Joe Exotic bred lions, tigers, and ligers at his roadside zoo. He was a modern Barnum who found an equally extraordinary nemesis. robertmoor_ reports
Joe Exotic at his zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, in 2015. Photo: Josh Welch Joe was born with an unusual last name, rough on the tongue: Schreibvogel. People were always getting it wrong or using it against him, so he changed it, and changed it again, until he finally slipped free of it altogether.
After graduation, Joe talked his way into becoming the police chief of a tiny, crumbling Texas town called Eastvale . He lived with a girlfriend named Kim but also explored Dallas’s gay nightlife. Overcome with shame one night in 1985, which Joe would later refer to as “the bad year,” he says he attempted suicide by crashing his police cruiser into a concrete bridge embankment at high speed.
After a couple of years, Joe returned to Texas, got a job as a security guard at a gay cowboy bar called the Round-up Saloon, and met his first husband, Brian Rhyne, a slender, sassy 19-year-old. They moved into a trailer together in Arlington, where they shared their bed with a pack of poodles and grew to resemble each other, with mullets and horseshoe mustaches and dressed in jeans and boots. On Saturdays, they would snort pink-tinged meth and go out to the bars.
Carole Stairs was a wild girl, fond of wild things. She took in stray cats, which she would take for walks through the swamplands around her house in Florida. She dreamed of being a veterinarian. But she dreaded the dullness of adulthood, of rules and routine. She recalls climbing a tree in her backyard, looking out over the expanse of ticky-tacky houses, and praying, God, I never want to be this bored again.
Carole got in and picked up the gun. The man drove a little while, then pulled the car over. He reached over and wrapped his hands around her neck. He said he could choke her to death if he wanted. “I know,” she said coldly, without a trace of fear. He relaxed his hands and began to massage her shoulders.
When Carole asked for Bob Martin, the secretary said she’d never heard of him. Carole described him — middle-aged, blond hair, blue eyes — and the secretary laughed. “You’re describing Don Lewis,” the secretary said. Carole realized she was having an affair with a millionaire. And as he would point out, unlike glass, steel cages are porous. People can smell the animals, hear them breathe and chuff and roar. Visitors to the G.W. Zoo often got sprayed with lion urine and “bombed” with ape feces.
Once word got around that Joe was willing to rescue adult big cats — which most people wouldn’t because they are dangerous to handle and expensive to feed — more and more of them began pouring in. Within two years, Joe had already amassed more than a dozen. He persuaded the local Walmart to donate its expired meat, which he would feed to the cats. He also secured donations from sponsors. But it was never enough. Joe borrowed more and more money from his parents to cover the bills.
In June 1997, their fighting escalated, and Don filed a petition for a restraining order against Carole. He told police she had threatened to shoot him if he didn’t leave the house. The petition was rejected, but he gave a copy to his secretary, Anne McQueen, telling her to keep it somewhere safe in case anything ever happened to him.
In 2002, Joe met a talented magician named Johnny Magic, and they briefly combined their efforts — Joe bringing animals onstage and Johnny performing illusions. In one of their most popular tricks, a baby tiger was magically transformed into a full-grown one. When Johnny Magic decided to leave Joe, Joe stole many of the tricks and folded the cub-petting into a magic show, which he called Mystical Magic of the Endangered. At first, he toured in a 1969 Frito-Lay truck.
Eventually, Joe would become, by his own estimation, the largest breeder of tigers in the country — a claim of which he was proud. He came to see himself as preserving the species. Captivity, he liked to say, is the only hope. The wilderness keeps shrinking, and poachers keep poaching. So if you’re not for breeding, you’re for extinction.
Employees at the zoo from that time liken the change to a snowball being pushed down a hill. It had begun, many of them say, when Brian Rhyne, Joe’s first husband, died of complications related to HIV in 2001. Joe was loading him into a pickup to take him home to die peacefully, when he breathed his last breath. Joe screamed loud enough to make your ears ring.
