Dog the Bounty Hunter's step-grandson dies, allegedly shot by father in ‘tragic accident'
Anthony, the reality TV star's teenage step-grandson died on Saturday evening after he was allegedly accidentally shot by his father Gregory Zecca — Chapman's stepson — in Naples, Fla., The Times has confirmed. He was 13.
A spokesperson for the Collier County Sheriff's Office told The Times on Monday that it is investigating the alleged shooting. Officers received a call about a shooting incident at an apartment on Sumter Grove Way in southern Florida at around 8:08 p.m., the spokesperson said, adding 'this was an isolated incident.' No arrest has been made in connection to the incident, People reported.
According to the incident report, parts of it redacted, reviewed by The Times on Monday, the responding officer heard screaming on the dispatch call. First responders arrived to the apartment and the victim — whose name was not revealed — was pronounced dead before 8:30 p.m.
In a statement shared to TMZ, which first reported on the alleged shooting, Chapman and his wife Francie Chapman confirmed Anthony's death.
'We are grieving as a family over this incomprehensible tragic accident and we grieve the loss of our beloved grandson, Anthony,' the statement said. The couple also requested privacy as they grieve their loved one.
The Times did not hear back immediately from the 72-year-old reality star or his wife on Monday.
Chapman, best known for his long-running A&E reality TV show 'Dog the Bounty Hunter,' married Francie Chapman (née Frane) two years after his late wife Beth Chapman died in 2021 after a battle with cancer.
He has been married six times and has a total of 13 children from those marriages. Zecca, 38, is Francie Chapman's son from a previous relationship.
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Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
2 weeks ago, she left a doctor's appointment with her baby. They haven't been found since
The search continues for a California woman and her 8-month-old daughter who vanished while on their way home after a doctor's appointment, authorities and family said. It's been more than two weeks since Whisper Owen and her daughter, Sandra McCarty, were last seen, according to the Fresno County Sheriff's Office. Authorities say they have no clues in the Sacramento pair's disappearance, and loved ones have been left wondering and searching. 'It just makes it really hard for me as her mother to shut my brain off and not constantly imagine what could've happened to her,' said Owen's mother, Vickie Torres, tearfully. 'And that beautiful little baby. God, I hope, whatever happened, she's with her mama.' In a post to social media, the Sheriff's Office said that no information had been found to explain the disappearance. The Fresno Police Department's Missing Persons Unit is leading the investigation and, as of Wednesday evening, had no new developments to report. 'There is nothing in the current missing persons investigations which leads us to believe any foul play is involved with Whisper and her child not being located yet,' the department said in a statement to The Times. Torres confirmed that Owen and her daughter left Sacramento around 4 a.m. on July 15 and headed south toward Fresno to go to a doctor's appointment for the baby. Owen stopped at Torres' house in Fresno to change Sandra's diaper and then checked in for the appointment at 8:30 a.m., Torres said. Owen then visited her brother's Fresno home until around 2:45 p.m., then stopped to see Torres at her home again before leaving the city around 5 p.m., Torres said. Owen drove a silver 2006 Chevrolet Trailblazer, and a license plate reader recognized her car in Atwater, about 65 miles from Fresno, at 8 that night, according to officials. Torres said that Owen probably stopped in Atwater to get baby formula for Sandra or to use the restroom. Security footage from a smoke shop in Atwater captured Owen parking and then changing her baby's diaper around 7:30 p.m., police said. That was the last sign of Owen, her daughter or her vehicle. Torres said Owen often spends days at a time at her house in Fresno, so her partner wasn't concerned when she didn't return home that night. Three days later, Owen's partner called Torres, asking where her daughter was. 'I'm like, 'What do you mean? She's not here,'' Torres told The Times. 'So then everything started to get scary at that point.' Ever since, Torres said, her family has been tirelessly searching the roads from Fresno to Sacramento, reaching out to businesses whose employees may have seen Owen, putting up fliers and spreading the word on social media. She also said that Owen experienced preeclampsia during her most recent pregnancy, causing her to be hospitalized several times with high blood pressure that continued even after she had given birth. Torres worried that Owen might have had a medical emergency while driving. With no information, it's easy to create troubling scenarios, she said. Torres said the situation has been distressing for the entire family. Owen and her partner are parents to Sandra, as well as a 3-year-old and a 9-year-old. She also has a 16-year-old child from a previous relationship. 'All of these kids are losing their minds,' Torres said. 'I mean, she didn't just run off or anything like that. ... She's got other children, I mean, no.' Owen's partner, whom Torres declined to name and who didn't immediately respond to The Times' request for comment, 'has been constantly searching, and he's exhausting every resource to him,' she said. Torres said she has been frustrated with the lack of information found so far. She has reached out to other agencies, including the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Sacramento Police Department, asking for assistance in the investigation. 'They've all blown me off,' Torres said. Sacramento police said in a statement to The Times, however, that they had assisted Fresno in the investigation. A Department of Justice spokesperson said the agency had posted Owen and her daughter on its public California Missing Persons website. The FBI didn't respond to The Times' request for comment. Torres described her daughter as an outspoken, trusting person who would drop anything to help a stranger in need. 'A lot of people love her,' Torres said. 'I've never met anybody that didn't like my daughter.' Fresno police said that teams were checking family shelters in Sacramento County and surrounding areas for Owen and her daughter. The Fresno Sheriff's Office advised the public to dial 911 if they saw Owen and her daughter or the vehicle.
