There’s a great danger in being a friend to your children. For me, it ultimately cost me the most precious gift of all—one of my kids. Just before marrying Beth, I was faced with one of the hardest decisions I have ever made. As difficult as it was for me to accept, my daughter Barbara Katie, who was living in Alaska with her mother, had gotten in a lot of trouble with drugs. Every time she called home for a little money, I sent it. It was always the same excuse—that she had lost her glasses. After the third call in a month, it finally occurred to me that I was being incredibly naïve. At last I asked, “Are you on drugs?”
“Oh no, Daddy.” And like a fool, I believed her. I kept sending a hundred dollars via Western Union every couple of weeks, under different names so Beth wouldn’t find out. It probably didn’t matter though, because Beth no doubt knew what I was doing anyway.
Beth could see how serious Barbara Katie’s problems had gotten. She insisted that I send her to rehab, but Barbara Katie didn’t want to go. She worried that she’d always be known as “that girl who had a drug problem.” Beth pleaded with me to send her anyway, but I still couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Beth even suggested we go up to Alaska and bring her to Hawaii. But I couldn’t do that, either. I knew if I brought Barbara Katie back to Hawaii, she and Baby Lyssa would reconnect, which I feared would have horrible consequences. I had spent an enormous amount of time straightening out Baby Lyssa and getting her off drugs when she came to live with me a few years earlier. I was terrified that Barbara Katie would somehow influence Baby Lyssa to go back to using.
Barbara Katie had sent her young son Travis to live with us while she tried to get her life worked out. Our agreement was that I’d take Travis so she could go to rehab. I wanted her to go to Betty Ford or Promises, but she didn’t want to leave home. She wanted to stay in Alaska. A week after she supposedly checked in to a local facility, I got a call from Barbara Katie saying that she was all better. But I knew she was lying and that she had never gotten the help she needed. Miracles happen, but no one gets clean in a week.
Each of my kids has a special place in my heart, but Barbara Katie was my oldest girl. She shared the same sensitivity I have, meaning she’d cry over anything! My mom was the only person I felt I could let my guard down in front of whenever I needed to decompress. We’d cry together for hours until I felt better. After Mom died, Barbara Katie became my crying pal. The night Dog the Bounty Hunter debuted on A&E, I was overcome with emotion. The first person I called was my daughter. As soon as she answered, we both lost it. Barbara Katie kept saying how proud she was and how much she hoped to someday be a part of the show. I promised her it would happen because she was family.
“Your dream came true, Daddy.” She was so proud of me. Of all my memories from that first night on television, those are the words I will never forget. We were so close, and that’s why it was extremely difficult to see her messed up on drugs.
Barbara Katie desperately wanted to come to my wedding. But I couldn’t let her attend while she was so strung out. On the day she died, I heard that she’d asked her mother that morning if I had called yet to say she could come to Hawaii for the big day.
I loved her so much, but I believe I loved her to death. Every time I tell someone that, they tell me how sorry they are for my loss. The reality is they shouldn’t feel sorry, because I have dealt with it in every way.
After Barbara Katie died, I received a call from a man who told me he was in a car that was driving behind the vehicle she was in when it flipped. He told me he saw the horrible accident as it happened. When he ran up to the overturned vehicle, he felt the pulse of the man behind the wheel. It was very weak. He told me he talked to the man and tried to tell him everything was going to be OK. Even so, the driver said he was going to die. That’s when the man looked over and noticed another body too. It was my daughter. He explained to me that her head was hanging down to her chest. It was obvious she had broken her neck. The man on the phone told me that he watched the son of a bitch driver who killed my baby take his last breath. He said he called to tell me he was there when the guy died and wanted me to know it was a miserable death.
I thanked him for calling and hung up. I got up from the table, began walking in my backyard, circling the pool, and then I started to cry. Why didn’t his phone call make me feel better? Why was I feeling mercy for the bastard that took my baby’s life? I couldn’t believe I wasn’t finding any comfort knowing that man choked on his own blood.
