Beth Chapman on the Moment She Met Dog: 'He Will Be Mine'

The late Beth Chapman, who lost her battle with cancer this week at 51, relived the moment she met her future husband, Duane "Dog the Bounty Hunter" Chapman, in an A&E interview.

People magazine reports Beth recalled how accidentally shoplifting some lemons led her to meet the man of her dreams.

“I was working for a state senator in Colorado," she says in the interview, "and I had gone to the grocery store to buy some lemons. The senator started paging me, and it's kind of like the bat line — you know when the senator calls, you get on the phone immediately. So I was waiting in the line, waiting in the line and there's like five people in front of me, so I just walked around the line, went to the pay phone, was going to use the pay phone. I had the lemons in my hands. The store security kind of swarmed me and go, 'You're shoplifting the lemons.'"

Arrested, she received advice to call Dog to bond her out. “I finally get the bond, I finally get out of jail and this guy starts calling me. He's like, 'You better get in here to do your paperwork' and I was like, 'Yeah, well, you took your sweet ol' time, I'll take mine.' So then he calls my daddy up and he tells my daddy, 'If she don't get down here, I'm going to go find her and drag her back to jail.'"

She says on video that when she finally met Dog, "This blonde bombshell comes walking out from this back room dressed in black all studded out with this long, wavy, blonde hair... I thought, 'Oh yes, he will be mine. Let the stalking begin now.'"

To get Dog's attention, she took the test to become a bail bondsman, knowing that if she wrote "a whole bunch of bad bail that the bounty hunter would have to come sit in my office."

It worked! The two eventually wed in 2006.

Beth passed away at 5:32 a.m. Wednesday in Hawaii. She had gone public with her throat cancer diagnosis in 2017, seemed to have kicked it, then suffered a recurrence of the cancer this year.