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Homicidal cousins and the Hillside Stranglers case: A trial that nearly did not happen
Angelo Buono was the elder of the killers. He was wiry and foul-mouthed, a swaggering 44-year-old high school dropout who ran a solo auto-upholstery business out of his Glendale garage. A sometime pimp, he fancied himself a ladies' man. He flew an Italian flag at his yellow house. His cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, was the more outwardly polished of their cruel partnership. Detectives would call him 'Slick Ken.' He was 27, an aspiring cop with a Hollywood apartment and a glib patter that reminded people of a used-car salesman. He had a closetful of bogus diplomas and liked to pose as a sex therapist. To lure girls and young women back to Buono's house, the cousins posed as vice officers and flashed fake badges. They raped, tortured and killed their victims between October 1977 and February 1978, and left them to be found in ways that seemed designed to taunt police and maximize public terror. Their targets included runaways and aspiring actresses. Some were waiting at bus stops. Some were working as prostitutes. Some were college students. The bodies, with cord marks on their necks and limbs, had been stripped of clothing and dumped — sometimes posed — on hillsides around Los Angeles County. The killings made the news, but did not elicit widespread panic until November 1977. That's when four victims were found during a one-week stretch, including two Highland Park girls, ages 12 and 14, who were last seen at the Eagle Rock Plaza. An Eagle Rock woman wrote in The Times that the killer 'has made us all wretched' with fear, and reported a conversation between a grocery store customer and a clerk: 'Where is everybody?' 'At home watching TV, to see if they know the girl who just got killed.' It's hard to trace the origins of the name, but it became official late that year, as the LAPD launched the Hillside Strangler Task Force. By early 1978, with at least ten known victims, the staff had grown to 162 cops, including Glendale officers and sheriff's deputies, with a 24-hour tip hotline. 'Inside Parker Center we were in disarray, choking on tips, leads, and clues,' Daryl Gates, the former LAPD chief, wrote in his memoir 'Chief.' 'We had, in time, more than 10,000 clues, 4,800 parolees to check out, and 120,000 fingerprint cards to run for comparison.' The LAPD had use of a relatively new weapon, a computer into which clues were inputted. But it was haphazardly managed, and investigators scattered among the agencies were not reliably sharing information with one another. 'There was really no coordination whatsoever,' Frank Salerno, one of the top sheriff's detectives on the case, told The Times in a recent interview. 'Investigation by committee doesn't work.' Since there was widespread suspicion the strangler might be a cop, the LAPD ordered its officers not to chase female suspects. 'If a woman runs from you, we said, don't chase her,' Gates would write. 'Understand that she may be panicking, thinking that you're him.' Some detectives thought the bodies had been carried to the dump sites by multiple people, since the scenes lacked drag marks. Serial killers almost always worked alone, but there might be 'one homicidal maniac or several,' The Times reported. An LAPD commander said, 'There may be as many as 4 or 5 sets of stranglers.' With panic pervasive and pressure to close the case mounting, the LAPD arrested a Beverly Hills handyman in connection with the murders — a jailhouse snitch had implicated him — but were forced to release him three days later, accompanied by a humiliating public apology from Gates. The L.A. killings inexplicably stopped in spring 1978; nearly a year passed without more bodies. Detectives rotated back to their old assignments. Reflecting on his reaction, Salerno said: 'Why did it stop, if there were two? Were both of them in custody? Did one kill the other? Who knows?' In mid-January 1979, the phone rang at the Sheriff's Department with a call from police in Bellingham, Wash., where 27-year-old Kenneth Bianchi was in custody for the rape and strangling of two local college students. He had been working as a rent-a-cop. The address on his driver's license was 1950 Tamarind Ave. in Hollywood. Alert L.A. detectives remembered that a Strangler victim, 18-year-old escort Kimberly Martin, had been abducted from that location. Another of Bianchi's former addresses, in Glendale, was an apartment complex where a second victim, a 20-year-old art student named Kristina Weckler, had lived. A third victim had lived across the street. Bianchi's name, it turned out, had surfaced multiple times during the investigation. At one point, he had even agreed to take a polygraph test. But no one had followed up. 