48 Hours - "48 Hours Suspicion": The Tiger King Mystery

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

Shocking new information in the disappearance of tiger activist Carole Baskin’s former husband Don Lewis.  "48 Hours" correspondent Richard Schlesinger investigates.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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ConstantContact.ca We were already living through this stranger-than-fiction time. And this was a stranger-than-fiction escape. Hey, Carabasca, down there at Big Cat Rescue. Tiger King was an addictive Netflix documentary series that premiered just as COVID pandemic shutdown was happening. Over 60 million households have been tuned into the show. The Tiger King documentary came out at the perfect time. Have you seen it? Is that Joe Exotic? That's Joe Exotic.

Tiger King centers around Joe Exotic. My name's Joe Exotic and this is Sarge. An Oklahoma-based animal cat owner and his sworn enemy, his rival, Carole Baskin. Talking about a woman down there in Tampa, Florida named Carole Baskin. Joe Exotic is this wild, cartoon cartoonish flamboyant openly gay mulleted tattooed gun totes large animal owner kind of the mick jagger i'd say of the large cat animal world carol's more a hippie new age vibe wears flower crowns. Hey, all you cool cats and kittens, it's Carol at Big Cat Rescue. Carol has fashioned herself as more of an animal activist. Big cats don't belong in cages. She says that what Joe is doing is not humane and should be stopped.

Joe saw this as an attack on himself, his business. It'll be a cold day in hell before you completely stop me. And he stopped at nothing to get back. But also woven into this entertainment was this cold case. Don Lewis, the owner of Wildlife on Easy Street, disappeared. Carol's second husband, Don Lewis, disappeared under very mysterious circumstances. It was in 1997 and he just vanished. There have been all sorts of theories. 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 him out this door. That's a challenge. Then there's the whole Carol Baskin fed him to the tigers theory. That she had her husband ground up in a meat grinder and fed him to the animals. It was such a weirdly fascinating unsolved story. I'm Julie Miller. I'm the senior feature writer for Vanity Fair. All of a sudden, everybody wanted to know what happened to Don Lewis. We had lost all hope of ever knowing what happened to Dan. There have been a sudden surge of tips that have flooded the sheriff's department in Florida. We are now assigned a homicide supervisor to look

into every tip that's coming in. It's kind of amazing. People are creating memes. They're creating Reddit threads. Going through documents, producing new theories, talking to new people. And tonight, in her first television interview, a woman who believes her ex-husband may have been connected to Don Lewis' disappearance. He said, if you try to leave me again, I will put you in the grinder like I did Don. In a meat grinder? Yeah. you in the grinder like I did Don. In a meat grinder? Yeah. But Carol Baskin herself offers up another surprising suspect. She clawed his face up pretty badly. He said he almost had to knock her out to get the gun away from her because she was so intent on killing him.

People want answers. They want to know what happened to Don Lewis. The It was the spring of 2020, the start of the season of COVID, and all eyes focused on Carole Baskin. I'm talking about a woman down there in Tampa, Florida, named Carole Baskin. The animal rights activist was at the center of the hugely popular Netflix series, Tiger King. She was the arch nemesis of its star, Joe Exotic. Carole was trying to shut down Joe Exotic. Carol was trying to shut down Joe Exotic's private zoo in Oklahoma.

She has spent over a million and a half dollars just trying to shut me down. Joe fought back. His weapon was a music video with a sensational message. Featuring his idea of a Carol Baskin lookalike, his video charged that 23 years ago, Carol murdered her husband, Don Lewis, and fed him to their tigers. Carol has denied the allegation vigorously and repeatedly, but millions of viewers saw the video and suddenly the heat was turned up on a cold case. What happened to

Carol's husband, Don? In August of 1997, he vanished. And tonight, for the first time on television, you'll hear from a woman who says she may know what happened. But let's begin at the beginning. The story of Carol's life with Don Lewis, like so many Florida stories, begins like a pulp fiction novel any reputable publisher would reject. It starts on an unusually chilly night in 1981 in Tampa. Carol was still a teenager and in a bad marriage. She found herself wandering in tears down a main street in the middle of the night. And just then, 42-year-old Don Lewis drove by in his truck. He had stepped out of the home he shared with his wife Gladys. We had had an argument and he left home and was headed to another girlfriend's house for the night, which I found out later. But he was going down the avenue and here was a pretty blonde and she was crying. And he told me that he stopped and she got in the truck with him.

