You Can Run but You Can't Hide (27 page)
Read You Can Run but You Can't Hide Online
Authors: Duane Dog Chapman
for Duane.
I was addicted. While I hid out in my room getting high, Leland
and Baby Lyssa tried to get rid of my girlfriend. They wanted her
stone cold out of my life. I remember Baby Lyssa coming to me one
day and telling me there were maggots in the kitchen sink. It hadn’t
been cleaned in weeks. My girlfriend asked me to send the kids
back to live with their mother. There were times when I thought she
might be right, but I didn’t want to live without my babies. I was in
deep. Too far. One night, out of pure desperation, I called Beth.
“Where have you been, baby?” I began to weep like a child as I
confessed to Beth I’d been freebasing. “I smoke it out of a pipe.” I
have no idea how long we were on the phone, or what else we talked
about.
Beth was on the next flight from Denver. I was too high to pick
her up from the airport. Though I was a complete jackass, Beth
wasn’t ready to give up on me yet. She came to Kona to reclaim the
house as hers. The first order of business was to get rid of my girl-
friend. Beth could see I was a wreck so she handed me a couple of
sleeping pills to take the edge off. Once I was asleep, Beth told my
girlfriend to get out and never come back.
The house was an absolute disaster. Beth changed all the sheets,
did mountains of laundry, cleaned the kitchen, scrubbed the bath-
room, and stocked the fridge. I never even realized I had been sleep-
ing without sheets on my bed, on a naked mattress, for weeks, if
not months. Beth looked through my checkbook while I was asleep
and discovered several checks had been written to my girlfriend’s
drug dealer. That bitch was robbing me! Even though I knew Beth
was coming from a place of truth and love, her brutal honesty hurt
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me. Beth has always been the one person in my life who slaps me in
the face when I need to wake up and see how things are. She helps
me come back to my senses when I’ve slipped or messed up.
I am an optimist. I think the best of everyone. Beth is a realist.
She sees people for who they really are. I think that’s why seeing me
with a strung-out woman was so hard for Beth to understand and
accept. She was literally and utterly in shock from the conditions
we were living in. My physical appearance was almost as appalling
as the mess she found around the house. Everything I had spent the
last six months sweeping under the carpet was about to be revealed.
When I came to, Beth stood over me and said, “Duane, your
mother would roll over in her grave if she saw how you’re living.”
Beth was good that way. She knows just the right things to say to get
under my skin fast and furious. Beth wanted to get me out of the
house before my girlfriend came back, so she took me out for dinner.
She thought I looked as though I hadn’t eaten for weeks. I was un-
recognizable, nearly emaciated. I was down to a hundred and forty-
three pounds.
“Where’s my Duane? Where’s Dog?” Beth’s voice sounded as
broken as her heart.
“Dog is dead, Beth. I’m Kawani now.”
I remember hearing Beth say, “Oh, my God” over and over.
“Dog is buried. He died with Mom. I’m different now. There’s
nothing you can do. It is what it is.”
“Kawani? You’re Kawani? You’re no flipping flower child, Du-
ane. You’re not a doper, either. What you’re doing is a crime. It’s
illegal.”
That seemed like a pretty good moment to pull my crack pipe
out of my pocket and light it up—right there in the restaurant.
Beth rolled her eyes and said, “So, for our next trick, we’re going
to jail for possession of an illegal substance? Is that what you’re
telling me?” Hell, she and I had already been to jail for burglary.
Why not? But Beth wasn’t going to stand there and watch me go
down in flames. No way.
“That’s bullshit!” Beth was mad as hell. She grabbed the pipe
and my dope right out of my hand. She wanted to beat the crap out
of my girlfriend for getting me involved in this shit. She wanted to
kick that chick’s ass in front of me so I could see what a bad influ-
ence she had been. When we got home, the girls began to rumble,
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rolling around on the floor and beating on each other. I had to
break up the fight before someone got hurt really bad . . . or worse.
“Take your crap and go, Beth.” I threw her out of my house. She
was crushed. I had resisted drugs and other temptations during at
least three thousand arrests of hardened criminals and four wives
who were all users. I never slipped. Not once. Once my girlfriend
started bringing other women into the bedroom, between the girls
and the feeling I got being high, I was confused and unable to make
rational decisions. I lost track of everything that was important in
my life. I didn’t care about work, my business, or myself.
Beth flew back
to Denver the day after I threw her out. Six
weeks later, I was begging her to come back.
“I can’t live without you. You have to come back, honey. Come
help me. I need you to help me.” I must have sounded pitiful.
Beth hopped on the next plane. She got to the house and found
my girlfriend sitting on the sofa, all messed up in her pajamas. I was
thirty pounds thinner and had let my hair grow. I didn’t have a
pompadour anymore, I just wore my hair shaggy around my face.
She hardly recognized me. She asked if we could have sex so she
could be sure it was me.
By now, Beth suspected there were problems with my business in
Honolulu. She has that same sixth sense that I do. She kept telling
me she thought something funky was going on. And, as it turned
out, there was.
She flew to Oahu to check on A Hawaii, the Honolulu branch. I
had ignored it for months. For the first time since I opened there, we
were losing money. It didn’t make sense, because that office was
busier than ever.
Beth started investigating. I thought it was errors in bookkeep-
ing or lack of management. Two days later, Beth called me and
said, “Duane, you’ve got problems.” I was hoping she was going to
say it was no big deal, she’d handle it, and everything would be fine.
Wrong. She said, “Your employees are stealing from you.”
