The mystery surrounding Carole Baskin's 'dead' ex-husband rages on - and Don Lewis' former lawyer believes his will was "forged".
Lewis vanished in the summer of 1997 after leaving his Florida home one morning and has never been seen since.
His disappearance gained worldwide attention due to Netflix's Tiger King series - with viewers coming up with all sorts of conspiracies over what happened.
Lewis was declared legally dead five years after he went missing, although it's since been claimed he is "alive and well" living in Costa Rica.
Baskin gained complete control of his huge $5million estate due to a 'disappearance' clause in the will she produced.
Under the power of attorney, Baskin was given full control over her husband’s estate in the event of his "disability or disappearance."
Alarm bells immediately started ringing for Lewis's attorney Joe Fritz, when he saw the disappearance clause.
"In my law office, we have lawyers with more than 100 years combined experience, and none of us has ever heard the word 'disappearance' used in a document like that," he told The U.S. Sun.
"Never. Not in one case. It leaves me to believe that a non-lawyer did that. Who the f*** thinks they're going to disappear?"
Fritz thinks someone with knowledge of the law added the clause to the document, but doesn't believe it was drafted by an proper lawyer.
Baskin has previously admitted to authoring the legal documents, claiming she did so because Don wanted to save money on lawyer fees.
In a post published on her website BigCatRescue.org in 2020, which has since been altered, Baskin originally wrote: "Some people made a fuss about using the word 'disappearance,' but Don had told me about people going to Costa Rica and disappearing, and he was dealing with the mob down there, so I thought that seemed like a potential threat and included the word.
"I also included disability because of Don’s increasingly strange behavior," she continued.
"Our Costa Rican attorney, Roger Petersen, said the Helicopter Brothers were their version of the mob, and Don was loaning them money."
Fritz said there is "no question" that Don was murdered as he thinks he was too attached to his animals to abandon them.
Don's lawyer has controversially suggested that he was strangled and thrown from a plane - but doesn't know who would have committed such a crime.
"What would have lured him more than anything else is a good deal on an airplane," he previously said. "So that's what I assume happened, that he got lured up to the Pilot Country Estates to look at an airplane."
Frtiz added: "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."
Fritz has long held the belief that Lewis' signature on both of the documents was forged - a theory which has been backed up by others.
Notary Sandra Wittkopp, whose signature appears on the document which leaves control of Don's millions to Carole, says she doesn't remember ever signing it.
She told the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting: "I don't remember a will at all. I was the housekeeper."
Florida law does not require notaries to keep recordings or journals of their acts.
In June 2020, Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister claimed on Tuesday that two different experts have said Don's will is forged.
Chronister told CBS station WTSP: "We knew that before because the girl who came forward and said, 'Hey, I was forced to witness and say that I witnessed this signature.'
"The problem was the statute of limitations had already expired. The will had already been executed at that point."
He said that the "only reason" legal action hasn't been taken is because of the statute of limitations' expiration, which means even if someone did forge it then they can no longer be prosecuted.
Chronister added: "There's no recourse. A judge deemed it valid, so the civil side of it would be execution of the will, the disbursements of the funds is one thing.
"But then you have the criminal side of it, it's unable to be prosecuted because of the statute of limitations."
In an episode of Fox Nation's Crime Stories, former prosecutor Nancy Grace speaks to expert Thomas Vastrick about the will.
He said: "In conducting the examination of the durable family power of attorney and the will, both of which were created on Nov. 21 in 1996, I was struck by the uncanny similarity between each set of signatures ... the two witness signatures and the notary signatures.
"When I cross-compared each of those sets of signatures, they were just ridiculously similar to each other."
There is no evidence to suggest that Baskin had anything to do with Don's disappearance, but that hasn't stopped some outlandish theories emerging.
One person who is convinced this is true is Joe Exotic, who outrageously claimed she fed her ex-husband to the tigers to make sure no one would find the body.
He even wrote a truly terrible song called Here Kitty Kitty about the alleged crime, which had the lyrics: "Oh, here kitty kitty. Mama's got some treats for you."
Exotic is serving a 22-year prison sentence for animal abuse and hiring someone to murder Carole.
Lewis' children and ex-wife Gladys have publicly theorised Carole fed Lewis to the tigers at the sanctuary - and have hit out at investigators for not running a DNA test on a meat grinder on the property.
However, the meat grinder was removed from the sanctuary weeks before Lewis' disappearance - and Carole said there would be human bones left as remains if the tigers had eaten Lewis.
"This is the most ludicrous of all the lies," wrote Baskin on her blog.
"As Gladys and the daughters did everything they could to make life difficult for me after Don disappeared, they spread this rumor that they thought I had ground Don up and fed him to the cats.
"And the media loved it. The meat grinder shown in the video was enormous. Our meat grinder was one of those little tabletop, hand crank things, like you'd have in your kitchen at home.
"Meat had to first be cut into one-inch cubes like you see here to go through it. The idea that a human body and skeleton could be put through it is idiotic. But the Netflix directors did not care. They just showed a bigger grinder."
In November last year, Carole told This Morning's Phillip Schofield and Josie Gibson that she was told Don was alive in Costa Rica.
She told the presenters: "I'll tell what, one of the really exciting things that came out of Tiger King 2 is that they produced a letter from Homeland Security and it says that a special agent in charge with the FBI reached out to the Sheriff's Detective.
"Which means this had to have happened after 2002 because Homeland Security wasn't even around until 2002, and they said that my husband Don Lewis is alive and well in Costa Rica.
"And yet all of this hate has been made about me having something to do with his appearance when Homeland Security has known where he is since at least back then," Carole continued.
Addressing one of the outlandish theories, Phillip said: "His children from his first marriage think you killed him, minced him up and fed him to the tigers!"
Carole quickly responded: "I think maybe they should check with Homeland Security who seems to know where he is."
When Phillip then asked if Carole believes that Don is alive, she replied: "I don't know how it is that Homeland Security says he's alive and well in Costa Rica, but I'm glad to hear it."
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