00:00:00
[Music] You believe he was killed, correct? Uh, yes. My name is Alex Spyro. I'm a former
00:00:18
prosecutor and I'm an attorney and I'm investigating the disappearance of Don Lewis.
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There's witnesses and information that shed light on further facts and circumstances surrounding this. Have you
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met these witnesses? Yes. And you believe them? Yes. There are new leads in this strange case of missing
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millionaire Don Lewis, a man who seemed to vanish without a trace. We had lost all hope of ever knowing what happened
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to dad. And then they got some hope from a TV series. Tiger King was an addictive Netflix
00:00:58
documentary series. I'm Julie Miller. I'm the senior feature writer for Vanity Fair. Tiger King centers around Joe
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Exotic. My name is Joe Exotic and this is Sergeant, an Oklahoma based animal cat owner and his sworn enemy, his
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rival, Carol Baskin. talking about a woman down there in Tampa, Florida named Carol Baskin. Joe Exotic is this wild,
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cartoonish, flamboyant, openly gay, mulleted, tattooed, guntoad thing, large animal owner. Kind of the Mcjagger, I'd
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say, of the large cat animal world. Carol has fashioned herself as more of an animal activist. Big cats
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don't belong in cages. She says that what Joe is doing is not humane and should be stopped. It'll be a cold day
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in hell before you completely stop me. But also woven into this entertainment uh was this cold case. Don Lewis, the
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owner of Wildlife on Easy Street, disappeared. Carol's second husband, Don Lewis, disappeared under very mysterious
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circumstances. It was in 1997 and he just vanished. There have been all sorts of theories.
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There's one that he was drugged and put in one of the small planes and dumped out in the Gulf. The plan was to push
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him out this door. That's a challenge. The most insane theory probably being that Carol Baskin had her husband ground
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up in a meat grinder and fed him to the animals. Word has it that Carol snuck up
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on Don in the middle of the night, beat him in the head, ground him up, and fed him to the tigers. As bizarre as that
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sounds, this woman believes her ex-husband, who once worked for Don and Carol, may have revealed something about
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Don's fate during a fight. He said, "If you try to leave me again, I will put you in the grinder like I did Don in a
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meat grinder." Yeah. Her ex-husband denies her story. Do you believe her husband told her that he'd put her in a
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meat grinder the way he did to Dawn? I will tell you that there is certain information she's provided that has been
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independently corroborated. Who would you like to interview the most? Carol Baskin. I didn't kill Don. People want
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answers. They want to know what happened to Don Lewis. Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music]
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[Laughter] Like it or not, the Tiger King Joe Exotic is back along with his archeneemy
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Carol Baskin. I'm talking about a woman down there in Tampa, Florida named Carol
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Baskin. Lots has happened to these two since we last heard from them. Netflix came out with a second season of its
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Tiger King series. When you think you've seen it all, you haven't quite seen it all. Carol Baskin vented on a celebrity
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webcast called Hollywood Raw. I really feel like this is going to be just another horrible year of people having
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the wrong idea about who I am and what I'm trying to do. Carol Baskin began getting all that attention when she was
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trying to shut down Joe Exotic's private zoo in Oklahoma. She has spent over a million and a half dollars just trying
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to shut me down. Joe fought back. His weapon was a music video with a sensational message featuring his idea
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of a Carol Baskin lookalike. His video charged that Carol murdered her husband, Don Lewis. Oh, here
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and fed him to their tigers. Carol has denied the allegation vigorously and repeatedly, but millions
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of viewers saw the video and suddenly the heat was turned up on a cold case. What happened to Carol's husband,
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Don? The show even lit a fire under the local sheriff's department. We reintered
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everybody and have looked at new evidence and continue to investigate. Investigators say only two people have
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declined to be interviewed by law enforcement. One of them is Carol Baskin. Carol is considered a suspect
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and a person of interest. It was 40 years ago that Carol first became a person of interest to Don
