Duane L. Chapman

Dog was born in 1953 and was the oldest of the four children raised by a navy welder father and minister mother. He was arrested for 18 armed robberies and the first degree murder of Jerry Lee Oliver, a friend of Dog’s, in 1977. One of his biker brothers had actually shot him during a drug deal. He was sentenced for five years in a Texas prison, where he vowed to make a safer place and switched to Christianity.

Dog (www.hauntedlives.com/TheLair/dog.html)

LaFonda, his first wife, filed for divorce while he was in prison, and Judge Levi told him that he owed thousands of dollars in child support. Dog told him he wouldn’t pay it because he was in prison, so the judge told him he would pay him $200 for bringing in a fugitive. Dog came back with him tied up in a belt and proudly said, “My first bounty.”

Dog and his family (www.hauntedlives.com/TheLair/dog.html)

He now owns four bonding companies between Colorado and Hawaii. He not only goes after bail jumpers, but anyone who has a bounty on his or her head. He refuses to work under the more politically correct term of BEA, and at 46 and close to retirement, plans to open a bounty hunter school in the Islands, where he will teach the kids the “tricks to trade” and the ethics of business.

Dog (www.hauntedlives.com/TheLair/dog.html)

In the last 20, years he has captured 6,000+ fugitives including: Quinton Wortham, the Capital Hill rapist; William Scatarie, white supremacist and convicted murderer of Denver radio shock jock Alan Berg; and, most recently, Andrew Luster, convicted rapist and Max Factor heir. Dog has become somewhat of a legend. Even though he is the best professional bounty hunter, he still fears for his and his family’s life. A man once threatened to kill him and five of his kids-the oldest was 12-who had helped capture him, which had shook him up quite a bit for a while. Bounty hunting, it turns out, isn’t quite the lucrative job after all.

Dog and his wife Beth (www.hauntedlives.com/TheLair/dog.html)

His wife, Beth, his son Lenand, his other son Duane, his brother Tim, and he also run a successful television show an A & E called Dog the Bounty Hunter in which they project how the lives of bounty hunters can be. Every episode I’ve seen ends with him talking to the fugitive and how they got into this mess, which Dog gives them advice to help them and telling them how to straighten their lives up. Most of them become his friends for life. He also hasn’t been paid for less than half of the 6,000 fugitives he’s brought in because most bondsman don’t have the money. Once a bondsman, with only $5,000 and cancer, had asked him to take a $500,000 case, which he did, and still hasn’t been paid. He asked, “How can you take money from a dying man?” This compassionate side isn’t often seen in the business, but he’s just a softy who likes to spread love.

The way he shows how he cares for everyone, even with a verbal abusive father, the way he loves, is strong, is cunning, and compassionate. That is why Duane (Dog) Lee Chapman is my hero.