Descent into Madness - a winter's tale

From a forthcoming compilation in Questionable.info's catalogue, here comes a dark true story that came into sharp focus exactly 19 years ago today, on 26 January, 1996.

Brace yourselves...it's going to be a bumpy ride.


Descent into Madness
A Winter’s Tale by Matt Lake


The snow began falling all over the east coast of the United States on January 6, and it didn’t stop until most of the major towns and cities were buried under two feet, with drifts routinely topping 30 inches. For two days huge flakes dropped from the sky, or were blown by fierce winds into drifts deep enough to bury cars. In Philadelphia, people were banned from the streets as plows pushed walls of compacted snow into the rivers--there was nowhere else in the city that could accommodate such a huge volume of the stuff. The Schuylkill and Delaware began to mutate into slow-moving channels of slush.


Nobody had ever seen the city and its surroundings like this. Even the near-legendary March Superstorm of 1993 paled by comparison. And that had happened quite recently: This snowfall would soon be known as the Blizzard of 1996, and it formed the backdrop to a murder so significant, Delaware County and the U.S. legal system would feel its repercussions throughout the next two decades.


As January wore on, the east coast was battered with a second snowfall, followed by a sudden surge in temperature that melted mountains of plowed snow into a wash of salty runoff. And then it poured down rain for days. People throughout the Delaware valley were tired, wet, and miserable, and they could hardly wait for the month to be over.


Finally, the last Friday of the month rolled around. At 2:45 that afternoon, in Newtown Square, in the northernmost reaches of Delaware County, the 57-year-old owner of the old Lisiter Hall Farm climbed into his Lincoln Town Car. With his security guard in the passenger seat, he drove off his property and onto Goshen Road. He took a left onto Route 252 and after a quarter of a mile, turned back into his property down a narrow access road, until he reached the small house occupied by his 36-year-old tenant Dave Schultz and his family.


Dave was working on his own car as the Lincoln pulled up. He turned to see the driver’s side window of the Lincoln wound down, and his his landlord and employer John E. du Pont, leaning out. He greeted du Pont with a cheerful “Hey, coach.” Without a word, du Pont, raised a  357 Magnum revolver and shot Schultz. “You got a problem with me?” he asked after the first shot. Then he shot two more rounds at his victim. The final bullet entered Schultz’s back.


The security guard Pat Goodale leapt out of the car towards Dave as du Pont put the Lincoln into gear and drove back towards the mansion that his grandparents had built on the estate sixty years earlier, as a wedding gift for his parents. In his rear-view mirrors, the security guard was rushing to Dave’s aid, joined by a soon-to-be-widow, Nancy Schultz, who had witnessed the entire episode through the kitchen window.


Du Pont drove his Lincoln round the semi-circular driveway to the door of the classical mansion house at the heart of his estate. He entered the building, found his secretary, and said “If the police show up, don’t let them in.”

For those of you who have seen the 2014 movie Foxcatcher, the scene will be familiar. According to John du Pont’s defense attorney, Thomas Bergstrom, Steve Carrell and Mark Ruffalo enacted that event in a way that was both dramatic and entirely historically accurate. The rest of the movie tells a compelling story, but confuses the historical narrative so much that it’s worth clearing up a few details.


“The crucial frame in the movie occurs in 1996,” Bergstrom explained in an address he gave to high school students on the 19th anniversary of the shooting, “The frames before that occurred in 1988. Du Pont’s mother died in 1988. He killed Dave Schultz in 1996, and there is an 8 year gap. And if you’ve seen the movie, you haven’t a clue as to what happened in that 8 year time period.”


In short, after his mother died, John descended into insanity. He had been mentally ill for years--his only marriage ended in 1983 after less than three months, because in that short time he had tried to stab her, strangle her, push her into a fireplace, and throw her from a moving car. So John’s mother Jean employed staff to keep a close watch on him from that point onwards, and despite a mounting series of eccentricities, she managed to keep him largely out of trouble.


