"48 Hours Suspicion": The Tiger King Mystery
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[MUSIC PLAYING] We were already living through this stranger than fiction time, and this was a stranger than fiction escape. I care about skin, don't have to get risky. 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. And 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, 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, whereas flower crowns. Hey, are you cool cats and kittens? It's Carol, a 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 was doing is not humane and should be stopped. Joe saw this as an attack on himself, his business. They had a bad cold day in hell before you completely stopped me. And he stopped at nothing to get back. But also woven into the entertainment was this cold case. John Lewis, the owner of Wildlife on Easy Street, disappeared. Carol's second husband, John 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 golf. The plan was to push him out this door. That's a challenge. Then there's the whole Carol Baskin fed him to the tiger's theory that she had her husband ground up and a meat grinder and fed them 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 John Lewis. We had lost all hope of every knowing what happened to Dad.
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Shocking new information in the disappearance of tiger activist Carole Baskin’s former husband Don Lewis. "48 Hours" correspondent Richard Schlesinger investigates.