The Missing Millionaire: A "Tiger King" Mystery | Full Episode | Forensic Files

[Music] You believe he was killed, correct? Uh, yes. My name is Alex Spyro. I'm a former
prosecutor and I'm an attorney and I'm investigating the disappearance of Don Lewis.
There's witnesses and information that shed light on further facts and circumstances surrounding this. Have you
met these witnesses? Yes. And you believe them? Yes. There are new leads in this strange case of missing
millionaire Don Lewis, a man who seemed to vanish without a trace. We had lost all hope of ever knowing what happened
to dad. And then they got some hope from a TV series. Tiger King was an addictive Netflix
documentary series. I'm Julie Miller. I'm the senior feature writer for Vanity Fair. Tiger King centers around Joe
Exotic. My name is Joe Exotic and this is Sergeant, an Oklahoma based animal cat owner and his sworn enemy, his
rival, Carol Baskin. talking about a woman down there in Tampa, Florida named Carol Baskin. Joe Exotic is this wild,
cartoonish, flamboyant, openly gay, mulleted, tattooed, guntoad thing, large animal owner. Kind of the Mcjagger, I'd
say, of the large cat animal world. 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. It'll be a cold day
in hell before you completely stop me. But also woven into this entertainment uh 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. The most insane theory probably being that Carol Baskin had her husband ground
up in a meat grinder and fed him to the animals. Word has it that Carol snuck up
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
sounds, this woman believes her ex-husband, who once worked for Don and Carol, may have revealed something about
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
meat grinder." Yeah. Her ex-husband denies her story. Do you believe her husband told her that he'd put her in a
meat grinder the way he did to Dawn? I will tell you that there is certain information she's provided that has been
independently corroborated. Who would you like to interview the most? Carol Baskin. I didn't kill Don. People want
answers. They want to know what happened to Don Lewis. Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music]
[Laughter] Like it or not, the Tiger King Joe Exotic is back along with his archeneemy
Carol Baskin. I'm talking about a woman down there in Tampa, Florida named Carol
Baskin. Lots has happened to these two since we last heard from them. Netflix came out with a second season of its
Tiger King series. When you think you've seen it all, you haven't quite seen it all. Carol Baskin vented on a celebrity
webcast called Hollywood Raw. I really feel like this is going to be just another horrible year of people having
the wrong idea about who I am and what I'm trying to do. Carol Baskin began getting all that attention when she 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 Carol murdered her husband, Don Lewis. Oh, here
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? The show even lit a fire under the local sheriff's department. We reintered
everybody and have looked at new evidence and continue to investigate. Investigators say only two people have
declined to be interviewed by law enforcement. One of them is Carol Baskin. Carol is considered a suspect
and a person of interest. It was 40 years ago that Carol first became a person of interest to Don
Lewis. Like so many Florida stories, theirs begins like a pulp fiction novel that 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, Glattis. We had
had an argument and he left home and uh 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 um 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 with Carol and took her to a hotel or a
motel. Yes. Wow. 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 Glattis. She was just 13 when he noticed her shopping with her
mother. And I looked up and I thought, "Woo, 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, Glattis 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 Anne McQueen.
Don took somebody with an eighth grade education and taught them how to manage a multi-million dollar business and kept
the books and helped run things. And they were quite a team. Eventually, Don was worth, according to his lawyer,
between five and 10 million. 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 Glattis raised a family. Their three daughters, Linda, Donna, and Gail, remember their childhoods as happy. He
was home every night. Um, 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. So, 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 Dons's women. And not just their mother, Glattis. 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. 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? Uh, if you're talking about the whole 34 years I was married to him or 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 uh to live in that situation or let it drive you crazy. Glattis 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 um she was just like the other 25, but um 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 Glattis 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,
them all over him, and him playing with them like 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 ran
by 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 business.
I find it hard to believe he'd walk away in these things. [Music] [Music] 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 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 um her answer to me was no that she hadn't seen him since um the
day before. And she asked me if I thought that she should call the police. And I think I made a smart eloic 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. And Don's daughter, Donna, had sensed trouble between the two. He
thought she was crazy. Crazy. Mhm. He didn't um 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 [Music] them. He had 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 a safe place." He either said, "Take it to the police or you'll know what to
do with it um if anything ever happens." I took her home. I didn't think anything
about it. But after Don went missing, Anne says she opened the envelope. He was asking
the judge um 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 he she
threatened to kill him? I started shaking. Did you actually start shaking? I'm shaking now.
An 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. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Carol got in with help from her father
and Don's handyman, a man named Kenny Far. 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, but Don's daughters were suspicious. Well, to us,
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
