Patrick Duffy Remembers His Parents Nearly 40 Years After Their Deaths

The Dallas Actor Recalled the 1986 Killings at His Family’s Montana Tavern

Patrick Duffy was 37 when his parents, Terence and Marie Duffy, were killed at the tavern they owned in Boulder, Montana. Nearly 40 years later, the actor became visibly emotional as he spoke about that night, the details he learned from court testimony and the role his Buddhist practice played in how he dealt with the loss.

Duffy, 77, revisited the events of November 18, 1986, during a November 9 conversation with Steve Kmetko on Still Here Hollywood. Television audiences knew him as Bobby Ewing on Dallas, and he would later play Frank Lambert opposite Suzanne Somers on Step by Step. In the interview, he spoke as a son remembering his parents and the place where they had worked together.

Terence Duffy Had Asked Two Teenagers to Leave

Duffy’s Bar was known in Boulder as a quiet, welcoming place to stop for a drink. Terence and Marie, both in their 60s, had a reputation for keeping disturbances out of the tavern. On the night they died, Terence asked two young men to leave after they had been drinking and causing trouble.

“My dad had thrown these two boys out because they were, you know, drunk and boisterous, and he just threw them out of the bar, and they went somewhere, finished whatever they were drinking, and the anger boiled up, and they went back in. It was very late at night,” Duffy recalled.

By the time the two returned, Terence and Marie were alone. Duffy remembered the detail plainly. “There was nobody in the bar except my father and my mother. And they walked in with their shotguns,” he said.

Duffy Recalled the Moments Described in Court

Drawing on court testimony, Duffy described his father stepping toward the two men when he saw them come back inside. Terence began to say, “I told you to…” The sentence went unfinished.

“And then that’s when, uh, they opened up on him and killed him,” Duffy said. Marie had been doing a crossword puzzle at the other end of the bar. When she saw what was happening, she ran toward her husband.

“And they shot her too,” Duffy recalled. The two men took cash from the register and bottles of alcohol before leaving. Duffy also spoke about how the robbery became part of the case that followed.

A group of workers later found Terence and Marie. They worked at a nearby institution for people with disabilities and had stopped at the tavern for a beer around a shift change. The discovery came during an ordinary visit to a place local people knew well.

Both Men Were Convicted of Deliberate Homicide

Investigators eventually identified the two men after one of them admitted his involvement to his girlfriend. Sean A. Wentz and Kenneth A. Miller were both 19 at the time of the killings. Both were convicted of deliberate homicide.

Wentz, who fired the fatal shots, received a 180-year prison sentence and was released on parole in 2015. Miller was released on parole in 2007. The convictions and subsequent releases marked stages in a case that began with the deaths of two people known to many in Boulder through the tavern they ran.

For residents who remembered Duffy’s Bar as a quiet place, the killings were particularly hard to reconcile with their experience of the business. The Duffys were known for asking disruptive customers to leave. Terence had done just that earlier in the evening, before the two men came back and found him and Marie alone.

His Parents Used to Record Every Episode of Dallas

Inside the tavern, Terence and Marie had devoted a wall to photographs of their son. They were proud of his work and spoke about their children with friends and customers. People who knew the couple could see that pride when they visited the bar.

Family friend Bobby Sutherlin recalled the couple’s routine shortly after their deaths. “They never missed one episode of Dallas and they always taped it,” he said. The show was the work that had made their son familiar to television audiences, and watching it was something they did together.

Duffy was already one of television’s best-known actors when the killings drew widespread attention. People who recognized him as Bobby Ewing were suddenly reading about Terence and Marie. In Boulder, people knew the couple through their conversations at the tavern and the photographs they had chosen to hang there.

Buddhism Helped Duffy Process the Loss

Duffy had practiced Buddhism for 15 years by the time his parents died. In his conversation with Kmetko, he said the practice gave him a way to approach grief after losing them both. Chanting was already a familiar part of his life by then.

“By that time I had been chanting my practice of Buddhism for 15 years,” he explained. He also spoke about the Buddhist understanding of life as a continuing cycle. That idea had become important to how he thought about death and loss, and it remained part of how he spoke about his parents decades later.

The practice Duffy described had been part of his life long before the murders. In recalling those years, he placed his response to grief in the context of an outlook he had developed over time. When Kmetko asked him about the events in Boulder, Duffy could speak about what happened that night and about the beliefs he turned to afterward.

A Son’s Memories of Terence and Marie

The details Duffy recalled in the interview came from different parts of his parents’ lives. The court testimony told him where his father had been standing and what he had begun to say. A family friend remembered a couple who watched their son’s show every week and saved the episodes. Both memories lead back to the same small tavern in Boulder.

The approach of the 40th anniversary brought Duffy back to details that have stayed with him since he was 37. He recalled his father’s unfinished sentence and his mother getting up from her crossword to go to him. He also spoke about what helped him live with the knowledge of those final moments.

For the people who knew Terence and Marie in Boulder, the tavern held memories from before November 18, 1986. It was a place where they had stopped after work and talked with the couple, who liked to tell customers about their children. Among the details their friend remembered was the care they took to see every episode of the show their son was in.