The Prodigal Father
Jon Dupre knows a thing or two about forgiveness and how difficult it can be to achieve.
He's a family man with a devoted wife and three healthy kids and a job as a TV news reporter based in Los Angeles. But make no mistake about it, for years, Dupre lived his life with one goal in mind: to create the "perfect" family he never had.
Correspondent Bill Lagattuta reports.
"My family would not be as sad as the family that I had left behind," he says. "My kids would know their dad loves them and would never have to worry whether their dad was going to be there for them."
A long time ago, his dad was a hero to his family. Bob Dupre was a former FBI agent who became a prominent attorney in Andersen, S.C.
What kind of lawyer was he? "He knew the law better than most judges he practiced the law before," says Jon Dupre.
He and his wife Marquise were raising three sons, Jon, Darryl and Marq.
"He was the larger than life superhero figure," says son Jon Dupre. "He was everything as far as we were concerned: the smartest guy in town, the most powerful guy in town."
"My dad had a GTO, which was the fastest car in town," says Darryl Dupre. "So, that was a big brag point....And he would show you FBI maneuvers in the car and stuff like that."
"He believed in us, too, as individuals, and that made you feel like you were somebody, when you had that from your own dad," says Marq Dupre.
He was "just the funniest, most gregarious, funniest guy we knew....when he was sober," recalls Jon Dupre.
Bob Dupre had a serious drinking problem and a mistress. He hid both behind his upstanding exterior.
"I was 11 years old, maybe 12. He came home one night after a two- or three-day absence,...unshaven, disheveled...hung over," says Jon Dupre.
"Mom began to quiver and then cry," Jon Dupre recalls. "What ensued that night was a horribly vicious verbal battle between my dad and my mom."
And then one day, when Jon was 14, it all fell apart. He remembers waking up one Saturday morning. "Mom came out of the bedroom into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee," Jon Dupre recalls. "And she said it...'Well, your father's gone.'"
Bob Dupre had walked out on his family.
"We missed him until it ached. I mean, we'd go to bed at night and stare at the ceiling and just cry ourselves to sleep because we missed our dad," notes Jon Dupre.
The boys' mother made a little money running a dance studio. But soon the family was destitute.
"He never called, he did not write, and he never sent money," Jon Dupre says. "And we had to resort to welfare to get by."
So where was the father who had left his family flat? Jon and his brothers would hear from him from time to time from somewhere out on the road. They knew he'd lost his job as a lawyer, that he was traveling from town to town, from Sout Carolina to Southern California.
Every now and then he'd show up for short periods of time then disappear again - usually after he'd borrowed money and spent it on booze and drugs, like the time he came to stay with Jon Dupre, when he was working his way through college.
Jon Dupre had extra money from a job that his father stole, about several hundred dollars, the son says. When he confonted his dad, "he got really vicious," Jon Dupre recalls. "How dare you accuse me of petty larceny, you ungrateful son of a -----."
When Bob Dupre disappeared that time, Jon Dupre didn't see him again for almost 20 years.
Jon Dupre married his girlfriend Gina. He got got himself a plum TV job in Boston and tried living his ideal life, but deep down he was filled with rage.
"I was angrier than I'd ever been because I realized how screwed up my childhood had been. I realized only then, when I was a dad, how crummy I’d had it as a kid. The way my dad had just left us for dead and I had never let myself be angry about it before. I never looked at it for what it was…just a blatant outright failure, abandonment," Jon Dupre explains.
"And so I started taking it out on my wife," he says. "I started taking it out on my kids."
"I had no idea what was bubbling underneath," his wife Gina explains. "All I knew was that I saw the explosion afterward and it would just start all over again."
Jon's brothers were suffering, too. Marq's marriage ended in divorce. Darryl had turned to drugs and alcohol.
"Oh, I smoked everyday," Darryl Dupre says. "I would drink a lot."
And then one cold winter day in Boston, when Jon Dupre was anchoring the local news, he saw a startling image on videotape.
"I see an old guy standing over a manhole cover staying warm in the steam," he says. "For the life of me, I could swear it's my old man."
"Of course it wasn’t. I have no reason to believe that it's him, but this guy looks like him. I've got to go find him," says Jon Dupre. "I've got to go find him now."
His plan was to use his skills as a journalist; he didn't know if his father was dead or alive.
Click here to find out the outcome of his search.
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