An Eccentric Heir's Wrestle With Death

Andre Metzget didn't. Metzger, now at the University of Oklahoma, had a brief career as an assistant wrestling coach during the du Pont era at Villanova. He lost his job in a dispute with du Pont and sued for $555,000-claiming, among other issues, that du Pont made a homosexual overture to him. Du Pont and his lawyer dismissed it all as "ridiculous," but du Pont's fondness for young athletes was widely rumored among wrestling enthusiasts. "We'd see him at tournaments and he just made us feel creepy," Jerry Stanley, a former assistant coach at Oklahoma, told NEWSWEEK. "He was using his money to put himself closer to these athletes." Stanley said it was common knowledge that du Pont settled the lawsuit out of court--and that du Pont at one point offered to decide the suit by wrestling Metzger himself.

In his own horsey neighborhood, du Pont was just as famous for being an ardent supporter of the police. From the mid-1970s and well into the '80s, he sponsored and ran police training programs at his own firing range -- which he called the J. Edgar Hoover Center -- on the grounds of his estate. He was deputized by the Newtown Township Police Force and once posed for a photograph in the uniform of the local gendarmerie--a millionaire amateur cop. Vicky Welch, whose husband, Tim, is a local officer, vividly recalls a visit from du Pont on Christmas Eve, 1984. Around 11:30 p.m., du Pont pulled up at their house--the Welches were living at Foxcatcher then--in his armored personnel carrier. "He popped out of the hatch and his head was all bloody," she says. "He'd been smashing into trees. He said, 'Can Tim come out and play?' I said, 'No, I don't think so'." The Welches moved.

Scary Incidents:

Du Pont's cop fetish gave him easy access to guns; the guns led to scary incidents. One involved a woman, Gale Wenk, a physical therapist whom du Pont married and quickly divorced in 1984. According to court papers, Wenk said du Pont once accused her of being a Soviet spy and pulled out a pistol, saying the only thing to do with spies was to shoot them. (He didn't shoot.) Dan Chaid, who until recently was on the Foxcatcher wrestling staff, says du Pont threatened him with a gun last October after a dispute over Chaid's housing on the estate. "He came right up to me with the machine gun [and] told me, 'Don't f-k with me. I want you off my farm'," Chaid recalled. Frightened, Chaid called 911--but the investigating officer, he says, merely said, "John's always been a little bit different."

But du Pont, friends and family say now, was steadily sliding into madness. Alcohol and cocaine may have played a role; Chaid says du Pont used both. Whatever the reason, du Pont found Dave Schultz sitting in his blue Toyota station wagon and, police say, used his pistol to blow away one of the best wrestlers the United States has ever had. It was a strange end for a star athlete--and a glimpse into the darkening mind of an eccentric gone wholly mad.

GREGORY BEALS, PAUL O'DONNELL and NINA A. BIDDLE

© 1996