Forty years ago next week, Patrick Duffy was a 37-year-old television star with a hit show, a wife he adored and two young boys getting ready for school in Los Angeles. Then the phone rang. On a new episode of Steve Kmetko’s Still Here Hollywood podcast, released November 9, the man who played Bobby Ewing on Dallas went back to that call and to the morning that followed, when he had to find words for his sons that no parent should ever need.
Duffy, who turned 77 in March, has spoken about losing his parents before, to Closer Weekly in 2019 and to People in 2020. This time he shared something more private, the way he told Padraic and Conor that their grandparents were gone. Hello! Magazine first reported the moment on November 10, and it is one of the gentlest things a father could do on the worst day of his life.
What Happened At The Duffys’ Bar In Boulder, Montana?
Terence and Marie Duffy, both in their 60s, had run a small tavern in Boulder, Montana, for years. Their son had been born in nearby Townsend before heading off to become an actor, and by 1986 he was one of the most famous faces on television. On the night of Tuesday, November 18, 1986, two 19-year-olds from Helena named Kenneth Miller and Sean Wentz walked into the bar and shot the couple during a robbery, according to UPI’s report the next day.
The case came apart fast for the killers. About an hour after the shootings, the two young men talked about what they had done with a woman friend in Helena, and she told her father, who called the police. Deputies arrested them that night with money from the bar, UPI reported, and each was charged with two counts of deliberate homicide. “My parents were murdered when two young men robbed the bar that my parents owned in Montana,” Duffy told Kmetko, putting it as plainly as he could four decades later.
Back in Hollywood, the Dallas family closed ranks around him. “It goes without saying that everyone is overcome with grief,” executive producer Leonard Katzman told UPI that week. “Our only concern is for Patrick and his family.” What came after, in the courts, is the part of the story he has always spoken about with surprising calm.
How Did Patrick Duffy Make Peace With The Men Who Did It?
Both men were convicted. A Montana Supreme Court sentence review shows that Miller received 75 years for each of the two killings, plus more time for robbery and assault, and Wentz was later identified as the shooter. Miller was paroled in 2007, and when Closer Weekly asked Duffy about it in 2019, as Fox News reported, his answer was not what most people would expect. “I’m OK with that,” he said. “My point of view is he’s already been punished.”
That outlook came from somewhere specific. Duffy had been practicing Nichiren Buddhism for about 15 years by 1986, a faith his wife, the ballet dancer Carlyn Rosser, had introduced him to. “As horrific as that was, I didn’t feel disconnected from them,” he told People in 2020, according to Yahoo Entertainment. “There was something about the eternity of life that had set deep inside me.” On the new podcast he summed up the belief that carried him through in one line: “You’re not here in order to suffer; you’re here in order to be happy.”
Faith helped him grieve, but it did not stop the work. That fall, Bobby Ewing had only just come back to Southfork, and the cameras were still rolling.
How Did Bobby Ewing Find His Way Back To Work?
The timing was cruel. Duffy had left Dallas in 1985 when Bobby was killed off, and only a few months before the murders he had made television history by stepping out of Pam’s shower, which turned an entire season into a dream. If you watched that fall, you saw him back in the role that made him famous, and he stayed with it until Dallas ended in 1991. Our look at how Larry Hagman talked him into that comeback tells the story of the friendship that kept him there.
Television gave him a second act as well. He moved straight from Southfork to ABC’s Step by Step, playing contractor and blended-family dad Frank Lambert opposite Suzanne Somers from 1991 to 1998, and he directed episodes of both series. You can see where that cast is today in our piece on the surviving Step by Step stars.
Home life brought its own heartbreak later on. Duffy and Rosser married in 1974 and stayed together until her death in 2017. In 2020 he found love again with actress Linda Purl, whom many readers remember from Happy Days and Matlock, after the two reconnected over Zoom calls during the pandemic. Yet the memory he chose to share this week goes all the way back to that school morning in 1986.
The Morning Patrick Duffy Told His Sons
His sister, a police officer, was the one who called with the news. Before he left for Montana, Duffy had to face Padraic and Conor, who were getting ready for school. The family already chanted together each morning, so he used that ritual. “We have to chant for Grandma and Grandpa because they’ve both been killed,” he remembered telling them, according to Hello! He did not hide the truth, and he did not leave them alone with it. He gave them something to do for the grandparents they loved, together, in the same quiet ritual that started every school day.
He still does it. Duffy told Kmetko that his parents remain part of his twice-daily chanting, nearly 40 years after the night in Boulder. Our 2020 story on that night showed a man at peace without forgetting. This week’s conversation adds the piece that was missing, two little boys at the start of a school day, learning from their father that grief and love can be spoken in the same breath.
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