The Transformation Of Dog The Bounty Hunter

Reality television fans fell in love with Duane "Dog" Chapman on his A&E show, "Dog the Bounty Hunter." Dog's fame helped raise the profile of bounty hunting as a career path, as he explained to The Guardian in 2010. "In the States, you can ask the cops, 'Who are you looking for and how much will you pay me if I catch them?'" he said. "In the 70s, there were three bounty hunters in the US. There are 8,500 today." His iconic mullet helped cement his fame, even leading the TV star to be parodied on a "South Park" episode in which Cartman becomes a hall monitor. For the record, he found the episode hilarious. "It was an honor to be spoofed like that," he told the outlet.

But Dog has had a complicated life, from a childhood steeped in church culture to teenage years spent on the run from the law. He's been in a significant amount of legal trouble himself, even as he became famous worldwide for his ability to track down bad guys and return them to the arms of law enforcement. In recent years, as his personal life has been marked by loss even as his professional life continues to be a source of controversy, Dog has managed to continue generating headlines by pivoting his career in new directions.

Because his mother was a preacher, Dog was raised to be religious. "Long before I became an outlaw, I was a good Christian kid," he would later write in his memoir "Nine Lives and Counting." He went to church weekly, and though people expected he would be a minister someday, Dog resisted the idea. "You mean like a fire-and-brimstone preacher? No thanks. That didn't really appeal to my tracking, fishing, football-loving, wild-at-heart boyhood," he wrote.

His father, on the other hand, was abusive, constantly belittling the young Dog. "If I didn't win a fight, he would beat me," Dog remembered. "If I brought home a bad grade, he would beat me. If it was Tuesday, he would beat me."

To that end, Dog ran away from home to join The Devil's Diciples ("not like the biblical disciples," Dog clarified in his memoir), a motorcycle gang, when he was 16. That led to a youth filled with crime. "My list of sins was long," Dog recalled, but he still wouldn't let his fellow gang members disrespect God. After trying to fight one boy who insulted Jesus, Dog picked up his famous nickname. "'I'm gonna start calling you DOG ... that's GOD spelled backward!'" a fellow biker told him. "From then on, I was Dog."

Eventually, Duane "Dog" Chapman's association with The Devil's Diciples wound up getting him into serious trouble. "I was determined to prove myself as being the baddest, toughest Diciple there was," he wrote in his memoir "Nine Lives and Counting." Dog recalled, "I tried my best to outdrink, outsmoke, and outfight everyone we came into contact with." Soon he was selling stolen drugs, and Dog's arrest record began.

In 1973, Dog and his friends were in Texas when one got into a fight with a drug dealer, fatally shooting him. Though Dog was in the car outside when it happened, he was convicted of murder nonetheless. "In Texas in the '70s, if you were present, you were just as guilty," he explained to The Toronto Star.

As a result, Dog was sentenced to five years in prison. In his memoir, he recalled praying, trying to understand why he'd been locked up for a crime he didn't commit. "Every brick in this prison is built on a crime you committed," Dog said God told him. "That's why you're here: To pay for your crimes. I will not be mocked. Whatever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Dog decided to commit himself to saving his fellow inmates.

Dog's prison sentence turned out to be a very pivotal time in his life. Though he was sentenced to five years behind bars, he wound up being paroled after only 18 months; still, that was plenty of time for Dog to have a conversation with someone who would change his life.

As part of his pledge to help the other inmates, Dog also cozied up to the overseers. "While I was in prison, I became the warden's barber, so that means all the guards were my friends," Dog explained on the Fox News show "Hannity & Colmes." He found himself helping keep the other inmates in line. "One guy went to break and run one day, an inmate, and I jumped him and just — the guards were going to shoot him in the back," Dog recalled. "And as the guard walked up when I was on top of the inmate apprehending him, and he threw down the handcuffs and said, 'Hook him up, bounty hunter.'"

That's all it took; Dog was hooked on the idea. In his memoir "Nine Lives and Counting," he recalled going to the prison library and looking up more information about the profession. "It seemed like all the bounty hunters I read about started out as felons, then something happened to them while they were in prison, and they turned their lives around and became good guys," he wrote. "I felt like I was reading about my future."

While Dog worked on rebuilding his life after prison, working towards a career in bounty hunting, his personal life was just as much of a rollercoaster as his professional one — he's been married six times and has 13 children.

