Episode 655: The Du Pont Foxcatcher Murder Part III - Wrestle-Mania

There's no place to escape to. This is the last podcast. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? You know, I feel like I've grown a lot. Just in this. Sideways? No, no, no. No, you piece of shit. Wasteline? I'm less swollen than I was. I can tell because I've been sick. Okay, I've been sick. And so I realized, though, something cut through the cloud, the miasma of my sickness. Wrestling might not be gay. Yeah. I don't know how. Oh, my God. At this age, in your 40s, you find... I understand what you're saying. I don't know how I came to that conclusion because none of the information actually would lead me to that conclusion. But you did finally come to the conclusion that men can touch each other without it being gay. I don't understand the desire, but that's fine. I'll hug a woman if she'll let me. I'll hug any woman available. Believe it, you're a woman. I'll hug a man. I just don't want to hug. You know what it is? I just never understood. I grew up out sisters. I was over-mothered. Yeah. I don't like roughhousing with you boys. I don't like getting my... I don't like you boys getting your sweat on me. That's for making love to a woman. Yeah. I don't want your sweat on me, and I don't get it. But I understand it's a sport thing that I just... It's past me. I like it. I had an alliance with the wrestlers. You know, I was on the football team, but I had an alliance with the wrestlers because I used to laugh when they beat up the baseball players. And they just wanted an audience. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with the, I mean, I would say, I mean, a totally different Henry Zebrowski. I mean, it's 55%. It's just this one sport that I don't understand. But hey, you know, it's because they don't really make any money from it. Yeah. It's physically grueling. Yep. It's extremely difficult. It's almost impossible to make it to the very top of the heap. And then you can make it to the top of the heap, get hurt, never do anything ever again, just end up selling cars just like everybody else. And so I don't understand why anybody would do any of this. But also, I mean, I did improv. The single most charlably gay thing one thing. No, I don't know. What do I know? And we've got the man who knows how to play the sides against each other. His name is Ed Larson. How are you doing, Ed? I'm doing great. I'm doing great. The best way to find out if wrestling is gay or not is go into a room with a bunch of wrestlers in it and call them all gay. Bitch, you won't kiss me to prove you're not gay. And then it just beats me. You can see me running, squealing. He does. And away we go. Well, now that we've spent two episodes demonstrating how the DuPonts were one of the most evil and consequential families in world history, let's end this series with a focus on one DuPont in particular. Today, we're finally telling the full story of John DuPont and the DuPont foxcatcher murder. Now, while the first two episodes of this series demonstrated what the DuPonts were able to accomplish just so long as they had no regard for human life, John DuPont was an example of what happens when one of the DuPont heirs is left to spin his own wheels completely apart from the rest of the DuPont clan. Not even close to being involved in the business. See, while I wouldn't put John DuPont on the level of evil as, say, the DuPont who said fuck it when it came to poisoning all of us with Teflon, John DuPont was still careless, dangerously lonely, completely devoid of social skills, and mentally ill. Cool. Great combo. Considering his behavior, I'd put John's emotional intelligence by the time he murdered someone just before he turned 60, I put him on the level of a disturbed seven-year-old, if, of course, that disturbed seven-year-old had nearly unlimited funds to do whatever he wanted. Oh, the movie Blank Check. Yeah. Now, in a poorer man, these qualities would have simply made John DuPont homeless. But for an heir to the DuPont fortune, these shortcomings instead made John DuPont into a dangerous and unpredictable man who had a lot of power over other people. As such, in this episode, we hope to show you exactly how people like John DuPont work, and what it's like to be in the immediate orbit of someone in the DuPont family, even if they are separated from the DuPont family. But to be completely fair, considering what the Epstein files have shown us concerning how incredibly wealthy people spend their time and money, I think that it's a bit of a minor miracle that John DuPont wasn't an absolute monster. Instead, I described John DuPont as a dangerous weirdo, a guy who probably could have lived a relatively normal life if anyone in the DuPont family had given a damn. John, however, was left to figure out everything on his own, and since he was a DuPont, he did so in a world completely devoid of consequence until, of course, he committed a murder that was so brazen that it could not be swept under the rug. I find it interesting that the rest of the DuPont family, you know, let's say their crimes were perpetrated on the rest of the world. And this is an interesting case of a DuPont pulling the world. Their crimes as far as we know. Yeah, but pulling the world into his world. Like he did this thing where John DuPont didn't have to go out to commit a bunch of crimes. He brought this very small world of high level competitive wrestling. It's an extremely small world. Yes. And he essentially bought it, brought it to his house. And that's where he did his crimes. Yep. Now, as far as what John DuPont did, he shot and killed an Olympic gold medal winning wrestler named Dave Schultz. Dave had been a member of John's wrestling team, Team Foxcatcher, which included a number of competitive wrestlers who all lived and trained on John DuPont's sprawling Pennsylvania estate, Foxcatcher Farms. Dave had been introduced to John DuPont by his brother, Mark Schultz, who was also an Olympic gold medal winning wrestler. Mark actually wrote our main source today, Foxcatcher, which is a surprisingly funny book, considering how it is ultimately about the murder of Mark's brother. He's an amazing talker, too. He's only 30 for 30, which is really how I had first even heard about this story. Yeah. He's not portrayed that way in the movie by Channing Tatum, I'll tell you that much. Yeah. That kind of makes me... That's why the fictional movies will never be the same. Like, once you know all the story, it's not quite the same when you go and look at it, because the real dude really had a lot of depth. Yeah. Yeah, he did. And so let's get into the story of John Eleuther DuPont, starting with his bizarre and wealthy childhood. John DuPont was born in November of 1938 as the youngest child of four to William DuPont Jr. and Gene Lisseter Austin. William DuPont was one of the many multi-millionaire DuPonts, and John therefore grew up in a massive mansion with more than 40 rooms on an estate outside of Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. The mansion, known as Liseter Hall after John's mother, had been modeled after President James Madison's home in Vermont, which had been designed by the DuPont's most famous family friend, Thomas Jefferson. Man, he just did anything, right? Thomas Jefferson? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He could just draw up a house? No, he fucking paid someone and said he did it. What do you mean? Like Tommy's mother did. Thomas Jefferson is so cool. He didn't discover birds. He hired someone to discover the fucking bird, and he gave a bunch of money. He's like, call it John. I heard Thomas Jefferson could turn himself silver. He could turn into, and he would protect us. He wouldn't be the emissary of the world eater galact. That's right, and he personally killed the Barbary pirates. Wow. He didn't, like, send people to go do it or nothing. Tommy's my favorite. You can tell by the ponytail. Now, Lisseter Hall was on an 800-acre estate that eventually acted as a compound of sorts, An extravagant guest house called the Chalet sat next to the mansion, while the estate itself boasted several other smaller houses and buildings. Eventually, this estate would come to be known as Foxcatcher Farms. Now, when John DuPont was born in the waning days of the Great Depression that his family had, of course, helped to create, Foxcatcher Farms was mostly dedicated to the breeding and racing of thoroughbred racehorses. From what it seems like, John DuPont's father spent his time and his family's wealth on horse racing, just as John would later use that same generational wealth to insert himself into the world of competitive wrestling. But as opposed to wrestling, horse racing was the DuPont family-approved hobby. And it's a hobby of many moneyed families that have been doing horse stealing and racing and breeding for an extremely long time. It's rich people behavior. Yes, but have you ever slapped a saddle on a man? Oh, hey! That's called creative engineering. Well, the DuPonts were known for horse racing, and John's father had achieved international acclaim for designing and building more than 20 racetracks and steeplechase courses across the country. Well, he just went ahead and drew up them courses. Yeah. And it's a big old circle. Maybe this circle can be a little wider than that. Now, the key here is the horses are here. and I ran and ran and ran and ran nobody's right in the middle a pond I hate you shoot this man in the head no no no it's just a pond Jake's a good idea kill him and throw him in the pond seems like a ponzi scheme let's keep going William DuPont however may have spent a little too much time on the horses because John's parents divorced when he was still a toddler It also may show you that William DuPont was probably not a great man, because getting divorced in the early 40s, especially in high society, it's a big fucking deal. I also suspect that John DuPont may have been the baby that was supposed to save the marriage, because his three much older siblings had all married and left home by the time John was in grade school, and they had nothing to do with him. John kind of sounds like a baby that was conceived by just sitting on a bunch of extra cum that was sitting on the toilet. Like, I don't know if it was purposefully done. It sounded like he just kind of sneezed while he was inside her once and then just fucking cum and set a piss shot out of him and then just made him. You're a doctor now. I'm Thomas Jefferson. All right. I think I know a little thing about how babies are made. Right. My name is Thomas Jefferson. No, and John's parents, yeah. Thomas Jefferson actually does know quite a bit about how babies are made. I invented fuck. The name is Tommy Jefferson. Now you invent fuck. Are you the Tommy Jefferson? No, and John's parents divorced. His father left and was not involved in John's life from that point forward. So John basically grew up alone on this massive estate with his mother as his only companion. And man, do we know how well it turns out when boys grow up with their mother as their only companion. It's nice. They definitely never stopped calling them mother. And as a result, John grew up painfully shy and soon developed a stutter. The closest thing John had to a childhood friend was the son of a DuPont family chauffeur. But John later learned that his mother had actually put this boy on the DuPont payroll, and his only job was to pretend to like John. Oh, like a frat boy. It's like paying for improv time. Even though John still had no friends by the time he reached high school, he was still well-known enough to be voted both laziest student and most likely to succeed, which was an obvious wink towards John DuPont's family name. He was actually held back a grade. Not because he was dumb in any way whatsoever. He was just very lazy. I think he was most likely to secede from the union. John was, however, reasonably athletic. And while he did participate in wrestling in high school, his first love in athletics was swimming. When he eventually went to the University of Miami, he actually competed on the swim team. And he graduated in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in marine biology. Now, I believe he did have his own little Olympic dreams. According to the 30 for 30. Very much so. Yeah, we're going to get to that in a second. Yeah. Yeah, but when he did his marine biology, he learned how to wrestle dolphins, which is very hard because you're so slippery. Absolutely. And honestly, it really helps you. You can see how that frustration will build that eventually you start just shooting those dolphins in the head. We already got a hole there. Now, like many eccentric wealthy men, John had a ton of interests and hobbies throughout his life. In the 60s, John was really into birds and seashells. So he traveled the world collecting thousands of seashells, and he eventually had a collection of over 40,000 stuffed birds, which is incredibly harmless behavior for a DuPont. Yeah, tell it to the birds. I mean, I just feel like it's not leading up to something good. But in 1965, John's father died. And to show you how much money these people had, even after the inheritance was split between John and his three siblings, John still walked away with somewhere between $50 and $80 million. And that's 1965 money. Not bad. That's pretty cool. Considering I got negative money. Yeah. Now, John did use some of that money to build the Delaware Museum of Natural History. Because remember, the DuPonts owned Delaware, Uncle Doopie. This was basically a building that held John's personal collection of seashells and stuffed birds. Got to put those 40,000 birds somewhere. John was actually such a prolific ornithologist that he is personally credited with discovering over two dozen species of birds. I'm sure he did it just like everyone. Do you have any fucking idea how empty your life has to be to find new birds? New birds! Think about how long and how much time. And he's not getting paid to do it. He's doing it on his dime, going and