And they spent the night together. I'm sorry, so he was on his way to another girlfriend's house when he met Carol and took her to a hotel or a motel? Yes. Wow. He was busy. Yes, he was. He was busy. Yes, he was. Don Lewis was busy with two main interests, money and women. Long before he picked up Carol that night on the street, he met Gladys. She was just 13 when he noticed her shopping with her mother. And I looked up and I thought, whoa, he sure is good looking. And then he winked at me.

And I turned 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 than a year later, Gladys and Don married. He was 17 with very little money, but very big plans. He could tear anything apart, put it back together. Don worked hard fixing broken machinery. He made enough money to buy and grow a trucking business. Then he started buying and selling Florida real estate and along the way he met Ann McQueen. Don took somebody with an eighth grade education and taught them how to manage a multi-million dollar business.

Ann kept the books and helped run things, and they were quite a team. Eventually, Don was worth, according to his lawyer, between five and ten million dollars. But you'd never know it. He did business out of a used trailer on an empty lot. He dressed in old jeans and cheap t-shirts. And his cash management system was quaint. What about burying money on the property? Did he do that? Yes, he did. That's kind of an interesting thing to do. Well, somebody 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 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 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. Don and Gladys raised a family. Their three daughters, Linda, Donna, and Gail, remember their childhoods as happy. He was home every night. We always had dinner. It was also a bit unusual, largely because Don had a thing for animals, mostly wild ones. I wouldn't call it passionate I would call it an obsession. We would come home from school and there would be a baby alligator swimming in the bathtub. There were ferrets and raccoons and horses and cows and

and a penguin and a monkey. Dad really loved animals. But his daughters never knew about that other love of Don's, women, and not just their mother, Gladys. Was he a good husband? He was until I would get a call and say he's seeing someone. Oh, well that's, pardon me, that doesn't sound like a good husband. 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 seeing besides you? If you're talking about the whole 34 years I was married to him, possibly 25. Forgive 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 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 to make up your mind to live in that situation or let it drive you crazy. Gladys was pretty good about living with a serial philanderer. And then Don met Carol. Was there any sense when he met her that she was different than the other 24-some-odd women? No, she was just like the other 25.

But I would say more greedy because she did find out that he had money. What do you think of her? You really want me to answer that? I'd 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. No, and there's more if you want them.

Don and Carol had been seeing each other for about 10 years when Gladys decided she'd had enough. She and Don finally divorced in 1990. A year later, Don married Carol and before long the new Mr. and Mrs. Lewis had a new business. They bought a bunch of big cats and put them on exhibit at a place called Wildlife on Easy Street. Don's former lawyer, Joseph Fritz. He'd take a chair and sit in a yard with 10, 12 bobcats and all over him and him playing with them like it was a household puppy. But before long, there was difficulty on Easy Street. Don and Carol weren't getting along. He told me then, he said, I want you to know right now,

don't you or the girls or any of the grandkids or anybody be left in the room with her alone. And then, after only six years of marriage, Don Lewis just vanished. He wouldn't walk away and leave his cats. He wouldn't walk away and leave his cats. He wouldn't walk away and leave his business. I find it hard to believe he'd walk away and leave me. In 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park.