His first wife, La Fonda Sue Darnell, left him while he was in prison, having had an affair with a friend. "All my goals of living a good, honest life when I got out of prison flew out the window. I was consumed with rage and revenge," he wrote in "Nine Lives and Counting." Upon his release, he planned to kill his ex-wife's new man, but when someone on a plane preached to him instead, he decided to let his plans for revenge go. In his memoir, Dog claimed that the man turned out to not exist, and he decided that he'd met an angel.

He would marry and divorce several more women before meeting Beth, who would become his fifth wife. At the time, he was dealing with addiction, and he credits Beth with helping him get clean. "She changed the sheets, did the laundry, filled the fridge with groceries," he wrote, "and was brutally honest with me about what a mess I was in. Beth was never one to pull any punches."

By the 2000s, Dog's bounty hunting career was in full swing. In 2003, he learned that a man named Andrew Luster had jumped bail and fled his prison sentence. Luster was a convicted rapist and the great-grandson of cosmetics magnate Max Factor, and his bail had been set at $1 million. If Dog could catch him and turn him in to authorities, he hoped he would receive a part of that bail as a reward. 

After being tipped off, Dog and several associates found Luster in Mexico. A street food vendor near the spot the capture took place told The Los Angeles Times, "These guys come along and begin threatening him with tear gas. He said nothing. They threw him on the ground. He resisted as they put him in handcuffs."

Unlike the United States, however, Mexico does not allow bounty-hunting, and Dog and his colleagues were arrested by the Mexican government. Upon being out on bail, they fled the country, leading to legal trouble that would follow Dog for years. He told Honolulu Magazine that he had no other choice but to become exactly the kind of fugitive he usually chases, explaining, "The Mexican government came and told us that there was some Luster money on the streets for a hit. They came and told us, 'We protected you for three weeks, and we can't protect you any longer.'" Ultimately, he did not receive any of Luster's bail money.

The Andrew Luster capture got Hollywood interested, and soon Duane "Dog" Chapman was filming his own reality show. "Dog the Bounty Hunter" premiered on A&E in 2004, following Dog's exploits as he tracked down various criminals and ne'er-do-wells. Speaking with Honolulu Magazine, Dog revealed that he sought advice from another reality television veteran, trying to learn about what Hollywood would expect of him from someone who's been in the spotlight for longer. Admitting that he'd grown close with Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne, Dog reflected, "You gotta watch what you say. ... I'm a runneth-thy-mouth kind of guy, but now I have to choose my words carefully, you know, so not to offend anybody or any ethnical group." It's a lesson Dog would have to learn again and again in the coming years.

In the meantime, though, "Dog the Bounty Hunter" was a massive hit, and soon Dog became a pop culture mainstay. Fans were fascinated by his incredibly long mullet and tendency to wear sunglasses at all times. In an interview with The New York Post, Dog admitted that his instantly iconic look was a costume. "From the hairdo to the tips of my boots, it's a uniform, and it's made to intimidate," he said.

Dog was also still dealing with the fallout from the Luster job. "I felt that this television show was a great opportunity to be able to show the world we're not vigilantes," Beth Chapman told the Post.

Dog's legal trouble in Mexico continued for years after he captured Andrew Luster, and by the time the kidnapping case worked its way through the system, Dog was a full-blown reality television superstar. This, of course, affected the way the case was covered in the media. The United States government considered extraditing Dog and his associates, even arresting the three men in Hawaii in 2006, leading to a public outcry. Dog's publicist told The East Bay Times, "He arrests the bad guys — and he is definitely not one of them." Dog himself complained that the government was jealous of him, telling the court, "You see what the American government is doing to us? They throw us in jail. I'm so upset about this."

It all came to a head in 2007, when Mexican judges decided to drop the charges. Still, the pending extradition needed to be overturned as well. That finally happened by November of that year. Dog's lawyer, James Quadra, told CNBC, "I don't think they have any regrets whatsoever in facilitating the capture of Mr. Luster, who is a known and convicted rapist. Though this has been a difficult process, they are proud of what they have done."

"Dog the Bounty Hunter" premiered in 2004, and by 2007, Dog the Bounty Hunter found himself in hot water with A&E, the network that aired his show. Dog was proudly foul-mouthed, which turned out to be a bad thing when a recording of a conversation with his son was leaked to the press. Dog and his son were discussing the fact that they often said the n-word around their home, and Dog worried that someone would hold that against him. "I'm not going to take any chance ever in life of losing everything I've worked for 30 years because some drunken n***** heard us say n***** and turned us into the Enquirer magazine" (via (via E! News). His words were, ironically, published by The National Enquirer.