looking at trees, which would later drive him insane. And he's just staring at it and just going like, there's a new bird. It's like, what is this? Can't anything else be done? I just feel bad for the guy who really discovered the birds. Yeah. I honestly think that he saw these birds. Yeah. Because he was standing next to someone very smart. It's easy to see a bird. He didn't go to school. He doesn't know anything about anything. He went to school. He had a bachelor's degree from. And he got most lazy. No, but he did get a bachelor's degree from the University of Miami. That he paid for. This man has done nothing. You can't convince me that he has an ounce of intelligence. He saw a bird. He saw a bird. He said, that's a bird. John's true love, however, was athletics. See, John had dreamed of swimming in the Olympics, but he was, at best, a good swimmer rather than a great one. While John's wealth meant that he could participate in pretty much any athletic competition, he did not have the ability to win, nor to even come close. If you swam in circles, he would have won. When he competed for a spot on the swim team in the 1968 Olympic Games, for example, John came in second to last. But from what it seems, things started going terribly wrong for John DuPont in the late 60s. Who fucking came... Who could have been slower than him? Someone richer and fatter. Yeah, she's like, I'm like, hello. The neighbor from Pee Wee Herman shows up. I want to swim in the Olympics. Well, before the late 60s, far as I can tell, John DuPont really was a fairly normal, wealthy weirdo with very specific tastes. But what seemed to truly change John was an incident that happened when John was about 30 years old. He was riding a horse when the horse threw him from the saddle, and John landed straddling a fence like he's fucking Wile E. Coyote. His testicles were so badly injured that they developed an infection and they had to be removed completely. Those testicles were replaced with plastic falsies. And John was supposed to take testosterone shots every day following this incident. While I know that hormones can be perfectly safe, I also know that they can greatly affect a person's behavior if they aren't applied correctly. And I'm not sure how advanced hormone treatment was in the late 1960s, even if you're as rich as John DuPont. As such, I think it is possible that the misapplication of hormones is what turned John from being a mere rich weirdo into a dangerous and unpredictable rich weirdo. I think later on it would go on to the mixture of alcohol, drugs, and the haphazard use of hormones. Yes, let's say the inconsistent use of hormones. Apparently when you're hammered on cocaine, you forget when to take your real medicine. Ha ha! I heard that I was out in my medicine. Now, right around the time that John lost his testicles, he also aged out of competitive swimming. It seems like John figured out very quickly that if he wanted to participate in something, the DuPont fortune would open any door he wanted. I did have a question I want to ask the audience. There's so much ball-smashing fetish content, right? Guys, I've seen this. Guys jumping onto sawhorses with their balls, getting kicked in the balls, doing this kind of stuff, and it's for sexual pleasure. My question is, why don't their balls get mashed up so bad that they need to be replaced? Sidestore is LPOTL at gmail.com. I think when you involve a horse, it changes everything. Right? I'm sure they do. I did actually work with a girl in Brooklyn. We worked at this flower shop together many years ago, and she made extra money doing ball fetish videos. Yes. And she said that, like, it looks much worse than it is. Oh, you think they're pulling it? They're pulling it. Yeah, they're pulling it. You can't go all willy-nilly. Some of these guys like getting their balls fucking hammered. Yeah, I'm sure some of them definitely lose their balls. Yeah, they're very, very delicate. Side stories, LPOTL at gmail.com. Even though John didn't even try to compete in the 1976 Olympic Games, he was still made a manager as a reward for his financial contributions. That meant that John DuPont could wear the team's warm-up uniform and pose with them for a photo, which gave John the illusion that he had actually earned a spot on the team. And the illusion was enough for John. Usually that's kind of all he needed, because John was indeed starting to lose his grip on reality. As it turned out, in addition to everything else, John was also schizophrenic. And by this point in his life, he's one of those guys where it seems to have showed up in his mid to late 20s and really started getting going hard in his 30s. But after that, the rest of the DuPonts, they more or less washed their hands of this oddball relative who is obsessed with swimming and birds instead of horse racing and institutionalized mass murder. How will we reach these kids? How will we reach him? He needs to be making forever chemicals. And he tried tweeting at him. Oh, he's not interested in the burning point of human flesh and I don't know what to talk about. Well, I guess he'll spend his days watching parrots and playing grab-ass. That's fine. And so, with near unlimited funds, no sense of consequence, and zero social skills, John DuPont's mental illness quickly became a danger to those around him. In the late 70s, for example, a swim coach that John knew had been invited out to Foxcatcher Farms, and that swim coach brought along his young son. The coach's son was taking a swim in the estate's pond while John was fishing that day. But John became enraged because the fish weren't biting. They weren't doing what he wanted them to do. Sounds like a Ponzi scheme. I love it. You should be filled with fish, though. You know what I mean? You should be absolutely filled with other fish, and then you bring fish to other empty ponds after you've taken the fish from them, and then you've got to do that, and you pay back. You're robbing fish to pay carp. I think your backyard could use a pond. I can sell you one. Oh, wow. That sounds amazing. Well, John eventually decided that the reason why the fish weren't biting was because the local geese were casting spells on him. So John pulled out his handgun and started shooting at the pond geese, completely forgetting that a child was swimming in the pond. And John came very close to shooting his guest's son. That's fucking power, man. He's just being a piece of shit. He knew what he was doing. Yeah, no, he definitely knew what he was doing. But that's the thing about the consequence thing. Because, you know, I definitely don't want to imply in any way whatsoever that being schizophrenic makes someone inherently dangerous. It absolutely does not. Well, if you're unmedicated and you're not doing stuff. Well, even if you're unmedicated, it still doesn't make someone inherently dangerous. It doesn't. It absolutely does. Nothing makes anybody inherently dangerous. Yeah, yeah. Having multiple loaded guns on them doesn't help. See, that's not a good thing to have. Yes. And because a lot of people are stopped, you know, by their own sense of consequence, their own sense of like, if I do this, that will happen. I mean, it's why we have not guilty by reason, reason of insanity, because some people do cross the threshold where they don't know the difference between right and wrong. John DuPont always knew the difference between right and wrong. But his schizophrenia did make him far more unpredictable and far more dangerous than, you know, the regular person. He wouldn't care either way. Yeah. Now, John's burgeoning mental illness and his penchant for carrying around massive loaded weapons that didn't stop him from getting married in 1983. The wedding was massive with over 500 guests, a true DuPont affair. But the marriage only lasted a few months because John DuPont was highly abusive in addition to everything else. See, John DuPont was also an alcoholic, and when he drank, he got mean. Allegedly, in just the few months that he was married to his first and only wife, John threw her into a burning fireplace, tried to shove her out of a moving car, and threatened her with a knife. In an incident that sounds like the last straw, John once even held a gun to his wife's head and accused her of being a Russian spy, saying, quote, Russian spies get shot. The voice. After that, John's first wife fled, never to return. She tried. But following the departure of John's wife, after he showed her just how dangerous he could truly be, John decided to focus completely on athletics, while also bringing himself closer to local law enforcement. This is another thing that I think he did very much on purpose. What really started the wrestling obsession? We have no idea. We'll get to it here in a bit. That's a whole thing, but we'll get to it in a bit. We have no idea. John built a 14,000 square foot world-class athletic training facility on Foxcatcher Farms in 1985. But that facility also included a shooting range. While John did indeed use the range to become an expert marksman, along with everything else, he also invited the local cops to use the shooting range for training. A lot of rich guys do this. Make the cops your friends and you can get away with anything. Murdoch family, we've seen it over and over again. Yeah, John kept a close relationship with the local cops from then on, donating money, buying them equipment, and even letting them use his helicopter. But consequently, the Newtown Township Police Department gave John his very own police badge, which showed John, yet again, that he could buy his way into pretty much anything. Yeah, but it doesn't need anything. It's another thing they just fucking gave him. Well, you know, the average person on the street don't fucking know that. Oh, I know. When he shows a very official-looking, well, what is an official police badge? I mean, that's what Alec Murdoch did. He used to drive around with it in his fucking front dash. Steven Seagal and Shaq. Yep. Shaq was an honest cop. And so was Elvis. And so John's close relationship with the police, combined with the fact that John was estimated to be worth about $200 million by the year 1987, have meant that the police ignored behavior from John that ran from simply concerning to outright criminal. For example, sometime during the 80s, John took a stick of dynamite and blew up a litter of newborn baby foxes for no apparent reason. Yeah, it's called Fox Catcher, not Fox Blow-Upper. Fox Exploder. Fox Exploder is a cool album name, man. It's Fox Exploder. It's like a disco punk album from like 2005. Yeah, that's awesome. Next, from Les Fox Exploder. And while some might say, sure, he can do what he wants, it's his property, most people don't have tanks on their property like John DuPont had. Somehow, John had bought a tank that had been stripped of its weapons, and John used it to drunkenly joyride the vehicle around the estate, sometimes even brought it out for local parades. But around Christmastime 1984, a police officer and his wife, who were living in one of Foxcatcher Farms' many houses, they said they heard the tank a-coming. John was, of course, drunk and had driven the tank through the trees. This was the type of tank that sank the political career of Michael Dukakis. You remember Michael Dukakis with his goofy little head sitting up, like he's riding the tank and he's got the helmet and he's looking so happy and that's why George H.W. Bush won the presidency? Because that stupid fucking tank? The old days, one embarrassing picture could destroy your entire career. And it's not even that embarrassing. Look it up. He's just grinning. He's having a good time. But guess what that is? Enraging. That makes me angry. Just see? Honestly, truly. Look at Michael Dukakis' smile and tell me you don't want to absolutely destroy it. Remember when Dan Quayle misspelled potato ruined his life? Yeah. It was the only thing. It was like the number one joke in Mad Magazine for a good five years. It's all Jay Leno said. For years. Hey, maybe if you learned how to spell potato, you wouldn't be a bad guy said it. Unbelievable. Well, this is the one, of course, where the head goofily sticks out at the top. And since John had just barreled right through a bunch of tree branches, he was covered in blood. His face was just scratched as shit. But John had no fear driving a tank drunk and bleeding up to a cop's house, even if it was on his own property. Instead, John parked the tank out front and yelled for the officer to, quote, come out of the plane. Come out of the plane. Now, if you own all the land and there's a fence around the land and you own the tank on that land, can you not drive the tank drunk? No, I don't think you can. You know driving, even on property, because they did this with, this actually came down with the Bill Murray case with the golf cart. Because they were trying to, he basically said all that. and they're like well you're drunk in a moving vehicle and we caught you yeah because by that logic you could murder someone but hey it's on my own property yeah okay you have to you have to not yeah the law is the law most of the time but the worst thing john du pont did in the 80s which again it all relative here was when he was driving his Lincoln Continental and hit a flag man directing traffic He hit a traffic cop with his car in broad daylight. Yeah, they're dressed in yellow waving flags. Not a good thing to do. Now that's what I'm talking about now. Thank God he made it so, so obvious. When John hit him, the traffic cop rolled over John's hood and then slammed onto the ground. And John did, at the very least, stop. He dragged the obviously injured traffic cop to the sidewalk and sat with him for a few moments, but eventually he just said, you'll be all right, and then drove away just as the police arrived. You know, I would like to ask you the question of, why aren't you flat? I thought when I hit things with my car that they would turn into flat little pancakes. They would turn into paper like paper. Good thing you went up and not down. I don't