Dog the Bounty Hunter Shares Touching Birthday Tribute to Late Wife Beth Chapman

Duane “Dog” Chapman has taken to social media to share a touching tribute for his late wife, Beth Chapman, on what would have been her 53rd birthday. In an Instagram post, the Dog the Bounty Hunter star shared a photo of Beth and wrote alongside it, “You are celebrating this day with Jesus and all his angels. That’s the only thing that gets us through without you. Happy birthday Beth. We miss you & love you.”

Beth passed away in June 2019, after fighting a years-long battle with throat cancer. Months after her passing, Chapman sat down for an interview with TV Insider and addressed his outlook on life in the wake of Beth’s death, saying candidly, “I told my [Dog’s Most Wanted] camera crew after she [passed], ‘If something happens to me, you’d better get that shot.’ They’re like, ‘Boss, we will.’ I’m not afraid to die now, because I know where I’m going and who I’ll get to see again.”

“I’m not afraid to die anymore,” Dog also said, then adding that, now whenever he’s about to knock down a door during a bust, he says to himself, “Here I come, Bethy,” and imagines her in a Heavenly garden saying, “Big Daddy, it took you a long time.” While Beth may no longer physically be with Dog and his bounty hunting team, he says that she is still with them spiritually. As an example, Dog referred to a recent instance where the team was chasing after a fugitive who they lost in a neighborhood they were not familiar with.

“I stopped for a second as I was running and said, ‘Beth, please. Where is he?’ All of a sudden, I heard [team member] David and Leland [Dog’s son] yell, ‘We’re on him again, boss.’ I told David, ‘Oh my God, she’s watching.’ David said, ‘We have an angelic drone.’ I feel her all the time,” Chapman shared. “I always did this job to make her proud. I just thought on every arrest how proud she would be.”

Chapman has since found love again with new fiancée Francie Frane. Frane opened up about the proposal with The Sun, sharing, “I wasn’t expecting it at all. I think I had gone to pick up some food and then when I came back he had all the lights turned down with just a few lights on and a bunch of candles lit. So when I came in I was like, ‘Wow, this is awesome’. Then he said, ‘Come in, sit down because I need to talk to you.’”

She continued, “So I put all the food in the kitchen and I came in and he said, ‘I know that God brought you into my life and I don’t want to spend one moment of it without you.’” She went on to share, “And he got down on one knee and he opened the ring box and he said, ‘Will you marry me and spend the rest of our lives together?’ Who can say no to that? It was wonderful.”