“God, why? Why do I feel this way?”
And then God spoke.
“This is why you will go out there and share your message with people, Duane. You have a forgiving heart like me. That’s why you’re the Dog. This is what you’re supposed to feel like.”
Being angry with the driver wouldn’t bring my baby back. It wouldn’t heal my shattered heart any quicker, and it wouldn’t allow me to set an example of the true meaning of mercy. Instead of cursing him, I forgave him. I haven’t forgotten any of the pain from that experience, but I’ve let go of my anger. That act alone gave me the foundation to tell others that they have to do the same thing. Who pays the price when we carry around negative emotional baggage? We do. And where’s the good in that? There is none.
So maybe Barbara Katie’s death was a way for me to reach out and help others see what they choose not to in their own kids. Perhaps her death will remind you to take the blinders off, get your head out of the sand, and pay attention to your kid’s addictions. Don’t love your kids to death like I did. It’s not too late to reach out and pull them from the abyss—but you’ve got to take action before something terrible happens or you will regret it for the rest of your life. It was too late for Barbara Katie, and now I saw the same thing happening to Tucker.
Tucker’s attitude had become noticeably worse since meeting Monique. It was obvious that he was going downhill fast, and despite everything I knew in my heart, I did nothing to stop his spiral. He appeared desperate and without proper moral judgment. He didn’t feel good about himself. He’d moan about his felony and the many tattoos he had all over his body that he now regretted. I don’t think he felt desirable, so when Monique began paying attention to him, whether or not I approved of her was pretty irrelevant. She made him feel wanted, and who can blame him for that?
Tucker and Monique started spending a lot of time in clubs. It’s a pretty well-known fact in our family that Chapmans and booze do not mix. It’s a dangerous, deadly, poisonous combination. It basically turns us all into idiots, and Tucker was no exception. I never felt comfortable with Tucker and Monique’s party lifestyle, and I now had a growing concern for my son’s safety and well-being.
I didn’t know if it was the alcohol or something worse, but his temper had become unpredictable and combustible. I suspected that he was on methamphetamines because I had seen him through another period of time when he was on that drug, and his behavior was exactly the same. I also began to notice that Tucker was losing a lot of weight and looked as if he wasn’t getting enough sleep. He looked like hell. Then I heard that Monique had helped him buy a prosthetic penis so he could pass his urine tests in front of his parole officer by pretending to piss clean urine. He never would have been able to pass the test without it. That’s when I knew for sure that he was back on hard drugs.
The day he came over to say he was quitting work once and for all, he actually threw a twenty-pound patio chair across the pool in a fit of anger. He was spiraling out of control. Drugs had to be a factor, because he was filled with so much rage.
When drugs get ahold of you, they take over all reason and rational behavior. There’s nothing you can do to take back your life except to get off of them. My son didn’t even admit that he had problem, which is always the first step to recovery. In truth, even though I could see what was happening to him, I still couldn’t admit the extent of the trouble he was in, a mistake I will regret for the rest of my life. Beth knew what was going on from the very start. Somehow I
put my head in the sand to pretend it wasn’t happening…again.
The thought of Tucker being hooked on drugs upset me more than I can ever put into words. I should have stepped in to intervene, but I didn’t. In the meantime, Beth had even threatened to call Tucker’s parole officer to tell him he was using drugs and using a prosthetic penis to pass his urine tests, because she knew he was in too deep to get off the drugs himself. I had been getting Tucker out of bad situations for years, but this time it felt like a betrayal to rat out my own kid. Since Tucker was on parole, an infraction like this would surely send him back to jail, something I didn’t want to be responsible for, so I chose to do nothing. After losing Barbara Katie to drugs, I swore that I’d never allow another one of my children to make the same mistake. Everything inside me knew what I had to do so I wouldn’t lose Tucker too, but still, for too long, I chose to do nothing.