'Our computer software could not collate all the information fed into it, and Bianchi's name was spelled differently each time,' Gates would write, lamenting that he had lacked the time and authority to supervise the case with more granular intensity. 'It continues to haunt me today that I didn't personally go over every detail.' One of Bianchi's former neighbors remembered him as 'a friendly, well-mannered, nice young man.' When reporters learned his cousin Buono was his suspected accomplice, they drove to Glendale but found him a surly subject. 'You guys blowed up the story too goddam much,' Buono said. 'Goodbye and get off my property.' A few months later, still free but under tight surveillance, he was ready to share a few bitter thoughts. 'The only thing I have to say is I haven't did nothing,' Buono told reporters. 'They won't find nothing 'cause I ain't did nothing.' He complained that the attention had dried up referrals to his auto upholstery business. 'The phone don't ring any more. Nobody comes in. As a businessman, I'm dead.' As for his younger cousin? He didn't even know him that well, he insisted. He had let him stay with him briefly as a favor to his aunt, and the association had meant nothing but grief. 'We didn't have nothing in common,' he said. 'Now I wouldn't do no more favors for anybody, even the Pope.' Up in Washington state, Bianchi had confessed to some of the L.A. murders and implicated his cousin as his partner. There was a bizarre catch, however. Bianchi did so under hypnosis, and convinced more than one psychiatrist that he suffered from multiple personality disorder. To take Bianchi's schtick seriously was to believe an alter ego named 'Steve Walker' had done the crimes, the basis for an insanity defense. 'We're looking at this going, 'Good God, hopefully nobody's believing this crap,'' Peter Finnigan, one of the sheriff's detectives on the case, told The Times recently. Finnigan said he and his partners soon discovered that Steve Walker was the name of a real psychologist whose credentials Bianchi had stolen to pass himself off as one. Bianchi had duped the psychologist into sending him his school transcripts by placing an ad in the L.A. Times pretending to seek an associate for a fake therapy practice. Detectives went hunting for the Help Wanted ad, hunkered over the microfiche machine at the newspaper's downtown office. 'We spent almost two weeks in your damn basement,' Finnigan told The Times. They found the ad and exposed Bianchi's ruse. 'Basically his multiple personality defense is destroyed,' Finnigan said. 'Because your primary multiple personality isn't yours, it's a real person.' In no time, Bianchi pleaded guilty to the two Washington murders and five of the L.A. murders. He agreed to testify against his cousin. (In a case with no shortage of weirdness, a woman who said she loved Bianchi, Veronica Compton, tried to strangle a cocktail waitress to make it appear the real Strangler was still loose; she went to prison for it.) At various times, more than a dozen L.A. murders were attributed to the Stranglers, some mistakenly. Los Angeles prosecutors prepared to try Buono for ten of them. But their star witness was increasingly capricious. Sometimes, Bianchi insisted he and Buono had taken turns strangling victims; other times, he claimed not to have been present at all, or to have watched Buono do it. It amounted to the 'self-immolation of his own credibility,' said Assistant Dist. Atty. Roger Kelly. He told the press it would be unethical to rely on a witness he considered a liar, bluntly conceding: 'The case is in trouble.' And so it was no surprise when he announced in July 1981 that his office, under Dist. Atty. John Van De Kamp, was dropping the murder charges against Buono. The office would pursue pimping charges, but even if convicted, at most Buono would get a few years. Cops were furious. 'Kelly was one of these guys who wanted eyewitnesses,' Finnigan recalled — an area in which the case was flimsy. 'He didn't like circumstantial evidence. He felt there were too many loose ends.' Gates, in his memoir, derided Kelly as a weak-kneed prosecutor who feared damage to his reputation if he lost on such a large stage, an attorney who preferred 'pat cases, sure things, with all the T's crossed and the I's dotted,' he wrote. 'Sometimes a prosecutor has to take a chance.' It was Superior Court Judge Ronald George who saved the case. He spent more than an hour reading aloud a scathing 36-page ruling, ordering the district attorney's office to 'vigorously and effectively resume' the prosecution, or else he'd give it to the attorney general's office. While Bianchi's account was a 'morass of contradictions,' there was nevertheless a great deal of evidence to corroborate his claims, which he said prosecutors had unaccountably 'glossed over.' For example, there was the account of Catherine Lorre, daughter of the late actor Peter Lorre, who said the cousins had posed as vice cops while trying to abduct her in Hollywood in 1977. And there were polyester fibers on two of the victims matching material found in Buono's shop. Prosecutors were stunned by George's ruling, and the defense flabbergasted. 