Reason First: The Richest Killer-John E. Du Pont’s Murder of David Schultz

Heir to the Delaware Du Pont dynasty, John E. Dupont shot and killed David Schultz. A man of eccentricity, he blew past those oddities and made a nightmare of his life. In the snow of Schultz’s home, Du Pont pointed a pistol at the wrestler’s chest and fired. He was also shot in the back.

An avid sportsman, Du Pont qualified as an expert marksman, and a passionate follower of wrestling. He kept his life together by harboring a fortune north of two hundred million dollars. He invested in making the Foxcatcher name synonymous with all things wrestling. His efforts led him to create a space for young athletes to develop their skills and abilities.

Most things seemed about normal until Du Pont began to look at Schultz as a protector. This dynamic fostered a peculiar relationship between mentore and mentee. With the money that he used to invest in schools and wildlife societies among othercendeavors, Du Pont’s social status grew even more.

The substantial amount of attention has been focused on the sense that he had paved a way for Olympic gold medalists like Schultz to train under him. The power he wielded came as part of his privileged lifestyle and stunted maturity.

His lack of growth as a man positioned him as an overgrown adolescent. He tried to keep up with reality but couldn’t. The weight of uncertainty in his life brought him to the lowest stage as the richest killer in American history.

Oddly enough, the jury found Du Pont guilty of third-degree murder. Even more bizarre, he grew out his hair and beard and declared himself “the Dalai Lama.” He spent the rest of his days in prisons and mental facilities.

Among many of his strange purchases, he had a closet of thirty identical blue blazers. One of which fitted him in his casket along with khaki trousers from Brooks Brothers.

Du Pont also collected rubber duckies. But the vicious thing wasn’t his offball behavior or strange collections. It wasn’t even his diagnosis as a schizophrenic. The irrationality of his malfunctioning, malnourished mind precipitated the death of a husband and father. His unthinking spelled his undoing. When he had the opportunity to grow, thrive, and prosper, he chose to break down, destroy, and kill.

He spoke of how it remained a burden for him to be a multimillionaire. Such an ironic statement could only be uttered by someone with no morality, no soul. The chestnut goes It’s not money that makes the man but the man who makes the money. There is no route to happiness in taking an innocent man’s life. Instead, he functioned on the level of an animal and lived an existence devoid of ethics. What happened didn’t create joy, alleviate pain, or foster relief. His corruption of values smashed his chances of carving out a life full of virtues.

As he continued to see matches throughout his years prior to the murder, he had every opportunity of directing his choices to sustain and advance life. How he could continue to be a manchild afraid of the world and always seeking to have enough guns to permit Pennsylvania police to train on his property, this concocted a recipe of murderous proportions.

While it would be easy to paint him as another pampered murderer who went haywire, he should be considered as the louse he was. He showed himself to be a monster who could not contain his emotions. His feelings ushered him into a realm of not acknowledging his own foibles which devolved from harmless weirdness to out and out vice.

The media hasn’t shied away from his exploits. A Netflix documentary and an Academy Award-nominated film starring Steve Carrell as Du Pont couldn’t find an audience or and an Oscar®. Yet, The News Delaware Online/News Journalpublished a story on Du Pont which does a deep dive.

It stands to reason that there should be a way of looking at this case clear-eyed and focused. It’s simple. The man tore another man from the bounds of reality by taking his life. This transgression can never be reversed. If the roles were though, the headlines might have read “Jock murders millionaire.” Rather the reality of it is that this happened and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. At least not the main ones involved.

Here lies the damning tale that we must face. An uber-wealthy man with all kinds of oddness associated with him murdered a man. While the specific, forensic reasons may be concerned with money and status, the actual concern is far more unsettling. A man who was not a man but a scared little boy mowed down a man because he couldn’t be him. He lacked the physique and the skillsets. He remained bereft of the vision of a wrestler. So, he put in his mind the idea that he could at least overpower Schultz one final time.

As he wasted away during the rest of his time on Earth, it is a wonder whether he knew somewhere in the annals of his mind the true consequences of his actions. The story still stands: a young, promising athlete was gunned down by his associate. An heir to a vast fortune with all the dollar power available to him threw away his ability to be a rational man, not to say his own freedom.

He was not in any way selfish. If he were, he would have valued his life as well as Schultz’s. To be completely rationally-self interested means that an individual prize life in themselves as well as others who deserve it. The free will concerning this reality is that Du Pont chose to virtually end his own life with his victim. The murder of a body in one regard and the soul in the other is a timeless tale that is as old as humanity.

The spirit that Du Pont snatched away from a man with a wife and children was also his own sanity and clarity of vision for life. As he damned his money, so did he also damn existence. That plucked him from the world of reason into a place of undeniable unforgivable evil. And it all could have been avoided.