Tiger King star Carole Baskin’s missing husband was strangled and thrown from a plane, his lawyer has claimed in an astonishing interview.
Netflix fans have been gripped by the hit documentary series Tiger King which focused on the rise and fall of zoo owner Joe Exotic, aka 57-year-old Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage.
The show chronicled Joe’s downfall – including his apparent plan to have animal rights activist Carole Baskin, 58, murdered, seemingly as revenge for the fact she campaigned to have his zoo closed.
However, viewers were also fascinated by Carole’s own mysterious past and that of her missing millionaire ex-husband Don Lewis, who went missing on 18 August 1997 aged 59, and Carole subsequently inherited his fortune.
Now Don’s lawyer, Joseph Fritz, has shared a theory of his own about what happened to the missing millionaire – and he is convinced foul play was involved.
Speaking to US news host Nancy Grace, Joseph said: “There's no question but that he was murdered.”
Joseph claims Don was too attached to the wildlife on his land to have ever abandoned them.
“He loved those cats. He never would have just walked away from them, ever. He wouldn't have done it. He was proud of those cats, he loved his cats, some force made him leave,” he said on the Fox Nation series A Tiger King Investigation with Nancy Grace.
The lawyer also suggested he thinks someone knows more about Don’s disappearance than they have already revealed.
He said: “I don't know who is a murderer and who is not a murderer, but I know who is a liar. And I can definitively state that that somebody is lying about it.”
Explaining his own “working theory” about what could have happened to Don, Joseph suggests the millionaire was lured to an airfield under the pretence of being sold an aircraft on the cheap.
Joseph said: ”Don Lewis, he was terribly cheap while he was very wealthy. He was cheap beyond belief.”
He continued: ”What would have lured him more than anything else is a good deal on an airplane. So that's what I assume happened, that he got lured up to the Pilot Country Estates to look at an airplane.”
He speculated: "What I had heard was that he was strangled from the backseat of an airplane over the Gulf [of Mexico] at 50 feet and dropped out over the Gulf.”
Meanwhile, Carole herself has released a statement rejecting the way she was depicted in the Netflix documentary and how the details of her ex-husband’s disappearance was presented in the show.
She wrote in a statement: “When the directors of the Netflix documentary Tiger King came to us five years ago they said they wanted to make the big cat version of Blackfish (the documentary that exposed abuse at SeaWorld) that would expose the misery caused by the rampant breeding of big cat cubs for cub petting exploitation and the awful life the cats lead in roadside zoos and back yards if they survive.”
She slammed the documentary as” “lies and innuendos from people who are not credible” and claimed she feared Don had developed Alzheimer's and had arranged for him to see a specialist.
She claimed: "I rescheduled an appointment for him to see the specialist Dr. Gold. But he disappeared before the appointment date.”