understand you. Why are you jumping like a rovin? Why aren't you flat? You're starting to fall into Don Corleone territory. Well, John, he just drove to his estate and fucked off somewhere in his helicopter. And when he returned to Foxcatcher Farms, the only consequence faced for the hit and run of a traffic cop was a meager fine for $42.50. Might as well be fucking pocket lamp to a guy like John DuPont. Yeah. Now, while John DuPont's interest in athletics ran from swimming to target shooting, he eventually settled upon wrestling as his number one love. Although nobody is exactly sure why John DuPont became obsessed with wrestling, just as no one can answer the question of why he was obsessed with birds or swimming or target shooting. He just found something and hyper-focused on it for sometimes years at a time. What I have also found in smaller market areas for rich people or rich, like, you could buy the entire scene. you just get to skip past everybody we were joking about how I got to meet if you show interest in a small world you can get access to everybody met a lot of professional blowing glass artists you can meet everybody that's ever been at the top of blowing glass if you ask them they're excited to meet you they want to go out there DuPont might have understood if you choose an obscure thing you can own it entirely. Damn good point. And those people are going to want to talk because no one ever asked them about it. Yeah, here's my theory. I think that he got into wrestling not because he was homosexual or anything but because he found it to be the only way he would ever touch a person. You know what? Really, there could be something to that. Yeah. The tactile need he has. You can see he's like a little boy. He does feel like a little boy. He looks like a little boy that's never been hugged, and this is how he can get millions and millions and millions of hugs. Well, John had wrestled in high school, but in 1986, competitive wrestling became John DuPont's new obsession. But this was John's first obsession that actually involved other people, and it would eventually end in murder. John DuPont was not interested in the professional wrestling we see on TV. He wasn't trying to hang out with Jake the Snake Roberts. Yeah, the real wrestling. Yeah, the real cooking. I'm going to get the fucking shit beat out of me, guys. Listen, I'm barely straight. Or rather, John became obsessed with the Olympic style of competitive wrestling, where two guys just walk onto a mat and grapple each other until one of them gets pinned for a single second. It's not a three-fall. It's just one. I know. It's annoying. I always thought it was three. You hear that sound? The relaxing sounds. The ASMR world. The collegiate wrestling. Fuck! I'm coming. You got me so good. You were doing so good. You got me so good. You started saying that you did not think that wrestling... Put my legs behind my ears. And within... How long, Rob? 20 minutes? Deeper. 35. 35 minutes? Gag me with it, you fucker. You fucking my girlfriend. You know why it's not gay? No gay man would choose to do something that would ruin his ears like that. My picture perfect ears. Now back in the 80s, wrestling was not what you would call America's sport. A lot of colleges didn't even have wrestling programs. and John DuPont noticed that nearby Villanova University was totally bereft of sweaty young men tussling with each other on a competitive level. So John convinced Villanova, and by convinced I mean he gave him a lot of money, to let him start an NCAA team from scratch. Now in the mid-80s, the best competitive wrestler in America was arguably a man named Dave Schultz. John wanted Dave Schultz as Villanova's wrestling coach, but Dave had just gotten a raise coaching at Stanford University. So Dave suggested his brother, Mark Schultz, who was also a gold medal winning competitive wrestler. Now the Schultz brothers have a fascinating story all on their own. Born in Palo Alto, California in 1959 and 1960, the Schultz brothers were natural athletes. In fact, their parents said that Mark Schultz had a six pack and sculpted muscles by the age of four, which sounds like a bizarre and terrifying sight to behold. Yeah, Mark, I'd like to see push. That's my boy. Yeah, Mark. That's the kind of build you get on a boy from slave labor. You can't get it anymore. You can't make a boy build a boat anymore. I remember watching an episode of Maury once. It was like, the world's most muscly kid. I remember that. You remember that one, yeah. I literally remember that. And that little jack kid come out doing pull-ups. Yeah, he had a mullet. Yeah. I heard his mullet wasn't even dilated. He just ripped it open himself. Yeah, he walked out standing up. While Mark came to be known as the sledgehammer for the brutal wrestling style he developed, his brother Dave was described as the Yoda of wrestling. See, Dave was dyslexic, and the way his brain was wired enabled him to master the technical aspects of wrestling, which led to the creation of new winning techniques and strategies. Dave Schultz changed the game. He was a fucking animal. He was. And I love, well, I actually started, like, looking up his matches, like, watching him go, like, actually made me see more of the sport. Truly, like, he's a fucking monster. And you know what I love? Hairy back. Yeah. That's what I love. You never see these fuckers anymore. Yeah, like a King Kong Bundy. I love it. Just hairy and just fucking love that fucking guy. What I loved about Dave Schultz, from what I could tell, I could be wrong, is that, you know, like, Mark was very intense, but Dave was like, shake your hand, smile at you. a hang out with you type of guy. Yeah. And then fight you to the death. That's what Mark said. Mark said, he's like, don't ever fool, don't let him fool you. He's like, never let his personality fool you. He was the most brutal motherfucker he's ever met to wrestle with on the face of the planet. Dave Schultz was like a master. Yeah. And since wrestling was neither a popular nor a well-funded sport, the Schultzes ended up in low-paying assistant coaching jobs after college, like most competitive wrestlers who wanted to make wrestling a career. But even though both of them had to move back in with their dad in Palo Alto, and this really gives you a perspective on competitive athletics. Yes. They both competed in the 1984 Olympics. They both won gold medals. They were the first brothers in history to even win medals at the same Olympic Games, much less win the gold. Despite their accomplishments, though, there were no financial opportunities for competitive wrestlers, no sponsorship deals for singlets. And the Schultz brothers seemed to feel like pro wrestling was beneath them. So the Schultzes had limited means of making money if they wanted to make wrestling a full-time gig. And that cannot be, that is probably the most important aspect of the story. You mean to tell me if you don't think that it was worth it for them to put on like sort of like a semi-garb of another race and go to another place and do steroids? Your name is Tataka now! Your name's Tataka! You're a Native American. All right. Dave Schultz, let me guess. Japanese? Yeah, that's what you are. You know, he's got to go in there, and then that's got to be hard. Can you play Arab? Yeah. Because we need... Oh, yeah. Yeah. Our cheeks look at... He's getting a little... Let me show you. Big for his britches. Let me show you. Let me show you. How'd it be cool if they made him the rabbi? Yeah. Wow. That would feel like a rabbi wrestler. The wrestling rabbi is a great idea. I really think anyone take it. If you're a wrestler and you're looking for an identity, please be the rabbi. And actually, he wouldn't have to change his name at all. He's like, hello, my name is David Schultz. I'm the wrestling rabbi. Yeah, come here. It was very nice to meet you. Come close. I'll make this the bris. Oh, and he's hitting him with the circumcision. He's hitting him. Hey, hey, hey. Oh, that's an abomination against God's creation. Can you even believe me? Where did he get the little knife? Things got desperate for Mark Schultz when he was fired from his coaching job at Stanford University in the summer of 1986. That meant that Mark had no place to train for the upcoming 1988 Olympics. I will also see why his family was really asking about that. I can see why, because if he's spending all of this money, you would assume that if he's a DuPont, according to the family, that he would have a view on a long-form business plan, right? And what's funny about wrestling is that there was none. There's no money to be made. No. So he was just, that's kind of, I think that's a part of the reason why they were like, why, you're literally just flushing money, you're just giving money away. Yeah. No, oh, you mean how the rest of the DuPonts saw John DuPont? Oh, yeah. You're just giving money to these strangers. Yeah. They didn't see the point in it. No, of course not. Because of course with horse racing, you might win some, but that's the thing. Well, horse racing is horse trading and breeding. True. And you sell the horse, there's other ways to make money. People buy tickets to go. Yeah. Yes. There's ways to make money within that. That's why, yes, the horse racing is actually extremely lucrative and all of the world of it. So you could see why they're like, no one makes money off of that. Unless it's like the big five sports, we do not take care of our athletes, especially our Olympic athletes here in America. Other countries, like literally you can make it your career and you have a good life and you have a nice house. But in America, we could give a shit. Well, we run on the capitalist model of, like, if it's worth something, then a rich weirdo will deign upon himself to give you money to do your thing. But you have to wait until somebody makes it, like, I have decided that this is valuable enough to give you money. And all of America's are really good at what we do here, too, is that if you're already making money, then help comes. Yeah. So that'll happen as you became if he went and he got a gold medal and then he put out an album and then he did. And he was already making all this money. Other stuff would come to help him make more money. Yeah. Well, in Mark Schultz's moment of greatest desperation, he's lost his job at Samford. He needs to train for the 88 Olympics. That is when Mark Schultz got a call from John DuPont. John called up Mark and told him about this wrestling job at Villanova. He told him that Mark would have the opportunity at the age of 26 to build a program from the ground up. And it did seem weird. Too good to be true, some might say. But John told Mark repeatedly that his only motivation for hiring him, doing the program, all of it, was the elevation of wrestling. It had to be. Well, I mean, his motivations were far worse. Oh, yeah, they were archaic. His real motivations were far worse. But finding funding for these sorts of athletic endeavors, it's the number one problem faced by elite athletes in America. And Mark hoped that wrestling was finally going to have a money man who would support his sport regardless of cost. This is also wrapped up in the Cold War because the Russians had consistently produced the best wrestlers in the world. And this goes to your point, Eddie. This is due to the fact that Soviet wrestlers, like all Soviet Olympic athletes, The reason why the Soviets were always so incredible at the Olympics is because these people lived and competed only for the glory of the Soviet Union. They had no other responsibilities, and they spent their entire lives training. Yeah, and they would train against bears. Yeah, you know, from what I hear, it was cold, man. And so if America had the capitalist version of that set up, i.e. a rich weirdo with a lot of time on his hands, then maybe American wrestlers could compete in the world championships on a consistent basis. It's not an incorrect idea. It's not. So despite the fact that Mark felt that John DuPont was at the very least hiding something, he said yes to John's offer. Now when Mark met John DuPont for the first time, Mark said that he immediately got the vibe that John was a massive loser. As Mark put it, John DuPont was like Richie Rich, all grown up but with a drug problem. John also had a bizarre appearance. John DuPont was nearly 50 years old by the time he met Mark. And since he was going gray, he had taken to dyeing his hair. Problem was, John had chosen Ronald McDonald Red as his hair color. And he hadn't kept up with it. So his natural gray hair color had taken over. Gray roots, red on the side. And he had this weird middle part haircut. He's very strange haircut. Yeah. Honestly, if I saw that haircut, I would have turned around. I feel like the haircut was the very first warning. And the redness left in John's hair only highlighted the thick layer of dandruff that covered John's head. John also had dark yellow teeth caked with food. And when John started talking, it was obvious that he was either drunk, stoned, or both. This is their first meeting. Mark, however, had called around to his wrestling buddies for advice on what to do in this situation. and every single one of them had told him that this was an unbelievable situation, an opportunity that he could not pass up. So Mark decided that he was going to put up with John DuPont's weirdness for the good of the sport. Remind me of every single thing every little girl in southern Florida was saying about Epstein, about what was going on, and then all their friends that were all embedded in it were telling them the same thing, just being like, it's a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah. I was watching the behind the scenes on the making of the movie Foxcatcher with Steve Carell, and everyone who knew John DuPont that saw Steve Carell on set was like, it's unbelievable. He's got everything. He looks exactly like him. He acts just like him. He's got everything that's similar to him, except for the smell. Yeah, John DuPont looked like a guy legitimately. He