Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given (2010) (25 page)

From that day on, Leland has stuck it out with me through some pretty rough times. And for as long as I can remember, he has shown more interest in bounty hunting than any of my other kids. All of my children have grown up in the family business, but Leland was a natural-born bloodhound.

As my kids got older, I didn’t feel comfortable being away from them all the time, so I began taking them to work with me. By the time Duane Lee was fifteen, an age where young boys need more attention so they stay out of trouble, I really knew I couldn’t leave him unsupervised, so I kept a watchful eye on my boys as often as I could.

As close as we were, I had to be careful not to be just friends with my kids. They needed a parent who was willing to be present. It’s important to be a part of their lives so you know what’s going on with them outside the home, and then stay there until it is time for you to
go off to the old folks’ home. Being with them gives you gigantic purpose and meaning in life. I’m happiest when I’m surrounded by my wife, children, and grandchildren. There’s nothing more precious in the world to me than family. As a dad, I feel it is my responsibility to make sure the children are taken care of in every way. Although I encouraged them to have friends growing up, as a large family we always had one another. I wanted to include my kids in every aspect of my life, so I made sure they learned the family business from an early age.

Some people think it’s unusual that our family is so close. We work together, spend free time with one another, and have built a television dynasty based on our strong family foundation. It’s natural that as parents, we worry about losing our babies, even when they are no longer children. After the tragic loss of Barbara Katie, I swore I’d never let any of them out of my grip again.

As hard as we try as parents, though, our kids still have the gift of free will and therefore the ability to make their own decisions along the way. You hope and pray you’ve done everything you can to prepare them to be out on their own, but there are no guarantees. I read an article about two boys riding ATVs without helmets who decided to have a chicken fight. They crashed into each other going forty miles per hour. They didn’t stand a chance of survival. Worse, one of the guys had his girlfriend on the back of his vehicle. She survived, but ended up in a coma. After hearing that story, I thought about those parents and how they felt when they heard the news. I have no doubt those boys knew about helmets and safety—that their parents taught them what was right when it came to riding their ATVs, and yet, sadly, they chose to ignore all that they knew was for their own well-being, and in the end, they paid the ultimate price for their stupidity. In the process, they left their parents behind to grieve and wonder for the rest of their lives what they could have done to prevent their children’s deaths.

As a parent, I spend lots of time questioning whether I am being the best role model for my kids. Do I set the standard I want them to live up to, or am I somehow showing them it’s OK to be less than your very best? I’ve made a lot of decisions along the way that I probably wouldn’t
have made if I’d had the knowledge then that I have now. Of course, experience is born out of necessity, and I know there’s no way to gain it before its time.

I spent years trying to prove to my kids that I wasn’t the bad guy their various mothers made me out to be. All of my ex-wives told our kids I was a no-good criminal, a biker, and a deadbeat dad. It was important to show them who I really was and what I did for a living. I wanted them to see firsthand that their dad wasn’t any of those things.

There were times I took the kids on bounty hunts when I probably shouldn’t have because they were too young or the situation was too dangerous. I’ll confess that on more than one occasion I even ended up taking my work home with me.

One morning, the kids woke up to find a fugitive handcuffed to the fifty-five-gallon fish tank in our living room. I’d warned the guy that if he broke my fish tank and hurt my fish or my kids, I’d beat the crap out of him. The kids got up to get dressed for school and asked the poor fool if he wanted a piece of toast. To them, he was nothing but another bad guy Daddy caught who’d spent the night at their house. They each waved good-bye to him as they left for school like it was an everyday occurrence and just another morning in the Chapman household.

Sometimes the kids would be in the car when I caught my guy. I’d warn him he’d better be civil and polite in front of my babies or he’d be roadkill. The kids never thought much of the day-to-day adventure that was our life. They’d start up a conversation with the captured fugitive like an old family friend had gotten into the car.

“Hi. You going to jail? What did you do wrong?” they’d ask him.

