TAMPA, Fla. _ Last weekend, a boat with cadaver dogs and sonar puttered around a small lake in Seffner, searching for the body of Tampa multimillionaire Don Lewis.
The search was organized by a group devoted to solving his disappearance.
Video of the search, posted to Facebook, showed a black German shepherd barking animatedly in the middle of the lake as a crew filmed for Netflix. But divers plumbed the murky brown water and didn't find anything.
It's been about three months since "Tiger King" lured 64 million households into the Lewis mystery. The eight-part Netflix series contained Lewis' story mostly to one divergent episode in the larger epic of zookeeper Joe Exotic and his yearslong feud with the missing man's former wife.
Now a long-dormant police investigation has sprung to life, as journalists, TV crews and amateur sleuths from across the country travel to Tampa, publicly pursuing leads and theories they believe investigators may have missed or discounted two decades ago.
People are being re-interviewed, documents re-examined, and one potential witness who spoke to the Tampa Bay Times is telling her story publicly for the first time.
After bingeing "Tiger King," Chad Chronister, the third Hillsborough County sheriff in office since Lewis disappeared in 1997, reviewed the case files and assigned new deputies to investigate.
The sheriff called for tips via a series of national interviews, including with People magazine and Fox News host Nancy Grace. He told Grace he was getting "good leads" after "Tiger King," which resurfaced old rumors about industrial meat grinders and septic tanks and Carole Baskin, best known locally as CEO of Tampa's Big Cat Rescue animal sanctuary.
Baskin, 59, has always denied involvement in her former husband's disappearance. She said "Tiger King" is full of "unsavory lies" from untrustworthy people.
Chronister declined interview requests from the Times, but he has repeatedly said publicly the Sheriff's Office has no evidence to consider Baskin or anyone a suspect. He does believe Lewis was murdered in a "sophisticated plan" that involved staging Lewis' van at an airport.
"I'm extremely suspicious, but not just of her, of this whole circle here," Chronister told TMZ. "There's normally not one person that commits a homicide. There's always a couple people."
The Sheriff's Office won't release records from its investigation, aside from a heavily redacted version of the original missing persons report, citing an exemption in Florida public records law for open cases. With no statute of limitations on murder, it's possible the agency could label it "open" forever.
Some believe making those case files public could lead to breakthroughs.
"I've seen it over and over again," said author Jerry Mitchell, a MacArthur genius grant recipient whose investigative reporting helped solve decades-old cold cases of murderous Klansmen and a serial killer. He's traveled to Tampa from Mississippi twice since "Tiger King." "When these reports become available to fresh eyes, you can go down some trails you wouldn't otherwise be able to go down."
Chronister has said the original investigation did not turn up any physical evidence, only a byzantine loop of dead ends and conflicting stories from Tampa to Costa Rica.
