Don Lewis' daughter mulls legal action against Carole Baskin for allegedly forging ex-husband's will
After the Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister confirmed the fact that Carole Baskin's ex-husband Don Lewis' will was forged, in order to make the Big Cat Rescue owner inherit all of his money in case he went missing, Lewis' daughter Donna Pettis is now trying to take legal action against Baskin, even though the statute of limitations has run out. Pettis told TMZ that the sheriff's confirmation confirmed what she and her sisters already suspected way back in 1997 - her dad's will presented by Baskin to court following his disappearance was a fake. However, Baskin had claimed at the time that her own analyst had verified the authenticity of the will and got a judge to sign off on it. Since Lewis' family did not have any monetary resources to fight the case against Baskin at the time, she walked away with all of her ex-husband's money - something between $5 to $10 million.
Since then, however, four other experts have evaluated the will and confirmed that it was indeed a forgery. Currently, Pettis is meeting with a string of lawyers with the hope that one of them will be willing to take up her case, which is going to be high-profile for sure, especially after the hit Netflix documentary, 'Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.' Although she and her sisters are yet to finalize lawyers to get their dad some justice, she said that they will probably be getting two attorneys -- one criminal and another civil -- to start with.
After Lewis' body was never found and he was declared legally dead in 2002, the sisters also want to see to it that more action is taken in the case. Pettis said that she did not necessarily think that Baskin killed her father but was sure that she knew more about his death than she was letting on at the moment.
We previously reported that Chronister confirmed to WTSP that his signature had been forged on the document that gave Baskins not just Lewis' money, but also the ownership of Big Cat Rescue animal sanctuary in Florida, which they had set up together. This followed a previous report from Fox News where Joseph Fritz, former attorney and friend to Lewis, had similarly suggested that the signature had been traced from his 1991 marriage record. "I believe it was traced," he said. "Somebody sat at my office and had the pictures and was able to lay one over the other on their cellphone and they are a perfect match."
Forensic document examiner and handwriting expert Thomas Vastrick backed Fritz's assertion and said multiple signatures from Lewis' will and power of attorney were "highly suspect." "In conducting the examination of the durable family power of attorney and the will, both of which were created on November 21 in 1996, I was struck by the uncanny similarity between each set of signatures," he said. "It was nearly exact replication to the extent that I was very confidently able to opine that what I was dealing with – at least with Mr. Lewis's signature – that these signatures were traced."
"Every time you sign your name, there's a level of variation from one signature to the next and these are just way, way too similar. I did not find this a difficult determination at all," he explained. Chronister all but confirmed the same. "They had two experts deem it 100 percent a forgery. But, we knew that...we knew that before," he said.