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Lewis. Like so many Florida stories, theirs begins like a pulp fiction novel that any reputable publisher would
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reject. It starts on an unusually chilly night in 1981 in Tampa. Carol was still a teenager and in
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a bad marriage. She found herself wandering in tears down a main street in the middle of the night. And just then,
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42-year-old Don Lewis drove by in his truck. He had stepped out of the home he shared with his wife, Glattis. We had
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had an argument and he left home and uh was headed to another girlfriend's house for
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the night, which I found out later. But he was going down the avenue and here was a pretty blonde and she was crying
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and he told me that he stopped and um she got in the truck with him and they spent the night together. I'm sorry. So
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he was on his way to another girlfriend's house when he met with Carol and took her to a hotel or a
00:07:17
motel. Yes. Wow. He was busy. Yes, he was. Don Lewis was busy with two main interests, money and women. Long before
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he picked up Carol that night on the street, he met Glattis. She was just 13 when he noticed her shopping with her
00:07:39
mother. And I looked up and I thought, "Woo, he sure is good-looking." And then he winked at me. And I turned
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around to see who he might be looking at. and there was no one there. So I said, I guess that was me. A little more
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than a year later, Glattis and Don married. He was 17 with very little money, but very big plans. He could tear
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anything apart, put it back together. Don worked hard fixing broken machinery. He made enough money to buy and grow a
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trucking business. Then he started buying and selling Florida real estate. And along the way, he met Anne McQueen.
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Don took somebody with an eighth grade education and taught them how to manage a multi-million dollar business and kept
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the books and helped run things. And they were quite a team. Eventually, Don was worth, according to his lawyer,
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between five and 10 million. But you'd never know it. He did business out of a used trailer on an
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empty lot. He dressed in old jeans and cheap t-shirts. And his cash management system was quaint. What about burying
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money on the property? Did he do that? Yes, he did. That's kind of an interesting thing to do. Well, somebody
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would pay him cash, and he loved having cash around. So, we'd put it in a jar and just dig a hole under the little red
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barn we had. I mean, where I'm from, people who want cash frequently go to the ATM. They don't go to the little red
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barn. But why do you suppose he didn't like go to the bank? Well, he had plenty of money in the bank, too. So,
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Don and Glattis raised a family. Their three daughters, Linda, Donna, and Gail, remember their childhoods as happy. He
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was home every night. Um, we always had dinner. It was also a bit unusual, largely because Don had a thing for
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animals, mostly wild ones. I wouldn't call it passionate, I would call it an obsession. So, we would come home from
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school and there would be a baby alligator swimming in the bathtub. There were ferrets and raccoons and horses and
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cows and and a penguin and a monkey. Dad really loved animals, but his daughters
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never knew about that other love of Dons's women. And not just their mother, Glattis. Was he a good husband? He was
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until I would get a call and say he's seeing someone. Oh, well that's Pardon me. Doesn't sound like a good husband.
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He was up until that point. Yes. May I be a little impolite and ask you if you know roughly how many women he was
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seeing besides you? Uh, if you're talking about the whole 34 years I was married to him or possibly 25. Forgive
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me again for asking, but how did that make you feel? Well, when I would find out, I would tell him I was leaving and
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he would say, "There'll be no more." Did you believe him? Of course, at that time, and as years went by, no. You have
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to make up your mind uh to live in that situation or let it drive you crazy. Glattis was pretty good about living
00:11:01
with a serial philanderer. And then Don met Carol. Was there any sense when he met her that she was different than the
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other 24 some odd women? No, she was um she was just like the other 25, but um I would say more greedy
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because she did find out that he had money. What do you think of her? You really want me to answer that? I'd
00:11:31
like to. I think she's the worst thing that ever was born in the United States of America. Wow. You don't mince words.
