Dog the Bounty Hunter's fiance Francie says they cried over their dead spouses when they talked the first time
Until a few months ago, Francie Frane had not even heard of Duane Chapman, better known as Dog the Bounty Hunter. But as fate would have it, presently they are engaged to be married. In a recent live social media interview, Francie opened up about how she met her soon-to-be-husband and how both of them grew emotional talking about the grief of losing their former spouses to cancer in their very first conversation.
In a Facebook Live interview, Francie revealed that even before talking to Duane, she had heard about his wife's passing due to throat cancer in June 2019 when a friend brought it up while catching up on the latest news. "In June of last year, I was six months into my grieving and my really close girlfriend and I went to Arizona together with her mom."
"We were in the hotel room and my girlfriend was listening to some worship music on YouTube and she said to me, 'Oh my gosh, Beth Chapman passed away two days ago. I had no idea. She had throat cancer. And I said, 'Oh my gosh, that's so sucky. I hate cancer'. We had that conversation for a minute and then I said to her, 'Who's Beth Chapman?’ And she goes, 'Dog the Bounty Hunter's wife, you don't know who that is?' And I was like, 'No, I don't know who Dog The Bounty Hunter is,'" she said.
Francie then recalled that her friend predicted that she would "get together" with Duane in the near future. Her prediction came one step closer to completion when Dog the Bounty Hunter called her looking to hire her husband, Bob Frane, who ran an excavating business, but he had died at that point. Apparently Duane's neighbor was a client of Francie's husband and that was how he ended up calling Bob.
After Francie listened to his voicemail asking for her husband, she decided to call him back and break the news of her husband's passing of the terminal disease. Both of them connected through their common grief. "So he starts balling and then I start crying…And he said, 'I lost my wife to cancer a few months ago also'. And so we ended up having this like hour and a half conversation about what we've been through," she said. During the recent interview, Duane also got choked up thinking about that moment. "I'm still crying right now," he said.
They decided to talk more over coffee and eventually struck up a friendship over similar experiences of love and loss. The first time Francie met Duane, she thought he needed a haircut. The two soon started a romance and are presently planning the "biggest wedding there's ever been" once guidelines on social gatherings are lifted amid the pandemic. Chapman's daughter Lyssa and a close family friend Rainy Robinson earlier shared that they could not be happier for the new couple. "They are both so happy together and they are good for each other. Francie has been very respectful to all the kids — and to Beth's memory — and my dad is the same way with Bob and their children. They go to church three times a week and dad is trying to give up smoking — she is a good woman for my dad," Lyssa revealed.