LAWFUEL – The Legal Newswire – WSJ Review – Duane Dog Chapman’s book – Bounty hunter Duane Chapman is not your standard working stiff. He has been stabbed, scratched and beaten with various objects, and he has peered down the barrels of a wide assortment of firearms. Or so “Dog” Chapman, the star of the A&E reality-television show “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” informs us in his engaging memoir, “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide.”
He has also spent a few decades on the other side of the law and did a prison stint for murder (a bum rap, he assures us). The unadorned prose he uses — “My weapon of choice is Mace” — is well-suited to Mr. Chapman’s headlong story: hard knocks, prison, addiction and eventual salvation. He reached the last stage, he says, with a boost from a redheaded being who appeared during a plane ride to tell him that “God’s got a plan for you.” Strangely, Mr. Chapman writes, when the plane landed the messenger was nowhere to be seen.
He suspects that an angel was at work. So how did Mr. Chapman end up a bounty hunter? Another divine intervention: “The Lord spoke to me,” he writes, “and said ‘I will make you fishers of men. Follow Me, Duane.’ ” Muscular Christianity thus gained a formidable convert. And in Mr. Chapman’s best-known caper, Andrew Luster — heir to the Max Factor fortune and a fugitive on multiple rape charges — discovered that indeed sometimes you can run, but you can’t hide if someone is in sufficiently dogged pursuit.