looked like he fucking reeked. Yeah. Now, amongst John DuPont's many shortcomings, he had no social skills, which translated to horrendous table manners. John would talk with his mouth full, spraying food and spit all over anyone unlucky enough to sit next to him during a meal. Before long, Mark recognized that John was the most miserable man he'd ever met. But it wasn't just because he was strange and difficult. Mark quickly saw how manipulative John DuPont can be. He saw how John DuPont saw the world. All the manipulation always came down to money. Like most people with generational wealth on the level of the DuPonts, John knew how much power his money allowed him to have over other people. And John truly believed that everyone had their price. And if they didn't have a price, John had the power to ruin whoever didn't play by his rules once they were in his immediate orbit. And remember how small of a world competitive wrestling is. Now, John was vague when Mark asked how involved John was going to be in the wrestling program at Villanova. But he did give the impression that he would be largely absent. Won't even know I'm here. Mark, of course, quickly discovered when he started at Villanova in the fall of 1986 that this was a lie. See, John had told Mark that the school was going to build a dedicated wrestling facility on campus. But when that didn't manifest, John insisted on training the Villanova wrestlers at his facility at Foxcatcher Farms, which honestly was probably John's plan all along. Oh, yeah. Mark also came to realize that part of his job was to be in John DuPont's crew, so to speak. See, not too long after starting his job at Villanova, Mark was invited over to John's estate, where he was surprised to find a party already in progress. To a guy like Mark, the whole thing was immediately weird. It was just a room full of mysterious men in suits. And soon, Mark was introduced to a guy named Bob, who John said was his, quote-unquote, events organizer. Now, I know what you're thinking, but Bob was no Ghislaine Maxwell. Rather, Bob's main job was to organize and host award ceremonies that John DuPont held in his own honor, complete with awards that John would commission from the local trophy shop and award them to himself. That's worse than a Ghislaine Maxwell. I feel like with a Ghislaine Maxwell, at least you're getting blown and you're getting sex out of it. Just the idea of you setting up a fake award ceremony. What a horrible thing to say. Yeah. Yes, but you get something out of it where something like this is like you're just getting a trophy and they're all looking at each other. It's very strange. It's very, very strange. It's extremely strange. Man, I bet that trophy guy didn't ask no questions though. Oh, so happy. What do you want on top of it? What else did he wish? Congrats! When John DuPont was arrested, I bet that fucking trophy shop guy, I bet he shot himself in the fucking head. It's over. I'm overextended on so many loans. I got to pull Stephanie out of private school. Now, on that night, John was drunker than usual. And as drunk people usually are, he was therefore more exhausting. Mark said that John had the ability to suck the life out of people. And most of the guests were either annoyed or worn out by John before Mark even showed up. He's a psychic vampire, like of the utmost. Of the highest level. When Mark walked in, John sarcastically called him pal. loudly saying, quote, Thank God you're here, pal! There you go. John then got on his hands and knees and crawled up to Mark. Mark barely knew John at this point. Oh, boy. John then grabbed Mark by the waist and clawed up Mark's body while repeatedly calling him, Pal! Hey, my big old pal! Big old wide pal! Wanna rub motherfucking no balls on you? I'm sure everyone present sighed, rolled their eyes, and looked at their watches. A lot of times, you know, that's interesting whenever you meet someone who's that rich and crazy, because then you just look at it because they get away with it because they're so rich, and you're like, man, that guy's crazy, man. You're excited about it at first. Of course. But the difference here is that all the other people in the room, they've seen it all before many times. Oh, they're over it. And with Mark, this is his new boss. And he is starting to see like, oh, this is what I signed up for. Fuck me. So I should stand up to Henry? No! No, do not learn! But John DuPont did stay out of the Villanova Athletics Department for the first few weeks of the job. Because while the training facilities were out at Foxcatcher, Mark's office on the Villanova campus was shared with the school's baseball coach. But pretty quickly, John started dropping by, drunk, high, or both, barging into Mark's office to rant for hours on end using a highly annoying vocal tick. See, after every statement, John was known to end his rant with the phrase, Y'all the same, we're the same! And this was John's way to get people to acknowledge him, no matter how bizarre his statements were. An example Mark Schultz gave in his book, John once showed up to his office and said, quote, I'm really craving blueberries right now, man. If I had a basket of blueberries right now, I would eat them all up. Yum, yum, yum. You understand what I'm saying? Why is he now, like, kind of jive? I don't really crave blueberries right now, man. I don't know. I like the first one he did when he was like, I'm really craving blueberries right now. If I had a basket of blueberries right now, I would eat them all up. Yum, yum, yum. You understand what I'm saying? I'm saying! I'm saying! You understand what I'm saying? This was while Mark was in his office trying to do paperwork. He's a fucking 26-year-old dude who's just been like, hey, build a fucking wrestling program at one of the most well-known colleges in America. But since John DuPont had donated so much money to Villanova, money that spread far beyond the fledgling wrestling program, he was pretty much allowed to do whatever he wanted. Nobody at Villanova ever said no to John DuPont. In fact, it soon became part of Mark Schultz's job description to deal with DuPont whenever John wanted to drop by the campus and yammer, which became an increasingly frequent occurrence as the months went by. Man, you know it was already hard to sell from the actually do paperwork. Yeah, he's a fucking lifelong wrestler. He's been an assistant coach. And it's the only job that he's had, his assistant wrestling coach. That was always so annoying. Whenever, like, you get good enough in your job and, like, kitchens and shit, they make you a chef, and the next thing you know, you're the manager. It's like, I just don't want to cook. Yeah, like, what do you think? They all come up doing schedules and fucking, like, yeah. Yeah. Doing wing math. Yeah. Like, you know how to do onion rings. Let's see you do taxes. Now, since this program at Villanova was new, it was difficult to attract wrestlers. So, after John hired a wrestler named Chuck Yarnall as head coach, John and Chuck would roam the Villanova campus looking for guys wearing high school wrestling t-shirts. Nothing gay about any of that. Nothing remotely. First time I agree with you. They would then approach these guys unsolicited and say, Hey, you want to join a wrestling team? Well, they asked me a question. How do you feel about taking that wrestling from that shirt to my body? Well, to try to entice guys who were on the fence about wrestling for a drunk weirdo with bright red hair costing them on their way to class, John would give these guys rides on his private jet or rides on his helicopter. He would promise them full scholarships, even though he had no authority to do so. This method, of course, did not turn up any all-stars. So John and Chuck gave up after a few weeks just roaming the campus. It took them a while to realize, hey, Mark Schultz is an actual gold medal winning wrestler. Maybe we should get him to do the recruiting. Yes. And then after Mark started doing the recruiting, the program did start to attract some pretty solid wrestlers. Villanova, I think they still are pretty well known for their wrestling. Are they? Pennsylvania in general is a big wrestling state. It is. Yeah, right behind. I think Iowa's the biggest, and then Pennsylvania's, like, number two, I believe. So I'm sure I'll get you all that. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I think they are pretty huge. I think Wisconsin might be number one. Okay. But I do definitely think that if you put your thumb on the scale with that kind of money in this world, it does crazy stuff. Well, on the collegiate level, this was back before they were like, hey, you know, we need to keep money and college separate. Like on the collegiate level, his money really didn't do a whole lot. It wasn't until he took it out of the collegiate sphere that his money really made a difference. Now, the group that would become the infamous Team Foxcatcher was a different entity from the Villanova wrestling team that Mark had been hired to rebuild. Team Foxcatcher started as more of an all-around athletics program that included training for swimming, the pentathlon, and the triathlon. Because I do believe his first obsession was the pentathlon. He did, yes. Well, it was swimming first, and then it was the pentathlon. The pentathlon, is that the one with shooting, too, or is that the, what was the other one, the 10 one? I have no idea. Which one's the one where you race to a woman, she's stuck in a well, you have to pull the pantyhose down before the water reaches her face. It's fencing. Then you shoot the guy in the pussy, the trans man in the pussy. Oh, wow. modern pentathlon was fencing swimming equestrian show jumping and a combined laser run of pistol shooting and running jesus christ that is strictly for rich people yeah oh yeah this is just about killing humans for sport oh yeah where's your sword outfit now jump on your horse and now have your high-powered laser rifle like well come on that's fun okay i admittedly i did since this is quick i did read that off ai so god knows my god knows if that's true or not still that's fun as hell i want to do that sport yeah yeah i want to ride on my horse with a sword and a gun in either hand think about that put them all together one act all together two people on a horse's sword gun who kills the other first yeah and then we could bring it like the pro wrestling angle into it and we could give you a turban and call you the sultan oh yeah especially because i got all that brown makeup in my suitcase. Well, wrestling was actually added to Team Foxcatcher later, and it was done with such little thought at the beginning that the wrestlers had to put down mats in the shooting range and train in there. But since the clearance is low in shooting ranges to prevent ricochets, the wrestlers couldn't lift each other above their heads lest they smash each other into the ceiling. That's fun, though. It is fun. But once the program moved out to Foxcatcher Farms, John began throwing around cash to recruit non-collegiate wrestlers, guys who had won competitions but didn't have any other avenue to make money. And that is when Dave Schultz, John DuPont's eventual murder victim, joined his brother Mark in Pennsylvania. Now, Dave was still coaching on a collegiate level and figured he could draw two paychecks here. And since Mark didn't think his brother had any intention of leaving coaching, he didn't warn Dave about what an incredibly annoying weirdo John DuPont could be. Pretty soon, once more burly men started showing up at Foxcatcher Farms along with Dave, Dave was the draw. That's how I feel men are together. Like a bunch of fucking clam meat. Well, after that, Mark got the feeling that John DuPont was collecting wrestlers, just like he collected seashells and stuffed birds. And John's father had collected horses. The difference is that wrestlers are actual human beings, but that means they're also far more fun for someone like John DuPont to manipulate. He saw them as toys, as objects. And according to Mark, if you did not want to be displayed on John's wall like an object, things could go very bad very quickly. It soon became obvious that this whole wrestling thing was heavily wrapped up in John DuPont's ego. In 1988, John hired a camera crew for a documentary about himself called Quest for the Best, which actually aired on the Discovery Channel. John also wrote a 115-page book called Off the Mac, Building Winners in Life. But it's almost certain someone else took the brunt of the writing, because while Mark never saw John DuPont writing a book, he did hear John drunkenly dictating the book into a tape recorder from time to time. Mark was also asked to write the forward for the book, but the finished product was published with an edition put in by John DuPont. While the draft that Mark Schultz turned in mentioned nothing about John's coaching, the finished product had Mark saying that he could not have accomplished anything without John's guidance. Not even this forward. Which I did not write. Me not being John DuPont. John also made Mark life more difficult in other ways seemingly just to play with him John made Mark fire Villanova head coach that guy that you said wander the campus with Yeah, yeah, yeah, guy. His mission partner. But instead of giving Mark the job, John DuPont took the title of head coach for himself. Villanova, of course, followed John's lead by releasing a statement saying, No, no, no, no, no. John DuPont's always been the head coach. John also tried controlling and manipulating Mark by nickel and diming him, throwing a fit about the cost of paperclips one day, then taking a private jet to another country the next, just so John could fire the starting gun at a triathlon. It seems like it just wasn't going fast enough for him. Well, I think John was also a person who he could get emotionally dysregulated very easily. There were not a lot of people in his life that were forced to be around him, people that he could take that out on and mark schultz was forced to be