The Disappearance of Don Lewis

Don Lewis was a self made man, who grew a small empire from nothing to millions in the trucking, real estate, and used car industries. He met and married Carole Baskin, and the two started Wildlife on Easy Street, which would later become Big Cat Rescue. In 1997, Don disappeared and has been missing ever since. As soon as she was able to, Carole had him declared legally dead. The rumors and accusations have followed her since Don’s disappearance, culminating with the Netflix docuseries “Tiger King,” and Joe Exotic.

Jack Donald Lewis

Jack Donald “Don” Lewis, was born April 30, 1938 in Dade City, Florida. There is almost no information about his parents and childhood, but we do know that Don was raised by a single mother who worked as a tailor to make ends meet. Don grew up poor so after he graduated from the University of Georgia, he began building his empire.

As a native Floridian, Don stayed local and made millions in trucking, real estate and used cars.

But before his business ventures made him a millionaire, he got married super young. In 1955 at the tender age of 17, Don married Gladys who was at the even more tender age of 14. During their marriage, Don and Gladys had 3 daughters; Gale, Lynda, and Donna.

Don Meets Carole

In 1981, Don met Carole Stairs Jones Murdock…whatever…

Carole said that the two met when Don was driving and saw her walking down the road after a terrible fight with her current husband, Michael Murdock. After passing her once, Don drove back by but this time stopped. He had a gun on his passenger seat and told Carole that she could hold it on him, but that he’d really just like her to talk to him. Carole did.

Despite them both being married, they began an affair. It was suggested that Carole was actually just one of many women that Don was seeing on the side. Carole began helping Don sell real estate in 1984 and by 1991, the two had divorced their current spouses and married each other. Don and Gladys had been married for 30 years at that point.

Carole’s site, “Refuting Tiger King” states that Gladys demanded a divorce in 1989, so she could marry another man from church. In getting that divorce, Gladys agreed to settle for one million dollars. Then in 1996, she sued him for more. Carole even linked the court documents. (CASE NUMBER: 95-DR-005258 CROSS;GLADYS L VS LEWIS;JACK DONALD)

Carole’s site also says that when she met Don, his business involved cutting axles off trailers and selling them back to Great Dane. She claims that Don was not a millionaire when she met him, but he was worth six figures. However, Carole basically says this didn’t mean he was “rich,” but since he came from nothing, he felt rich? She says that no records have come forward saying that he was worth more than six figures.

She goes on to say this about how Don got not-rich:

“One day at the bank he overheard a bank officer say he had a $20,000 loan in default he would be glad to sell for $2,000. He got the information and, because he could not read beyond a first-grade level, asked me to look into it. In brief, we bought the loan, foreclosed, and sold the property for a substantial profit. That is what got us into the real estate business. We started buying defaulted loans from banks and going to tax deed sales. This was before this became a popular business. There were few people doing it.

With me doing the research, negotiations, and title clearing on the properties, we built this to a portfolio of properties to rent or resell that was worth around $5 million dollars at the time of his disappearance. We kept the properties in trusts. During the roughly ten years we were partners before his divorce and our marriage there were properties we bought together and some Don bought on his own or with another woman, Pam.

When we married I put all of those I had not worked on into one trust. The ones from our joint efforts were kept in a separate trust. The trust holding the properties I was not involved in was set up with his children as beneficiaries if he passed and called the PRSL Land Trust. I was the beneficiary of the trust holding the properties I was involved in. Anyone can search his name in the public records from 1950 – 1997 to see this is true.”

In 1992, Don and Carole bought land in Tampa and founded Wildlife on Easy Street as a sanctuary for big cats. Don’s business mind wanted to use this place to breed these big cats, but Carole wanted it to be the sanctuary it claimed to be to save these animals. Their disagreement over how to manage the “sanctuary” was not the only source of contention in their marriage. According to Carole, Don was quite the horndog. Carole said that Don frequently ran off to Costa Rica for some nookie. Specifically during Carole’s time of the month. Don was the kind of business man who wore jeans and carried around buttloads of cash. For the times when he was walking around and saw a plane he wanted to buy.

