'We came up with a plan to decapitate' Joe Exotic: The only shocking 'Tiger King' 2 reveal

Spoiler alert: The following contains details from “Tiger King 2,” currently streaming on Netflix.

Could the second season of “Tiger King” be enough to free Joe Exotic from his cage in a Texas prison?

Wednesday, Netflix released the five-part follow-up to the series that captivated a wide-spread audience in the early days of COVID-19 lockdown. The debut season of the true-crime series explored the life of Joe Exotic (real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage), a man with an affinity for big cats, blonde mullets, guns and explosives.

New episodes show some from the “Tiger King” cast enjoying their newfound fame after the first season, which depicted Joe's unusual life at Oklahoma's Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park (referred to as the G.W. Zoo) and his hatred for Carole Baskin, founder of Big Cat Rescue sanctuary in Tampa, Florida. Joe deemed Baskin a threat to his livelihood through her advocacy of the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which aims to abolish ownership of big cats as pets and the practice of cub petting. In 2019, he was convicted of a murder for hire plot aimed at Baskin.

Two of the new episodes look further into the disappearance of Baskin’s first husband Don Lewis, who went missing in 1997. But the docuseries doesn’t provide a concrete resolution to the mystery of his disappearance or whether Lewis might be alive today. (Baskin and her current husband, Howard Baskin, have filed a lawsuit against Royal Goode Productions and Netflix for featuring the couple in the series’ sophomore season. Baskin’s appearances are limited in the new episodes, and most footage seems to be pulled from her YouTube channel or interviews with other outlets.)

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The most interesting of the five episodes is the season finale. John Phillips, formerly an attorney for Lewis’ family, now represents Joe. He acknowledges any clemency or immunity authorities granted to Jeff Lowe and James Garretson in exchange for their cooperation is legal, "but what you have now is James Garretson and Jeff Lowe saying, ‘Look, in order to secure the conviction of Joe Exotic, the federal government told us exactly what to get.’ That’s a huge statement.”

Phillips leans on evidence: an audio recording allegedly from a June 5, 2018, meeting between a federal agent, Garretson, Lowe and his wife, Lauren.

“I want (Joe) arrested to where he’s not coming back here,” Lowe is heard saying. When the agent says the conviction would need an overt act, Lowe says: “I could completely (expletive) set him up. I could do this: I could say, ‘Where did you get $3,000 to pay Allen (Glover) to go kill Carole Baskin?' ”

The agent responds: “If there is an admission that he did that, and he says that, that would be good information.”

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Joe allegedly paid Glover $3,000 to kill Baskin, but in the debut season of "Tiger King," Joe claimed the money was a donation so Glover could leave the zoo. Glover – who says he had no intention of harming Baskin – makes the most shocking revelation of Season 2. He and Lowe supposedly had a plan to kill Joe, so Glover claims in an affidavit recorded in September. Lowe, apparently, was listed as a beneficiary to Joe’s life insurance.

“I was gonna have Joe’s head cut the (expletive) off,” Glover says. "Nobody knows about what me and Jeff had planned.”

“Was Jeff gonna pay you if Joe died?” Phillips asks.

“I wouldn’t have to work no more,” Glover says.

Providing more details to filmmakers, he adds: “We came up with a plan to decapitate Joe’s head, to kill him, to clear him away from the property so Jeff could take it over, animals and everything.”

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The plan was to string barbed wire in hopes it would kill Joe if he ran into it at a high enough speed on his four-wheeler, Glover alleges. Glover goes so far as to return to the zoo to find the wire intended to end Joe's life, which he claims to recover.

“Isn’t that nuts? I’m sitting in jail for murder for hire, and I was the hit,” says Joe.

“I kept telling everybody Jeff tried to get me killed in a cage,” Joe adds, as footage of a big cat gnawing on his show is shown. “They put perfume on my shoes.”

Lowe disputes the perfume accusation in the episode: “He didn’t want to admit that he was just dumb and shouldn’t have been in there, not paying attention.”

At the episode’s conclusion, text on screen says Lowe “declined to comment on the allegations made against him in Allen Glover’s sworn affidavit.” USA TODAY attempted to reach out to Lowe but was unable to obtain contact information for him.

Joe was arrested in 2018 and found guilty of 19 counts, included attempted murder for hire, killing five tigers and the selling of lion and tiger cubs. In January 2020, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison. In July, a federal appeals court ordered a shorter sentence for Joe, deciding that the trial court should’ve grouped two charges. Joe has not yet been resentenced.

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Contributing: Elise Brisco

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Tiger King 2: Joe Exotic's alleged hitman planned to 'decapitate' Joe