Now that Dog the Bounty Hunter is married again, find out about his five previous marriages and his new wife, Francie Frane.
On September 2, 2021, Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman said “I do” all over again. The 68-year-old TV star got married for the sixth time and this time he chose Francie Frane as his bride. In May 2020, about ten months after Duane’s wife Beth Chapman died of throat cancer, he proposed to Francie. Duane found comfort in Francie, who had also lost her husband after Beth passed away.
Duane has had 12 children. Eleven of them came from his marriages to Beth and four other women that all ended in divorce. The Tech Education has put all the information there is about Duane’s five marriages and his relationship with Francie. Find out more below!
La Fonda Sue Honeycutt
Duane got married to La Fonda Sue Honeycutt for the first time. On April 1, 1972, Duane and La Fonda got married in Texas. At the time, Duane was 19 and La Fonda was 20. After Duane was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to five years in a Texas prison, La Fonda filed for divorce on October 27, 1977.
Duane and La Fonda had two sons while they were married. Duane Lee Chapman Jr., now 48, and Leland Blane Chapman, now 44, lived with their father after he got out of prison and later appeared on Dog the Bounty Hunter.
Anne M. Tegnell
Duane got out of prison on parole after two years and soon after, he married Anne Tegnell. The wedding took place in Colorado on August 22, 1979. The first child Duane and Anne Chapman had was a son named Zebadiah Chapman.
He was born on January 1, 1980, but he died almost a month later. They had a second child, Wesley Chapman, who is now 40 years old. After that, they got a divorce. But Duane and Anne did get back together for a short time and had a third child, 39-year-old son James Chapman.
Lyssa Rae Brittain
In 1982, Duane married Lyssa Rae Brittain for the third time. Duane and Lyssa met in a bar just a few days before they got married. Duane is said to have said in his autobiography, You Can Run But You Can’t Hide, published in 2007, that he paid Lyssa $1,000 to have his child.
She agreed, and during their nine years of marriage, they had three children: daughter Barbara Katie Chapman, who was 23 when she died in a car accident in 2006; son Tucker Dee Chapman, who is 37; and daughter Lyssa Rae Chapman, who is 34. Lyssa Rae was on her father’s A&E reality show for six years.
Tawney Marie
Duane’s fourth wedding was to Tawney Marie. Duane is said to have met her when he arrested her for drug possession in 1988. After that, he hired her as his secretary. They got married in 1992, but they broke up in 1994. Eight years later, they got a divorce. The famous bounty hunter is said to have written in his autobiography that Duane and Tawney’s marriage “was a disaster from the start.”
Beth Smith
Duane was best known for his marriage to Beth Smith. They dated on and off for almost a decade before getting married on May 20, 2006, in Hawaii. In 2011, Beth told Rosie O’Donnell on The Rosie Show how the two of them met. She told the comedian, “I was in jail, and I called him to ask for a bond.” “He went outside and sent my bond, but he did so on the bus.
So I stayed in jail for another 12 hours.” Duane and Beth had a happy marriage and had two children: Bonnie Joanne Chapman, who is 22 years old, and Garry Chapman, who is 20 years old. Duane also adopted Beth’s daughter Cecily Barmore-Chapman, who is 28 years old and who she had with her ex-husband.
Beth died on June 26, 2019, after a two-year fight with stage II throat cancer. She was 51 years old. Since Beth died, Duane has continued to remember her with dates that are sad. In May 2020, when the couple would have been celebrating their 14th wedding anniversary, Duane posted a touching tribute to Instagram.
“She told Big Daddy, ‘You’re going to be so sad when I’m not there on our next anniversary.’ Why did she have to be so right? On the post, which showed a picture of the couple with their arms around each other, Duane wrote, “I love you.”
Francie Frane
After Beth’s death, which was very sad, Duane fell in love with Colorado rancher Francie Frane. When Duane called Francie’s husband Bob to do some landscaping work on the family property, he found out that Bob had died just a few months before Beth.
This brought the two people together. “We called each other on the phone and started crying and comforting each other. Then something else happened,” Duane said in May 2020. “I can’t believe I’ve met someone like her.” In the spring of 2020, they started dating, and in May of that year, they got engaged.
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