That control lasted only a few years, however. By 1988, John had fallen from favor at the wrestling program he sponsored at Villanova University, reportedly because of sexual advances he made to athletes and coaches. So he started to plan a training camp on his family’s estate. His big hope was a man he had hired at Villanova, Mark Schultz, the younger brother of the man he would ultimately kill.


Things unraveled rapidly in the summer of 1988. Jean du Pont died a month before the Summer Olympics, and Mark Schultz fell far short of winning a gold medal in Seoul, placing sixth. On their return from Seoul, Mark quit du Pont’s team, and left du Pont’s estate, which was still operating under the name Lisiter Hall Farm. When John took over, he renamed the farm after his father’s stables: Foxcatcher Farm. This was a significant choice: His parents had divorced when John was two, and he chose to honor his father with the name change. His mother’s family had been the brand name of the old estate: Her maiden name had been Jean Lisiter.


Foxcatcher Farm was very different from its previous incarnation as Lisiter Hall Farm. Fences and checkpoint gates and strict security became the order of the day. What had previously been a country estate was fast becoming more of a compound. And in the face of these extreme security measures, rumors began to fly. They said around town that John was getting weirder than he had ever been before. He drove cars into the lake on more than one occasion. He bought a tank to drive around the estate, and equipped it with a fifty caliber machine gun. He dealt with a den of foxes on the property by blowing it up with dynamite. He hired crews to move around the large field stones that littered the property because their random placement was throwing the land “out of balance.” They said that his love of birds was taking a strange turn, and that he wanted to be called Eagle. Some people even spread the rumor that he had built a huge bird’s nest in the mansion that he would sleep in.


This was the setting in which John du Pont shot Dave Schultz. The police knew how heavily armed du Pont was, so they weren’t about to knock on his door and burst in. So they called him on the phone instead. They got very little sense and no cooperation from him, so he remained under siege in the mansion for two days, until the authorities cut the power to the mansion, and ambushed the man as he slinked out of the building to fix the heating.

At this point, the story took on two separate narratives. As far as the prosecution was concerned, du Pont was upset with Schultz’s plan to quit the Team Foxcatcher and take up a coaching position out of state. He flew into a jealous rage, and killed him in the kind of spoiled child tantrum that screamed “If I can’t have him, nobody can!” As far as the defense was concerned, du Pont had built an elaborate fantasy world in which Schultz represented an enemy of the United States. In his own twisted way, killing Schultz was the only logical thing to do. The only thing that the prosecution and defense could both agree on was the obvious: John du Pont was out of his mind.


But it was only after his arrest that the extent of his illness became clear. He fired his defense attorneys after a few months because he was convinced they were conspiring to kill him. His new attorney Thomas Bergstrom successfully petitioned for a competency hearing, but by September 1996 had publicly stated that he had still not successfully completed a coherent conversation with his client.


“John’s delusional system, his paranoia, was in full bloom,” Bergstrom said, “It was impossible, impossible, to communicate with this man. The first problem I had was ethically trying to determine how can I possibly represent this man who hasn’t a clue as to why I’m here, why he is where he is, and what are we gonna do about all this.


“The problem with John was that John believed that he was a prisoner of war, and that the military should take over and try this case. And he would be exonerated because of his status as a prisoner of war.”

Only after months of psychological treatment in Norristown State Hospital building 51, the forensic unit, where he was medicated with Haldol (“somewhat against his will,” as his attorney described it), was John deemed competent to stand trial.


The trial began about a year after the crime occurred, in late January 1997.


“This was not a whodunit,” said Bergstrom, “There was never any doubt in anybody’s mind that John killed Dave Schultz. The question was always “Why did John kill Dave Schultz?””

“John didn’t want to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. He did not want me to raise the insanity defense. John believed that Dave Schultz was a Russian agent, that the entire Soviet army would be in Newtown Square, and that there would be the war of all wars. That John’s property was holy ground. That John alternated between being Jesus Christ, the Dalai Lama, and the last heir to the Russian throne. Up to the time that he died, he believed that he had to kill Schultz because Schultz was going to kill him.”


