Dog the Bounty Hunter star Duane “Dog” Chapman made a surprising admission in a New York Times profile published this week. He claims he is “broke” and could lose his Colorado home if he did not find his latest bounty. The mounting medical bills following wife Beth Chapman‘s battle with cancer and other family expenses have made it difficult to pay the bills.
“I’m broke,” Chapman told the Times in a September 2019 interview published on Friday. The interview took place just two months after Beth’s death in June at age 51. Beth fought throat cancer for two years before her death.
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At the time of the interview, Chapman and his bounty hunter partner David Robinson were tracking down a Hawaii fugitive who was accused of dealing drugs and fled to California. Chapman said this was a the “biggest bond I’ve ever written” and he would have to pay $1.5 million if he could not track the fugitive.
Chapman told Robinson he could get the fugitive since he was only “three hours away.” However, Robinson was worried for Chapman’s health, after all, he had just been released from the hospital. Chapman shrugged off Robinson’s concerns, stating he “just got a blood clot, that’s all.”
When Chapman appeared on The Dr. Oz Show though, Dr. Mehmet Oz said the reality TV star was a “ticking time bomb” and needed to take more care of himself.
“You’re not going to be here with the heart the way it is right now,” Oz told Chapman in October. “Fear of death is normal. I’m surprised you don’t fear death when you’re chasing after convicts. But when you run away from doctors, that means you have to do your own doctoring.”
In November, Chapman went back on Dr. Oz, where the host explained he had a pulmonary embolism.
“You see how this normal artery here has little white middle part?” Oz told Chapman of the results of a recent lung scan. “But this one has a little piece missing out of it. You notice it’s white on the outside but the middle is like an eclipse, real black. That’s a piece of blood clot, that is actually inside the arteries of your lungs. That’s called a pulmonary embolism.”
“The problem with these clots is when they block off the arteries, they don’t let any oxygen get to the lungs,” Oz explained. “There are plenty of folks who died from these emboli.”
Chapman recently starred on Dog’s Most Wanted for WGN America. Although the show was a big hit when it aired last fall, the show’s future is unknown. The first season focused mostly on Beth’s cancer battle. In his Times interview, Chapman hinted at another show idea: Sheriff Dog. If he got a pardon from the state of Texas for his murder conviction, he could become a real sheriff, and he would want cameras following him.
“I think it’d be a hit,” he said.
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