A naked Beth Chapman told Dog The Bounty Hunter to 'look' at her before she 'choked on her cancer', says daughter Bonnie
Bonnie Chapman, the daughter of Duane and Beth Chapman, recently opened up about the final moments of her mother's life, who passed away at the age of 51, after battling with lung cancer.
Talking to Survivor.net, Bonnie revealed that last few moments of her mother's consciousness on June 26 was filled with vulnerability and love for her famous bounty hunter husband. “My mom was naked in the bathroom and told my dad to look at her,” she recalled. “And he goes, ‘I am looking at you.’ And she goes, ‘No, look at me.’ And then she was standing there and she started gasping.”
“And my sister came into the room, and they called 911 immediately,” Bonnie continued. “And that was the last moment that we really saw her completely conscious.”
Her account of her Beth's final moments was echoed in an Entertainment Tonight interview that the "Dog" did, in which he fondly remembered his late wife.
“The last few moments she said, ‘Come in here right now, in the bathroom,'” he recounted. “I went in and she said, ‘Look at me.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you’re freaking beautiful baby.’ [And she said,] ‘Look at me, Duane Chapman.’ And I did, I always saw Beth and she said, ‘Please, let me go.'”
Duane added: “And I didn’t even make a decision, I almost said, ‘I can’t.’ Before I could say, ‘All right,’ she couldn’t breathe and I called the ambulance … But every day, she talked as if she was not there. ‘Here’s what to do with this, here’s what to do with that. Don’t keep running your mouth. When they ask you a specific question, just answer that.'”
A year after Beth entered remission for her stage II throat cancer in 2017, the terminal disease returned, spreading to her lungs, forcing the reality star to undergo chemotherapy.
Bonnie said that her mother hated radiation treatment and made the decision to stop after just one round.
“She did try one round of chemo,” Bonnie told SurvivorNet. “And it did not go well for her. She had very severe symptoms. She completely despised it. She despised who she was after that one session. And she had tried [the chemo] because so many people had been telling her, ‘Please, at least try.’ And she didn’t want to disappoint people by not trying it at all, but at the end of the day, she did not want to lose her hair, her teeth…”
It was her dad who always supported her throughout her ordeal, Bonnie revealed.
“My dad had a love for her that was constantly growing stronger and stronger,” Bonnie told the outlet. “And it really showed her like, ‘He is really here for me. He is going to take care of me until my very last days.’ It was really nice to see her take comfort in that my dad was always gonna be there.”
She recalled: “Even as her hair started to diminish, he would tell her that she looked like an Egyptian goddess. He just loved her so much, and I’m really proud of him for sticking with her until the very last moments. That’s what she needed. She needed someone who loved her as much as my dad did. You know, I think that she truly feels that love now,”
However, in the months following her death, Beth's absence had weighed heavy on Duane, to the point where he has not been able to bring himself to return to Hawaii (where his wife died) since.
"My dad goes over and over and over what happened because he can’t get it out of his head,” Bonnie said. “She quite literally choked on her cancer.”