“So the delusions that danced in his head continued,” Bergstrom said, “He was so delusional and so paranoid that he had Pat Goodale his security guard, and his agents, literally install barbed wire inside the walls of his house, because he thought that people were crawling around inside the walls. He dug tunnels under the house to find the people who were trying to get into the walls of the house. That was John du Pont.


“It’s hard to convince a jury of twelve people to find “not guilty by reason of insanity,” because the jury believes that “Well, if we do that, he’s going to wander out some day and kill somebody else, so they are loath to find that verdict. After Hinckley shot Reagan in the early 80s, most legislatures in this country passed a bill that permitted “guilty but mentally ill,” and that’s the compromise verdict we got.”

With a verdict like that, John du Pont could have been sentenced to between 20 and 30 years; he was actually sentenced to 13 years. He went to Crescent State Prison in the middle of the state, where he stayed, medicated and treated, for almost the entire length of his sentence.


To this day, his attorney believed this crime could have been avoided.
“All John needed was that therapy and that medication. Would he have rejected it? Yes, early on, but when the medication takes hold, we saw it in the case…John got better. Did he get well? No. Was he ever going to be well? No. But he got better.”

“I think that if John’s mother had lived, none of this would have happened. She paid for a friend to monitor him and watch him. When she passed away the bottom fell out of things. His mother was gone. His friend was gone. There were all these people who were feeding his paranoia with the barbed wire and the razor wire and the tunnels. And guns, and everything else. It was awful. Awful. There was no doubt what was going to happen. It was inevitable. Fifty caliber machine guns on tanks. It was nuts!”

As it was, John du Pont reached the age of 72 on November 22, 2000, medicated in jail in Somerset County. He was awaiting the end of his sentence, but on December 9th, two weeks before the shortest day of winter, he died.

The farm where all this took place had undergone changes during that time. He had ordered many buildings to be painted black during his incarceration. And the Olympic pool house he had built on the property had been drained, and its roof had fallen in. The greenhouses were overgrown and collapsing. And the property had been divided. Part of it had became a school campus a few years earlier. The remainder was carved up a few years later for development into a McMansion farm. In 2013, many of the original buildings were demolished after their contents had been removed and sold at auction.

Before the bulldozers came in, I was given a rare opportunity to visit the property. The gates were to be unlocked to allow farm equipment to be removed, and I was given twenty minutes’ notice to make a tour of Foxcatcher Farm before it became the Lisiter McMansion village. So I had to borrow a camera and act fast. Of course, the camera battery gave out before long, so most of my tour is just a memory. But the most unsettling part of the whole trip--in fact, the part that made me run from the property quickly with a chronic case of the heebie-jeebies, was in that Olympic pool house. The structure was in ruins by then, with the roof fallen in and debris everywhere.

But at the far end of the building was a work of art that caught my eye. Along the entire wall was a beautiful and largely intact mosaic. It portrayed a variety of Olympic athletes competing at their sports. As I ranged from left to right, I saw a sprinter, an equestrian, a swimmer, and a host of other athletic men in training. At the right end of the mosaic was a man holding a hand gun--practicing the Olympic sport of pistol shooting. Directly in front of him, instead of the pistol target that the Olympic sport calls for, was one last Olympic athlete, a fencer, thrusting into the firing line.

Within two weeks, the mosaic, the training facility, the greenhouses, stables, and even the Lisiter mansion itself had been razed to the ground and bulldozed away. That was in 2013, which already seems a long time ago. Shortly after I began writing this narrative, I went for a hike through the property, starting down the access road John du Pont had driven his Lincoln Town Car. I walked past athletic fields, construction vehicles, and at the end of the road, a cluster of upper-middle-class homes. But even behind the veneer of civilization, it’s not hard to remember that this was once the home to a tank, a team of wrestlers, an arsenal of firearms, and at its core, a mind unhinged by madness.


Copyright (c) 2015 Matt Lake. All rights reserved.