They have to alert the military, and when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. The scary cult classic was set in the Chicago housing project. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. Candyman. Candyman? Now, we all know chanting a name won't make a killer magically appear, but did you know that the movie Candyman was

partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. We're going to talk to the people who were there, and we're also going to uncover the larger story. My architect was shocked when he saw how this was created. Literally shocked. And we'll look at what the story tells us about injustice in America. If you really believed in tough on crime, then you wouldn't make it easy to crawl into medicine cabinets and kill our women.

Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. In the days before he went missing, Don 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 numbers and supposed to call me back, and he didn't. Was that like him? I mean, did he do that frequently? No. Don and I spoke on a daily basis. I finally reached Carol. I kind of asked her if she knew where her husband was, and her answer to me was no, that she hadn't seen him since the day before.

And she asked me if I thought that she should call the police, and I think I made a smart aleck remark and said something like, you think, yeah, you need to do that. There were some not-so-subtle signs that there were problems in Don and Carol's marriage. There was that cryptic warning Gladys said she was given not to be alone with Carol, and Don's daughter Donna had sensed trouble between the two. He thought she was crazy. Crazy? He didn't

like the way she spent money. The couple also reportedly thought about what to do with the animals. Carol wanted to keep them and make Easy Street a sanctuary. Don, so the story goes, wanted to breed and sell them. Don had reportedly also been having affairs and talked about getting a divorce. And if he had gone through with it, it could have been costly, says Don's lawyer, Joe Fritz. So she would have lost a considerable amount of money. Millions. That's considerable. That's considerable. The couple made a lot of money while they were together, but it turned out there were more signs of trouble. After Don disappeared, Anne McQueen says she remembered a sealed envelope that he had given her two months earlier. He came to the office and he was agitated and he

gave me an envelope and he said, take this, keep it in a safe place. He either said take it to the police or you'll know what to do with it if anything ever happens. I took her home. I didn't think anything about it. But after Don went missing, Ann says she opened the envelope. He was asking the judge for a restraining order. Just months before he disappeared, Don tried unsuccessfully to get a restraining order against Carol, telling the judge, Carol has gotten angry enough to threaten to kill me. She has a.45 revolver and she took my.357. Do you remember how you felt when you read the stuff about how she threatened to kill him? I started shaking. Did you actually start shaking?

I'm shaking now. Ann says she took the document to the sheriff's department. And while she was there, the burglar alarm went off at Don's office. Carol had set it off. Carol apparently had help from her father and Don's handyman, a man named Kenny Farr. And when Anne got back to the office, she says she was shocked. Everything was gone. Everything that was in my desk was gone. Including, she says, Don's will and power of attorney. Police said Carol's action was legal. After all, she was Don's wife.

After all, she was Don's wife. But Don's daughters were suspicious. Well, to us, it's very odd. She may be his spouse, but she did not have a key at all to the gate or the office. So that says a lot right there. But that's not the only odd thing. Carol gave this interview to the television show Hard Copy, suggesting Don might have had some kind of dementia. Maybe he doesn't know who he is. Maybe he doesn't know where to call us. But Don's lawyer, Joseph Fritz, says Don had no memory problems.

Absolutely none. Did you see him shortly before he disappeared? I saw him at least every week and sometimes two or three times. And Don's family doesn't believe Carol was really worried about Don, in part because they say weeks after he disappeared, she canceled Don's cell phone account. If a person at the beginning, your husband, you think he has dementia, he's got Alzheimer's, and now he's missing. Do you turn his cell phone off after two or three weeks of him being missing? His only lifeline to reach you?

Yeah. She turned it off. His cell phone was turned off. Three weeks after. Canceled the account. As the weeks turned into months, Carol offered another possibility. As the weeks turned into months, Carol offered another possibility. Instead of Costa Rica, maybe Don was under arrest in Mexico and couldn't call her.

The only place I still haven't looked that I feel somewhat hopeful of being able to find him alive is going to be Mexico. And I don't know how hard or how long that'll take. Maybe a prison? Yeah. 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 me. Don's family began to think the worst, that Don was dead, and that Carol played a role in his death.