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No. And there's more if you want them. Don and Carol had been seeing each other for about 10 years when Glattis decided
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she'd had enough. She and Don finally divorced in 1990. A year later, Don married Carol, and before long, the new
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Mr. and Mrs. Lewis had a new business. They bought a bunch of big cats and put them on exhibit at a place called
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Wildlife on Easy Street. Don's former lawyer, Joseph Fritz. He'd take a chair and sit in a yard with 10, 12 bobcats,
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them all over him, and him playing with them like like it was a household puppy.
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But before long, there was difficulty on Easy Street. Don and Carol weren't getting along. He told me then, he said,
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"I want you to know right now, don't you or the girls or any of the grandkids ran
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by be left in the room with her alone." And then after only six years of marriage, Don Lewis just vanished. He
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wouldn't walk away and leave his cats. He wouldn't walk away and leave his business.
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I find it hard to believe he'd walk away in these things. [Music] [Music] In the days before he went missing, Don
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Lewis was planning to go to Costa Rica to sell some used cars and trucks. He was supposed to go and get me some VIN
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numbers and supposed to call me back and he didn't. Was that like him? I mean, did he did he do that frequently? No.
00:13:31
Don and I spoke on a daily basis. I finally reached Carol. I kind of asked her if she knew where her
00:13:39
husband was. And um her answer to me was no that she hadn't seen him since um the
00:13:45
day before. And she asked me if I thought that she should call the police. And I think I made a smart eloic remark
00:13:54
and said something like, "You think yeah, you need to do that." There were some not so subtle signs that
00:14:00
there were problems in Don and Carol's marriage. And Don's daughter, Donna, had sensed trouble between the two. He
00:14:08
thought she was crazy. Crazy. Mhm. He didn't um like the way she spent money. The couple also reportedly thought about
00:14:21
what to do with the animals. Carol wanted to keep them and make Easy Street a sanctuary. Don, so the story goes,
00:14:30
wanted to breed and sell [Music] them. He had talked about getting a divorce, and if he had gone through with
00:14:38
it, it could have been costly, says Don's lawyer, Joe Fritz. So, she would have lost a considerable amount of
00:14:45
money. Millions. That's considerable. That's considerable. The couple made a lot of money while they were together,
00:14:53
but it turned out there were more signs of trouble. After Don disappeared, Anne McQueen says she remembered a sealed
00:15:01
envelope that he had given her two months earlier. He came to the office and he was agitated and he gave me an
00:15:09
envelope and he said, "Take this. Keep it a safe place." He either said, "Take it to the police or you'll know what to
00:15:15
do with it um if anything ever happens." I took her home. I didn't think anything
00:15:21
about it. But after Don went missing, Anne says she opened the envelope. He was asking
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the judge um for a restraining order. Just months before he disappeared, Don tried unsuccessfully to get a
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restraining order against Carol, telling the judge, "Carol has gotten angry enough to threaten to kill me. She has a
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45 revolver and she took my 357. Do you remember how you felt when you read the stuff about how he she
00:15:56
threatened to kill him? I started shaking. Did you actually start shaking? I'm shaking now.
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An says she took the document to the sheriff's department and while she was there, the burglar alarm went off at
00:16:12
Don's office. Carol had set it off. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Carol got in with help from her father
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and Don's handyman, a man named Kenny Far. And when Anne got back to the office, she says she was shocked.
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Everything was gone. Everything that was in my desk was gone, including, she says, Don's will and power of attorney.