Carole also claimed that in the time before his disappearance, Don’s mental health was beginning to decline. According to one article, in his prime, Don was a guy who could mentally compute tax on things quicker than most people could get out their calculator. However, Carole claims that Don was starting to dumpster dive and just collect crap and nonsensical, useless things. She claimed he was losing his memory and even thought he might be in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. Carole even said that once, Don was dumpster diving and got stuck in the dumpster. She said that he called her crying and looking for help because he didn’t know where he was.

Friends and family who saw Don in this time don’t agree with this description of him. Both his lawyer, Joseph Fritz and his former business associate, Wendell Williams called Carole’s claim of mental deterioration bullshit. They both said that Don was completely lucid and oriented to time and place. Williams put forth the idea that Carole was doing this kind of character assasination to lay the foundation for what was to come.

In July of 1997, Don filed for a restraining order against Carole stating that she threatened to kill him and then hid his guns from him. Carole’s side was that he filed it because he got mad when she would get rid of the junk he’d been collecting when he would take his Costa Rica trips. The request for a restraining order was rejected because of “freedom of speech.” Don and Gladys’s daughter, Gale doesn’t believe that Don would have gone to the police unless he truly felt like he was in danger.

Another wildlife sanctuary owner, Mark McCarthy said that Don had expressed concern for his safety to him in the months prior to his disappearance. According to Don’s first wife, Gladys, Don wanted a divorce from Carole, but Carole said she didn’t take him seriously and it never happened.

Don Disappears

Two months later, on Sunday, August 17th, 1997, Don told Carole that he had to wake up “early, early, early” the next morning to head out on his next trip.

On Monday, August 18th, Carole said that Don left the house around 6:00 am. Don was never seen again. He was supposed to take some real estate signs to his lawyer’s office. The signs were dropped off at the office, but it was before anyone arrived so no one was there to see who actually dropped off the signs. After encouragement from Don’s first wife and daughters, Carole reported him missing the next day (August 19th, 1997).

On August 20th, Don’s 1989 Dodge Ram Van was discovered 40 miles away at Pilot Country Airport in Springhill, Florida. The van had been there for a couple of days parked between some planes and highway 52 (according to one article) and the keys were found inside on the floorboard. The van was brought back to Easy Street and then was later tested for evidence. There might have been evidence, but the van had sat for days at Easy Street before it was examined and no evidence was found.

On August 23rd, Carole was asked to take a polygraph, which she refused after her attorney advised against it. Carole’s legal team supposedly didn’t want her cooperating with the police as much as Carole wanted to. She told the Tampa Bay Times that if this were up to her, she’d let the police snoop around wherever, including the meat freezers.

Wildlife on Easy Street was eventually searched, but no evidence of foul play was found. On December 7, 1998, Don’s daughters publicly called out Carole. They told People magazine that they believed she killed him.

During their investigation, police discovered that 2 ocelots were sold from Don’s Costa Rica property about a month after he disappeared. The police were unable to find out where the ocelots were shipped or who shipped them. Carole also made numerous attempts to prove that Don was still alive or that he died in another way that did not involve her.

Carole claimed that Don’s attorney in Costa Rica told her that Don had been giving money to a local organized crime gang known as the “Helicopter Brothers.” Carole also claimed that the caretaker of the Costa Rica property told her that Don had been seen there after he “disappeared.” The sheriff’s office also said that there was a theory about an insurance scam. The sheriff’s office even went to Costa Rica to investigate reported sightings of Don. Still no sign of Don.

In order to have a person declared legally dead, you have to wait until they have been missing for 5 years. 5 years and one day after Don was last seen, Carole had him declared legally dead. Don was last seen on August 18th, 1997 and was declared legally dead on August 19, 2002. Once he’s declared dead, Carole can finally access his will (which she is the executor of) and everything else. Carole later remarried to Howard Baskin, and they now run Big Cat Rescue on the same land.