it was part of mark's job to take the brunt of uh john dupont's emotional dysregulation well he's one of those guys that believes every single interaction with humans is transactional yeah so he so on some level like it goes away from it developed i feel like i wonder it's like a selfishness bordering on sociopathy that you wonder if it's clinical or not like you don't know whether or not it's like he literally can't have empathy for other human beings? Or is he just fucking lost in the sauce of many different mental illness descriptions, rampant alcohol and drug use, and just being just a straight-up fucking weirdo? I mean, it does, like, raise the question of, like, if you're raised with this amount of extreme wealth, like, I know, you know, people are, most people who are raised with this amount of extreme wealth, like, they don't look at the rest of us as people. No. But it even begs the question, do they even look at each other as people? I doubt it. Do they have the sort of interaction that is necessary to make a human? Apple Paltrow is going to decide who lives or dies. Do you guys understand that? She's going to decide. That's who's going to decide. Lily Rose Depp is going to lead the ground invasion of Iran. Good. It's what's going to happen. She'll do a great job. I think she's great there. Isn't she part vampire? Yeah. No, she's part pirate. Vampire Pirates! Sorry. That's right. There's nothing wrong. There's nothing wrong with that. Fly from North Way. Now Mark Schultz really was trying his damnedest to get a wrestling program going at Villanova. But John was nothing but a hindrance, shouting and arguing with both wrestlers and coaches. John then brought guns into the mix, waving them around at practice while dressed as a cop just to see the wrestlers scattered. All right, in the South Florida, see who here's got the littlest butt, and the guy who's got the littlest butt goes to DuPont jail, which is in my house. There we go, let's see what he got in, huh? He got any of these packets that can stick me? I hope so. John also got highly inappropriate with the wrestlers, as was demonstrated by a so-called move that John invented called the Foxcatcher 5. Was this in the movie? No, it was not in the movie, it was not in the documentary. Really surprised this movie. I mean, I'm not surprised it wasn't in the documentary. Surprised it wasn't in the movie. It would have been great in the movie. Yeah. I think the problem with it is that if Steve Carell is doing the Foxcatcher 5, it will be funny. That is true. It's going to be really funny. Well, in this move, John would simply grab a wrestler's testicle. What's the 40-year-old version? He would have been the same character. Wow. Well, in this move, John would simply grab a wrestler's testicles with his whole hand. That's it. It's just grabbing a guy's balls and calling it a move. It's a move. No, I mean, it's a move. It's a move of sorts. Now, Mark said that he was going to be on the receiving end of the Foxcatcher 5 one day when John held out his hand like a claw and moved towards Mark's crotch, playfully saying, The Foxcatcher 5. The Foxcatcher 5 is coming. Here's the Foxcatcher 1. Foxcatcher 2 And my favorite Foxcatcher 3 Of course they get the middle Foxcatcher 4 And Foxcatcher Ooh the pinky comes around The corner of the ball God it's so hard not to hit you I don't know how these guys But it was possible To make John back off in these moments And after Mark gave him a Withering stare John ended the bit I guess people find things funnier I guess some people know that I think's funny. Other wrestlers, however, were not so lucky. A lot of them got their balls grabbed by John DuPont at Foxcatcher Farms. And since John was giving them all opportunities that otherwise wouldn't exist, the ball grabbing became just another thing to put up with. This is where I will put the idea that John DuPont, you know, I was making jokes talking about all this stuff, but really it's about, like, masculine horseplay. Sure. That he has no idea how to do. Yes. Yeah. He does not know how to engage with these big, strong men. He wants to be a big, strong man and thinks he is a big, strong man. And he thinks that just collecting the big, strong men around him will make him one. And I think in that way, this is one of those, like, nut-tapper scenarios that all men have to deal with, where you have to deal with everybody doing pain games with each other. And he's doing it as a thin, needle-faced, weird nerd against a bunch of actual, very powerful men. Yeah. That probably should have broke his body. Well, they also knew that once he started grabbing on them and wrestling them, that they would just have to let him do his thing. Oh, yeah. They're like, honestly, if he gets up at you, let him finish. Yeah. It's so funny to watch him wrestle these guys. The footage, there's so much footage of John DuPont trying to wrestle these world-class athletes in the documentaries. And he looks like a fish trying to wrestle a man. Yeah, he's like just kind of flopping back and forth between their hands and circling around them like they're in a jitterbug contest. And the wrestlers are trying to figure out how to let him win. Yes. Now, relations between Mark and John unsurprisingly began to disintegrate, but not because of Mark's performance. Mark actually won the 1987 World Championships of Wrestling. He demolished the Soviets, just like he hoped he could. But Mark was not behaving in the way that John wanted him to. So on Christmas Day, 1987, John called up Mark and fired him from Villanova, adding that Mark shouldn't even come back to campus because, quote, the cops were looking for him. Now, Mark hoped that he could still train at Foxcatcher Farms because he was desperate. He had seen what he could accomplish with John's financial backing. The Americans could finally compete with the Russians. I can't stress enough. Watch the 30 for 30 to see him really describe the wrestler's life. Like, that's what I really appreciated about that documentary, about how he had two jobs, and he was training for the Olympics, and he was doing... It's just... It's thankless. Also, training for wrestling is harder than any other sport. Yeah. But when Mark went back to John's mansion in January of 1988 to ask, hey, can I still train here? He found John, just as ruck as ever, yelling and repeating, what else, bud? You understand what I'm saying? You understand what I'm saying? You understand what I'm saying? You understand what I'm saying. You understand what I'm saying. Mark eventually left. But the next day, John actually called Mark and told him, Sure. You can train here. You can go back. Absolutely. But the only condition is that you got to live on the farm. And let's just say, when we're all watching TV, your favorite seat is this right knee. Right? Yeah. And you got to wear this horse suit. If you would. Mark, want a carrot? A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. Mark, of course, agreed. It was free rent next to a training facility. Even though the same person offering said free rent was the same guy who'd fired Mark from his job for no reason just weeks earlier. So you take that money. This goes out to all y'all. You know a fucking rich ass, dumb ass guy that's just pouring money into your life. You take that money, but then you leave. You leave. I say do not take the money because the money always comes with strings attached. Every single fucking time with these rich assholes, it always, always, either he wants to be your friend, you're going to have to do something that you really do not want to do. And they'll give you just enough to make you not successful. Yeah. But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. No, there's not. And so Mark moved into the chalet right next to the big house on Foxcatcher Farms about a month after he'd been fired. And he soon discovered that if John was a bad boss, he was an even worse neighbor. John would randomly barge into Mark's house, ranting and raving with a gun in his hand. And John once showed Mark a video of a surveillance van shooting lasers into a house window, made it possible to hear the conversations inside the house via the window's vibrations. This, of course, was a clear threat to Mark, saying that John was always watching. But in between threats, John actually started opening up to Mark. One day, John was making them both sandwiches when he suddenly told Mark the story about how he lost his testicles in the horse accident. Now put some peanut butter and jelly and smash them together. This reminds me. Well, John admitted, hey, I got plastic in my scrotum where my balls should be. Take a look. And that while he was supposed to take testosterone shots every day, he did forget sometimes. And this, I would imagine, only contributed to John DuPont's instability. Up and down and up and down. John DuPont tried running Villanova's wrestling team by himself after he fired Mark, but he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. The team's morale, which was now coached by the instigator of the Foxcatcher 5, it plummeted. And when Mark moved to the farm, John decided to shut down the Villanova wrestling program to focus on Team Foxcatcher, which was by this point mostly wrestlers. And so with a whole stable of the best competitive wrestlers in America living in various houses on Foxcatcher farms, John threw himself completely into the world of competitive wrestling. He donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to USA Wrestling. That's the organization that governs freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling nationwide. What's the difference between the two? Freestyle, you can use and attack the legs. Greco-Roman, you cannot use any holds below the waist or attack the legs. That's the only difference. Oily. Yeah, well, Greco-Roman was more served with like a shaved cheese. And with freestyle, normally you don't want to serve it with cheese. Yes. With Greco-Roman, before you wrestle, they actually measure your back hair. And if it's not at a certain length, you're not allowed. Is back hair not a liability for a wrestler? Or does it make you slick? Like, if you cover yourself up with dural, like, that's what I'd do. If I got in there, I'd cover myself with, like, Vaseline or something. I would think that hair actually makes you, I would think it would be a hindrance. Because they'd make you more tactile, easier to grab onto. That's what I'm saying. I'm surprised. But that's how good Dave Schultz was. He was just slick to the touch like a fucking beaver. He would Velcro on to the other wrestlers. They said wrestling David Schultz was like wrestling a python. yeah it's what a hairy python yeah it's me baby yeah fucker well you certainly are kind of like one length up and down throughout your whole body just had to get measured for a thing i'm exactly the same from the bottom of my belly all the way to my shoulder i'm just i explained to the guy this is actually easy to make i have an apple on two toothpicks and then Afterwards, he was like, you weren't lying about that apple part. I got some for you in the new year. Tube tops. Yeah, yeah. Ever tried being less of you? Well, John's name was soon on everything related to USA Wrestling, and he gave so much money that they had no choice but to give him the man of the year award. But at the same time, John was becoming more erratic and with good reason. He was over 50 years old at this point, and he had injured both of his knees and his back in various athletic incidents over the years, doing shit that he was too old to do. John DuPont was therefore addicted to pain medication in addition to being an alcoholic. So to even himself out and to put a little zip in his step, John DuPont also began doing a lot of cocaine. Well, that's the whole thing about self-medicating is that if you're adding one, you've got to make sure you balance it out with the other. And honestly, right now, I'm not feeling right. So, here we go. Here we go. I love this guy. You know, Mark Schultz actually said that when John DuPont did cocaine, that was when he was his most coherent. Honestly, great for cocaine. That's a great advertisement for cocaine. Yeah. Probably ADHD in this guy. Good old stimulants. I could talk for hours when I did cocaine. Back in the day, cocaine was clean, too, man. Yeah. Wow. You could just do it without dying. Everybody did. Yeah, so many people did cocaine without diet. Nobody ever died of cocaine, man. They only died of being a fucking pussy and their nose being weak. Or from being too cool. Yeah, you're right. That's the other way to die from cocaine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Too cool to live. Well, as far as where John DuPont got his coke, he certainly had a dealer, but Mark said that one night, John showed up with a kilo of cocaine in a big bag marked evidence in big orange letters. This is the evidence that we're about to do a whole night's worth of cocaine. I'm just like, you know, it's cold. I don't know what the crime's going to be ahead of time. It's a bit of a murder mystery. Mark didn't think that the cops had just given John a kilo of cocaine. Instead, Mark believed that John, remember, John loved cosplaying as a cop. And remember, he had a badge that the local cops had given him. Mark thought that John just put on the badge, put on the uniform, and then used his incredible amount of unearned confidence to just walk into the evidence locker, the local PD, to take whatever he wanted. What if he just wrote it on there? Now this is cool. Such a funny joke. This is funny, funny stuff. Man, I just always, whenever I think of an evidence locker, I don't know why, but I always like, where's the crossbow? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. No, where's the crossbow section, you mean? Let me just make sure I get to sneak into the evidence area. Let me make sure you got to tiptoe past the sleeping bills. Oh, that's where the Mexican Martian powder is. Now, since John DuPont was obscenely wealthy. It's like Pink Panther, but weird. In my mind, I imagine him as he, in his head, he's Pink Panther, and everybody else, he's John DuPont. Yep. Now, since John DuPont was obscenely wealthy, the media naturally tried as hard as they could to pinpoint an exact moment when he, quote-unquote, changed. They, of course, wanted to explain away his behavior and the subsequent murder that he committed. Often they would point to the death of John's mother in 1988 as the turning point because John's mother was the only family member who would have anything to do with him throughout his entire life. The media said that John became untethered after his mother's death. But Mark Schultz maintains that after John's mother died, absolutely nothing changed. And Mark would know because he was actually living on John's estate when John's mother died. He was in the chalet next to the mansion. And John was constantly coming in. And John liked to talk. And if it really bothered him, he would have talked about it endlessly. Oh, yes. Mark said that John DuPont never really had much to say about his mother's death. Said it didn't really affect him. He was just as weird after the death as he was before. Mark, however, eventually had enough of Foxcatcher Farms by 1990. You know what could be interesting? Is that because the mother, there was a couple of times when he was throwing his own award ceremonies where his mother would come from the main house. She was living with him in the house. And what she'd do is, in perfect, old, rich, lady form, she'd sit there and just shake her head. And every single time she'd go, she'd just be like, I don't know why you're so obsessed with this. Why are you doing this? And so I actually do think there was a relief when she was gone. Because now he can really do whatever he wants and not have to hear fucking word one from his stupid old mother who doesn't get it. Hold on, you don't think she was nice? No, she didn't get it, dude. She didn't get it, man. But Mark, however, eventually had enough of Foxcatcher Farms by 1990. He called up his brother Dave to help him move out, and after enduring one last paranoid rant from John DuPont, Mark broke free of Foxcatcher Farms forever. But while Mark was packing up his shit, John brought Dave Schultz over to his house to have a conversation. And just a few months after Mark Schultz left Foxcatcher, his brother Dave Schultz moved in and took a job coaching wrestling for John DuPont. Dave Schultz was, by all accounts, a good man. He was popular, easy to talk to, and it was said that he was not only the only wrestler who could communicate with John in a way that John would listen, he was the only person on earth who could get John to do something that John didn't want to do. As such, Dave had a pretty easy time on the farm in the beginning. He was married with kids, so rather than living next to John in the chalet, which he knew was a bad idea, he and his family moved into a house on the estate about a mile away from John's mansion. Badgers. And despite John's behavior, Foxcatcher Farms had established a reputation for creating champions. And as I said, there were already several other top-notch wrestlers living on the property by the time Dave Schultz moved in. All that donated money started doing its trick. Like, it started really building a reputation, and they started getting wins, and they started getting more like world championship wins. Because I think that's what Mark said, that he won against the Russians again, and that was like a big deal. And they were like, it was starting to actually get the momentum. And John also understood the number one way to really give something a little bit of cred, merch. Oh, yes. And John started making the Team Foxcatcher merch. He started using pictures of Mark Schultz in front of the American flag with his gold, with his championships, and underneath it said, Team Foxcatcher. As much as I don't like this man, the merch was kind of cool. Yeah, I did. That's what he figured out. Yeah, yeah. Well, soon after Dave's arrival, John built the largest wrestling facility in America on Foxcatcher Farms, complete with an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a mural of John DuPont competing in pentathlons. John, however, was becoming more eccentric now that he was building his own little world on his estate. He had taken to calling himself the Golden Eagle of America, or the Eagle for short. and he began theming his personal spaces to reflect his new chosen nickname. He had a plaque engraved and mounted on the door of his office that said, The Eagle's Nest, which is incredibly douchey. But the bizarre addition to this office was a big round bed that John surrounded with sticks, which made it appear as if it was a literal eagle's nest. Yes, and you would be surprised at the lack of eggs. just imagine like getting up in the middle of the night just cutting your feet on sticks and being happy about it oh yes i have an eagle oh yeah i forgot i like that now mark schultz kept in touch with his brother dave and all his other wrestler friends out at foxcatcher farms so while the information we have from here on out is secondhand the wrestlers still in John DuPont's thrall were still very forthcoming about John's increasingly erratic behavior. By the early 1990s, John had become convinced that the mansion was full of so-called spirits and spies. Which, that sounds like a great bar name. Oh, yes. I'd go to spirits and spies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which should we whisper? Yeah. You'll never go to the bathroom alone. Well, John hired a psychic to identify the spirits. He brought in laborers to check the walls and floors for spies. and he had all the mansion's columns and walls x-rayed for listening devices. John openly talked about his fear of interlopers with his wrestlers, telling them that they should stay on the lookout for Nazi spies hiding in the trees of the estate. You know, if I was that much, I'd be like, I caught three yesterday. I got three yesterday, you can't believe it, man, oh man. I spent about $1,500 uber-blacking them into the prison in town so if I could get $1,500 back, that'd be great. Now you get one of the other wrestlers to dress up as a Nazi soldier. You put like a mustache on like, yeah, my name's Gunther. I'm sorry. And here we go. And you hit them in the head just once with a stick and they all go, done. We did it. They're all gone. But John also became convinced that spies had built a network of tunnels underneath the mansion. And he hired people to look for these fucking tunnels. But, of course, nothing was ever found. John then started removing things from the training facility, like treadmills, because John claimed that the clocks in the treadmills were transporting him back in time. Get it. Honestly, yeah, they do. They do. So once you start with that treadmill, it's like you're there for a fucking week, huh? Yeah. Come on, y'all. Come on. Come on, y'all. You got it. Me and Fred. Oh, I'm not fat. I'm just fluffy. Remember that? I remember that. John also believed that rocks talked to him, and he became convinced that there was a device in his mansion that would spray a magical oil that could make people disappear. That's what happened to all my friends and loved ones. It's like a hundred year old mansion. Yeah. So he thinks there's like microphones inside of the columns of the hundred year old mansion. He thinks that people have broken in while he wasn't there and drilled into the columns and put microphones in there and then repaired them while he was gone. And this is also the rise of him filming trees. Yeah. Oh, God. He feel so much footage of him filming trees. He would film a tree for an hour. Right. And then he'd become convinced that the tree could move on its own. And then he'd invite people into the main house to watch his movies of the trees. And he'd go, you see that, what a move? You see that, what a move? And they're all like, yep, wind. The guy said that they were, that was sort of like this weird thing that they were constantly faced with. Like, okay, do I tell him that I see it and feed into the delusion? Or do I tell the truth and risk his wrath? And he's going to make me sit here for an hour until I say, yeah, I see something, John. I bet he actually made some very peaceful videos that will never be able to be taken that way. Dude, no. I really like the sunrise channel. Remember when HD first started, there was a channel that was all sunrises? Dude, it's not the sunrise channel. It's close-up shot. It's like not scenic. No. It's not well shot. It's like a shot of a branch for like 45 minutes. And it's him mumbling in the background. Ah, so it was annoying. Yeah, say ASMR. But the paranoid delusions were not John Dupont's only fantasies. See, by this point, a Bulgarian wrestler named Valentin Yurdanov had moved to Foxcatcher Farms to be a part of John's team. And Valentin began setting up John to compete in wrestling matches in Bulgaria for the 50 and up crowd. The senior wrestlers. What's called Masters. Masters. That's a nice way of putting it. See, Bulgaria had been added to John's Hall of Obsessions. and he therefore made up stories that his mother had sex with a Bulgarian soldier and that made him Bulgarian. He was truly Bulgarian at heart. At times he even claimed to be the president of Bulgaria. He was also very fond of claiming to be the president of Bulgaria. Sometimes he'd say he was the president of the Soviet Union. Anything but French. Anything. Does Bulgaria have like a specific tie to the wrestling world? Bulgarian wrestlers are known to be quite good, but I don't think it had anything to do with that. I think it had to do with the fact that he had a man crush on Valentin Yordanov. And he wanted to connect with him. Yeah, he really wanted to connect with him. He also wasn't an evil. To be honest, what a letdown. John also had affection for Bulgaria because the matches that Valentin set up for John in Eastern Europe were fully rigged. These Bulgarian wrestlers made more money throwing matches to John DuPont than what they made wrestling in matches for an entire year. and they went to great lengths to make sure that John won. And these were not private matches. These were held in large auditoriums with big audiences. In one match, a Bulgarian wrestler had scored a bunch of points, but John was too tired by the end of it to even pretend to try to fight back. But the Bulgarian wrestler knew that he couldn't beat John Dupont. So the Bulgarian just threw himself onto his own back and pinned himself. The ref called the fight for John, and the other wrestlers following this guy's lead hoisted John up on his shoulders in celebration, even though everyone in the room, including John DuPont, knew that he had fully paid for this fantasy. You know, though, it does start to, this is where the chipping actually kind of begins, it seems, is when he starts doing these fake competitions that he's winning and setting up to win, and he's starting, this man that has no experiences of other people's emotions or thoughts, is starting to understand, are they making fun of me? Yeah, maybe. Well, this guy who wants to own people starts calling himself the master. But the problem is that this is what we're seeing right now in our current country. These guys get ridiculous, and when they get ridiculous, if you laugh at them, they'll fucking kill you. They'll get rid of you. These guys are hyper-serious about stuff that sounds really ridiculous because he's a madman. Yeah, and he's buying his way into it. He's trying to find a way into being a champion. He can't do it on his own. He can't do it just by training. He just doesn't have it. But he actually did get it. Like, if he allowed himself to feel it because they started to win, like Team Foxcatcher. But him. I'm talking about him. I'm not talking about Team Foxcatcher is doing great. I'm talking about John DuPont wrestling another human being and actually winning. But you could actually see what he did was he set up Team Foxcatcher up to a point where he thought that maybe that would fulfill it. And then as they were winning and it wasn't him, it wasn't cutting the mustard. Yeah, it really wasn't. It's not like Jerry Jones puts on fucking football pads and goes out there and tries to win a game. We don't know. We don't practice with them. They don't win. Yeah. Yeah. Make that evil bastard's head fucking explode. Oh, God. I just would love, love to see if I get Daryl Johnston, bring him out of retirement, put him in pads, make him fucking hit Jerry Jones, make his fucking head explode. Pow! Has there ever been an owner where you're like, that's a nice guy. Never. No. No. You can't own a football team and be likable. Wouldn't the guy who owned the Browns for a while, didn't people like him until he died? And then when they died, they sold the Browns. I mean, he named the team after himself. Yeah. Maybe not then. Yep. Maybe not. Yeah. If I was going to name it after myself, they'd be called the modeled pinks. Let move on Well back at the farm John was getting more reckless One winter day John drove his Lincoln Continental into a pond on his estate likely intoxicated A few days later though one of his wrestlers asked John Hey, how'd you manage to drive your car into a pond, John? This is the beginning of the fall of my Ponzi scheme. I was trying to burn down my Ponzi scheme for the insurance. But water doesn't burn. Well, John told the wrestler, get in the back seat. I'll show you. And John proceeded to drive his Lincoln through the estate, through the trees, and directly into the same pond. Just like that. John, however, leapt out of the car before it hit the water. The wrestler was still inside the car when it hit the pond. Hey, you didn't know he was going to fucking drive into the water. Yes. And this is like in the middle of a Pennsylvania winter. We just experienced Pennsylvania winter when we went to Philly. Great fucking show, by the way. Thank you very much, everyone. It was a fucking amazing show. But God damn, it was cold. That was cold, man. It was