Bobby Briggs

Robert "Bobby" Briggs is a character from the television series "Twin Peaks", created by David Lynch and Mark Frost.

Bobby (played by Dana Ashbrook) was the boyfriend of Laura Palmer and therefore one of the lead suspects. He is the son of Major Garland Briggs, and has an uneasy relationship with his father, a member of the U.S. military.

Bobby becomes jealous of James Hurley when he discovers he was secretly seeing Laura. Laura on the other hand did not really love Bobby, she only used him to get a part of Bobby's cocaine.

The prequel film "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me" shows that just two days before Laura Palmer's death, Bobby (accompanied by Laura) has a midnight meeting, arranged by Jacques Renault, with Cliff Howard, deputy in Deer Meadow, the town in which Teresa Banks was murdered the previous year. Howard is supplying Bobby with cocaine to be sold in Twin Peaks; when an inebriated Laura yanks the drugs out of his hands, Howard pulls a gun and is shot by Bobby. This scene serves to explain what James Hurley reported to Donna Hayward in the series' pilot— that Laura, the night she was murdered, had mentioned to him that someone had gotten killed.

Bobby was secretly seeing Shelly Johnson even before Laura's death, and they move in together when Leo Johnson becomes comatose.

Trivia

On the documentary included in the "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" DVD, Miguel Ferrer (who portrays FBI agent Albert Rosenfield on the series and film) jokingly recalls an assumption that he and other members of the cast had regarding Dana Ashbrook's portrayal of Bobby. Ferrer had come to the conclusion that Ashbrook was basing his character's manner of speaking on Captain Kirk; Ferrer complimented Ashbrook for this, much to his bewilderment.