Bobby Briggs

Robert "Bobby" Briggs, played by Dana Ashbrook, was Laura Palmer's boyfriend. His father is Major Garland Briggs, a member of the U.S. military, with whom he has an uneasy relationship. Though Bobby was secretly seeing Shelly Johnson before Laura's death, he becomes jealous of James Hurley when he discovers that James was secretly seeing Laura. As it turns out, Laura did not really love Bobby but was merely using him as a source of cocaine.

The prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me shows that just two days before Laura's death, Bobby (accompanied by Laura) had 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 was supplying Bobby with cocaine to be sold in Twin Peaks; when an inebriated Laura yanked the drugs out of his hands, Howard pulled a gun and Bobby shot him. This scene explains 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 been killed.

In the first episode, Bobby is a suspect in Laura's death, but Cooper determines he is innocent and has him released. He and Shelly eventually move in together when Leo Johnson becomes comatose. He tries to become an assistant to Ben Horne but falls in with Horne at the point of Horne's nervous breakdown and finds little success.

Bobby later becomes a deputy in the Twin Peaks sheriff's department, a position he assumes by 2014. As Major Briggs's son, Bobby is able to solve clues left behind by his father that mystify Sheriff Truman and Hawk. He is the father of Shelly Johnson's daughter, Becky.