When I finally decided to call Tucker to tell him how I felt, I really believed he would understand that what I was saying was for his own good. Like any hands-on parent, I wanted to help Tucker get away from the girlfriend I was convinced was adding to his problems.
That now infamous conversation lasted a solid twenty-five minutes, not the eight minutes or so that were leaked to the media. The call started off calm and cool, but the more I pleaded with him to leave the girl, the harder he pushed back, until I finally lost my temper. I became so pissed off that I couldn’t get it through his thick head that I believed everything I was suggesting was for his own good. Tucker kept trying to convince me that since we never allowed his girlfriend into the house, we never spent the time to get to know her like he had. But we did know her, well enough to know we had to keep someone we were certain was out to hurt our family out of our home. No way, that would never happen. Not in my house! That’s when I began saying things about Monique I now regret.
“I’m not taking the chance on some motherf**ker. I don’t care if she’s a Mexican, a whore, whatever…it’s not because she’s black. It’s because we use the word n***er sometimes here. I’m not going to take a chance ever in life for losing everything I’ve worked for thirty years because some f**king n***er heard us say n***er and turned us in to the Enquirer magazine. Our career is over. I’m not taking that chance at all, never in life. Never. Never.”
Beth was standing in the courtyard outside our bedroom telling me to be quiet. She kept saying I needed to stop talking and hang up the phone, but I didn’t. Nope. I kept right on talking. When I look at those words in print, it hurts my heart to think they ever came out of my mouth. It’s obvious that I wasn’t talking about the color of Monique’s skin so much as the character, or lack thereof, that this young woman embodied, this young woman who had all but taken over my son’s life. None of my sons had Anglo-Saxon wives or girlfriends, so my concern for Tucker had nothing to do with race.
I spent years studying and learning from Tony Robbins, who taught me that if a person doesn’t understand what you’re saying, you have to continue to change your approach until the person does. So I begged Tucker to leave Monique in every way I could, giving him all the reasons why I felt the way I did and why I thought she was bad news. I’d initially gotten on the phone to explain to Tucker why he couldn’t bring her around my house, to tell him that she was trouble. But the more I tried to make my point, the less I thought I was getting through to him. Stupidly, I kept hoping I would somehow get through to his stubborn Chapman ass. Tucker didn’t have much to say as I talked. One of the only things I remember him saying was “If Baby Lyssa was dating a black guy, you wouldn’t be acting this way.”
“If Lyssa was dating a n***er, we would all say f*ck you…and you know that. If Lyssa brought a black guy home ya da da…it’s not that they’re black, it’s none of that. It’s that we use the word n***er. We don’t mean you fucking scum n***er without a soul. We don’t mean that shit. But America would think we mean that. And we’re not taking a chance on losing everything we got over a racial slur because our son goes with a girl like that. I can’t do that, Tucker. You can’t expect Gary, Bonnie, Cecily, all them young kids to because ‘I’m in love for seven months’—fuck that! So I’ll help you get another job, but you cannot work here unless you break up with her and she’s out of your life. I can’t handle that shit. I got ’em in the parking lot trying to record us. I got that girl saying she’s gonna wear a recorder…”
Looking back, I realize that, deep down, I instinctively knew this was going to end up in print somewhere. I was trying to protect everything I held near and dear—my family, my career, and most of all, my son. The son I’d delivered into this world with my bare hands. When his mother went into labor, she let out such a loud scream I thought she was dying. She passed out cold after her water broke. I picked her up, carried her into the bedroom, and did what I could to make sure she and the baby were safe. Thankfully, my mother didn’t live far from our house. I called her to say I needed help getting my wife to the hospital. By the time Mom got to me, Lyssa was already giving birth. I could see the baby’s head in between her legs. Even though I didn’t know why I needed it, I told Mom to get me some hot water. I remembered watching episodes of Gunsmoke as a kid and hearing people yell for hot water and towels when a woman went into labor, so I did too. Mom came running into the bedroom with hot water and a towel.
