The former wife of Carole Baskin’s former handyman says in a CBS documentary that she thinks her ex may have had something to do with the disappearance of Baskin’s then-husband, Don Lewis, in 1997, the Daily Mail reports.
Lewis’s disappearance was a key element of the Netflix series Tiger King, in which Joe Exotic claims that Baskin had Lewis killed and fed him to the tigers the couple kept at their rescue facility. Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, is serving a 22-year prison sentence for a botched murder-for-hire plan to kill Baskin, as CrimeOnline has previously reported.
But now Trish Farr-Payne tells “48 Hours Suspicion” that Kenny Farr brought home a large freezer around the time of Lewis’s disappearance and that the freezer disappeared from their porch about a week later.
And two weeks before Lewis’s disappearance, she says, Farr told her, “Don’s gone, and I don’t want you talking about him.”
Baskin has repeatedly denied any involvement in the disappearance of Lewis, who was declared dead in 2002. No remains have been found.
Farr also denies knowing anything about Lewis’s disappearance. The Tampa Bay Times reported earlier this summer that Tiger King director Rebecca Chaiklin said that a former detective on the case told her that Farr passed a lie detector test.
The Times also says that Farr-Payne told detectives in 2000, as the couple was breaking up, that she believed her husband had something to do with Lewis’s disappearance. Recently, her accusations have made the rounds of Facebook posts and YouTube videos, the Times said.
Farr served 90 days in jail in 2001 after pleading guilty to domestic violence and improper exhibition of a firearm in an incident involving Farr-Payne. He later went to prison for drug trafficking.
Lewis’s family has offered a $100,000 reward for information about his disappearance, CrimeOnline reported last month. They’ve also filed a lawsuit against Baskin.
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[Featured image: Don Lewis]
