death.
In 1995, after becoming notorious for wearing an orange jumpsuit and insisting on being referred to as the Dalai Lama, there was a worrying sign of things to come when du Pont pulled a gun on another of his wrestlers, Dan Chaid. Despite the incident being reported, police – who had received substantial sums of money from him – simply brushed it off as another example of John being John.
Even 13 years prior, long before the construction of his Foxcatcher empire, du Pont’s short-lived marriage to occupational therapist Gale Wenk ended within months after he pulled a pistol on her and accused her of being a Russian spy.
As well as a desperation to be liked by athletes, and to prove himself as being one of their own, his obsession with security and protection spiraled into full-blown paranoia, largely through his growing cocaine and alcohol addiction. After becoming tired of his behavior, Mark walked out on Foxcatcher in 1988.Â
Angle quickly noticed du Pont’s odd behavior as his addiction to cocaine and alcohol spiraled
Dave remained and, according to Nancy, tried to convince du Pont to seek help for his problems.
‘He refused because he was worried that, if he admitted to an addiction, his family would come in and try to take his money from him,’ Schultz’s wife claimed in a 2014 interview with The Guardian. ‘I think, in the end, John had done so much cocaine that he had lost his ability to know right from wrong or friend from foe.’
While hindsight clearly suggests otherwise, the general consensus among Foxcatcher athletes was that du Pont remained a harmless man despite his odd antics. Angle stresses that he never imagined his old boss would be capable of what played out on Friday January 26, 1996.
Angle warmly refers to Dave as a ‘father figure’ and ‘the best wrestling technician in the world.’
Though, Angle says, just a week before his murder, Dave warned his prot̩g̩ not to return to Foxcatcher Рfor a disturbing reason.
‘I called Dave and told him I’m coming, and he said, “Listen… John’s acting really odd. He’s accusing you of being inside his walls,”‘ Angle remembers.
‘And he said, “Don’t come here right now, things aren’t really good. For some reason he thinks you’re trying to kill him.”‘
When Angle asked what he should do, Dave told him to ‘Hang loose, I’ll convince him that nobody’s in the walls.’
He never managed to talk du Pont back around.
Dave had formed a close relationship with du Pont and understood what he wanted from the sport, meaning that – unlike his brother – he was prepared to stay and reap the rewards of both the facilities and a decent salary.
The Foxcatcher boss killed Schultz near this house in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania
He was captured by police after a tense two-day standoff while barricaded in his mansion
Du Pont was eventually found guilty but mentally ill, leading to a 13-30 year sentence
Yet similarly to most, he had acknowledged that du Pont’s increasingly erratic and paranoid behavior was becoming untenable, and a doomed plan to wave goodbye to Foxcatcher after the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, was hatched by the majority of the team, Angle claims.
‘The crazy thing is, we all knew that John was unraveling,’ he admits. ‘But he was doing so well for all of us by paying us to wrestle and taking care of our traveling expenses and competition expenses and everything. So we thought, “If we can just get to the ’96 Olympics, then everybody will just leave the farm and let it go.” But we didn’t get there.’
After killing Dave, du Pont barricaded himself in his gun-filled mansion for days and had a tense standoff with police. Officers finally captured him by switching off his power and waiting for him to step out to fix his heater.
When he was put on trial a year later, he pleaded not guilty by insanity after one of the defense’s expert psychiatric witnesses diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.
According to Angle, du Pont’s attorneys urged his wrestlers to remain on Foxcatcher Farms under the agreement they would continue to be paid. ‘They wanted to make it look like [the wrestlers] were taking advantage of him,’ he alleges.
Angle was the first to quit, telling the deranged millionaire’s legal team to keep their ‘blood money.’
The jury found du Pont guilty but mentally ill in February 1997, leading to a 13 to 30 year sentence. In December 2010, he died in his cell at the age of 72.
Soon after leaving Foxcatcher, Angle received a phone call from a grieving Nancy Schultz. She had set up the Dave Schultz Wrestling Club in her late husband’s honor and wanted Angle on board.
In December 2010, he died in his cell at the age of 72 while 13 years into that sentence
Angle left Foxcatcher immediately after Schultz’s death and joined a club setup by his widow
He remembers his mentor as a ‘great friend’ as well as the ‘best technician in the world’
Nancy promised to match Angle’s $1,000-a-month Foxcatcher wages and added the world-champion athlete to her newly-launched team. Just months later, he captured Olympic gold in Atlanta.
He owes that success to Dave.
‘I was struggling in 1993-’94 to make the team,’ he explains. ‘I was placing second or third and wasn’t the number one man on the USA team. Then Dave Schultz started training me and he taught me a lot of great stuff. He actually got my career where I wanted to be.’
Angle’s eyes light up when the conversation turns to Dave’s unique physical and mental talents. The seven-time World and Olympic freestyle wrestling medalist, who learned to speak seven different languages in order to pick up techniques from other countries, was a master of the mat and an equally influential teacher.
‘He was a really great friend, he was a father figure to me,’ Angle insists. ‘And he was the best technician in the world.’