Half the fun of detective and true crime shows – your Columbos, and your Laws & Orders – is trying to puzzle out the mystery for yourself from the safety of your living room. Nobody’s more aware of this than the people running the shows, so this is perhaps why stuff like the recent Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness is practically begging the question of “wait, is there something fishy going on here?”
The show’s not subtle about it. Its entire third episode revolves around former zoo operator Joseph ‘Joe Exotic’ Maldonado-Passage openly accusing animal rights activist Carole Baskin of having killed her husband, Jack Donald ‘Don’ Lewis, and feeding him to her tigers. Lest you think this is the kind of wet slapfight you might expect between tree-hugging animal-likers, note that Maldonado-Passage is currently in prison for trying to put a hit on Baskin – the culmination of a years-long running feud between the two, in which Baskin attempted to get Maldonado-Passage’s zoo shut down through a series of tit-for-tat legal battles.
With Tiger King having become Netflix’s hit of the week, it’s spawned a whole lot of speculation from those who’ve watched it and now agree that Baskin’s guilty. This isn’t unheard of: Oliver Stone’s film JFK got more than a few viewers questioning the official story of the Kennedy assassination – to the point that the US government unsealed their records about it. But even that didn’t get them to reassemble the Warren Commission.
The success of Tiger King, however, has prompted a steady stream of tips from armchair detectives, to the point that Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister took to Twitter and publicly asked for new leads in Lewis’s death, under the slogan ‘Only YOU can help solve the Jack ‘Don’ Lewis cold case’ – which would seem to tread a fine line between soliciting help from the public, and encouraging people whose expertise begins and ends with having watched a Netflix miniseries to throw around accusations of murder.
Since @netflix and #Covid19 #Quarantine has made #TigerKing all the rage, I figured it was a good time to ask for new leads. #CaroleBaskin #DonLewis #Netflix #Tiger #BigCatRescue #JoeExotic #TigerKingNetflix #HCSO pic.twitter.com/LHoJcBZVOI
— Chad Chronister (@ChadChronister) March 30, 2020
Baskin herself flatly denies everything. She notes that Tiger King features “a segment devoted to suggesting, with lies and innuendos from people who are not credible, that I had a role in the disappearance of my husband Don 21 years ago. The series presents this without any regard for the truth…the unsavoury lies are better for getting viewers.” By her account, the show’s creators had previously approached her sanctuary to “make the big cat version of Blackfish, that would expose the misery caused by the rampant breeding of big cat cubs…the series not only does not do any of that, but has had the sole goal of being as salacious and sensational as possible to draw viewers.”
To be sure, the viewing public like sensationalism, and there’s plenty of documentary-makers out there eager to feed their ceaseless appetite for it. In that regard, Baskin didn’t help herself by offering the following quote within the show itself: “If I were gonna, you know, if somebody wanted to kill you, then they would put sardine oil all over you. Something that the cat wants to eat, not something the cat wants to drool on.” This has been repeated across social media, invariably with the air of someone presenting a smoking gun, or Columbo beginning a sentence with “one more thing…”
Maldonado-Passage has a viral quote of his own – specifically, “that bitch Carole Baskin”, a clarion call which has gone beyond the Twitter detectives and turned into a minor meme. This is no kind of legal claim, nor even any sort of specific accusation, but then it doesn’t need to be. In the court of public opinion, Netflix is now both hotshot prosecutor and hanging judge. We’ve seen this play out before, when the documentary Leaving Neverland – rather than any actual legal proceedings – was what prompted Michael Jackson to be thrown down the memory hole.
(Curiously enough, Jackson also figures into this story. He owned seven alligators which died in a fire at Maldonado-Passage’s zoo, which Maldonado-Passage claimed was also Baskin’s doing.)
My inclination is to close by asserting that mob justice, online or off, is a bad thing – but this shouldn’t need to be said. Particularly to the true crime fans who, not too long ago, were equally obsessed with Making A Murderer, which told the story of how a splashy, much-publicised attempted murder conviction turned out to be wrong. I encourage everyone to bear that in mind before they take to social media to insist they saw their neighbours shaking hands with the devil down at the black mass.
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