What was your first thought? I would love to tell you, but I 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 that that was your first thought? Maybe. Maybe I'd be wrong? Maybe you might be right. And then the case took a turn. Police found Don's van abandoned at a remote airport. The keys were reportedly still in it. Remember, Don had been planning to go to Costa Rica for work. There is the theory that he just got tired of everything and jumped in an airplane and flew to Costa Rica and drove up the mountain and is living happily ever after there.

Don had owned several planes and he loved to fly. Tell me a little bit about this airplane. So it's a Piper Arrow 3. Joe Solon has flown hundreds of hours in one type of plane that Don Lewis liked to fly. You can roughly get about 700 miles to a full tank, the two main tanks full. So if, say, you were going to go from the Tampa area down to Costa Rica, it's not a non-stop flight. No, no. So that's like how many refueling stops? Oh, probably three to four at least. If he did refuel, no one seems to know about it. Besides, Don's family says he would never just take off and leave them. 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 time that he was strangled from the back seat of an airplane with an electric cord pushed out 50 feet over the gulf. Arrow 09 Mike will depart 29, left turn out to the south i'm also a pilot and i fly the same type of plane don often flew first of all imagine the struggle involved in strangling a 170-pound man in this passenger seat. Then, if the plan was to push him out the door, that's a challenge. The slowest this airplane can fly is about 65 miles per hour, and that means winds approaching hurricane strength would be pushing against this door, trying to keep it closed. You'd have to open it, you'd have to keep it open,

and you'd have to somehow wrestle the body out of here without interfering with the flight controls. Bottom line, I guess he could do it, but there are easier ways to get rid of a body. And there was no evidence that any of Don's planes were missing. So if it's unlikely Don Lewis was pushed out of a small airplane, where was he? As the mystery got deeper, the theories got wilder. In the summer of 1997, Carol spoke with the local Fox TV station. I'm very worried. It's just a feeling. But he is okay that he will just walk back in the gate.

But Don never did. And while Carol declined to do an on-camera interview with us, in August she posted videos of herself reading entries of her diary she says she wrote at the time of Don's disappearance. Don has been missing since yesterday morning before Don, which isn't unusual except that he didn't call Anne McQueen all day, and she said she even paged him into the night, and he still did not call her back. According to Carol, Don had a history of vanishing, but she wrote that a deputy did come out to ask her about Don's disappearance in 1997. She wrote, if he knew anything about Don's history, he probably would not have even bothered

to drive out here. After Don disappeared, Carol produced what she said was Don's will and power of attorney, leaving her in charge of everything. But Don's family says his signature on those documents is forged. Would I be wrong in assuming that you believe that Carol was involved in making up the will and the power of attorney? You could be. I could be wrong? You could be right. If she was involved, why would she want to have Don Lewis killed?

M-O-N-E-Y. Money. Of course. That happens all the time in the world we live in today. The first time I met her, she was sort of ethereal almost, gliding through her sanctuary. Leonora LaPeter Anton is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and CBS News consultant. She interviewed Carol for the Tampa Bay Times. She had four handwriting experts examine Don's signature on the power of attorney. All said the signature did not look authentic. Two of them said they felt it was traced from the 1991 marriage license between Don and Carol and that basically they were,

you know, not accurate Don Lewis signatures. But Carol says the signatures were authenticated back in 1997 and they are real. The Tampa Bay Times also looked into Don's former right-hand man, Kenny Farr. Remember, he reportedly helped Carol get into Don's office that day. He was basically a jack-of-all-trades, his right-hand man. And then after Don Lewis disappeared, he went and worked with Carol Baskin. He was driving one of Don's vans, Don's blue van. Trish Farr Payne was married to Kenny for five years. This is her first television interview. She says two days before Don Lewis was reported missing, Farr came home with Don Lewis's van and inside there 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 the closet.

