When Beth Chapman was dying from throat cancer, she told her husband Duane “Dog The Bounty Hunter” Chapman that she wanted to be cremated and have some of her ashes scattered in the waters off Hawaii and more near their longtime Colorado home. The 66-year-old reveals in a new interview that while he followed through with her cremation request, he just couldn’t bring himself to “throw her away.” Instead he keeps her ashes next to his bed so that she’s the first thing he sees every morning and that last thing he sees before he falls asleep.
Just the cremation process alone was so difficult for Duane. “Well, I’ve never done ashes in my life. And that’s what she wanted. And then she wants me to do it and put the same thing, guess put it on the fireplace or something, so, this is the most morbid stuff,” Duane tells Entertainment Tonight‘s Kevin Frazier in a heartbreaking interview. “When I was a little boy, all the Christians [said] you can’t get burned because then you won’t rise from the grave with Jesus. And then I said, ‘Honey, you know, what about that?’ She goes, ‘It’s from ashes to ashes to dust to dust.'”
“Well, she said scatter some, leave some on the fireplace, of course when I go to heaven, she wants me in the box with her,” he continued. “You know, I was going to do all the scattering, and then I looked at it and thought, ‘I’m not gonna throw you, like, away. I’m just gonna throw you away and start over?’ I can’t do that,” about why he didn’t follow Beth’s dying wishes. “I haven’t gotten past the place where I’m still putting a pillow where she was, and covering it up, like the jailhouse escape, right? I mean it. And then I wake up in the middle of the night and I see her and it doesn’t register that ain’t her. I’m still there.”
As to where he wanted to keep Beth’s ashes, he had to stop himself from going to a “morbid” place. “So, I wanted to put them in the car and seatbelt them in,” he says. “And I want to take them with me. But that’s like, morbid, you know? You gotta really watch it. These are the times when people go over the edge. And you really gotta watch how you do ’cause my life, I went through experiences to help others — I really mean this.” Instead Beth’s ashes are in a pink box next to his bed and that’s where his beloved wife’s remains will always be. “I leave it next to the bed right there and I think that might be where it’s going to be forever,” he explains.