I reached between Lyssa’s legs and began to pull gently on the baby’s head. She was screaming while I yelled, “Push, push!” I pulled until one little shoulder popped through and then the other. Within seconds I was holding Tucker in my arms. But something was wrong. He wasn’t breathing. He wasn’t crying, and now I noticed he was completely blue.
“He’s dead,” I said to Mom as tears streamed down my cheeks.
I put his little body to the side while I pulled on the umbilical cord. When the placenta came out, I thought it was another dead baby. I was absolutely beside myself with grief.
“Good job, Dad,” a voice said from behind me. It was a paramedic who had arrived and then taken a large scissor and cut the cord.
Tucker began to cry. I never felt so proud in my life. I had brought this little baby into the world, and I felt a bond from the very moment I held him in my arms. I named him Tucker D. Chapman. His initials were the same as the Texas Department of Corrections. I looked into my son’s eyes and thought, This is the son that I’ll be a good guy for. I hadn’t been a model citizen up until that point. But something about Tucker made me want to live an honest, honorable life.
I have a soft spot for all of my children, but the three I had with Big Lyssa have always had a special little piece of me because of my shame and guilt about the divorce. I spent years feeling responsible because they didn’t have a mother who was around. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for any of my kids, but those three in particular were impossible for me to say no to.
One Christmas, when he was just a little boy, Tucker begged me for a “My Buddy” doll. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to buy it for him. Money was tight and the doll was really expensive. Even so, I didn’t want to disappoint my son, so I spent all of Christmas Eve that year bounty hunting so I could earn enough money to buy the doll. I sat on the guy I was chasing for hours, just waiting for the right moment to get him. The cops wanted him as much as I did, but if they got him first, I wouldn’t make a dime, which meant I wouldn’t be able to bring home the doll for Tucker.
The cops drove by me from time to time over the course of the day and asked, “Are you going to get him?”
“I’ll get him.” I said. And then one of the cops said to me, “Why? Is he your buddy?”
I knew right then the Lord was going to let me catch this guy so I could get Tucker his My Buddy doll just in time to open it on Christmas Day. Sure enough, I caught my jump. I sang the jingle from the doll commercial all the way to the jail. The poor bastard probably thought I was nuts. By the time I handed him over, I barely had enough time to make it to the store before they closed for the holiday. When I got there, th
ere was only one doll left. I took the box off the shelf as fast as I could so no one else would swoop in. I couldn’t wait to give My Buddy to Tucker and see the look on his face knowing that his old man had come through.
I had a lot of great times with Tucker over the years. When he got out of prison, I knew he was feeling a little left out of the mix because he wasn’t on our show. One of the last episodes we shot before going on break for the season was when Duane Lee, Leland, and I taught Tucker how to drive. We set up bright orange pylons in an empty parking lot so he could take serpentine turns through them. We put that boy through all sorts of torturous drills, but it was all in the name of family fun, brotherly bonding, and togetherness. When we finished, Duane Lee and Tucker were walking away, when I heard Duane Lee say, “Come on, I’ll drive you home.”
“How about I drive you home?” Tucker asked.
“No way! I’m not letting you drive my car.”
We all laughed, but it was a really touching moment between my boys I’ll never forget. It was probably the last good time we all had together.
I hung up the phone after going off on Tucker, somehow knowing that I would pay for losing my cool. I hoped and prayed he wasn’t going to be my Judas, the one to sell me out, but deep down, I knew that he was capable of it. I wanted to believe it was because of what the drugs he was hooked on had done to him, and that he wasn’t acting out of pure malice. That’s an awful feeling for a father to have about his son.
Family is everything to me. I will defend my children to the bitter end against anyone or anything that I deem dangerous or harmful. I spent the rest of the day secretly fearing that I would now be in a position where I would have to defend myself against a member of my own family. I knew the bomb would eventually drop. I just didn’t know when.
Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given (2010) Page 7