After the recording was published, A&E announced that "Dog the Bounty Hunter" would be going on hiatus. "We take this matter very seriously. Pending an investigation, we have suspended production on the series," they said in a statement published by E!

Ultimately, Dog went on a public apology tour. He told CNN that he'd stricken the word from his vocabulary, insisting he wasn't racist. "Once I said it and met with leaders of the black community and realized what that word meant, that's when I said, 'I will never again utter that word,'" Dog swore. "Ever." As a result, "Dog The Bounty Hunter" would continue until 2012, ultimately running for 222 episodes.

After a long illness, Dog's wife and TV co-star Beth died of throat cancer in 2019. Her final years were chronicled on a show called "Dog's Most Wanted," which managed to capture the moment she received a call that her cancer had come back. Dog told People that he hadn't been able to watch the show because the pain of losing his wife was still too raw. "I have not looked at none of these shows. I looked at the first show a little bit, but at that time, I wasn't able to handle it," he said.

However, Dog told Entertainment Tonight that the length of his wife's illness meant they were thankfully able to have difficult conversations towards the end. "For two to three years, she knew this might happen," he explained, remembering that she would often ask him what he would do without her after she was gone. "'Big Daddy, you better not let another girl take my place,'" he remembered her begging. He added, "I said, 'I won't.'" This was ultimately a promise that Dog would not keep.

While Dog no doubt mourned the death of his wife Beth, he moved on mere months later with a woman named Francie Frane. She had recently lost her spouse, too, and the two bonded over their grief. Speaking with Entertainment Tonight, Frane explained that she only agreed to date Dog if he went to church. He did, and the two connected over their faith. "We understood the pain that the other one was feeling and [in] those tough days and moments, we helped each other stand up," she said. Dog admitted, "We don't feel guilty, but it's kind of strange."

Though Dog told ET that he wanted his wedding to be a big spectacle that included fans of his TV shows, when they finally married in 2021, the ceremony was relatively restrained. "Dog and Francie were married last evening in Colorado Springs in an emotional and intimate ceremony with a small gathering of close friends and family," a representative said in a statement to Today.

The bounty hunter did eventually include his fans after all ... at least, the ones who follow him on social media. Several weeks after the wedding, alongside an Instagram post of himself and his bride, Dog wrote simply, "Yes knot is tied !!"

In late 2021, much of the country was captivated by the search for Brian Laundrie, a man who was accused of murdering girlfriend Gabby Petito. Dog joined in the search, telling Fox News that he knocked on the door of Laundrie's parents' house. "I carry a reputation with me. The reputation is, 'He gives you a second chance,'" Dog said. "'He's gonna get you, but he gives you a second chance.'"

Little did he know, Dog was already in the process of messing up his own second chance. (Or was it his third or fourth, at that point?) While he was down in Florida to insert himself into the Laundrie investigation, Dog was served with a lawsuit alleging that he'd broken his contract with a new streaming service called Unleashed, which was supposed to unleash a new "Dog the Bounty Hunter" show called "Dog Unleashed." Got that?

According to The Sun, "Dog Unleashed" was canceled without ever making it to air, yanked over concerns that Dog had illegally used a Taser on a suspect. Furthermore, court documents examined by the outlet read, "Defendant is a disgraced reality TV star who was fired by Plaintiff after his company discovered that the Defendant had used racial epithets to attack Black teenage Black Lives Matter Activists." Racial epithets are, you'll remember, the reason why his original "Dog the Bounty Hunter" show was canceled. So much for second chances!

Even though he is no longer regularly on television, Dog has managed to keep his name in the headlines. In 2023, for example, Dog went on a tirade against Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer, after she appeared in a Bud Light ad. In an interview with Sharell Barrera, a televangelist, Dog threatened and misgendered Mulvaney. "Rebuke Satan out of him and just give him a couple black eyes. ... I mean that. If I ever see him, I'm dropping him," the former TV star said (via The Advocate).

That is, after all, Dog's latest transformation: Christian influencer. In 2024, he published the book titled "Nine Lives and Counting: A Bounty Hunter's Journey to Faith, Hope, and Redemption." In addition to being a bounty hunter, Dog has refined his life's work, explaining to Crosswalk Headlines that he has an even higher calling than bringing people to mortal justice. "I am an evangelist, and my wife is a prophet," he said. "I have been assigned to the devil's herd. That's what God has called me to do. I believe that I have been placed here to take felons to Heaven."

Still, Dog confessed that he hasn't changed that much after all. "The main thing, the truth, I like beating them down because I'm Christian outlaw," he said. "I like putting them in the back of the car and watching them cry."