'I've been practicing law for 15 years and I've never seen anything like this happen before,' said Gerald Chaleff, one of Buono's attorneys. It was a decision the judge was proud of, later telling a reporter: 'Ten bodies don't just get swept under the carpet!' In a recent interview, the retired judge — who went on to serve as chief justice of the California Supreme Court for 14 years — told The Times: 'Normally, like most judges, I would not second-guess a prosecutor's evaluation of his or her own case.' But 'I felt I had not only a right, but a duty' to do so. The attorney general's office prosecuted Buono, which became the longest murder trial in American history — a record that still holds. From jury selection in November 1981 to nine guilty verdicts in November 1983, it ran for 729 days, with 392 witnesses and 1,807 exhibits. Bianchi testified for months, and although his testimony was riddled with contradictions, he supplied details only one of the killers would have known — like the use of cleaning fluid to inject one of the victims. Sentenced to life, Buono died in prison in 2002, at age 67. For prosecutors who had tried to scuttle a winnable case against a serial killer, the notoriety was unkind. Kelly, a downtown veteran, was transferred against his will to the Compton branch. His former boss, Van De Kamp, carried a political albatross. 'It was an error,' he acknowledged, admitting he had wrongly assessed the strength of the evidence. But Democrat and Republican rivals cudgeled him with it during his failed run for governor in 1990. Bianchi, now 74, remains locked up and was recently denied parole. Finnigan, the retired detective, attended the virtual hearing and perceived no difference in the 'pathological lying sociopath' he began studying in 1979. 'He's exactly the same,' Finnigan said. 'His mannerisms and his speech patterns, exactly. He's double slick.'
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Reputed Mexican Mafia member charged in killing of L.A. club owner, B-movie actor
One night nearly 15 years ago, two men broke into the Downey home of Hermilio Franco, an actor and nightclub owner. The scene could have been ripped from one of the low-budget, shoot-em-up Mexican films Franco starred in — or the ballads chronicling the drug trade that were sung at his club. The intruders shook Franco and his wife awake. Franco pulled a chrome-plated .45 from under the mattress. Screams and gunshots filled the bedroom. When the shooting stopped, Franco was dead. One of the intruders lay moaning a few feet away, paralyzed by a bullet that struck his spine. The second would-be robber slipped out a back door. The paralyzed assailant was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2014. His companion went unidentified until last week, when Los Angeles County prosecutors charged that Manuel Quintero, a reputed Mexican Mafia member nicknamed 'Snuffy,' was the intruder who got away. Quintero, already in custody on charges of conspiring to murder a rapper who allegedly ran afoul of the Mexican Mafia, pleaded not guilty to charges that he killed Franco while trying to rob him and burglarize his house. Quintero's lawyer, Randy Collins, said his client was innocent of the charges and noted that another man has already been convicted of murdering Franco. 'There was no credible evidence linking Manuel Quintero to these charges more than 15 years ago, and the same is true today,' Collins said in a written statement. If the charges are to be believed, the killing of Franco would represent a stunning betrayal. Quintero had previously dated Franco's daughter, according to a police report — and she was inside the house when her father was shot dead. Born in the western Mexican state of Sinaloa, Franco immigrated to California at 13 and later found work washing dishes, in construction and as a security guard, The Times reported in 2011. After managing small bars in the Florence district, he bought a nightclub in Lynwood that he named El Farallon, Spanish for 'the cliff by the sea.' The club, along with a concert and rodeo venue Franco later acquired in El Monte, was 'an all family business,' his wife testified in 2012. 'I would work wherever I was needed,' she said. 'If I had to wash dishes, I would. If I had to sell sodas or water or fruit, I would do that.' El Farallon became known as a venue for narcorridos, ballads about the triumphs and betrayals of the drug trade. An early performer was Chalino Sanchez, a legendary Sinaloan singer who was gunned down in 1992. Franco also starred in straight-to-DVD films. In 'El Baleado,' 'Chuy Y Mauricio 3: El Chrysler 300,' 'El Corrido del Katch' and 'Una Tumba Para Dos Hermanos,' he played the part of ranchers and drug traffickers avenging the deaths of loved ones. Franco's wife said the movies were more of a 'hobby' than a career. 