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. 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 cancelled 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. Three weeks after cancelled the account. 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. I mean, you think 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. Uh so it's a Piper A3. Joe Solen 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. Uh the two two main tanks full. Um I know. So if say
you were going to go from the Tampa area down to Costa Rica, it's not a non-stop
flight. Uh no. No. So that's like how many refueling stops? Oh, probably three to four at least. Yeah. 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 backseat of an airplane with an electric cord and pushed out 50 ft over the Gulf.
Arrow09 Michael, 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 170lb 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 mph. 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 they're 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. What were some of those theories or rumors? Someone said he was under a septic tank on
BigCat Rescue. In the summer of 1997, Carol spoke with the local Fox TV station. I'm very
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
in the 21st century to go missing missing as a middle-aged man who has a very active cellular records, banking
records, etc. Alex Spyro is an attorney and a former New York City prosecutor. He's now working for Don Lewis's
daughters. Well, there were all sorts of um theories about what might have happened to Don.
One of them was that he was tossed out of an airplane. Do you find that credible? Sometimes in high-profile
cases, people come up with fancul theories of, you know, tigers, lions, bears, and airplanes. I mean, there's
usually a simpler explanation of things. Spyro says the simplest thing of all is
to start with the timeline of the day Lewis disappeared. There's a critical window here where Don Lewis went
missing. And what really matters and where the where the rubber meets the road is what happened during those 24
hours. So what happened during those 24 hours? Carol says she last saw Don Lewis
early in the morning of August 18th, 1997 when she came home from running a late night errand. She would not talk to
us in person this time, so she sent us a couple of diary entries. Leonora Le Peter Anton is a Pulitzer Prize-winning
reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and a CBS consultant. And one of them was the what what she did that night, the
Sunday, August 17th, 1997. Carol says that late that Sunday night before Don went missing, she needed milk
and supplies for her wild cats. At 11:00, you know, she had these kittens that were in the house. There was a
bobcat kitten and two caracle kittens and um she didn't have enough ingredients for the milk. In her
diaries, Carol says she left Dawn and drove to a supermarket about 6 miles away, but the store was closed. And then
the story takes another twist. She says her car broke down. Carol says she walked all the way home. It took her
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
morning, they went back. He got the radiator cap off, put water in it, and then they drove
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
she saw him. Don's ex-wife has her doubts about that story. I don't think she was going to
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?
Could be. What happened next has raised even more suspicions. 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 these wills, 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? Money, of course.
That happens all the time. The world we live in today. Leonora Le Peter Anton had four
handwriting experts examined 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. um and that that basically they were, you know, not accurate Don Lewis
signatures. But Carol says the signatures were authenticated back in 1997 and are
real. The Tampa Bay Times also looked into Don's former right-hand man, Kenny Far. Remember, he reportedly helped
Carol get into Don's office that day. He was basically his 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 Far Payne was married to Kenny for 5 years. In her first ever TV interview, she told
48 Hours that two days before Don Lewis was reported missing, Farre 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 I'm I'm hanging on to these right now for Carol, but uh" he said, "Don's
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.
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. Uh,
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, she
says the freezer vanished. How long after Dawn disappeared did the freezer disappear? About a week after
Don disappear. 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 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 grinder. He said, "If you try to leave me again,
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,
I will put you in the grinder like I did Dawn." In a meat grinder. Yeah. 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. My goodness.
So, you you sort of thought at that point that you were living with a murderer. Yeah.
3 years after Don went missing in the midst of her divorce from Kenny Farre, Trish says she finally told the police
everything. Kenny Farre wouldn't talk to 48 hours on camera, but told us Trish's
story is, as he put it, a outlandish lie. He says, "I had absolutely nothing to do with Don's disappearance." Farre
also says he cooperated with police at the time of Don's disappearance and even took a
polygraph. Now, attorney Alex Spyro says he's found some new witnesses. Have you
met these witnesses? Yes. And you believe them? Yes. He said, "If you try to leave me again,
I will put you in the grinder like I did Dawn." Do you consider Trish Far Payne credible? Yes. Attorney Alex Spyro has
been investigating the disappearance of Don Lewis for months. He doesn't want to
say much because his investigation is still going on, but he will say there's been some progress. Has there been a new
witness who surfaced who can shed significant light on what happened or corroborate Trish Far Payne's version of
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
lot closer to figuring out what happened than many people might know. I like to think I'm closer to figuring out what
happened than many people would know. Yes. The obvious question is, what about Carol
Baskin? You were going to be a fur coat, weren't you, honey? After Dawn's disappearance in 1997, Carol Lewis
carried on at her sanctuary, Wildlife on Easy Street. It is a lot of work. Um, feeding is one thing that he was always
here for. On August 19th, 2002, 5 years to the day Don Lewis was reported missing, Carol