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Police said Carol's action was legal. After all, she was Don's wife, but Don's daughters were suspicious. Well, to us,
00:16:49
it's very odd. She may be a spouse, but she did not have a key at all to the gate or the office. So, that says a lot
00:16:58
right there. But that's not the only odd thing. Carol gave this interview to the
00:17:04
television show Hard Copy, suggesting Don might have had some kind of dementia. Maybe he doesn't know who he
00:17:11
is. Maybe he doesn't know where to call. But Don's lawyer, Joseph Fritz, says Don
00:17:18
had no memory problems. Absolutely none. Did you see him shortly before he disappeared? I saw him at least every
00:17:27
week and sometimes two or three times. And Don's family doesn't believe Carol was really worried about Don in part
00:17:35
because they say weeks after he disappeared. She cancelled Don's cell phone account. If a person at the
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beginning, your husband, you think he has dementia, he's got Alzheimer's, and now he's missing. Do you turn his cell
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phone off after two or three weeks of him being missing? His only lifeline to reach you? Yeah, she turned
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it off. Three weeks after cancelled the account. As the weeks turned into months, Carol
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offered another possibility. Instead of Costa Rica, maybe Don was under arrest in Mexico and couldn't call her. The
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only place I still haven't looked that I feel somewhat hopeful of being able to find him alive is going to be Mexico.
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And I don't know how hard or how long that'll take. I mean, you think maybe a prison? Yeah.
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I can't think of anything else that would keep him away this long. I find it hard to believe he'd walk away and leave
00:18:31
me. Don's family began to think the worst, that Don was dead and that Carol played
00:18:40
a role in his death. What was your first thought? I would love to tell you, but I
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better not. Can you give me a hint? You got it. You thought it was her? I can't say that. Would I be wrong in assuming
00:18:55
that that was your first thought? Maybe. Maybe I'd be wrong. Maybe you might be right.
00:19:03
And then the case took a turn. Police found Don's van abandoned at a remote airport. The keys were reportedly still
00:19:11
in it. Remember, Don had been planning to go to Costa Rica for work. There is the theory that he just got tired of
00:19:18
everything and jumped in an airplane and flew to Costa Rica and drove up the mountain and is living happily ever
00:19:23
after there. Don had owned several planes and he loved to fly. Tell me a little bit about
00:19:32
this airplane. Uh so it's a Piper A3. Joe Solen has flown hundreds of hours in one type of plane that Don Lewis liked
00:19:41
to fly. you can roughly get about 700 miles to a full tank. Uh the two two main tanks full. Um I know. So if say
00:19:50
you were going to go from the Tampa area down to Costa Rica, it's not a non-stop
00:19:56
flight. Uh no. No. So that's like how many refueling stops? Oh, probably three to four at least. Yeah. If he did
00:20:03
refuel, no one seems to know about it. Besides, Don's family says he would never just take off and leave them.
00:20:13
But if Don didn't just fly off to begin a new life somewhere, what was his van doing at the airport? I've heard at the
00:20:21
time that he was strangled from the backseat of an airplane with an electric cord and pushed out 50 ft over the Gulf.
00:20:28
Arrow09 Michael, depart 29. Left turn out to the south. I'm also a pilot and I fly the same type of plane Don
00:20:38
often flew. First of all, imagine the struggle involved in strangling a 170lb man in
00:20:48
this passenger seat. Then, if the plan was to push him out the door, that's a challenge. The slowest this airplane can
00:20:56
fly is about 65 mph. And that means winds approaching hurricane strength would be pushing against this door,
00:21:03
trying to keep it closed. You'd have to open it. You'd have to keep it open. and
00:21:08
you'd have to somehow wrestle the body out of here without interfering with the flight controls. Bottom line, I guess he
00:21:16
could do it, but they're easier ways to get rid of a body. And there was no evidence that any of Don's planes were
00:21:24
missing. So, if it's unlikely Don Lewis was pushed out of a small airplane, where was he? As the mystery got deeper,
00:21:33
the theories got wilder. What were some of those theories or rumors? Someone said he was under a septic tank on
00:21:41
BigCat Rescue. In the summer of 1997, Carol spoke with the local Fox TV station. I'm very
00:22:03
worried. It's just a feeling that he is okay that he will just walk back in the gate. But Don never did. It's very hard
00:22:12
in the 21st century to go missing missing as a middle-aged man who has a very active cellular records, banking
00:22:20
records, etc. Alex Spyro is an attorney and a former New York City prosecutor. He's now working for Don Lewis's
00:22:28
daughters. Well, there were all sorts of um theories about what might have happened to Don.