One key to stopping the rampant breeding of big cats, Carole realized, was to stop the cub-petting industry, which she estimated was responsible for 90 percent of tigers and lions born in America. She began contacting shopping malls that were hosting cub-petting zoos to voice her outrage. She marshaled her followers to do the same.
This Carole lady, on the other hand, was just relentless. She had more online supporters, more money, and — infuriatingly — the moral high ground. But was she really any better than he was? She had cats in cages, just like him. She charged money for tours, just like him. The difference, Joe believed, was that she had found a rich husband who’d died mysteriously, whereas Joe had to scrape for every penny he had .
The plan worked — at first. Carole and Howard began receiving confused, outraged, and sometimes tearful phone calls and emails asking why they were participating in cub petting. In February 2011, Carole filed a lawsuit against Joe for trademark infringement, asking for roughly $1 million in punitive damages. The proceedings dragged on for years. Eventually, Joe, wearied by the mounting legal fees, consented to a judgment. “She just out-moneyed me” was how he put it.
Joe advertised on Craigslist, and many of his new employees were either fresh out of jail or fresh out of rehab. There were frequent outbreaks of scabies and ringworm among the staff, which would spread from one trailer to the next and back again. Employees were also caught acting as spies for animal-rights organizations. Joe believed his computers had been hacked by Carole Baskin. Joe instructed his staff, “Don’t trust anyone. Even in your crew, be suspicious.
The tiger flexed its claws and began raking them down his arm. Saff was wearing a down jacket that day, so for a few moments the claws tore through nothing more than fabric. White feathers floated innocently in the cold air.Joe’s video crew captured the aftermath of the accident — Saff lying on the ground beside the cage in shock, his arm flayed to red shreds, the bone bright white, as if boiled. Saff ultimately lost his arm. But amazingly, he returned to work at the zoo soon after.
That same month, Carole received a call from a woman named Jacqueline Thompson, who informed her that she had overheard some people talking about a plot to kill Carole; they had discussed injecting Carole with ketamine, throwing her in the back of a truck, and dumping her body in a swamp. On another occasion, Carole received a voice-mail from a young woman named Ashley Paige Webster, who said Joe had offered her a few thousand dollars to kill her. “I feel like your life is in danger,” she said.
Lowe owned 12 big cats, which he kept in a warehouse in his hometown of Beaufort. He had tried to open a cub-petting operation in a flea market but was shut down by county officials. He believed Carole had been a catalyst behind the protests against him. He referred to her as “the devil incarnate.” One night soon after, Joe was sitting alone in his house, crying. He lifted his .357 Magnum revolver and shot the television, shot the couch, and then put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. The hammer hit the bullet and dented in the primer but did not go off. Afterward, Joe made a necklace out of it as a memento mori.
One night after work, Joe made Alan an offer: He would pay him to kill Carole Baskin. Joe promised him $5,000 up front and $10,000 on the back end if he pulled it off. Joe suggested he find the bike path Carole often took to get to work, wait for her wearing a camouflage “ghillie suit” — the shaggy, leafy kind snipers wear — and shoot her using a crossbow or rifle. Alan told Joe he couldn’t carry a gun because he was a convicted felon.
After he left, Alan went dark. Neither Joe nor the federal agents knew where he’d disappeared to. When Joe finally did hear back, he learned that, instead of going to Florida, Alan had simply taken Joe’s money and traveled home to South Carolina, where he spent much of his time getting drunk. He and Dillon drifted for a time. Joe was convinced he was being followed, so he started posting cryptic messages on his Instagram account to obscure his whereabouts. In one, he took a shot of the ocean and wrote, “Omg California is so amazing.” In another, he posted a photo of Dillon shirtless on the beach. “So he wants to call this home?,” he wrote. “Ok. I give in #belize #Mexico #gay #gayboy #carabianbeach.
In March, Joe stood trial for two counts of murder for hire and 17 counts of exotic-animal abuse, including the killing of five tigers.
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