had a judge declare Don dead. Gradually, the investigation into his whereabouts went cold. She's a good
girl. Yes, she is. In 2004, Carol got married again. This time to Howard Baskin, a businessman. And the ceremony
was unusual even by Florida standards. Perhaps Howard wore like a toga, a tiger patterned 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%. 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
Maldonado Passage. 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. Charging money for pictures. Joe fought
back. Hey, Carol Baskin down there at BigCat 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
damn poor. I use a file cabinet from my dresser drawer. 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. Joe made that music video with a woman who was
supposed to be a Carol Baskin lookalike, pushing that unsubstantiated theory that
she fed her husband Dawn to the Tigers. Joe's hatred of Carol Baskin started feeding on itself. And you think
I'm obsessed with you and getting more violent. Carol Baskin better never ever see me face to face. He's posted
pictures of an epige 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 Winniewood 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. Meanwhile, Carol had a new theory
about who might be responsible for her ex-husband's disappearance. 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.
In January 2021, then President Donald Trump held the keys to Joe Exotic's prison cell. His legal team hoped for a
full presidential pardon. I think we're going to get the pardon. I do. I'm 100% sure. A very stretched limo waited near
his federal prison, ready to whisk the Tiger King away from captivity. But the limo left empty. There was no
pardon. Joe Exotic's case is closed, but Florida Sheriff Chad Kronister still doesn't know what happened to Don Lewis.
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 law man in Florida. They talked about the meat grinder and that the meat grinders were used to feed the cats.
Well, the meat grinders had been removed from the property, you know, several weeks before his his disappearance. Not
saying they couldn't have been involved, but they weren't on the property. With all those uncertainties and those
millions of Tiger King viewers demanding answers, the sheriff ordered his team to
take a new look at the case. As a result of Tiger King, we contacted and followed
up on well over 200 leads. Moses Garcia is a homicide detective for Hillsboro County. He says all those tips didn't
help much. A large amount of those were virtually useless. And Garcia says some of his efforts at investigation have
been blocked by Carol. In the first Tiger King, there were some rumors that came out that Don Lewis was buried in a
septic tank or underneath a septic tank on the property. Um, we wanted to go onto the property and kind of look
around, but we were not allowed access. It is frustrating. I'd like to get on that property and look around a little
bit. The detectives also say they've been unable to interview Carol Baskin. She does a lot of interviews where she
says that the sheriff's office has not even approached her. That can be very frustrating when you know you've
approached multiple times and you've been told no. Most missing persons, wives, spouses, they cooperate with the
law enforcement. Carol's alleged lack of recent cooperation does seem to have increased the sheriff's focus on her.
The only people that have refused to be interviewed has been Carol Baskin and Kenny Far. In an interview with TMZ,
Carol said since Don went missing, she has released scores of documents and done many interviews. TMZ reports Carol
said she has nothing new to tell detectives and is declining to speak to investigator Garcia on advice of her
lawyer, but she did email us saying Trish Far Payne's story about Kenny is false. She called Trish's description of
the meat grinder quote ludicrous and clearly fabricated unquote. And as for Don's family's accusations that she
canled Don's cell phone 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 stuff he'd
accumulated. But Carol says she may know who did threaten Don. It's an explosive
allegation. Carol says it's Glattis, Don's ex-wife, who might be the real villain. According to Carol, Glattis was
angry over a lawsuit she filed against Don after their divorce. She sued him for a million dollars, but Glattis lost.
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 lastditch effort to recover the money she felt he owed her for all of her suffering? The Lewis
family's new attorney, Alex Spyro, says that's nonsense. I have seen no credible
evidence that the Lewis family has anything to do with Don Lewis's disappearance.
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
Dancing with the Stars. Tyra Banks introduced her. Carol Basket. [Applause] [Music]
And she's come out with a documentary on the streaming channel Discovery Plus. Carol Baskin's cage fight.
You're abusing big cats. I'm coming for you. As for the Don Lewis case, his family is
still hopeful. And they say after more than 20 years, the publicity around Tiger King has changed everything with
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
one of those angels? He might be leading the whole band. [Music] 48 hours. Don't miss an episode.
[Music]

A look into the disappearance of Carole Baskin's husband. Famed lawyer investigates "meat grinder" theory. "48 Hours" correspondent Richard Schlesinger reports. Watch more full episodes of "48 Hours" on Pluto TV.

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Brief Summary

The episode investigates the disappearance of Don Lewis, featuring insights from attorney Alex Spyro and Vanity Fair's Julie Miller about Carol Baskin and Joe Exotic.

Key points

The Disappearance of Don Lewis. Don Lewis vanished under mysterious circumstances in 1997, leaving behind a tangled web of theories.
Carol Baskin's Allegations. Joe Exotic accused Carol Baskin of murdering her husband and feeding him to tigers.
A Troubled Marriage. Don and Carol's marriage was fraught with tension and financial disputes before his disappearance.
The Mysterious Envelope. Just months before his disappearance, Don gave Anne a sealed envelope with a troubling message.
Carol's Changing Stories. After Don's disappearance, Carol suggested he might have dementia, raising suspicions among his family.
The Forged Will. After Don's disappearance, Carol produced a will that his family claims is forged.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It'll be a cold day in hell before you completely stop me.

Carol Baskin's defiance against Joe Exotic.

1:45WatchAug 12, 2025

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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