Ricky

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@V01D5TAT1C Come on, is this really true?

[Ricky @rickyrates]

holy hell. one of the richest men in America shot an Olympic champion in front of his wife. police caught him by turning off his heat.

the video below starts with him bragging on camera: "I win, they lose."

John E. du Pont was an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune. On his estate outside Philadelphia he ran Team Foxcatcher, a private training center for Olympic wrestlers. Some of them lived on the grounds, including 1984 gold medalist Dave Schultz, his wife Nancy, and their two kids.

By the mid-90s, the people around him were worried. Wrestlers said he talked to the walls and saw animals moving in his bed. He carried a gun at practice and once pointed it at a wrestler. His money shielded him.

January 26, 1996. Du Pont drove up to Schultz's house. Schultz walked toward the car. Du Pont fired three shots while Nancy watched.

He locked himself in his mansion for two days. Police didn't storm it. They cut the heat. On Sunday he walked outside to fix the heater, and SWAT grabbed him.

Defense psychiatrists called him a paranoid schizophrenic who believed Schultz was part of an international conspiracy to kill him. At first he was ruled too psychotic to stand trial.

the verdict:
→ the court throws out the insanity defense
→ 1997: "guilty but mentally ill" of third-degree murder, the kind of verdict that took off after the Hinckley case
→ 13 to 30 years
→ 2010: dies in prison, buried in his red Foxcatcher wrestling singlet
→ 80% of his estate goes to a Bulgarian wrestler from his team

Police never found a motive.

Sick enough to hear the walls talk, sane enough for prison. Did the jury get it right?

[Ricky @rickyrates]

holy hell. one of the richest men in America shot an Olympic champion in front of his wife. police caught him by turning off his heat.

the video below starts with him bragging on camera: "I win, they lose."

John E. du Pont was an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune. On his estate outside Philadelphia he ran Team Foxcatcher, a private training center for Olympic wrestlers. Some of them lived on the grounds, including 1984 gold medalist Dave Schultz, his wife Nancy, and their two kids.

By the mid-90s, the people around him were worried. Wrestlers said he talked to the walls and saw animals moving in his bed. He carried a gun at practice and once pointed it at a wrestler. His money shielded him.

January 26, 1996. Du Pont drove up to Schultz's house. Schultz walked toward the car. Du Pont fired three shots while Nancy watched.

He locked himself in his mansion for two days. Police didn't storm it. They cut the heat. On Sunday he walked outside to fix the heater, and SWAT grabbed him.

Defense psychiatrists called him a paranoid schizophrenic who believed Schultz was part of an international conspiracy to kill him. At first he was ruled too psychotic to stand trial.

the verdict:
→ the court throws out the insanity defense
→ 1997: "guilty but mentally ill" of third-degree murder, the kind of verdict that took off after the Hinckley case
→ 13 to 30 years
→ 2010: dies in prison, buried in his red Foxcatcher wrestling singlet
→ 80% of his estate goes to a Bulgarian wrestler from his team

Police never found a motive.

Sick enough to hear the walls talk, sane enough for prison. Did the jury get it right?

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@Aiseminae Imagine reducing a murder case to a cheap shot at someone’s daughter. Du Pont killed an Olympic champion in cold blood, and that’s the story worth discussing. Dragging his daughter’s dating life into it says more about you than it does about her.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@koaxbt The wildest part is that the same system that fell for his tricks eventually paid him to teach others how to catch them. He turned the loopholes into both a crime and a career.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@orshovskiy The disturbing part is how many people saw the warning signs and treated them as a joke. Sometimes the clues are obvious in hindsight, but nobody takes them seriously until it’s too late.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@Kv0r1n She spent 45 years preserving Hollywood history, only to watch it get scattered to pay her debts. Sometimes the people who save the past can’t afford to keep their own lives together.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

holy f*ck. a Manson girl held a loaded .45 two feet from the President of the United States. the gun didn't fire. the court psychiatrist found no signs of mental illness.

and in the video below, she tells you how she did it herself.

Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme was 19 when Charles Manson stepped off a bus at Venice Beach and told her, "Your parents threw you out, didn't they?" She decided he was psychic. She never let go.

When Manson went on trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders, she camped outside the courthouse and carved an X into her forehead.

September 5, 1975. Sacramento. President Ford was walking through a crowd, shaking hands. Fromme, 26, in a long red robe, raised a Colt .45. Four rounds in the magazine. None in the chamber.

A Secret Service agent tackled her. On the ground she kept saying: "It didn't go off. Can you believe it? It didn't go off."

the evaluation:
→ asked about the X on her forehead: "we definitely marked ourselves"
→ the court psychiatrist: competent. "I certainly don't find any overt signs or symptoms of mental illness"
→ she refused to cooperate with her own defense
→ when the prosecutor called her "full of hate and violence," she threw an apple at his face and knocked off his glasses
→ life in prison

what came next:
→ Christmas Eve 1987: she heard Manson had cancer and escaped prison to reach him. caught two days later
→ 1989, from prison: "I'm romantically in love with him... He's given me more than any creature on Earth."
→ 2009: paroled after 34 years
→ 2019, on TV, asked if she was still in love with Charlie: "Yeah. I still am."

Devotion, delusion, or a perfectly sane woman who just wanted the whole country to look at her?

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@0_oRai The scariest part is that the audience saw a sick child, but the person they trusted to protect him was the one causing the harm.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@tiltdiaries The university sticker wasn't a safety signal. It was borrowed trust, and he knew exactly how to use it.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@Emberxbt The most disturbing detail is how casually she described it afterward. The line between explaining what happened and showing remorse seems completely absent here.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@0_oRai The system treated him as too dangerous to stand trial, yet predictable enough to catch with a thermostat. That’s a detail you couldn’t write better.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@Elyren_n Money can delay consequences, but it can’t make the warning signs disappear. Everyone saw pieces of the problem. Nobody connected them until it was too late.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@0xlatiuk A 162-game season rewards consistency. A five-game series rewards whoever gets hot at the right time. That’s why the best regular-season team isn’t always the champion.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@0xmrledger The warning signs were there long before the murder. His wealth just made it easier for everyone to look the other way.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@0xkumaa The most revealing evidence wasn’t the stabbing. It was the phone call and the blood on the bathroom tap. Small details can expose what an entire story tries to hide.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@Elyren_n She had five days to bring her children back and still didn’t do it. That detail says more about her choices than any courtroom speech ever could.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@Dorianxxbt The most disturbing part is how ordinary he made himself look. A father, a neighbor, a familiar face. Sometimes the people around us have no idea who they’re really living beside.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@xbtDraco The hardest part of this case is that a surviving witness recognized someone, yet the evidence never gave the family a definitive answer. Decades later, they’re still left with suspicion instead of closure.

[Ricky @rickyrates]

@0xkumaa He hid from investigators for 18 years, but his own writing gave him away. The one thing he couldn’t disguise was how his mind worked.