Book review: “You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide” by Duane “Dog” Chapman

I recently got some books from the local library’s leased books sale.  One of those books was “You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide” by Duane “Dog The Bounty Hunter” Chapman.

I’m not a Dog fan, but at $1.50 for a hardcover edition, I couldn’t resist.

Several things really stood out in this book.  For one, Dog refuses to take responsibility for anything bad in his life.  To his mind, every bad thing which has ever happened to him was caused by what someone else did to him, rather than by his own bad decisions.  For example, while he was in prison, his first of many wives left him for another man.  According to Dog that was completely their fault - in fact, he plotted and planned to kill both her and her new husband - and not his fault for being in prison while she was penniless with two very young children to support and raise.

Of course, Dog was in prison for first degree murder.  He has always claimed that he was wrongfully convicted - that he was basically an innocent bystander - but even according to his own description of what happened, that claim of innocence is not true.  Apparently Dog was with a biker (he used to hang out with bikers all the time) who was looking for drugs.  Dog told him this particular man had drugs, and drove the biker to the man’s house.  Dog knew the biker was going to rob the man, he knew the biker was armed, and Dog was driving the getaway car.  The truth is, both legally and morally, Dog is just as responsible for that man’s death as the biker who pulled the trigger.

Dog started out as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, and returned to that career after being released from prison.  He was very successful with the Kirby Vacuum company, at one point being recognized as their top salesman in the country.  He was even offered a job training their salesmen, which paid $100,000 per year; but the offer was rescinded when Kirby’s president found out that Dog had a criminal record for first degree murder, and at that point, he was also told that he could no longer sell vacuum cleaners for Kirby.  Dog has a hard time understanding why they would make that decision, though common sense should tell him that, from their viewpoint, they cannot send a convicted murderer into unsuspecting people’s homes.  However, Dog blames his departure from Kirby on his first ex-wife’s husband, who knew the company president.  Again, in Dog’s mind, it was not his fault.

It wouldn’t make a difference where they heard about his conviction, though.  As soon as they discovered his criminal record, he was doomed; even if Dog never harmed a customer in any way, the fact remains that if customers found out that a door-to-door Kirby salesman had a felony record for first degree murder, it would harm the company’s reputation irrevocably, and could possibly even put them out of business given that their business is based upon door-to-door sales.  Though he refuses to see the reality, Dog has no one to blame for his criminal record, or the consequences of that record, except Dog.

Another interesting admission is that Dog apparently tends to turn to drugs whenever he has problems.  I’m not talking about marijuana, either.  At one point in time which was described in his book, he was a hardcore crack addict …. while he was a bounty hunter with his own bail bonds company (with multiple location), and not before then.  That really surprised me, I have to say.  I have always been under the impression that his drug days were far behind him.

That’s not his fault either, you see.  Instead, he blames that on his girlfriend at that time.  He got all cracked out, stayed that way for months, and neglected his home and his children to the point that Child Protective Services pulled them out of school and put them in foster care.  It appears that he was regularly smoking crack with his children in the house, no less.  During the same period of time, he neglected his business to the point that his employees were stealing from him and writing bonds under his license without him even suspecting anything, which caused the insurance company to audit his records, and he lost his bail bond business as a result.  None of that is his fault either, according to Dog.  Nor is it his fault, at least in his opinion, that he has almost been put out of business repeatedly, by laws restricting the right of convicted felons to either engage in the bail bonds business or to be a bounty hunter.  Of course, those laws wouldn’t affect him at all, if he had not taken a biker to someone’s house to rob them, and that person was murdered.

Are you starting to see a pattern?  As I said, Dog refuses to take responsibility for his own life and actions.

Dog also is a complete hypocrite who holds others to a high standard of behavior, yet excuses his own behavior which is no different from the behavior he is attacking.  For example, he badmouths a bondsman for cheating on his wife, yet in another part of the book, he admits that he and his current wife Beth were having a longterm affair while they were both married to other people. 

The most enlightening part of the book, however, is that Dog believes that he is chosen by God.  In fact, he thinks he talks to angels, in the flesh, and he relayed two specific stories wherein he was talking to someone no one else could see.  When he asked others where the person went, no one else had seen them, and all said that they only saw Dog talking to himself.  Those two instances were separated by decades, incidentally, and seem to have happened when he was sober.  These “angels” talk just like they walked right out of the King James Version, incidentally, which to me is just more proof that they were not really there.  For example, the angel disguised as an elderly man at the dentist’s office told Dog, “Honor thy father and thy mother”.  However, the KJV is merely a translation written over a thousand years after the Bible was written, so even if he did see an angel, they would not talk that way.

Of course, in the real world, seeing and talking to people who aren’t really there is called “schizophrenia”.  Who knows how many people he thinks he has talked to, who weren’t really there?  It’s very sad when you think about it.  However, his apparent psychosis, with both auditory and visual hallucinations, explains a lot about Dog’s lifetime of bizarre behavior.  If he were not raised by an  extremely religious woman who had brainwashed him into believing that he was chosen by God, he would have thought the nonexistent people were something other than angels.  We interpret what we see based upon what our brains tell us we are seeing, after all. 

Overall, the book is not a bad read, though the first chapter was so discombobulated that I almost stopped reading it even before I got started.  The actual book was actually written by a ghost writer, which is fine since a lot of famous people don’t write their own autobiographies.  All in all, it was an interesting book, and I would very much recommend it to those who enjoy watching his television show.