Duane “Dog” Chapman opened up about watching episodes of the upcoming Dog’s Most Wanted, his new series co-starring his late wife, Beth Chapman. Chapman admitted that seeing the completed footage has made him emotional, but it has been “therapeutic” for him ahead of Saturday’s Colorado memorial for Beth.
Chapman told Entertainment Tonight he was unsure of how much footage with Beth will be used when the series finally airs on WGN America next year. The footage he has seen made him tear up.
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“So, I mean, I’ve already looked at some of them, OK, and I see her and I hear her and I freaking start bawling ’cause it happened,” the Dog the Bounty Hunter star said. “I just instantly start crying … so, I think it’s also therapeutic that you have those. You know, if you lose a loved one, then you have the little pictures you look at. But I have her alive in that show.”
In another part of his wide-ranging interview with Entertainment Tonight, Chapman admitted that he has still not spread Beth’s ashes. Beth’s body was cremated and her ashes are now in a pink box.
Chapman said Beth told him to scatter some of the ashes, but still wanted him to keep some above a fireplace because “of course when I go to heaven, she wants me in the box with her.”
“You know, I was going to do all the scattering, and then I looked at it and thought, ‘I’m not gonna throw you, like, away. I’m just gonna throw you away and start over?’ I can’t do that,” Chapman explained to ET. “I haven’t gotten past the place where I’m still putting a pillow where she was, and covering it up, like the jailhouse escape, right? I mean it. And then I wake up in the middle of the night and I see her and it doesn’t register that ain’t her. I’m still there.”
“Even though she is not physically there, mentally and spiritually she is there,” Chapman told Entertainment Tonight. “There is not another Beth. There’ll never be another Beth. There ain’t a girl built like another Beth.”
Beth died on June 26 at age 51, following a battle with throat cancer. The family held a traditional Hawaiian memorial ceremony a few days later, but will gather in Aurora, Colorado Saturday afternoon for a Celebration of Life service at Heritage Christian Center. The service begins at 1 p.m. local time and will be livestreamed on WGNAmerica.com.
Beth was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2017 and thought to be cancer-free later that year. However, the cancer returned in November 2018, and she was given a terminal diagnosis. Beth stopped chemotherapy before her death.
“She did it her way. There’s some things that they predicted that the doctors ended up saying, ‘We’ve never, ever, seen anything like this,’” Chapman said following his wife’s death. “Her way was to live. She wanted to live so bad and she fought so long, and the reason she fought, she liked life but she wanted to show people how to beat it and what to do when it got her.”