'Mexican films don't pay much,' she testified at his killer's trial. Franco made enough money to raise his three children in an affluent part of Downey. A Mercedes sedan and Cadillac Escalade were parked in the driveway, and his safe was stuffed with bundles of $100 bills held together with rubber bands, according to a video filmed by police after his death. Franco was dogged by rumors he was in the drug business. His widow testified it wasn't true. 'I was asked if he was involved in anything like that, but I say no,' she said. 'He was a hard-working man.' Around 2:45 a.m. on Nov. 3, 2010, Franco and his wife were shaken awake in their bed by two intruders saying 'foul words,' she testified. One of the men shot Franco, who drew his .45 and fired back, his wife testified. She grabbed a shotgun from a closet and ran out, she said, jumping over the body of a man on the floor. The man was yelling expletives and calling out for 'the other guy,' she recalled. Franco's daughter, Adriana, testified she woke up to the sounds of shots and her father yelling. She ran toward her parents' room and saw a man slip out a back door. She testified she didn't recognize the intruder. Adriana was once in a relationship with Quintero, who grew up in the neighboring city of Paramount, according to a police report reviewed by The Times. In 1999, detectives were tailing Quintero, whom they suspected of operating a methamphetamine lab. When they pulled him over in a blue BMW X5, Adriana Franco was in the passenger seat, the report said. She told the detectives she was Quintero's girlfriend of six years, according to the report. Adriana Franco declined to comment when reached last week by The Times. Quintero served 10 years in prison for manufacturing methamphetamine. After his release, he was implicated in a kidnapping that played out days before Hermilio Franco's death. Facing another drug case, Quintero was trying to get a stake together before he jumped bail and fled to Mexico, a witness testified before a San Diego County grand jury. According to a transcript of the woman's grand jury testimony, Quintero and his associate Larry Trujillo wanted her to obtain $10,000 from a fraudulently accessed bank account. When she failed, she testified, Trujillo tortured her in a San Diego hotel room for several days and cut off her ear, saying he was 'taking it to Snuffy.' The woman escaped less than 24 hours before the intruders jimmied a back door at Franco's home in Downey. The assailant paralyzed by the bullet from Franco's .45 was Trujillo. He rode in an ambulance with a sheriff's deputy, who testified that Trujillo asked in a soft voice if he was going to die. Trujillo said he 'wanted to make things right.' The plan was to rob Franco, he admitted. According to the deputy, Trujillo said he'd broken into the home with someone called 'Spooky,' whose true name he didn't know. Trujillo, paralyzed from the neck down, attended his trial in a gurney. Midway through it, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2014 to 25 years to life. He was granted medical parole two years later and released to a healthcare facility, court records show. Prison authorities revoked his parole after he gave a healthcare worker 'chocolate candy laced with marijuana' and tried to 'enforce prison politics' at the facility, a judge wrote in an order. In 2023, another judge found Trujillo was 'permanently incapacitated' and granted him compassionate release. In 2012, two years after Franco's death, Quintero was arrested in Tijuana and charged with kidnapping the woman in San Diego. He pleaded no contest to false imprisonment and served less than two years in prison. Released in 2014, Quintero stayed out of jail until last month, when a task force of Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies and FBI agents arrested him on charges that he put a hit on a Los Angeles rapper who was later slashed and beaten in jail. Last week, Quintero's lawyer asked a judge to release him on bail. In a motion, Collins called the conspiracy case a flimsy one, resting on hearsay and innuendo cobbled together by investigators who heard what they wanted to hear on recorded jail calls. Collins described Quintero, now 49, as a devoted father of two who enjoys playing basketball and video games with his eighth-grader son. According to his lawyer, Quintero is a legitimate businessman who owns a trucking company, manages a restaurant in La Habra and pays his taxes. Collins filed returns that showed Quintero and his wife jointly reported earning $300,000 to $600,000 annually since 2018. According to Collins, Quintero also started a charity that gives school supplies to 'underprivileged inner-city kids.' 'Mr. Quintero has personally spoken to groups of at-risk youth, sharing his time, experience and encouragement which has led to helping many of them find hope and direction,' the lawyer wrote. A judge denied Collins' motion, and Quintero remains detained without bail.
