CHARLESTON, WV (WOWK) – Carole Baskin, who is featured on the Netflix reality show “Tiger King,” once lived in West Virginia.
According to a series of Baskin memoirs, he lived in Kanawha County in the early 1970s. His family moved from Florida after Gov. Arc Moore hired his father as a private pilot.
Baskin said she He lived in Slacks Video Park on Cranbrook Drive in Charleston in 1970 I attended Ruffner School the old man next to her in the white school days.
By 1972, Baskin at Larwood Road in Mink Shoals (about 5 miles from Downtown Charleston). His school days revealed that he was 10 years old and in the fifth grade at Shoals School. The album also confirmed that Baskin was part of the company sixth grade there.
Baskin said his passion for retrieving and releasing animals at Mink Shoals began when his dog would often “pull home” wildlife. Others in West Virginia shared memories of riding the bus, attending church, trick-or-treating, and making friends.
Baskin eventually left West Virginia and attended Florida College Academy in Temple Mount. He attended the Academy from the sixth grade in 1973 to ninth grade in 1976next to his school day list.
In October 1976, Baskin returned to West Virginia dating two guys while he lived in Sissonville near Lonesome Road and Ridgeview Drive. Baskin said the guys names were Ricky and Randy. Although she wasn’t entirely sure about Randy’s name, she instead called him a “good boy” in comparison to Ricky.
Baskin recalled how the “good boy” drove her around in his beefy Pontiac Firebird during the weekend in Charleston. In contrast, Baskin called Ricky “the ultimate boy” and “James Dean incarnate” who was a snowmobile driver with substance abuse problems.
According to Baskin, Ricky called one night saying he had overdosed on energy and wanted to say goodbye. Baskin said he searched through the darkness of the night for Ricky and finally found him. He said that his parents screamed so they could take him to the hospital.
“I wonder if he’s still alive today,” Baskin said of Ricky in his series of memoirs.
Baskin said that around March 1977, he and his mother went to Florida for two. Baskin’s mother seemed to him that he never wanted to see again. Thinking that his mother really meant this, 16-year-old Baskin Jim took Jones and ran away with him to Sissonville, West Virginia.
Baskin said he and Jones live in a small garage, not without water and not without air conditioning, with a toilet, sink and shower, but no water to run them. That cast Jones often got violent, beating her multiple times and punching “huge, gaping” holes in the concrete walls of the chambers.
“Jim Jones was a four-foot-six, two-and-fifty-pound mutant, a drug addict who beat me to within inches of my life,” Baskin said. “Even though I worked hard, it was never enough to support his behavior. Sometimes I worked for weeks because I could not serve black food, turgid eyes, bloody lips.
According to Baskin, she worked at various restaurants in Charlotte, such as Cabaret, Athens Nightclub and other events. One night after work in 1977, Baskin attempted death jumping off the bridge into the Kanawha river. Baskin said he woke up and heard a drunken man yelling “Don’t worry, I’ll help you!” before jumping.
“In somewhat worse condition than I, and as a boot drunk, these efforts of my aid would drag me ashore,” said Baskin. “But I’m touched, nonetheless. For no matter how bad he shows himself in the face, you can help someone else. You can make a difference if you never give up.”
At one point, Jones and Baskin received a loan to help pay the rent for their Sissonville residence.
She recalled a time when she was too sick to buy cigarettes and asked her roommate if she could borrow one. Baskin said the roommate gave him the packages, and he picked up a “ratty looking one” because he didn’t want to take one of his “goods.” She unknowingly took a weed joint rather than a tobacco cigarette. Baskin said the roommate had quite a laugh when he told him the fibers on the floor started to transform “into dinosaurs.”
Baskin was fond of friendship with him as a roommate. She said that he repeatedly told her that she needed to get Jones to leave before he killed her.
“I thought I had the strength to do what I did next,” Baskin recalled of his fake roommate.
In Baskin’s video diary, she doesn’t specifically say how she and Jim split up. However, he recalled a time when his marriage took a significant turn.
while two visited Florida in 1977, Baskin was seriously injured in a car crash after a drunken Jonas allegedly tried to grab the wheel from her. Baskin was apparently too nervous to call his family for help and couldn’t walk “forever” while staying with Jones’ parents. The Joneses helped Baskin hide because they didn’t want to confront their son’s activities and didn’t want the army to find him AWOL.
Baskin’s grandfather eventually found her and took her to a chiropractor so she could walk again. Baskin’s father gave him a Mazda wagon at the station, and he and John drove it back to West Virginia.
During that time, West Virginia Gov. Jay Rockefeller was in office and sold all plans to replace the government with helicopters. According to Baskin, none of the president’s pilots, including his own father, knew how to fly helicopters, and they can no longer fill the position. Rockefeller’s bold plan it was given to apply to the West Virginia Office of Economic and Community Development.
“I decided I needed to go to Rockefeller as a way to politically bring him down to what it cost to support my family,” Baskin said.
When Baskin was only 16, his parents allowed him to sign the work. Young Baskin moved quickly through the ranks and was hired as a secretary for the president’s office. He told her that the plan for revenge had been diminished by then, and instead he ended up trying to catch up on some funny memories in the office.
Baskin’s job was to meet the people of the president and make a portfolio with information and a picture of the person. He said that once Sen. Robert Byrd, but no one could give him a photograph. Apparently, everyone told him that Byrd looked like Robert Redford, so he put a picture of the actor in the senator’s portfolio. Baskin recalled that Gov. Rockefeller was “roaring” behind his desk to come in and explain what had happened.
“I got a pretty good laugh out of it when I explained it,” Baskin said. “And then 40 years later I was able to share that story with Senator Byrd.”
As mentioned earlier, Baskin does not say exactly how she and Jones got back together in West Virginia once they separated. As for her video diary series, the last West Virginia entry is about a suicide attempt in December 1977. She doesn’t remember where she worked after various restaurants and a position with the governor’s office.
Baskin’s next daily update is in April 1979; she was married to another man while at his parent’s home in Tampa, Florida.
In March 2020, Baskin was cast in the Netflix reality series “king of tigers.
To watch Baskin’s full video documentary series, visit her YouTube channel.
