THURSDAY 8:50 P.M. UPDATE:
Notary Sandra Wittkopp, whose signature is on Don Lewis’ will, leaving control of the late millionaire’s assets to his widow, ‘Tiger King’ star Baskin, claims that she has no recollection of signing the document.
“I don’t remember a will at all,” Wittkopp told the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. “I was the housekeeper.”
Florida law does not require notaries to retain recordings or journals of their acts. Journals are only required when electronic notarizations are involved.
A Fox Nation show called “Crime Stories” recently featured an interview between former prosecutor Nancy Grace and handwriting expert Thomas Vastrick.
According to Vastrick, the documents in the Lewis case appear very suspicious.
“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,” he says. ” When I cross-compared each of those sets of signatures, they were just ridiculously similar to each other.”
The Mississippi Center adds that the statute of limitations for forgery has since passed, meaning that anyone who had forged Wittkopp’s name back then could no longer be prosecuted.
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ORIGINAL STORY:
The mystery surrounding the disappearance of ‘Tiger King’ star Carole Baskin’s second husband, Don Lewis, is deepening and may be pointing to a murder coverup.
A pair of handwriting experts believe that the signatures on the will and power of attorney documents were ‘traced’ or forged.
Don Lewis, second husband of “Tiger King” star Carole Baskin, disappeared in 1997 and the missing persons case has been closed allowing Carole to move om an marry husband number three.
Recently, after the Netflix docuseries “Tiger King” reignited interest in Baskin’s missing husband, experts examined key documents and found that they were likely forgeries. The handwriting experts postulate that someone traced Lewis’ signature on his marriage license and copied it onto his will and power of attorney.
Not only that, but one handwriting expert concluded that the signatures of the witnesses and the notary are also identical to one on another on both the will and power of attorney. This led the expert to conclude that one or both of each pair of signatures was forged through tracing.
Netflix’s smash-hit “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness” tells the bizarre tale of Joe Exotic, a zany gay polygamist owner of a private zoo in Oklahoma. He goes to battle with animal rights activist Carole Baskin and eventually gets convicted in a murder-for-hire plot to off her that lands him in prison for 22 years. Throughout the documentary, Joe and his compatriots repeatedly accused Carole of killing her second husband, millionaire Don Lewis.
Twenty-three years ago, Don Lewis vanished while married to Carole. Five years later, a judge declared the missing husband dead, which permitted Carole Baskin to inherit his substantial estate.
The new finding in the Clarion Ledger about Carole Baskin’s missing husband is the product of reporting by the renowned investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, whose work was instrumental in reopening cold cases of unsolved civil rights era murders.