00:22:35
One of them was that he was tossed out of an airplane. Do you find that credible? Sometimes in high-profile
00:22:41
cases, people come up with fancul theories of, you know, tigers, lions, bears, and airplanes. I mean, there's
00:22:49
usually a simpler explanation of things. Spyro says the simplest thing of all is
00:22:54
to start with the timeline of the day Lewis disappeared. There's a critical window here where Don Lewis went
00:23:02
missing. And what really matters and where the where the rubber meets the road is what happened during those 24
00:23:06
hours. So what happened during those 24 hours? Carol says she last saw Don Lewis
00:23:12
early in the morning of August 18th, 1997 when she came home from running a late night errand. She would not talk to
00:23:21
us in person this time, so she sent us a couple of diary entries. Leonora Le Peter Anton is a Pulitzer Prize-winning
00:23:29
reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and a CBS consultant. And one of them was the what what she did that night, the
00:23:38
Sunday, August 17th, 1997. Carol says that late that Sunday night before Don went missing, she needed milk
00:23:47
and supplies for her wild cats. At 11:00, you know, she had these kittens that were in the house. There was a
00:23:55
bobcat kitten and two caracle kittens and um she didn't have enough ingredients for the milk. In her
00:24:04
diaries, Carol says she left Dawn and drove to a supermarket about 6 miles away, but the store was closed. And then
00:24:14
the story takes another twist. She says her car broke down. Carol says she walked all the way home. It took her
00:24:21
until nearly 4 a.m. And then when she got home, Don wanted to immediately go back and get the car. So at 4 in the
00:24:30
morning, they went back. He got the radiator cap off, put water in it, and then they drove
00:24:36
home. 2 hours later, she saw him in the doorway, and he was leaving. You know, he just left. And that's the last time
00:24:44
she saw him. Don's ex-wife has her doubts about that story. I don't think she was going to
00:24:51
buy milk. No. Okay. You do not. No, she wasn't going to go buy milk. You think that she was up to no good that night?
00:25:00
Could be. What happened next has raised even more suspicions. After Don disappeared, Carol
00:25:07
produced what she said was Don's will and power of attorney, leaving her in charge of everything. But Don's family
00:25:15
says his signature on those documents is forged. Would I be wrong in assuming that you believe that Carol was involved
00:25:24
in making up these wills, the will and the power of attorney? You could be. I could be wrong. You could be right. If
00:25:33
she was involved, why would she want to have Don Lewis killed? Money, of course.
00:25:44
That happens all the time. The world we live in today. Leonora Le Peter Anton had four
00:25:52
handwriting experts examined Don's signature on the power of attorney. All said the signature did not look
00:25:59
authentic. Two of them said they felt it was traced from the 1991 marriage license between
00:26:07
Don and Carol. um and that that basically they were, you know, not accurate Don Lewis
00:26:16
signatures. But Carol says the signatures were authenticated back in 1997 and are
00:26:23
real. The Tampa Bay Times also looked into Don's former right-hand man, Kenny Far. Remember, he reportedly helped
00:26:33
Carol get into Don's office that day. He was basically his a jack of all trades.
00:26:38
his right-hand man. And then after Don Lewis disappeared, he went and worked with Carol Baskin. He was driving one of
00:26:46
Don's vans, Don's blue van. Trish Far Payne was married to Kenny for 5 years. In her first ever TV interview, she told
00:26:55
48 Hours that two days before Don Lewis was reported missing, Farre came home with Don Lewis's van and inside there
00:27:05
was a pile of guns. He said, "Help me carry these in." We carried them in. We put them under the bed. We put them in
00:27:11
the closet. We put them in the little bathroom we had in our room. I was like, "Whoa, where did you get these?" He
00:27:17
said, "Listen, I I'm I'm hanging on to these right now for Carol, but uh" he said, "Don's
00:27:22
gone." And uh I don't want you talking about him. Did you ask him what he meant by Don's gone? No, not right then.