In 2011, Carole was asked again to take a polygraph, but again, she refused.

Don’s disappearance has been a dark cloud over Carole for many years and recently the case has picked up some steam due to public interest in a little show called Tiger King.

The Resurgence

During the great pandemic of 2020, people were trapped at home for MONTHS on end. So, on March 20th, Netflix blessed us all with the majesty that is Tiger King. In the Netflix series, Carole’s dark cloud of suspicion gets darker when other big cat folk start pointing fingers at her.

Specifically, Joe Exotic became obsessed with Carole and bringing her down in all the ways he could. He brought up Carole’s missing husband and his theories about what really happened to the documentary crew as well as on his personal TV show. Joe and other big cat people suggested that perhaps Carole fed him to the tigers on their property, and Joe suggested that Don could be in the septic tank on the property.

The court of social media jumped on this scandal and pumped out meme after meme about Carole feeding Don to the cats.

With public interest at a peak, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office decided that there should be more investigation into the disappearance of Don Lewis. Carole was once again under the microscope.

Joseph Fritz, suggested that perhaps Don went to look at a plane he wanted to buy and was pushed out of the plane. Carole, surprisingly, does not agree with this theory.

She agrees that it’s possible that Don was looking at a plane that morning, but that it was more likely that the plane crashed in the Gulf of Mexico. Carole brings up that Don had once had a pilot’s license, but that it was revoked after he crashed multiple times (3 times). She says that, because his license was revoked Don continued to fly under the radar, literally, and not report his flights. She proposed that he tried to fly the plane somewhere (possibly Costa Rica) and crashed OR that he made it there, but couldn’t be tracked because it was an unreported flight.

That dog ain’t gonna hunt though, because one of those small planes would never have made it to Costa Rica on one tank of gas. Don would have had to refill multiple times which would have left a trace or more sightings.

Joe Exotic’s theory (and the theory of many others) that Carole killed Don and fed him to the tigers became the most popular (and most likely) scenario. So many people in the Tiger King documentary and around the world think that Carole chopped him up and fed him to the tigers or possibly put him through the meat grinder.

Don’s daughters and ex-wife believe that the meat grinder on Carole’s property should have been tested for DNA. Carole thinks it’s absurd that they think he’d fit in their meat grinder which was apparently not big enough for his arm to go through. She claimed that in the meat grinder they had, you’d have to cut meat up into 1-inch cubes. At other times, Carole made comments that made it seem like she may know more about how to dispose of a body. Things like suggesting that “sardine oil” is what you’d use to entice a big cat.

Joe Exotic’s suggestion that Carole hid Don in the septic tank was also unfounded and kind of impossible since the septic tank wasn’t installed on the grounds until about 10 years after Don’s disappearance. Either way, people believe that the motive Carole would have for murder is obviously, money and control of the sanctuary. With Don gone, Carole got to decide what the sanctuary will and will not do. She decided they would no longer breed big cats and changed the name from Wildlife on Easy Street to Big Cat Rescue. Their new mission was to stop cub-breeding and rescue big cats from other places that did breed.

In the Tiger King docuseries, Anne MacQueen, Don’s assistant, was interviewed. In the interviews, she claimed that Don left her with documents that were given to her specifically to hold in secret. These documents said things like, “in the event of my disability or disappearance…” However, Carole claims on her site that Anne is not to be trusted and had been found to be embezzling money from Don and had gotten somewhere around $600,000 by using Don’s money to buy properties and then put them in her own name.

However, despite there being multiple theories and “suspects” (not really suspects, but people that could have a problem with Don) the case has never been solved. Because of the success of Tiger King, however, the Hillsborough Co. Sheriff’s Office decided to use this to their advantage to attempt to get new leads.

Sheriff Chad Chronister went to Twitter on April 1st, 2020 to proclaim the re-examination of the case:

Currently, Don’s case is not considered a murder. It’s still an open missing persons case.

Nothing has officially been linked to Carole Baskin, evidence-wise. Neither Carole, nor anyone else has been looked into as a person of interest in the case.