We put them in the little bathroom we had in our room. I was like, whoa, where did you get these? He said, listen, I'm hanging on to these right now for Carol. But he said, Don's gone. And I don't want you talking about him. Did you ask him what he meant by Don's gone? No, not right then, 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 Don had gone missing.

Everything started kind of coming together. Kenny's got Don's van, Kenny's got Don's guns, Don's gone. And I knew Don was gone the day before he supposedly was missing it something wasn't right she says she was too afraid to ask Kenny but it was hard to ignore some very strange things like the large freezer with a padlock that she says appeared on their porch around the time Don disappeared and then then, she says, the freezer vanished. How long after Don disappeared did the freezer disappear? About a week after Don disappeared. But Trish says she waited years to tell police about her suspicions.

I was afraid for my kids. You know, I had my kids. I was afraid for them. I You know, I had my kids. I was afraid for them. I was more afraid for them than anything. She says he made that one threat that was especially frightening and bizarre and maybe revealing. Kenny had threatened to put me in the grinders. He said, if you try to leave me again, I'm going to put you in the grinder like I did Don. I'm sorry, he said what?

if you try to leave me again, I'm going to put you in the grinder like I did Don. I'm sorry, he said what? He said, if you try to leave me again, I will put you in the grinder like I did Don. In a meat grinder? Yeah. Do you remember what you thought when he said that? I thought he was telling the truth. I knew deep down that Kenny has some part in Don's not ever coming back.

I knew then for sure. Three years after Don went missing in the midst of her divorce from Kenny Farr, Trish says she finally told the police everything. Kenny Farr told us this morning Trisha's story is, quote, an outlandish lie, unquote, and that when Don disappeared, he cooperated with police and even took a polygraph. He says, I had absolutely nothing to do with Don's disappearance. The search for Don Lewis seemed to go cold, and things might have stayed that way

if Carroll hadn't picked a fight with a man who called himself the Tiger King. Could Don Lewis have been fed to the tigers? Hear from the former volunteer who used to feed them on Facebook at 48 hours. Hot shot Australian attorney Nicola Gaba was born into legal royalty. Her specialty? Representing some of the city's most infamous gangland criminals. However, while Nicola held the underworld's darkest secrets, the most dangerous secret was her own.

She's going to all the major groups within Melbourne's underworld and she's informing on them all. I'm Marsha Clark, host of the new podcast Informants Lawyer X. In my long career in criminal justice as a prosecutor and defense attorney, I've seen some crazy cases and this one belongs right at the top of the list. She was addicted to the game she had created. She just didn't know how to stop. Now, through dramatic interviews and access, I'll reveal the truth behind one of the world's most shocking legal scandals. Listen to Informant's Lawyer X exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify,

and listen to more Exhibit C true Crime shows early and ad-free right now. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have heard it. It just happens to all of us. I'm journalist Luke Jones and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it,

people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely, Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn trials

exclusively on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You were going to be a fur coat, weren't you, honey? With her husband's whereabouts unknown, Carol Lewis carried on at Wildlife on Easy Street. It is a lot of work. Feeding is one thing that he was always here for. Feeding her big cats and shrugging off rumors that she was behind Don's mysterious disappearance. Hey, Aurora. But with no answers, she was having trouble defending herself. There's no way that I can finally say, see, I didn't do it. I can't do it. On August 19th, 2002, five years to the day Don Lewis was reported missing, Carroll had a judge declare Don dead.

Gradually, the investigation into his whereabouts went cold. She's a good girl. Yes, she is. And Carol soon began dating a man named Jay Bakel. It was not the ideal relationship, says Don's daughter, Donna. He said he was afraid of her. He said he slept with a gun under his pillow. He actually called me and said that we really needed to pursue some type of action against her. In October 2002, Jay took action himself. Like Don, he tried to get an order of protection against Carol, but it was denied. In court papers, he wrote, I honestly fear I am in danger of death

and recounted a story in which he says he asked Carol, What happens if your husband shows up now? And she responded, Dead bodies don't talk. What does that tell you? That she knew that he was dead and not missing. Not surprisingly, Jay and Carol's relationship did not last. Carol soon met a new man, Howard Baskin, and in 2004, they got married in an unusual ceremony on a beach in Florida.