cold. Luckily, the wrestler got out of the car before he drowned. And although he was cold, wet, and shaken, he was physically unharmed. John, of course, just walked back to the mansion without even checking to see if the wrestler was okay. He started walking back to the mansion before the guy even got out of the car. I mean, wrestlers do find this kind of stuff funny. This guy, some of them do. He did not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was like, John, you really almost got me on that one. That's a hindsight thing. I'm telling you, in the moment, he was like, this is crazy. What's wrong with this fucker? Six hours later, you're like, I almost died. Yeah. Did he try to kill me? Now, it's said that John would hyperfixate on a hobby or an activity until he reached the peak, at least the peak by his standards, or until he got bored. And it is speculated that John lost all interest in wrestling in 1995. And as a result, he began getting far more reckless with his wrestlers. Yeah, this is the way you described it in the beginning. This is a now he's sick of his toys. Yes, exactly. In October of that year, a wrestler named Dan Shade said that he was lifting weights in the Foxcatcher facility when John walked in with an assault rifle. John crouched, aimed the gun at Dan, and told him he wanted him off the farm immediately. Dan Shade told the other wrestlers what happened, but they shrugged it off like they shrugged off everything else. Dan even made a police report, but nothing came of it. After John committed a murder, however, the police said, No, no, no, he came by, but he didn't file the right paperwork. Yeah. So he didn't sign this form, so nothing we can do. Because the problem is that crimes don't exist without paperwork. Yeah. So without them filling up the paperwork, it's like nothing happened. Yeah. Dan Shade soon after left Foxcatcher Farms. But when he returned just to pick up some of the stuff, John reacted. John was, of course, extraordinarily drunk. He showed up at Dave Schultz's house looking for Dan. Eventually, John stumbled in Dave's house, slipped, and Gash just had opened on a windowsill. Dave Schultz and his wife took John to the local ER, which, of course, had a trauma center named after John DuPont. But John, in true entitled rich cunt form, refused to fill out any forms and literally just sat there shouting, don't you know who I am? I'm asking you, who am I? I can't fill out who I am. I don't know who I am. It seems that from this bag my name might be Cocaine Johnson. I don't know. Is my name Everdeer? but this incident was important because it caused the first break between dave schultz and john du pont because dave schultz and him he didn't really fuck with dave schultz the way he fucked with mark schultz no he didn't fuck with dave schultz at all no like dave never put up with anything and in fact if if mark if john fucked with other wrestlers they would actually go to dave like hey can you talk to john and tell him to stop doing this and dave would go on the behalf of other wrestlers and explain it in a way that for some reason John listened to. Don't know why, but he did, always. But this was the first time that there was a break. Dude, you know what? He wasn't scared of him. You know who he just hit me? You know who John Dupont is? Who? An aristocratic Andy Dick. That's literally what he is. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, see, this is why it's fine that Andy Dick's homeless. Yeah, it's good almost. See, John filed a police report of his own, and he told police that Dan Shade had hit him with a baseball bat. Dan and John, however, never even saw each other when Dan Shea was on the property. And when the police questioned Dave Schultz, that's exactly what he told him. He told him the truth. But when John found out that Dave had not gone along with his lie, John requested a copy of the police report. And that same report was sitting on John's desk in his mansion when he was arrested for murdering Dave Schultz. Now, Dave, however, had been in the process of trying to get out of the orbit of Foxcatcher Farms when the murder finally came. See, by November of 1995, John Dupont had become deathly afraid of the color black and demanded that anything black be removed from the estate or it had to be painted a different color. John then extended that fear to black men, and he therefore kicked three black wrestlers off Team Foxcatcher because he believed that they were an extension of the evil related to the color black. And this was disturbing for all of the wrestlers. but most of them, including Dave Schultz, they stayed because they were so attached to John DuPont's money. He was the, Dave Schultz, the only way I can support him in this is that he was just like, the Olympics are like in six months. Yeah. He's like, I'm training for this. I could go win this gold and then I could be out. And he's got a wife and two kids. At certain points For some people Principals just can't come into it He had him over a fucking barrel It's a lot harder when your principals Not only cause you to lose your job But move Your house is there Your wife and kids are there vulnerable You have a psychotic who is Ready to pop off at any minute You're now trying to just get this Out of You're trying to get this plane off the fucking runway And he did announce that he was going to stay only until the 1996 Olympics were over. Because it's like you said, Olympics are six months away. Just let me fucking finish this. Let me do this. And then I'll go back to my wrestling job at Sanford. Get out of here. And Dave was the best wrestler there. He was the most respected. He was sort of a father figure to a lot of these guys. So when Dave said he was leaving, a lot of wrestlers also decided, fuck this. Let's go. And one of the wrestlers planning to leave was John's beloved Bulgarian, Valentin Yordanov. I just always see, why do I see Valentin Yordanov just in a Speedo in a big giant, like, glass cylinder? Like, with, like, a lot coming up from a very good time. See, another possible motivation for the murder of Dave Schultz, and there were probably a few, considering how addled John's brain was by this point, by mental illness, drugs, and alcohol, one of the big motivations, or possible motivations, is that Dave and Valentin had become close friends, and John DuPont was jealous of their relationship. But Mark didn't believe that John was gay. I don't think he was either. No, dude, I actually think it's more complicated than being just a gay love affair. I think it's not that. No. I think it's that John DuPont was a highly unstable individual who didn't know how to have a human relationship and didn't know how to handle it if a human relationship ended. He didn't know what friendship meant. He didn't know what companionship meant. He didn't know what any of those things meant. All he knew, he could not separate these people from the thought, like, these are objects. These are my objects to play with, and they're going to act how I want them to act. And if I paid for them to be there, how dare they act any other way? Yeah, he's paid them for a service, and that service is being his wrestlers, being his guys. And calling him Golden Eagle. Yeah. Before we say, I want to hear Golden Eagle, one last time. That's Golden Eagle. That volatility, unfortunately, finally came to a head on January 26, 1996, when John DuPont shot and killed Dave Schultz. Now, the wrestlers at Foxcatcher Farms were not so coincidentally throwing a party for Valentin Yordanov's birthday the night before the murder. And that party had lasted well into the morning. And we have absolutely no idea what set John off or what might have been said at that party. But something happened. Because when the sun rose the next day, John DuPont asked a security guy, a man named Pat Goodale, to take a ride with John around the estate. I have one theory what happened. So it came up in the 30 for 30 I was watching just before, and they posited the theory that was interesting, which is that Dave Schultz, the night of the party, drunkenly, what they used to do, one of the fun things they used to do, shoot off fireworks, shoot off all these things. And apparently, so this is at the height of John saying there's Nazi spies everywhere, the spies, all these people are doing, and he's been interrogating people one by one who's a spy. And apparently he saw Dave funnily shooting out of a, what they call these like bazooka things with a bottle rockets in it. And he was shooting it at DuPont's house and laughing. And John DuPont went to his head of security that night and says, I know who the spy is. We're going to handle it tomorrow. Well, that seems pretty cut and dry. But that's just a version of the story. So you have no idea what's real or what's not real. And I'm not saying that you should put bottle rockets in PVC pipes, but it is a lot of fun. It is quite a lot. It's a lot of fun. Just make sure you put the cap on the end. Yeah, yeah. But this is what Piper Property is for. It really is. Yeah, yeah. It really is. You can use the same PVC pipe you use to build your potato gun, which is also an incredible amount of fun to build. It's fun to do. This is all you need. Some PVC pipe, a little bit of hairspray, and a match. And a few potatoes. And oh, my God. Oh, my God. It's so much fun. It's fun. It's fun to break rules. Well, the security expert that John went and talked to that night, his name's Pat Goodale. And Pat has been criticized for feeding into John's paranoid delusions because Pat did whatever John asked him to do, no matter how weird it was. Pat was the guy who x-rayed the columns. Pat was the guy who dug up the property looking for these hidden tunnels that John swore were there. It's his fucking job. Well, that's what Pat says. He maintains that he only did this in an effort to show John that there's nothing to worry about. He thought that if he did it enough and showed him enough evidence, like, look, there's no listening devices, there's no spies, that eventually John would drop it. Pat's not really a mental health expert. No, he has no idea. But I will say, they do say, I've received many emails about this over the years, about you are actually, if someone is, like, they say this is with dementia patients, where you should help, you should actually say yes and. Yeah, you go along with it, especially in Alzheimer's as well. It helps, but schizophrenia is a different animal altogether. Yeah, to me, I always yes and that. It's yes and where's the dragon? Yes and your blood is butter. Let's cut it out of you, put it on bread. Yes and where are your pills? Where are the pills? Any parent listener will tell you how many times they did something completely wrong, knowing they were doing it wrong, only should they show their child, this is what happens when you do it wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Now, John's everyday gun was a .38 Special. Nice. Solid everyday gun. Yeah. But on the morning of January 26th, he grabbed his long-barreled .44 Magnum revolver before heading out into the estate with security guy Pat Gudale. After surveying the grounds in his Lincoln Continental, John drove to Dave Schultz's house on the property, of course the place where Dave lived with his wife and two kids. Luckily the kids were already at school, but Dave was outside trying to fix his car radio. His wife was in the kitchen. John pulled up to Dave, opened the door, and said, Hi coach. John then got halfway out of his car, didn't even fully get out, pulled his .44, and shot Dave Schultz. Dave's wife was inside the house and said she didn't think anything of the gunshot because Dave sometimes liked to shoot small game like squirrels with a .22 rifle. Also, they were shooting guns all the time. Yes, but when she heard a second shot and a scream, she went outside. There she saw her husband lying face down on the ground next to his car while John DuPont was still halfway out of his Lincoln Continental. She then watched as John DuPont put a third and final bullet into Dave Schultz for reasons that are still unclear. At least, fully unclear. It does seem like it was a paranoid delusion that got out of hand, now that you say that. It seems that he was crawling, and then he did a final shot to his back. Yeah. As far as what security expert Pat Goodale was doing this whole time, because, hey, someone starts to fire a gun, you think the security expert's going to know what to do. He testified at the trial that he got out of the car and pointed his own gun at John DuPont. But Pat told police right after the shooting that he was too stunned to really do anything. and that the shooting happened too fast for him to react. Based off of that, based on where they found Pat later, it seems like Pat just ran from the car and hid behind a metal barrel, which, honestly, as long as John DuPont's not shooting the wife as well, smart move. You know, what else are you supposed to do, honestly, if you're going to get shot? He's not the Secret Service. His job is not to be murdered. He's a security guy. Yes. John, meanwhile, tossed the .44 Magnum into his backseat and drove away while Dave's wife tried putting pressure on her husband's wounds. Unfortunately, though, the bullets had been hollow point, and this very much speaks towards motive and also speaks towards premeditation. Hollow point bullets expand upon impact. We all know that. They're chosen for the express purpose of killing a man. It's the only reason why you use hollow points. So Dave tragically died before the ambulance got there. While Dave was dying, John DuPont drove back to his mansion and walked directly into a windowless steel-lined vault on the first floor that his mother had installed as a bomb shelter. The dream. Oh, man. This is the dream. I miss when houses... The house I grew up in had a bomb shelter. Not a safe room? Is it like a safe room? No, a bomb shelter. It's Cold War era shit. The house I grew up in was built in the 50s, and so there was an actual bomb shelter out back because I grew up an hour away