00:27:30
Because he would blow up real easy at me and I just didn't question it. Later that week, she heard on the news that
00:27:38
Don had gone missing. Everything started kind of coming together. Kenny's got Don's van. Kenny's got Don's guns. Uh,
00:27:47
Don's gone. And I knew Don was gone the day before he supposedly was missing. It something
00:27:56
wasn't right. She says she was too afraid to ask Kenny, but it was hard to ignore some very strange things, like
00:28:03
the large freezer with a padlock that she says appeared on their porch around the time Don disappeared. And then, she
00:28:11
says the freezer vanished. How long after Dawn disappeared did the freezer disappear? About a week after
00:28:19
Don disappear. But Trish says she waited years to tell police about her suspicions.
00:28:27
I was afraid for my kids. You know, I had my kids. I was afraid for them. I was more afraid for them than
00:28:36
anything. She says he made that one threat that was especially frightening and bizarre and maybe revealing. Kenny
00:28:44
had threatened to put me in the grinder. He said, "If you try to leave me again,
00:28:48
I'm going to put you in the grinder like I did Dawn." I'm sorry. You said what? He said, "If you try to leave me again,
00:28:54
I will put you in the grinder like I did Dawn." In a meat grinder. Yeah. I thought he was telling the
00:29:02
truth. I knew deep down that Kenny has some part in Don's not ever coming back. I knew then for sure. My goodness.
00:29:14
So, you you sort of thought at that point that you were living with a murderer. Yeah.
00:29:21
3 years after Don went missing in the midst of her divorce from Kenny Farre, Trish says she finally told the police
00:29:28
everything. Kenny Farre wouldn't talk to 48 hours on camera, but told us Trish's
00:29:34
story is, as he put it, a outlandish lie. He says, "I had absolutely nothing to do with Don's disappearance." Farre
00:29:43
also says he cooperated with police at the time of Don's disappearance and even took a
00:29:50
polygraph. Now, attorney Alex Spyro says he's found some new witnesses. Have you
00:29:57
met these witnesses? Yes. And you believe them? Yes. He said, "If you try to leave me again,
00:30:18
I will put you in the grinder like I did Dawn." Do you consider Trish Far Payne credible? Yes. Attorney Alex Spyro has
00:30:29
been investigating the disappearance of Don Lewis for months. He doesn't want to
00:30:34
say much because his investigation is still going on, but he will say there's been some progress. Has there been a new
00:30:42
witness who surfaced who can shed significant light on what happened or corroborate Trish Far Payne's version of
00:30:52
what happened or just clear up some of these unclear matters? There have been. Yes. If that's true, you're a heck of a
00:31:02
lot closer to figuring out what happened than many people might know. I like to think I'm closer to figuring out what
00:31:10
happened than many people would know. Yes. The obvious question is, what about Carol
00:31:17
Baskin? You were going to be a fur coat, weren't you, honey? After Dawn's disappearance in 1997, Carol Lewis
00:31:25
carried on at her sanctuary, Wildlife on Easy Street. It is a lot of work. Um, feeding is one thing that he was always
00:31:33
here for. On August 19th, 2002, 5 years to the day Don Lewis was reported missing, Carol
00:31:43
had a judge declare Don dead. Gradually, the investigation into his whereabouts went cold. She's a good
00:31:53
girl. Yes, she is. In 2004, Carol got married again. This time to Howard Baskin, a businessman. And the ceremony
00:32:03
was unusual even by Florida standards. Perhaps Howard wore like a toga, a tiger patterned toga, and was like a caveman.