On a few rare occasions, I even used the kids as decoys. Leland once carried Baby Lyssa up to the front door of a suspect’s house and asked if they had seen her missing puppy. Baby Lyssa was crying like she had really lost her best friend. We sprayed a little milk on her face to make it look like real tears, messed up her hair and clothes so it would look like she was distraught. When they answered their door, Leland looked in the house to see if our guy was there. Blam. He was.

I spent years trying to instill a solid work ethic into each of my
children. I taught them to strive for excellence at whatever they did. I wanted them to seek out things they were interested in and become the best at them. Some have followed that route, while others…not so much.

Leland had shown an interest in my work from the day he came to live with me. As he got older, I began taking him with me whenever I had to fly from Hawaii to Denver for a job. Leland was no more than twenty-one or twenty-two years old, but he was quickly becoming a very good bounty hunter. On one particular trip, I picked up a jump from a local bondsman that said we were looking for a guy named Mad Max Valez. We made a quick stop at Radio Shack to pick up batteries for our walkie-talkies. As we were pulling out, a cop car blocked us from leaving.

The cop got out and started walking toward us. I guess I looked like a bounty hunter to him. “I can see
what
you are, but
who
the hell are you?” he asked.

“I’m Dog Chapman, the bounty hunter from TV.” At that point, I had only been on a show called
The Secret World of Bounty Hunters.
This was a couple of years before I had my own show.

“I don’t watch much television. Sorry, pal. Who you looking for?” he asked.

“A guy named Mad Max Valez. You ever heard of him?”

“Yeah. He used to be around all the time, but he ain’t been here for a while.”

“Really?” I was intrigued.

He continued. “Yeah, he and his kooky old lady are gone.”

I glanced over at Leland, hoping he was picking up on all of the clues the cop was unaware he was feeding us. “Are you sure his old lady is gone too?” I asked after a moment.

“Naw. She still may be around. Just Mad Max is gone. We searched the house three or four times and came up with nothing.” The cop instinctively knew we were legit, so he didn’t detain us much longer. After he drove away, I turned to Leland and asked him if he’d caught all the clues.

“Yeah. The guy said, ‘We searched the house and came up with nothing’ was the first one, Dad,” Leland told me.

“Good boy. Any others?”

“Yeah. His old lady is a whacko.”

“Good boy. Anything else?”

“No.”

Leland got them all.

I beamed with pride as Leland and I drove to the local library to pull Max’s library card, something I used to do before the Internet. You’d be amazed at how much information you can gather at your local library. It turned out he had a different address listed with the library than we had on the bond. We drove to the house, knocked on the door, and asked if Max was home.

An elderly couple answered. They could have been his parents. “Oh no. We haven’t seen him in weeks,” they told us.

As we made our way back toward our car, I turned to Leland and asked if the report listed what type of cigarettes Max smoked. Most fugitives are smokers, so a lot of bondsmen will ask them for those types of details when filling out the paperwork. Sure enough, Leland said, “Salems.”

We had some searching to do. Leland pulled a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and began picking through the trash cans in the back of the house. I call this technique “garbology” because we’re like archaeologists sifting through the ruins looking for any sign of civilization. We go through the layers of trash trying to piece together any clue that will help lead us to our man. When you’ve done this as much as we have, you can pinpoint dates, times, and all sorts of other helpful information. At the very bottom of the bin we found an empty pack of Salem cigarettes. We knew the pack hadn’t been in there very long because we found a recent newspaper right on top of it. I was proud to see that Leland was growing into a seasoned bounty hunter and was learning all the tricks of the trade. I had taught him well.

After finding the cigarette pack in the trash, we walked back around the house and knocked on the door again. However, this time no one
answered. Something wasn’t right. Before Leland and I knew it, two pit bulls came tearing out of the backyard and began chasing us. I quickly reached for the Mace can on my belt and blasted one of them in the face. I soaked that son of a bitch from head to tail, being extra careful not to get any in his eyes. The dumb dog actually stood there and let me spray him down. I hit him with as much Mace as I could, hoping he’d run back into the house through the dog door I spotted. If there was someone hiding in that house, they were in for a burning surprise when that dog came bolting in. I didn’t intend to hurt the animal, but we had to be absolutely sure no one was home.

