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.
MAX FACTOR HEIR’S FORMER LAWYER DETAILS JUDGE’S ERROR THAT WIPED OUT 124-YEAR RAPE SENTENCE
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 Mussel Shoals, California.
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
“Itâs 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 doesnât 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.
CAPTURED ‘AMERICA’S MOST WANTED’ FUGITIVE RONALD FISCHER ABANDONS ALIAS AFTER 20 YEARS ON THE RUN
She said she dated Luster for five or six months without knowing she’d been drugged and raped the night they met â something detectives discovered years later, after they recovered videotapes from the home.
“It was me, comatose on his bed, wearing the clothes that I was wearing the first night I met him,” she said. “Thatâs how I knew when it happened, because I had just bought that outfit, and I was wearing it the night that I met him. So thatâs how I figured out when it happened to me, which was absolutely horrifying.”
Police found more than 100 videos, she said. Not all of them involved criminal activity, but those that did were “mortifying,” she said, as Luster spoke to the camera like he were playing with “a toy.”
“Theyâre pretty brutal,” she added. “The things that he did to us while we were completely unconscious were things that, I mean, had we been able to feel anything, it would have been awful. He narrated the video and talked to the camera throughout and thoroughly enjoyed the whole entire thing.”
He initially received consecutive sentences totaling 124 years â later reduced to 50, and he was released earlier this month after over two decades behind bars.
Prosecutors had opposed early release in 2024 and again in 2025. However, he was able to earn substantial early release credits under California’s controversial Proposition 57 criminal justice reforms, and his prison term came to an end on Oct. 11.
“I did not know that [Prop 57] meant that it was gonna make Andrew Lusterâs crimes be deemed nonviolent,” Doe No. 3 told Fox News Digital. “Thatâs just so baffling. I just feel like if anybody could watch these tapes of what he did to me and all of these other women, just to look at that and try to put the word nonviolent on it, that word could not come out of your mouth. It just would be impossible.”
FOLLOW THE FOX TRUE CRIME TEAM ON X
Chapman said he never received the bounty for Luster and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money for the operation and ensuing legal fallout.
Mexican law did not allow bounty hunters to apprehend fugitives. Chapman said he was arrested alongside his son Leland, longtime friend and associate Tim Chapman, who is not a blood relative, and members of a camera crew.
“He told me, ‘Iâm going to get him for you,’ and he did,” Doe said of Chapman. So to help him get out after he put Luster back behind bars, she kicked off a legal fundraiser that she said attracted donations from around the country.
SIGN UP TO GET THE LATEST TRUE CRIME NEWS
A judge in Mexico later dismissed the case.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM THE FOX TRUE CRIME HUB
The incident happened shortly before Chapman rose to fame with A&E’s reality series, “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”
Chapman is returning to the screen with a new YouTube series launching Saturday â “Dog the Bounty Hunter … Everyone Deserves a Second Chance.”
As part of the series, he plans to help bail out certain inmates with a history of good behavior and positive reports â but not for people facing serious felonies or sex abuse charges, he said.
LISTEN TO THE NEW ‘CRIME & JUSTICE WITH DONNA ROTUNNO’ PODCAST
“We’ll call out the ones that deserve a second chance, right, and you can’t be perfect OK, so if they run, yeehaw,” he said. “I don’t wish they would, but if they do, then I’m going to catch them.”
He said he’s got at least another five to seven years of bounty hunting left in him.
Fox News’ Greg Wehner and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
