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Spagetti131526 karma

Our focus was really containted to Episode 3, which discussed the disappearance of Don Lewis. One detail in that episode stuck out in my mind. It's a recreation of when Don and Carole first met. Don picked her up in his car as Carole walked on a Tampa street at night after fighting with her first husband. In the recreation, you see a street sign that says Nebraska Avenue.

That was an explosive detail, locally, because in Tampa, many people associate Nebraska Avenue with prostitution. (That association is probably overstated, but it is commonplace here.) But Carole says that is not the street where she met Don, and there are news stories from around the time of Don's disappearance that also place that first meeting on a different street. It's possible that someone who wanted to make that connection told the Tiger King directors it was Nebraska Ave.

Overall I did not come across anything in Tiger King that appeared to be factually inaccurate. It's not for me to analyze what the directors chose to include, and what it may have insinuated or not, but that has been debated and analyzed quite a bit.

I will say that I've been personally surprised with the tone of the discussion around Tiger King online. People really seemed to take sides, for some reason, and overwhelmingly (maybe it's just the places I've looked) they seem to have sided with Joe Exotic, who is in prison for animal cruelty and for hiring a hitman to kill Carole. Meanwhile, Carole, who is not a suspect in any crime, according to the police, has been harrassed and labeled a murderer in online pop culture.

Spagetti13813 karma

One of these upvotes is from me.

Spagetti13746 karma

Don liked Costa Rica, and he wanted to move the animal sanctuary down there. This was something he and Carole had argued about.

According to Carole:

“By the time of his disappearance he had bought the 200 acres in Bagaces, a triplex in Rohrmoser and a brothel in Limon. Seems like there were a couple of others, but I don't recall. I was later able to sell everything except the brothel hotel with the help of the attorney and my husband Howard, so it had to have been after 2003. It was just too dangerous to even go near the brothel given it was in a bad part of a port town that catered to criminals.”

Carole says that Don had loaned $100,000 to Luis Enrique Villalobos Camacho. Camacho is mentioned in this news story from 2002.

Spagetti13695 karma

I talked to Tampa Bay criminal defense lawyer Kaitlyn B. Statile about this. She says no. Here is a long quote from her that did not all make it into the story.

“In my opinion, this case hinges 100 percent on a witness statement, because you don’t have any physical evidence,” Statile said. “So many people that are involved in investigating this are getting pulled down different rabbit holes that are irrelevant. You know, people talk about how they can prove Carol Baskin has lied. Carol Baskin can lie about a million different things, but that doesn’t prove that she killed or didn’t kill her husband. ... Without a witness testimony that someone saw something, knows something or heard something, you’re not getting anywhere.”

By the way, Statile says that if you do know something and are ready to come forward, she will represent you for free, and the Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a previous interview that "immunity is on the table."

There are some who believe that if if the sheriff's office would release the files from the original investigation, it might yield new connections as fresh eyes look at them.

One person who believes this, and who is also investigating Don Lewis' disappearance, is investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, and he would know. Mitchell's journalism has helped solve a number of decades-old cold cases from the Civil Rights era, and in his work, such files have been instrumental.

The sheriff's office won't release any of the case files, citing an exemption in Florida's public records law for "active" cases, but from what we know it would have been a stretch to call the case "active" before Tiger King came out.

Spagetti13642 karma

Only that he is dead, and likely has been dead for 23 years.