Millionaire murderer du Pont, 72, dies in prison

John E. du Pont, 72, the multimillionaire sports patron who killed an Olympic wrestler in 1996, died in prison Thursday morning.

A nurse found du Pont unresponsive in his bed at 6:55 a.m. at a prison in Somerset County, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections said. He had been ailing and died of natural causes in the hospital unit, she said.

Du Pont was sentenced to 13 to 30 years for third-degree murder in the killing of David Schultz, the father, husband, and Olympic gold medalist whom he gunned down on Jan. 26, 1996.

Nancy Schultz, who witnessed her husband's shooting, said du Pont's death brought some relief to the couple's son, who was 9 then, and their daughter, who was 6.

"He was kind of the bogeyman for my children in some way," she said Thursday. "Sometime he was going to get out, and we had no idea what his behavior was going to be."

She said of du Pont's legal defenses and appeals, "He kept making excuses. . . . He never just said, 'I'm sorry I did it.' "

A great-great-great-grandson of Eleuthere Irenée du Pont de Nemours, founder of the Wilmington chemical company, du Pont was best known before the killing as a sports patron.

A sports arena at Villanova University bore his name. (It has since been changed.) He transformed Foxcatcher Farm, his 800-acre Newtown Square estate, into a world-class athletic training facility. Wrestlers housed their families there while they trained. Schultz was one of a dozen wrestlers living there in 1996, preparing for that summer's Olympics in Atlanta, his wife said.

Their host had become known by then for wild behavior.

"We were all predicting something like this would happen," said Martha du Pont, his sister-in-law, after the killing. "He has been walking around with loaded guns for a number of years. It has been very frightening."

Wrestlers told of being ordered to chase ghosts from the walls and shoot Nazis from the trees. Du Pont threatened athletes with guns during his angry outbursts.

Nearly 15 years after the shooting, his motive remains unclear. He shot Schultz, 36, three times with a .44-caliber revolver during an argument outside Schultz's home on the estate grounds. Du Pont then holed up in his mansion for two days, emerging only when police cut off his heat that freezing weekend.