Howard wore like a toga, a tiger pattern toga, and was like a caveman. wore like a toga, a tiger pattern toga, and was like a caveman. 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 her over his shoulder. And then apparently she put a leash around his neck. You know, it's not how I would have done my wedding, but. Carol Lewis became Carol Baskin, and Wildlife on Easy Street got 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 degree, and he sort of brought a business sense to Big Cat Rescue. He brought in, like, a Washington lobbyist. He knew people in the community. He basically was really good at getting donations. Our donations last year alone were up 50 percent.

The organization's mission also changed. There was no more breeding or buying big cats. Our goal is to end the trade in big cats. Carol is an animal rights advocate. We can do it with help from people like you. Someone who believes no one should own a wild cat, not even herself. She spoke about it in a 2018 interview with CBS affiliate WTSP. Our mission is to put ourselves out of business because there shouldn't have to be a place rescuing lions and tigers from people that get them as pets. Carol eventually went after Joseph Schreibvogel. You know him as Joe Exotic, an exotic animal owner in Oklahoma. In 2010, she tried to stop him from taking his baby tigers to shopping malls around the country. Fifty-five dollars total.

Charging money for pictures. Joe fought back. Hey, Carol Baskin, down there at Big Cat Rescue. And tried to take the name of Carol's organization and make it 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 a judge ordered Mr. Exotic to pay Carol nearly $1 million, and that only added more fuel to their feud.

I'm already so goddamn poor I used a file cabinet for my dresser drawers. Joe took to his YouTube channel, Joe Exotic TV, to air his grievances in his own exotic way. Can you believe they spent enough time to build another entire website about me? For Joe, nothing was off limits. Word has it that Carol snuck up on Don in the middle of the night. And he gleefully revived those suspicions about Don Lewis's disappearance. we fully revived those suspicions about Don Lewis's disappearance.

Joe made that music video with a woman who was supposed to be a Carole Baskin lookalike, pushing that unsubstantiated theory that she fed her husband Don to the tigers. Joe's hatred of Carole Baskin started feeding on itself. And you think I'm obsessed with you? And getting more violent. You're a masculine, a better, never, ever see me face to face. He's posted pictures of an effigy of me hanging and pointing a gun to my head. And Joe Exotic may have done more than pretend to kill Carol. A jury finds former Winnie Wood Animal Park owner Joe Exotic guilty.

In 2019, he was convicted of, among other things, hiring a hitman to actually kill her. He got 22 years, but while he's locked away, Carol has aired her suspicions about who might have killed Don. suspicions about who might have killed Don. Take an in-depth look at the timeline of Don Lewis's disappearance at 48hours.com. It might seem peculiar, but even though it was Joe Exotic who went to prison in the Netflix series, many thought Carole Baskin came off as the bad guy. I think there's an argument to be made that Carole Baskin got a very bad cut of the series. And Carole has come under attack from some of that huge Netflix audience. Armchair detectives thought they might be able to solve the mystery

of Don Lewis's disappearance. Who doesn't love solving a good mystery? So there's been renewed interest. There have been a sudden surge of tips that have flooded the sheriff's department in Florida. As the local sheriff, Chad Chronister, sorted through leads, he wondered why someone would just vanish, leaving everything. He says he thinks Don was murdered and more than one person might be involved. This wealthy individual left and left his wealth behind, left his money behind. You know, when's the last time you've ever heard someone leaving without their wealth behind?

