Tiger King star Jeff Lowe has claimed that he received an anonymous letter detailing what happened to Carole Baskin’s husband.
Netflix’s documentary series about big cat owners in the US told the story of the titular “Tiger King” Joe Exotic and his rivalry with animal rights activist Baskin.
One episode of the show, which was released in March 2020, focused on the mystery surrounding Baskin’s second husband Don Lewis, who went missing in 1997.
While Exotic and his companions claimed that Baskin was involved in Lewis’s death, she has repeatedly denied this and is not a person of interest in the still-open case.
Speaking toTMZ, Lowe has now claimed that a handwritten note was posted to the Tiger King Park in Oklahoma in May 2020 without a name or return address, although its postmark shows it was sent from Rhode Island.
The letter simply reads: “The corpse lies under Her House” and is signed by “The Faithful Witness”, leading him to suggest that Lewis’s body is beneath Baskin’s home.
Baskin’s representatives said in a statement to The Independent: “People who abuse big cats have never been able to justify their practice so their only recourse is to divert attention by lying to the media.
“I’m surprised, and saddened, that it usually works for them because the press will capitalise on the sensational headlines without doing any real research.”
Lowe and his wife Lauren told TMZ that they were speaking with a federal agent about the letter.
Lauren said that she informed law enforcement in Florida’s Hillsborough County, where Lewis went missing, about the letter. However, she said that Lowe refused to hand the letter over after producers on the Tiger King sequel advised he kept it.
Baskin has previously said that she felt Netflix had betrayed her by using Tiger King to focus on her “feud” with Exotic and the allegations against her rather than the animals, claiming that the show’s producers had told her that Exotic would feature in only “five minutes” of the documentary.
