Patrick Duffy opens up about the night his parents were murdered and how he told his two young sons
Patrick Duffy on ‘Dallas’ in 1986.Credit: Courtesy EverettKey Points
Patrick Duffy went on the Still Here Hollywood Podcast, where he spoke about his parents’ murder at the bar they owned.
“The Buddhist philosophy is one of continuous life cycle of your entity,” the Dallas alum said of how he coped with the grief.
The actor also recounts having to tell his two young sons and asking them to chant for their grandparents.
Patrick Duffy is opening up about one of the most devastating moments of his life: the 1986 murder of his parents after a confrontation at the Montana bar they owned.The Dallas and Step by Step star revisited the tragedy during a recent appearance on the Still Here Hollywood Podcast, hosted by Steve Kmetko, sharing harrowing details about the night his parents were killed and how he found the strength to move forward in the aftermath.
Patrick Duffy on the ‘Still Here Hollywood Podcast.’Credit: Still Here Hollywood Podcast w/ Steve Kmetko/YouTube
According to Duffy, the two men responsible had previously been thrown out of his parents’ bar by his father after becoming drunk and disruptive. But later that night, the men returned armed with shotguns.“It was very late at night. There was nobody in the bar except my father and my mother,” Duffy recalled. “And they walked in with their shotguns.”Duffy explained that, according to testimony presented during the trial, his father saw the men come back and took a step toward them, telling them, “I told you to,” before they opened fire.His mother, Marie, who had been at the other end of the bar working on a crossword puzzle, then ran toward her husband, Terrence. She, too, was shot and killed.The men subsequently jumped over the bar, stole money from the cash register and took a couple of bottles of liquor before leaving. Duffy explained that the robbery compounded the severity of their crimes, and the men were ultimately sent to prison.
When Kmetko asked how he managed to cope with such an unimaginable loss, Duffy pointed to his Buddhist practice, which he had been following for 15 years by that time.“The Buddhist philosophy is one of continuous life cycle of your entity, for the lack of a better word,” he explained. “But I didn’t study that at all. I was just chanting because it felt good. It felt right. It made my life feel better.”Duffy also vividly remembered the morning he received the news. His sister, who was a police officer, called him completely devastated and was already on her way to Montana.The news quickly spread, and film crews were soon waiting outside his home. His colleagues at Lorimar, the production company behind Dallas, immediately rallied around him, offering to arrange a private jet to Montana and provide a publicist to help manage the media attention. “So, that was fine,” Duffy said of Lorimar taking care of all the logistics.But before making the trip, Duffy had something even more important to do: tell his young sons what had happened to their grandparents.“They were getting up to go to school,” he recalled. “And I said to the boys, I said, ‘Padraic, Conor, we have to go in now. I’m going to chant with you.’”
Patrick Duffy with sons Padriac (left) and Conor (right) in 2008.Credit: Barry King/WireImage
Duffy explained that chanting was already part of their daily morning routine before school. This time, however, he told them they needed to do it for a different reason.“I said, ‘We have to chant for grandma and grandpa because they’ve both been killed and we have to chant for them because they’re going to understand it and hear,’” he remembered telling his sons.“And they went, ‘Okay.’”Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.For Duffy, his Buddhist beliefs provided a way to understand the loss that went beyond the immediate pain of losing his parents. He eventually traveled to Montana with a close friend by his side, carrying with him the belief that although his parents’ lives had ended, the things he loved would continue.“This is the end of something, but it’s not the final of anything,” Duffy said. “Everything that I held dear continues.”You can watch the entire interview with Duffy on Still Here Hollywood Podcast below:
Source: Crime
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