Then, Leland and I put our ears up to the front door to listen. One sneeze or cough was all I needed. But there was nothing. Still, I was convinced someone was home. While being very careful not to be seen, Leland peeked into one of the windows that was wide open with the screen down, so we could take a look inside the house. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling they were there.

Leland was convinced they were listening to us. We were talking out loud, saying what our next move was going to be, so maybe that was the case. It was time to regroup, assess the situation, and make a plan.

We decided to head to a diner on the corner to get some lunch. It’s important to nourish the body when you can when you’re on a hunt, because you never know how long it’ll be before your next meal. We used that time to brainstorm and gather our thoughts on where Max could be hiding. We rehashed everything we’d seen and decided Max was definitely at that house.

When we went back, Leland peered in the same window as before. Only this time he spotted two plates and a pizza box.

I asked Leland if he was positive there wasn’t a box there before.

“I’m not positive, Dad,” he said, going back over it in his mind. “I didn’t do my job right, because I’m not absolutely one hundred percent sure.”

“Close your eyes, son, and visualize what you saw. Think hard. Was there a pizza box there when you looked inside the house the first time?”

“I don’t know!” he snapped. I could tell Leland was getting flustered.
The only way we’d be able to know if the pizza was fresh was to touch it. If it was old, it would be cold, but if it was fresh, it would still be hot.

“You’ve got to go in, son,” I told him. “That’s the only way we’ll know for sure.”

“But, Dad, isn’t that breaking and entering?” Leland asked.

“Yes, but it’s a misdemeanor. If you get caught, I’ll bail you out.”

Luckily, Leland was able to slip through the open window. Once he’d climbed into the house, he crouched down on the floor like a soldier and shimmied his way over to the pizza box. He reached his hand up to touch it and then jumped up and through the window in one fluid motion.

“It’s hot, Dad. The pizza is hot,” he said quietly.

“We’re going through the front door, Leland. That’s probable cause and we’re going in right now,” I whispered back.

Boom!
We booted the door in. Immediately, a woman came running into the room screaming her head off.

“Help me. Police!” She was yelling into her mobile phone. “They’re here right now. They’re breaking in. Can you hear them?” And then she held the phone up so the police could hear the ruckus.

I began to worry that Leland was right, we shouldn’t have broken in, but then I remembered that in Colorado, you had to have the intent to commit a felony and remain in the house or it is considered a misdemeanor.

Before either of us knew it, there was a cop at the front door. Not just any cop, the same one who had pulled us over earlier in the Radio Shack parking lot. He was soon flanked by two of his deputies. Leland and I were in a tight spot, so I did the only thing that popped into my head in the heat of the moment. I bolted through the house like greased lightning and hit the back door going forty miles an hour. I ripped the screen and took the door right off its hinges.

“Tell the cops I’m on his ass!” I yelled back at Leland.

Leland knew I was lying, but he did it anyway. “My dad saw the guy tear out the back door. He’s chasing Max Valez!” he shouted.

The cops bought into the story hook, line, and sinker. As I was run
ning I could hear dogs barking and see the flashing lights in the distance behind me. The dogs were sniffing, looking for a scent. A moment later, the sheriff yelled out, “You got him, Dog?”

“No, but he’s out here somewhere,” I answered back.

In the meantime, Leland went to work on the woman back at the house. He told her she better tell him where Max was hiding or she was going to jail for harboring a fugitive. Still, she refused to cooperate.

“Let me see your cell phone,” Leland demanded. When he paged through the recent calls, sure enough Max’s number was on her phone. They had spoken an hour after we got to her house the first time. She had tipped him off that we were hot on his trail.

By then, I had the cops with me searching a nearby field. I knew there was no one hiding in the area we were in, but I had to go through the motions or we were going to go to jail for breaking and entering. Just as I started to tell the sheriff, “It doesn’t look like he’s out here,” Leland radioed me. It was the first time he’d ever used the radio on a hunt.