from Dias Air Force Base, which was one of the top targets for the Soviets during nuclear war, because that's where all the B-52 bombers were. So if there was a nuclear war, I grew up knowing, if there's a nuclear war, I'm going to die. That's fine. I want a bomb shelter. Don't bomb shelters go underground? Yeah. This was on the first floor. Probably very thick walls. Very thick walls. Usually John used this vault as both his library and his cocaine layer, where he snorted lines and met his dealer. Honestly, a cocaine layer, you have to have. You really do. If you're rich and you don't have a cocaine layer. Are you rich? Yeah. And all cocaine layers belong with books that you won't read. Definitely. Books about a naked girl. It's paired best with books that you take off the shelf, open, flip through, put back on. Take off the shelf, open, look, nah. That's not the secret. Nah, books. After putting the gun away on a high shelf, DuPont stepped out of the vault and told the three house staff members that were remaining in the house, you better not let the police inside because the police are definitely coming. Yes, and you will each sacrifice yourself to me. And your God, your Pharaoh, and we will burn this place to the ground. And I know that we will all join each other in the afterlife when we are done, okay? Sure, John. Sure. And come they did, before long, 75 police officers from 10 departments and 30 SWAT officers were outside John's mansion. Because you know why? The Uzis. The Uzis, a machine gun, and a tank. Yeah, he let the local police train on his gun range. They knew how many guns he had. But in the end, there was no shootout in John's future. No massive last stand. Instead, John just sat there and made phone calls to lawyers and wrestlers. Hey, there's this gold dust. I don't know. Come on, Gabe. I figured I'd ask you, you know, all right, well. Oh, ask Jake the Snake? Go ahead. Jake. Hello, this is Big Foley. Would your dude love do wish you were Cactus Jack? Do you ever think about that? Or is that, are they the same guy? Are they cousins? Or are they different entities all together? Oh, I should be calling Dusty Rhodes. I'm sorry. But specifically, John called Valentin Yordanov over and over, leaving messages begging the Bulgarian to come visit him in his hour of need. But Valentin did not answer. And after the staff left one by one without incident, they just all kind of snuck out the door when he wasn't looking. I get them to feel like, so I'm going to leave. Yeah. Okay, I'm up. I'm going to go. John DuPont, by 6.45 p.m., was left all alone in his mansion. Now, the police, of course, treated John DuPont with the utmost respect, despite the fact that he had just killed a man in cold blood in front of his wife. This was much to the criticism of the media, who knew how much money John had given the local police department and definitely asked them about the money every time there was a press conference. The standoff, therefore, lasted for days, until the police finally shut off the mansion's heater in the middle of a Pennsylvania winter. John, however, simply built a fire for himself, using copies of a book he'd written and self-published, that if this was in a movie, you'd say it was stupid. It was called Never Give Up. You know what I got to say, Johnny? There's not a lot of things I'm proud of us for. But that's a great title. Remember what Sandusky's book was called? Touched. Oh, my God. Oh, wow. Are you serious? It's better than sucked. Here's my new book, Boys Don't Cry. Boys never cry. Before long, the cold got to be too much. and when John asked the police to bring out a repairman for the HVAC, an opening emerged. You will bring to me your finest Yelps HVAC repairman. And don't bring me anyone who has to give me a subscription to be a part of the service. I'm sick of putting out reviews. The police told John that it was too dangerous to bring a civilian into the situation. But John was more than welcome to exit the mansion and check on the boilers himself, just so long as he promised to not bring a gun. That's a great idea. And amazingly, John did what he was asked. and he exited the mansion unarmed, wearing a Bulgarian wrestling team sweatsuit with a team foxcatcher t-shirt underneath. Bizarrely, he has a love of lanyards like you do. He slipped a lanyard from the 1995 World Wrestling Championships over his neck before going out. Guy can't be all wrong. I love lanyards. You do love lanyards. Like every other person, I always put mine in my pocket and have it ready if someone needs it. Yours is on over whatever nice thing you've got. I like the lanyards. That's like a lanyard. I like a badge. You know what I mean? Dork. No, I'm a police officer in many ways. In many ways, I'm a cop, yeah. I think it just comes from you remembering the moment in Wayne's World where they have the backstage passes and they're showing everybody and so excited. Is there anything that you can show to somebody and they let you into a place where there's bad food and like little waters? Yeah. Yeah. Within moments, though, John decided to make a run for it. A SWAT officer stepped out from behind a tree. You'll never catch me. You'll never catch me. Spirits and spies, come to me. Spirits and spies. Tree people. And he told John to stop. And John did freeze for a moment. He put his hands up, but he decided, fuck it. Oh, get me home. Grab this company in. The SWAT officer, of course, chased John down, tackled him to the ground. But it took a whole swarm of SWAT officers to finally take down the DuPont heir and put the cuffs around his wrists. Now, John DuPont naturally tried an insanity defense for the murder of Dave Schultz. I was crazy for wrestling. And also cocaine. And cocaine was the middle of the insanity as well. And even though John was a reasonably well-kept man prior to the trial, he grew out his beard and gave himself a purposefully disheveled appearance in court to bolster the insanity defense. All these guys do this shit. Harvey Weinstein brought out the walker and is just like, oh. John DuPont showed up in a wheelchair. Like, they all do it. But after all the arguments were heard and the jury deliberated for a week, they came back with a verdict of guilty of third-degree murder, but mentally ill. But you're crazy! Yeah. You know that, alright? You're crazy! Well, we just wanted to tell you that. That meant that while the jury believed that John did have paranoid schizophrenia, he had still fully understood that he was doing something wrong when he killed Dave Schultz. So, John DuPont was sentenced to 13 to 36 years in prison, which was basically a life sentence, because John was nearly 60 when he was put in jail. Dave Schultz's wife soon after won a wrongful death suit against John DuPont, and while we don't know the amount, it was reported to be the largest settlement ever paid to one person. Good! Yeah. Every once in a while, it's lucky when your husband gets shot. You know? Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ, I know. Men are expendable That's what I'm talking about John meanwhile spent three months In a state hospital before he was Transferred to state prison Where he shared an eight foot cell with another Roommate in a wing for older Prisoners and child molesters This guy's hilarious Do you think he got put in with another old guy Or a child molester? I bet they pair them One old guy, one child molester I think they need to have That's the balance Yeah, that's the Batman and Robin of it. You need the two. Yeah, because if you've got two child molesters in there, they're just going to talk shop all day. All day. What's the age that you're like, all right, you're 65. In with the kid fuckers. And you look at your legs and your knees and stuff, you're like, he's got the tensile strength of a child molester. I think we can move in. We're just a worker. Well, it was with the old man and the child molesters that the DuPont heir died in 2010 at the age of 72, making John DuPont, as far as I know, the only DuPont to truly pay for the crimes he committed. He was embarrassingly buried in a red team foxcatcher wrestling singlet. And the remainder of his estate was left to who else but his favorite Bulgarian wrestler, Valentin Yordinov. How American. Yeah, multi-millionaire, breaking off a piece to the Russians. Valentin, the interviews he gave during the documentaries were, the house was quite nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Quite, quite nice. Now, why do I feel like the grossest thing of all is that he was buried in a wrestling zinglet? I think it is the grossest thing that happened. There's something about that because they're like, even just, it's an old man, you're going to go open casket? You're going to see his bulge in this thing? Now, you don't see the lower half in an open casket. Not for my grandmother. We opened the whole fucking thing. We saw all of that fucking bitch. And we cut off her dress. Yeah! Yeah! Fuck yeah! Let me take this! Yeah, you dead bitch! And that is the tale of a DuPont. We have done it in three episodes. The crimes of the DuPont and the crimes of one single DuPont. Thank you very much for coming along on this journey with us. been a lot of fun. It has been fun. In the midst of the Epstein files, this has been very fun, but it was actually very edifying. Once the Epstein files came out and we read all this stuff, a lot of stuff in Epstein started making sense. Like I said, at the beginning of this whole thing, if you really want to understand how we got to this point, people like the DuPont, you have to understand how this world works and what these people do. You have to understand how people like John DuPont work. These systems are set up for these people to behave in this manner. And we did this specifically in this way as we said last episode because of where we are in the country and how we personally feel as creators. So this meant a lot to us as a series, but next week it's going to get a little bit less important. I'm coming back to me. I'm going to be doing a thing. We'll get a true crime. Henry's first true crime. Yes, it's going to get real fucking gross. I'm excited for it. I watched part of a documentary about it and I didn't care for it. Yeah! So we're getting back to the fucking sloppy bloods next week, you fucking animals. And we've got some really fun ideas for this year's March Madness, which will be coming up in a couple of weeks. Very soon. And then after that, we're going to return to the Mount Rushmore of evil. We've got a lot of cool shit coming up. It's coming. But we've got to get to the airport. Yeah, let's go. So thank you for your money. Go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left and give that money. You can get ad-free episodes. You can also see last stream on the left live, 6 p.m. PST each week. We might be changing it to 5. Yeah, I think we should change it to 5 starting next week. I thought we said we were doing it. We're doing it. It's 5 p.m. It's done. It's done. Decision's been made. It's for us. Daddy needs to eat dinner. We like to not be hangry during the episodes. That's what we're going to do. So that's done. Also, you're going to go over to LP on the left for all the stupid social media. I don't know why. You're going to go to YouTube channels. Someplace underneath, LPN Romanticity, No Dogs in Space, LPN TV, The Forward Report, Who's the B, all on YouTube. Go check that fucking shit out. We'll be back next week. Good work, Marcus. Thank you. Great work to both of you as well. Thank you for coming along with me on this journey. Hell yeah. Next week we're going to be in Indianapolis at the Egyptian Room. Come check us out. And then the very next night on March 14th, Henry and I are going to be in Urbana, Illinois. Can't wait. Can't fucking wait. We're going to have a lot of fun there. And then after that we got Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, Tulsa, Oklahoma City. a bunch of side story shows. Go to lastpodcastandaleft.com to find out where we're coming to see you. And, Eddie, I've got to take you to the Slippery Noodle. You're disgusted. Dude, don't take him to the Slippery Noodle. He's got to see it. Don't take him to the Slippery Noodle. He's got to see it. Just because of the music performances alone. Yeah, okay. The last time we went, there was that weird 70-year-old man with just the fan on him, so his hair would blow back. Yeah. Do you remember that? And up in the jazz part, but that's also where the man showed up. No, I don't remember that because I was stuck in the hotel room dying of long COVID. Yeah, you almost died. Yeah, Indianapolis? Yeah, Indianapolis. Yeah, that's when the doctor came to see me at the hotel room to do a house call. And she told me that even though her husband died of COVID, she still did not believe in COVID. And then she just handed me a whole lot of steroids, which a doctor back in New York told me was not the right thing to do. It almost killed him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll always remember that because, yeah, it was a rough time. And then we also met a weird, very strange, I watched a nurse cheat on her husband. Oh, that's nice. You love the slippery noodle. I've been to Indianapolis. I had a good time. I watched some Ghost Hunters and ate a bunch of sausages. We're going to go see some bad jazz and we're going to have someone flash us their penis in the men's room. As long as I can get sausages and stare at murals of Kurt Vonnegut, I'll be okay. Yeah, definitely. If anybody at the Kurt Vonnegut, if anybody can give us some, like, Kurt Vonnegut's my dude. You know, I've been forever. so if anybody can give us like an inside track to some Kurt Vonnegut stuff in Indianapolis sidestorieslpotl at gmail.com get a hold of us we'd love to see it please and thank you all hail Satan again hail Dave Schultz yeah dude he's a real motherfucker really is yeah seriously like Dave was a he's a what you want from an American athlete he's a true American athlete he's a true American hero yeah and it's sad what happened to him it is bye