00:32:13
And he came to her on the beach and she hit him over the head with a plastic bat. And then he picked her up and threw
00:32:21
her over his shoulder. And then apparently she put a leash around his neck. You know, it's not how I would have done
00:32:30
my wedding, but Carol Lewis became Carol Baskin, and Wildlife on Easy Street got
00:32:37
a new name, too. Hi, I'm Carol Baskin, and I'm the founder and CEO of Big Cat Rescue. Howard has an MBA and a law
00:32:45
degree, and he sort of brought a business sense to Big Cat Rescue. He brought in like a Washington lobbyist.
00:32:51
He knew people in the community. He basically was really good at getting donations. Our donations last year alone
00:32:58
were up 50%. The organization's mission also changed. There was no more breeding or buying big
00:33:06
cats. Our goal is to end the trade in big cats. Carol is an animal rights advocate. We can do it with help from
00:33:14
people like you. Someone who believes no one should own a wild cat, not even herself. She spoke about it in a 2018
00:33:22
interview with CBS affiliate WTSP. Our mission is to put ourselves out of business because there shouldn't have to
00:33:30
be a place rescuing lions and tigers from people that get them as pets. Carol eventually went after Joseph
00:33:39
Maldonado Passage. You know him as Joe Exotic, an exotic animal owner in Oklahoma. In 2010, she tried to stop him
00:33:49
from taking his baby tigers to shopping malls around the country. Charging money for pictures. Joe fought
00:33:58
back. Hey, Carol Baskin down there at BigCat Rescue. And tried to take the name of Carol's organization and make it
00:34:04
his own. So, Carol sued him. She has spent over a million and a half dollars just trying to shut me down. She won and
00:34:12
a judge ordered Mr. exotic to pay Carol nearly $1 million. And that only added more fuel to their feud. I'm already so
00:34:23
damn poor. I use a file cabinet from my dresser drawer. Joe took to his YouTube channel, Joe Exotic TV, to air his
00:34:32
grievances in his own exotic way. Can you believe they spent enough time to build another entire website about me?
00:34:41
For Joe, nothing was off limits. Word has it that Carol snuck up on Don in the middle of the night and he gleefully
00:34:48
revived those suspicions about Don Lewis's disappearance. Joe made that music video with a woman who was
00:34:56
supposed to be a Carol Baskin lookalike, pushing that unsubstantiated theory that
00:35:02
she fed her husband Dawn to the Tigers. Joe's hatred of Carol Baskin started feeding on itself. And you think
00:35:10
I'm obsessed with you and getting more violent. Carol Baskin better never ever see me face to face. He's posted
00:35:20
pictures of an epige of me hanging and pointing a gun to my head. And Joe Exotic may have done more than pretend
00:35:28
to kill Carol. A jury finds former Winniewood Animal Park owner Joe Exotic guilty. In 2019, he was convicted of,
00:35:36
among other things, hiring a hitman to actually kill her. He got 22 years. Meanwhile, Carol had a new theory
00:35:47
about who might be responsible for her ex-husband's disappearance. She clawed his face up pretty badly. He said he
00:35:54
almost had to knock her out to get the gun away from her because she was so intent on killing him.
00:36:16
In January 2021, then President Donald Trump held the keys to Joe Exotic's prison cell. His legal team hoped for a
00:36:25
full presidential pardon. I think we're going to get the pardon. I do. I'm 100% sure. A very stretched limo waited near
00:36:33
his federal prison, ready to whisk the Tiger King away from captivity. But the limo left empty. There was no
00:36:43
pardon. Joe Exotic's case is closed, but Florida Sheriff Chad Kronister still doesn't know what happened to Don Lewis.
00:36:51
He thinks Don was murdered and more than one person might be involved. this wealthy
00:36:59
individual left and left his wealth behind, left his money behind. You know, when's the last time you've ever heard
00:37:06
someone leaving without their wealth behind? But the more bizarre theories about what happened are too much even
00:37:13
for a law man in Florida. They talked about the meat grinder and that the meat grinders were used to feed the cats.