But the more bizarre theories about what happened are too much, even for a lawman in Florida. They talked about the meat grinder and that the meat grinders were used to feed the cats and people suspect that's the way it happened and that's why we will never locate him. Well, the meat grinders had been removed from the property, you know, several weeks before his disappearance. Not saying they couldn't have been involved, but they weren't on the property. The sheriff declined to respond in detail to our request for comment about this case,

except to say there are no suspects, and that includes Kenny Farr and Carol Baskin. Is Carol Baskin a suspect right now? She isn't. She isn't. She isn't even a person of interest at this point. We have no evidence to deem her or anyone else equally as important as a suspect in this case. And I'm hoping that the popularity of this Netflix series will change that. Carroll is fighting back against people who suspect her. Just yesterday, she emailed saying Trish Farr Payne's story about Kenny is false. She says he had nothing to do with Don's disappearance and that she gave him Don's guns long after Don vanished. Carol also says that

Trish's description of the meat grinder is, quote, ludicrous and clearly fabricated, unquote. About Don's family's accusations that she canceled Don's cell phone account just weeks after he disappeared, she says that never happened. And she told us regarding the family, quote, they are liars, unquote. And Carol says Don's allegation that she threatened his life is just made up. The judge denied his application saying Don wasn't in any immediate danger. She says she never threatened Don and he only sought a restraining order to stop her from throwing out mountains of odds and ends he had accumulated. And remember that unusual language in a legal document that gave Carol power of attorney. The document referred to Don's possible

disappearance. Carroll says there was good reason to use that word. Don was going to Costa Rica all the time. He would frequently disappear for days on end. About that scene at Don's trailer office, she insists she broke into his office after he disappeared because she was worried things could go missing. And then, just weeks ago on YouTube, Carol, reading from one of those old diary entries, made the startling suggestion that the real person behind Don's disappearance may be Gladys. Carol claims Don told her his ex-wife had tried it before. Gladys Lewis Cross, the kid's mom, had tried to kill Don on at least three occasions that he told me about. Carol says Gladys was angry about Don's constant cheating, and she says Gladys sued Don after the divorce and lost. According to

Carol, Gladys wanted more money, a million dollars more. Could she have been so angry over not getting the million dollars more that she thought she would get that she would kill Don in a last-ditch effort to recover the money she felt he owed her for all of her suffering? And she says Gladys may be trying to frame her. Everybody in his family, says Gladys may be trying to frame her. Everybody in his family, including Miss Gladys, categorically denies having anything or any information about Don Lewis's death, Don Lewis's disappearance, or many of the other lies that Carol Baskin has expressed in her videos. John Phillips is an attorney now representing Don's daughters and Anne McQueen, and they are fed up with Carol Baskin. She's got a forum. She's got the ability to

post daily and have thousands, if not more than thousands of people see it. And she does. And so there's daily lies, daily defamation. Now, Phillips has helped Don's family and Anne McQueen file suit against Carol. He says it's not about money. It's just about getting to the truth. Everybody knows she has information. I mean, you know, more than what she's putting on a two minute video. I mean, that's obvious. There's no preventing her being deposed in the next six to 18 months. If all the attention is hard on Carol, she's made the most of it. Tiger King has made her a queen of social media. Hey, all you cool cats and kittens, it's Carol Baskin. She's been doing what are called cameo birthday greetings with her husband. Celebrities give personalized birthday

greetings for a fee. Here's one Carol did. Go Charlotte, it's your birthday. We're going to party like it's your birthday. Each one costs $299. And you know we don't give a fudge that it's your birthday. Now our own big dogs at CBS Studio are getting in on the action in the big cat world. They're developing a series with Nicolas Cage as Joe Exotic. The one thing all the shows and all the investigations are still missing after all these years is an answer to the question, what happened to Don Lewis? The newest actor in this drama, the lawyer John Phillips, says we will know the answer eventually. The death and disappearance of Don Lewis is a mystery that can be solved. People on earth know. We just appeal to compassion or we'll appeal to the courts of law.

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