Serial Rapist Andrew Luster Freed After Dog's Mexico Hunt

Twenty-three years after Duane "Dog" Chapman hunted fugitive Andrew Luster into Mexico and tackled him on a Puerto Vallarta street, the convicted serial rapist walks free 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 made him famous.

Chapman, his son Leland, and others went to Mexico after a tip about Luster's location months after he fled the U.S. during a California rape trial. They identified him from photos showing a knee and a watch. Chapman studied that face for weeks. He also recognized the watch from a televised interview. His son spotted Luster first speaking with a young woman in a bar on June 18, 2003.

"When I saw him, you talk about an adrenaline rush went through my body," Chapman said to 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.'"

They pulled him into an SUV and drove off only for Mexican authorities to intercept them outside town. Those officials arrested everyone amid the chaos. Luster claimed he'd been kidnapped, so Chapman handed investigators a "bible" of case information.

Luster is the great-grandson of makeup mogul Max Factor. He vanished during trial recess. A court convicted him in absentia on 86 counts involving drugging and raping three women between 1996 and 2000 at his home in Mussel Shoals, California.

"It's sort of a slap in the face to the victims and also just kind of the safety of the public too," said Jane Doe No. 3.

One victim asked not to be named for her own safety. She struggles to comprehend Luster's release even though she knew it was coming. "It's 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 worries about her own safety and her family. She fears Luster's other victims too. She also fears investigators after police recovered a notebook from his Mexican hotel room containing a "payback list" with their names on it.

She dated Luster for five or six months without knowing she'd been drugged and raped the night they met. Detectives discovered this years later after recovering video tapes from his home. "It was me, comatose on his bed, wearing the clothes that I was wearing the first night I met him," she said. "That's 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 that's how I figured out when it happened to me, which was absolutely horrifying."

Police found more than 100 videos. Not all involved criminal activity. But those that did were "mortifying," she said. Luster spoke to the camera like he played with a toy. "They're 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.

One man stood before the camera, narrating his own story with a tone that suggested he thoroughly enjoyed every second of it. This was Andrew Luster. He eventually received consecutive sentences totaling 124 years. That number later dropped to 50. He walked free earlier this month after spending over two decades behind bars.

Prosecutors fought against his early release in both 2024 and 2025. Despite their opposition, California's controversial Proposition 57 criminal justice reforms allowed him to earn substantial credits toward his freedom. His prison term ended on Oct. 11.

Doe No. 3 told Fox News Digital that she did not realize Prop 57 would reclassify Luster's crimes as nonviolent. "That's just so baffling," she said. She argued that if anyone could watch the tapes of what he did to her and all the other women, they would find it impossible to call those acts nonviolent. The word simply would not come out of your mouth.

Doe No. 3 never received a bounty for Luster. Instead, she lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of her own money due to the operation and ensuing legal fallout. Chapman said he was arrested alongside his son Leland and longtime friend Tim Chapman, who is not a blood relative, as well as members of a camera crew. Mexican law did not allow bounty hunters to apprehend fugitives on their soil. A judge in Mexico later dismissed the case.

Chapman told Doe No. 3 he was going to get Luster for her. He did. To help him get out after putting Luster back behind bars, she kicked off a legal fundraiser that attracted donations from around the country. 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 called 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. He explicitly stated this would not apply to people facing serious felonies or sex abuse charges.

"We'll call out the ones that deserve a second chance, right," he said. "And you can't be perfect OK, so if they run, yeehaw." He admitted he doesn't wish for them to run but added that if they do, then he is going to catch them. He said he has 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.