Disappearance of Don Lewis

Jack Donald Lewis, known as Don Lewis, was born April 30, 1938, in Dade City, Florida. By 1981 he had built trucking, real estate, and used-car businesses in the Tampa area, and had three daughters and an adopted son from an earlier marriage. In 1991 he married a second wife, and the following year the couple co-founded an animal sanctuary for big cats in Tampa, originally called Wildlife on Easy Street. The two disagreed about how to run it: Lewis wanted to breed the animals and operate it as a business, while his wife wanted it run as a non-profit charity.

In the years before his disappearance, Lewis made recurring trips to Costa Rica, where he owned a 200-acre property near the town of Bagaces, and told family and friends he planned to move there permanently. In early 1997 he began transferring ownership of his Florida properties to a Costa Rican company he controlled, and in the days before he vanished he bought a plane ticket to Costa Rica and loaded equipment onto a truck. In July 1997, Lewis filed for a restraining order against his wife, alleging she had threatened to kill him and hidden his gun; the request was denied, and Lewis continued living with her afterward. His wife said Lewis's mental health was declining and that she suspected Alzheimer's disease; his former attorney and a former business associate disputed this.

Lewis disappeared on the morning of August 18, 1997, after making an early delivery from the sanctuary. Two days later, his van was found at an airport in Spring Hill, Florida, about 40 miles away, with the keys in the floorboard; the airport manager said it had not moved for several days. Lewis owned several small planes and sometimes flew despite a suspended pilot's license. The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office found no sign of foul play at the sanctuary and sent investigators to Costa Rica for a five-day inquiry, which turned up evidence of extramarital affairs and questionable business dealings but no trace of Lewis; two of his ocelots had recently been shipped out, their whereabouts unknown. None of his credit cards have been used since, and no one has ever been arrested or charged in connection with his disappearance.

Lewis left behind more than $5 million in assets, and his wife and children disputed the estate. He was declared legally dead in 2002; most of it went to his wife. In 2004 she declined, on her attorney's advice, to take a polygraph; Lewis's children volunteered to take one. By 2005 investigators said they had moved away from the theory that Lewis disappeared voluntarily.

The case drew renewed public attention after Lewis's disappearance was featured in the docuseries Tiger King, which centered on a feud between his wife and a rival Oklahoma exotic-animal-park owner. In March 2020, citing the series' popularity, Sheriff Chad Chronister publicly appealed for new leads, saying his department had no evidence Lewis had been killed or that a crime had occurred; the office received tips in the following days, but none were deemed credible. The series aired several unproven theories, including that Lewis was killed and fed to the sanctuary's tigers (his wife denied this, saying human remains would exist if tigers had eaten him) and that he instead flew to Costa Rica under a new identity or died in a plane crash. A later television interview in which his wife called a disputed claim that Lewis was alive in Costa Rica "really exciting" prompted articles in January 2023 alleging he had been found alive; a fact-checking organization rated the claim unproven.