THE DISAPPEARANCE OF DON LEWIS

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF DON LEWIS A LEGAL ANALYSIS

Hey all you cool cats and kittens! it’s Carole at Big Cat Rescue.

Only kidding, I doubt Carole Baskin would be interested in stopping fighting the rest of the big cat community while trying to pass the Big Cat Public Safety Act to write for The Hilarian. But her story, as told to a quarantined audience of millions in the hit true crime documentary Tiger King, is of great interest to us.

There are many weird and crazy characters in Tiger King. From the absolutely bizarre guntoting, mullet-wearing, gay redneck former US Presidential and Oklahoma Gubernatorial candidate Joe Maldonado-Passage né Schreibvogel (aka Joe Exotic), to real-life Creed Bratton from The Office except he’s not playing a caricature of himself, alleged attempted hitman and bathtub interviewee Allen Glover. However, one person in the documentary has garnered more online hate than all of the others, so much so that even Tony Montana from Scarface’s likely inspiration Mario Tabraue, who ‘sold drugs to fund his animal habit’, seems fearful of her. And that person is, in Joe Exotic’s words, ‘that bitch Carole Baskin down in Florida’.

Carole, along with her husband Howard, run Big Cat Rescue, a wildlife sanctuary for abused animals liberated from dastardly private zoo owners like Joe Exotic so that they can live out their lives in peace and comfort. Only problem is that Big Cat Rescue doesn’t seem very…sanctuary-y. It more resembles the very institutions Carole is trying to shut down by taking on the Washington swamp and Big? Big Cat by passing the Big Cat Public Safety Act. However, beyond the whirlwind of hypocrisy that surrounds Carole Baskin wherever she rides her bike, there is a darkness to her story which is covered by an entire episode of Tiger King: the disappearance of her second husband Don Lewis, potentially by foul play. The facts of the case are murky, but can be narrowed down to these. Carole and Don met when she was fleeing an abusive first marriage. They had an affair while both were still married, and, after divorcing their spouses, opened Wildlife on Easy Street, which later became known as Big Cat Rescue. Along with wildlife conservation, two of Don’s other passions were aviation (even if there was the small matter of his pilot’s license being suspended) and trips down to Costa Rica, where Carole alleges he had multiple affairs. After several years of marriage, Carole claims that Don exhibited some strange behaviour, such as rummaging through dumpsters, symptoms of what she believed to be Alzheimer’s Disease.

It was around this time that Don gave his endurable power-of-attorney to Carole ‘in the event of his disability or disappearance’, as well as booking another trip down to Costa Rica. While the use of ‘disappearance’ in the powerof-attorney documents may look in hindsight a little suss to say the least, it is apparently not an isolated usage of the term, even if Don’s lawyer, Joe Fritz, had not seen the usage of the term in 37 years of practice. However, at this time Don also filed a restraining order against Carole which was subsequently rejected. In it, Don claimed Carole had threatened to kill him and hidden his gun so that he couldn’t protect himself. Amid many other stories told of Don wanting to divorce Carole, the remaining known facts are that Don disappeared on the 18th of August 1997 and hasn’t been seen since. He was declared legally dead in 2002, with much of his multi-million-dollar estate going to Carole after a protracted legal battle with Don’s children. The case remains open as of the time of writing and, with the immense popularity of the documentary, authorities are calling on anyone with new information to come forward.

So, like a suitcase containing a tiger cub in one of Jeff Lowe’s seedy Vegas hotel rooms, there’s a lot to unpack here. Carole’s enemies in the Big Cat community such as Joe Exotic have variously alleged Carole killed Don for his money and other more defamatory reasons, and have variously alleged that Carole ground up Don’s body in a meatgrinder and fed him to the tigers, or that he’s buried under Big Cat Rescue’s septic tank. Don’s first wife and children, who understandably have beef with Carole, also believe he met his demise by Carole’s hand. Don’s secretary Anne McQueen, a partial beneficiary of Don’s estate, who describes herself as ‘probably the only woman he never fooled around with. I used to say it was the only time in my life that I was glad I was short and fat.’, also doubts that Don simply vanished off the face of the earth, and that Carole may have been involved. It is worth noting however that McQueen has been accused of absconding with approximately $600,000 worth of Don’s assets. Joe Fritz believes that there was foul play involved in Don’s disappearance. When asked who he thought might be involved, he simply replied, ‘won’t go there’. It’s also worth pointing out that Fritz’s somewhat tenuous relationship with attorney-client privilege given he divulged the contents of conversations between himself and Don might warrant enrolment in Stubbsy’s Foundations of Law class.

One piece of circumstantial evidence that has made up the minds of many about Carole’s involvement in Don’s disappearance is her surprising amount of knowledge about what foodstuffs cause tigers to attack humans. In the context of Joe Exotic believing that someone had smeared his shoes with a substance that caused him to be attacked by one of his tigers, she laughs off this notion, while casually throwing out the line, ‘If someone wanted a cat to eat you they’d pour sardine oil on you’. This line, followed by one of Carole’s trademark dead-eyed, Manson Girl-esque laughs, while not necessarily being directly related to Don’s disappearance, is chilling nonetheless.

The body in charge of investigating Don’s disappearance, the Hillsborough County Sherriff’s Department, found no signs of foul play at either Wildlife on Easy Street or Don’s property in Costa Rica. Since the airing of the documentary, County Sherriff Chad Chronister has had multiple tips, and, despite his view that the documentary was ‘spun’ for entertainment and the fact that the authorities have ‘not one piece [of evidence]’ that foul play was involved in Lewis’s disappearance, is calling on the public to provide his team with legitimate leads on Lewis’s disappearance, a fair request now that everyone who’s watched Tiger King at least has a theory.

My own view is that Don Lewis made a lot of enemies during his life, and the disappearance of a multi-millionaire big cat conservationist leads me to believe that on the facts, it is not beyond reasonable doubt that he met with foul play. As to the perpetrator of this foul play, I’ll take a leaf out of Joe Fritz’s book, and say ‘won’t go there’. All I can say is that in my view, there is an extremely fine line between the behaviour of Carole Baskin and Joe Exotic and others she targets, and that overall, it is the animals who are hurt by all the murder, mayhem and madness. With the soaring popularity of Tiger King, it is my hope that this last fact is the one that is finally changed.

P.S. If you’ve seen the documentary / can’t be stuffed watching it, look up Joe Exotic’s song Here Kitty Kitty on YouTube about Don’s disappearance which he ~definitely~ sung himself for a crystallisation of his views on the matter. Regardless of the song’s actual content, it is unequivocally a banger with a Grammyworthy music video (seriously, how did he find that good of a Carole Baskin lookalike??).

By Will Broderick