EXCLUSIVE: Twenty-three years after Duane “Dog” Chapman chased fugitive Max Factor heir Andrew Luster to Mexico and tackled him on a Puerto Vallarta street, the convicted serial rapist is a free man â despite an initial sentence of 124 years.
“I hope he’s smart enough â and he’s smart â to never do anything like that again,” Chapman told Fox News Digital Wednesday, more than two decades after the capture that helped make him a household name.
Chapman, his son Leland and several others went to Mexico after receiving a tip about Luster’s whereabouts â months after he fled the U.S. in the middle of a California rape trial. They first identified him from the tipsters’ photo, which showed a knee and a watch.
Chapman had been studying his face closely for weeks, but he also recognized the watch from a televised interview, he said. And he credits his son with first spotting Luster, who was speaking with a young woman in a bar on June 18, 2003.
PARENTS OF SLAIN PREGNANT MOM CHRISTA GILLEY DEMAND LEE GILLEY’S RETURN FROM ITALY FOR MURDER CASE
“When I saw him, you talk about an adrenaline rush went through my body,” Chapman told Fox News Digital Wednesday. “Tim got down…he snuck up behind him, and then I pushed him. He fell over. We all jumped on him, and I screamed, ‘You’re under arrest by the United States of America.'”
EXCLUSIVE: FBI EXTRADITIONS SOAR AS PATEL RAMPS UP FOREIGN OUTREACH, VOWS ‘NO SANCTUARY’
They pulled him into an SUV and drove off â only to be intercepted on the road outside town by Mexican authorities who arrested everyone amid the chaos.
Luster claimed he’d been kidnapped, Chapman said, so he handed the lead investigator what Chapman called a “bible” of information on the case.
Luster, the great-grandson of makeup mogul Max Factor, vanished during a recess in his trial and was convicted in absentia on 86 counts involving the drugging and raping of three women between 1996 and 2000 at his home in
One of the victims, who asked not to be named out of concerns for her safety, said she’s still struggling to comprehend Luster’s release even though she knew it was coming.
SENATOR TIM SHEEHY: SOFT-ON-CRIME JUDGES NEED CONSEQUENCES. THE JAIL ACT DELIVERS
“ItâÂÂs very unsettling knowing that he is not behind bars, not in a closed facility,” she told Fox News Digital Wednesday. “He is out in the public, in a community that just â it just doesnâÂÂt feel very good at all.”
She said she has concerns for her own safety, her family, Luster’s other victims and even investigators after a notebook containing a “payback list” was recovered from his Mexican hotel room â with their names on it.</