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There was no way what Beth was saying could be true. These were
two of my closest and most trusted friends. Why would they steal
from me? I put them into business. I gave them their jobs. It made no
sense at all. We were like the three musketeers—all for one and one
for all.
“That’s not all. Both of them are taking their bail bonds test.”
This wasn’t good news.
“Snap out of it, Duane. It’s time to get back to reality, Big Daddy.”
Whenever Beth calls me Big Daddy, I know she’s being sincere and I’d
best pay attention.
“From what I can see, the guys have been writing bail behind
your back with your powers and pocketing the fees. They’re skim-
ming a few hundred bucks here and there, but from the looks of it,
it’s adding up to thousands of dollars.”
As hard as it was for me to believe, it was true. While I was lost in
space for six months, the guys wrote two hundred eighty-five pow-
ers, signing my name to the checks, and stealing eighty-five. A bail
bond power of attorney, or “power bail,” is an instrument much like
an oversize cashier’s check from a bank. The bail bondsman signs
this power and gives it to the jail or court official who will accept it
and release the defendant from custody. This means they failed to re-
port those bonds to the insurance company, Amwest. I was aware
that the Honolulu office was consistently coming up short, and ow-
ing the insurance company money. Whenever that happened, I usu-
ally wrote a check to cover the deficit, because I knew I had
payments coming in. I was only out-of-pocket for a short period.
This time was different. The insurance company became as sus-
picious as Beth after she saw their agent Richard Heath in Las Ve-
gas at the bail convention in February 1997. Heath told Beth he’d
heard I was doing drugs. Although she refused to answer him, she
did suggest he come out to Hawaii to pay me a visit. Before Heath
left, she said, “Do yourself a favor. Don’t call him first.”
Richard Heath came to audit my books in early March. In spite
of Beth’s suggestion, he did call to let me know he was coming. He
told me to come to Honolulu to answer any questions he might
have. I was writing four million dollars a year with that punk. I had
to prove my innocence so I didn’t take the fall. This business was all
I had left. My sister Jolene was now running my Denver office.
Kona wasn’t netting a profit. If I lost Honolulu, I was done.
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After a couple of days, Heath was convinced that I wasn’t the
one who wrote the powers. I could easily prove I was in Kona when
they were written. Also, the paperwork was all done in someone
else’s handwriting, so I couldn’t have been stealing from my own
company. It was obvious who stole the money. Nonetheless, I prom-
ised Heath I would make up any deficit, so he could go back to his
office and say it had all been worked out. After all, I didn’t have
a history of falling behind. I even had $200,000 in my “build-up
fund,” which is like a slush fund the insurance company keeps on
account to make sure they don’t lose money if you don’t pay.
My offer to make good wasn’t enough to appease Heath. He sat
me down and suggested I take a break from the business, take a year
off to get my life together. He even offered to “take over” my busi-
ness and clean things up while I worked on getting my personal life
in order. As added “encouragement,” he told me the two guys steal-
ing from me were not convicted felons. He was quick to point out
that I was. He said everyone in the business hated my guts.
To be clear, what he was really saying was that he was going to
steal my business out from under me. He had the ability to rescind
my powers by canceling my insurance, but he didn’t have the right
to take my business. This was a clear attempt to extort from me. I
was furious. Who the hell did this guy think he was, coming into
my office and threatening me?
“You will never take my business. Never. Do you hear me,
Heath? I will never let you take my business away.” I stormed out of
the office, headed straight for the airport, and flew back to Kona.
The next day, I received a call from Heath. It was March 11,
1997. I remember the date, because it was my mom’s birthday. After
school that day, the kids and I were supposed to go visit her grave in
Hilo.
Heath was angry. He was in my office, still trying to get some
answers. Apparently he didn’t like whatever he was finding. He or-
dered me: “You need to come back to Honolulu now.” No one tells
Dog what to do. I had plans. It was my mom’s birthday. Heath
coldly said, “Let the dead bury the dead,” but I wasn’t about to
jump just because he told me to.
“Go to hell, Heath. I’m on my way to get my kids. I’m not com-
ing.” I slammed the phone down like I was killing a bug. When I got
to school, I was met in the parking lot by the principal. He told me
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the police had just come to pick up the kids. Social services had re-
ceived a phone call from someone who said that my children were
in danger and asked that they be removed from my care. Though he
didn’t have a lot of details, he did say something about my being a
drug addict who was endangering them.
My whole body went numb from the shock. At first, I felt weak in
the knees. That quickly gave way to a rush of adrenaline that washed
over me like a tidal wave. I went berserk. I wasn’t a doper. I wasn’t an
addict. Who were they talking about? OK. I have to admit that, at the
time, I didn’t know I was in as deep as I was. I was oblivious to the re-
ality of my use. While I don’t think I ever put my kids in a dangerous
situation, I can’t say for sure, because I wasn’t thinking clearly. All I
knew was that I had to find my kids. They were all I had left. Without
them, I had nothing.
I drove home, hoping and praying this was all some terrible mis-
take. I was living a nightmare, one from which I couldn’t awaken.
When I got home, my phone was ringing. I thought for sure it was
one of the kids.
“Hello?”
“Duane, it’s Richard Heath.” He was suspiciously kind. “Every-
thing OK with the kids?”
I played dumb. I wasn’t sure if he was involved in my children
being taken away, and frankly, at that moment, I didn’t care. All I
wanted was to get them back.
“Well, then. Can I expect you back in Honolulu tomorrow to
resolve this?”
“Yeah. Sure.” I just wanted to get off the phone in case one of
