Carole Baskin Found Evidence on ‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic’s Zoo Property That May Implicate Jeff Lowe Too
Tiger King 2 is out on Netflix, but Carole Baskin has other priorities. She launched her own show, Carole Baskin’s Cage Fight on discovery+. Her series shows Baskin as she prepares to hand over Joseph Maldonado-Passage, aka Joe Exotic’s Greater Wynnewood Zoo to new owners. Before she leaves the property, she digs for evidence of Maldonado-Passage’s crimes, and she may have found evidence against Jeff Lowe too.
Carole Baskin’s Cage Fight is now streaming on discovery+. Here’s what Baskin found in the first episode of her show.
The first evidence Carole Baskin finds on the ‘Tiger King’ property is not a tiger
When courts awarded Baskin the Greater Wynnewood zoo, Lowe moved the living animals to a new property. With the help of Maldonado-Passage’s niece, Chealsi Putman, Baskin knew where to dig on the Greater Wynnewood property. With a steam shovel, they uncovered bones, but the first were not big cats.
“Those are really big ribs,” Baskin says. “These were just laying like this? It’s bigger than a human rib cage. Look at the spinal column. That can’t be a cat. That’s way too big.”
Baskin hired Griff Garrison to help with the investigation. Garrison speculated on what else the Tiger King star had buried on his land.
“So maybe this is a horse?” Garrison said. “It almost appears dry rotted, been out in the sun and the weather for a long time so it could be that it was drug here.”
Baskin noted how heavy the bones were so someone large and strong must have dragged it there. Garrison adds that it could have been another animal that dragged it.
“Just because this is a horse doesn’t mean there’s not a cat in here too,” Baskin says. “When we exhume the bodies of these cats, I expect to find paper shell bones. I expect to find cats who suffered from the very beginning right up until the moment they died.”
Carole Baskin found big cat bones on the ‘Tiger King’ property
Continuing to dig up Greater Wynnewood, Baskin’s team found tiger bones and a skull. The skull confirmed Baskin’s worst fears of Tiger King. The skull was missing teeth, which Putman alleged Maldonado-Passage took for jewelry.
“What’s missing is the canine,” Baskin said. “You’ve got all these great molars but I’m not seeing any canine teeth. This cat was nothing more than parts to him once it was dead. If he didn’t kill it for the teeth.”
Was it Joe Exotic or Jeff Lowe?
Garrison and the Baskins tried to determine how long the bones had been buried on the property. They enlisted university analysts to help.
“It’s definitely been here for a little while,” Garrison said. “I don’t see any hard soft tissue. How long? That’s what we would determine with the university.”
That timeframe will be key. Maldonado-Passage went to prison for his plot to have Baskin killed. In the meantime, Lowe took over the infamous Tiger King property.
“We have the bones from the one tiger that we found,” Baskin said. “We boxed those up. Howard’s working with a professor at the university to see if we can determine the age. If these bones have been in the ground for less than two years then it seems to me like it’s got to be Jeff Lowe. I can only imagine Jeff doing the same thing as Joe. We may have the evidence we need to report this to the authorities.”
Producers of Carole Baskin’s Cage Fight reached out to Lowe for comment and said at the end of the episode that Lowe declined to participate.
