ONE day after the dust had settled on a weekend of violence and drama at the estate of John Eleuthere du Pont, a cartoon in the Philadelphia Inquirer perhaps said it all.
On the left was a poor vagrant, dishevelled and screaming at passers-by, with the caption: 'Obsessive, compulsive, psychoneurotic, paranoid threat to society.' Pictured opposite was a top-hatted du Pont, driving recklessly around his magnificent 333-hectare property in a tank, with a bag of cash in one hand and a smoking gun in the other.
The caption? 'Eccentric.' For much of his adult life, the 57-year-old co-heir to the du Pont company billions had indeed been known to friends, family and colleagues as 'eccentric'. Ask his ex-wife, who accused him in 1984 of trying to push her out of a speeding car and then acting as if nothing was wrong.
Or a neighbour on the estate, who came out of her home a couple of years before to be greeted by du Pont atop that very tank which is now the stuff of legend, his face bruised and bloodied, asking whether her husband would 'come out to play'.
The police certainly now wish they had asked Dave Schultz, the Olympic gold-medal winning wrestler, who was cold-bloodedly shot dead by du Pont, his long-term benefactor, a week ago. His violent end says quite enough about the difference between being merely eccentric and a menace to society.
The crop-haired dreamer, who vainly aspired at various times to be a world-class pentathlete, marksman, wrestler and simple police officer, has a psychological CV which reads at times like a madman's manifesto.
He was by no means the first twig of the massive du Pont family tree to know eccentricity or controversy. The great-great grandson of Eleuthere du Pont, a French immigrant who founded the chemical giant in 1802, he is one of 1,000 living descendants.