00:37:21
Well, the meat grinders had been removed from the property, you know, several weeks before his his disappearance. Not
00:37:27
saying they couldn't have been involved, but they weren't on the property. With all those uncertainties and those
00:37:32
millions of Tiger King viewers demanding answers, the sheriff ordered his team to
00:37:38
take a new look at the case. As a result of Tiger King, we contacted and followed
00:37:44
up on well over 200 leads. Moses Garcia is a homicide detective for Hillsboro County. He says all those tips didn't
00:37:53
help much. A large amount of those were virtually useless. And Garcia says some of his efforts at investigation have
00:38:00
been blocked by Carol. In the first Tiger King, there were some rumors that came out that Don Lewis was buried in a
00:38:07
septic tank or underneath a septic tank on the property. Um, we wanted to go onto the property and kind of look
00:38:13
around, but we were not allowed access. It is frustrating. I'd like to get on that property and look around a little
00:38:17
bit. The detectives also say they've been unable to interview Carol Baskin. She does a lot of interviews where she
00:38:25
says that the sheriff's office has not even approached her. That can be very frustrating when you know you've
00:38:31
approached multiple times and you've been told no. Most missing persons, wives, spouses, they cooperate with the
00:38:37
law enforcement. Carol's alleged lack of recent cooperation does seem to have increased the sheriff's focus on her.
00:38:45
The only people that have refused to be interviewed has been Carol Baskin and Kenny Far. In an interview with TMZ,
00:38:53
Carol said since Don went missing, she has released scores of documents and done many interviews. TMZ reports Carol
00:39:00
said she has nothing new to tell detectives and is declining to speak to investigator Garcia on advice of her
00:39:08
lawyer, but she did email us saying Trish Far Payne's story about Kenny is false. She called Trish's description of
00:39:17
the meat grinder quote ludicrous and clearly fabricated unquote. And as for Don's family's accusations that she
00:39:26
canled Don's cell phone just weeks after he disappeared, she says that never happened. And she told us regarding the
00:39:33
family, quote, "They are liars," unquote. And Carol says Don's allegation that she threatened his life is just
00:39:42
made up. The judge denied his application, saying Don wasn't in any immediate danger. She says she never
00:39:49
threatened Don and he only sought a restraining order to stop her from throwing out mountains of stuff he'd
00:39:56
accumulated. But Carol says she may know who did threaten Don. It's an explosive
00:40:03
allegation. Carol says it's Glattis, Don's ex-wife, who might be the real villain. According to Carol, Glattis was
00:40:12
angry over a lawsuit she filed against Don after their divorce. She sued him for a million dollars, but Glattis lost.
00:40:23
Could she have been so angry over not getting the million dollars more that she thought she would get that she would
00:40:29
kill Don in a lastditch effort to recover the money she felt he owed her for all of her suffering? The Lewis
00:40:36
family's new attorney, Alex Spyro, says that's nonsense. I have seen no credible
00:40:41
evidence that the Lewis family has anything to do with Don Lewis's disappearance.
00:40:47
If all the attention is hard on Carol, she's made the most of it. Meow. Tiger King has made her a queen. She was on
00:40:55
Dancing with the Stars. Tyra Banks introduced her. Carol Basket. [Applause] [Music]
00:41:05
And she's come out with a documentary on the streaming channel Discovery Plus. Carol Baskin's cage fight.
00:41:14
You're abusing big cats. I'm coming for you. As for the Don Lewis case, his family is
00:41:25
still hopeful. And they say after more than 20 years, the publicity around Tiger King has changed everything with
00:41:33
more tips and leads coming in every day. We feel like we have an army of angels behind us at this point. Is Joe Exotic
00:41:44
one of those angels? He might be leading the whole band. [Music] 48 hours. Don't miss an episode.
00:42:21
[Music]