A June 15, 1973, story in the Arkansas Democrat extolled the many attractions within the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus that week at Barton Coliseum: the clowns, the horses, the monkeys, the elephants, the trapeze artists. It noted the crowds' "uproarious laughter" and said the audience was particularly captivated by lion tamer Wolfgang Holzmair's daredevil feat of placing his head in the mouth of one of the lions.

Two days later, the circus, Holzmair and the lions were back in the newspaper, but for a very different reason. Someone left the lion cage unlocked, and two of the 900-pound predators escaped from their enclosure. While one was quickly recaptured, another made it into the dense woods southwest of the state fairgrounds in Little Rock, touching off a desperate search for the dangerous creature that ended in its death.

Reports in the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette recorded the escape, which happened 44 years ago this month. The narrative below is comprised from those two publications and illustrated with never-before-published photos from the Gazette archives.





This map appeared in the Arkansas Gazette on June 17, 1973

The two lions managed to get out of their cages in the Swine Building at the fairgrounds after someone mistakenly left a door open, the newspaper reports show. It happened sometime after 5 p.m., which was about the time when the animals were returned there after a matinee performance.



Wolfgang Holzmair Holzmair, who died in 2013 after a career that earned him the nickname "Lord of the Lions," told the Gazette that he was showering in the Coliseum when news of the escape reached him. The lions had been in cages tied together to a length of some 50 feet, but workers who had been cleaning them "apparently forgot to close the metal gate" on one end.

The two 6-year-old lions soon discovered the opening and darted from the building. One, a lioness, settled into grass not far away and was surrounded and coaxed back into a cage, the Gazette story said.

Some onlookers watched the lioness get recaptured from behind a wooden fence, though the Democrat report noted that they were likely unaware of two things: The big cat could have scaled the barrier with ease, and the circus officials standing guard with "high-powered rifles" didn't know how to load the bullets.

Neither became an issue as the lioness was corralled without incident. But the other lion, a male named Josef whose circus skills included jumping through burning hoops, made his way under a chain-link fence at the border of the fairgrounds, down nearby railroad tracks and into the wooded Fourche Creek Bottoms.







Holzmair told reporters that he had never known a lion to swim, but the lion tamer and searchers followed tracks that led to Fourche Creek. So they waded in the swampy waters, which the two newspapers reported was at times chest-deep. "It was a jungle out there," said Holzmair, who was reported in the Democrat to have warned the group that the lion would likely "wait until they were right on it before it lunged for the kill."

The escaped animal was spotted multiple times in the woods by the main group of searchers, which included police officers, Holzmair and a Little Rock Zoo veterinarian who carried a tranquilizer gun, the newspaper said. But it was too far away to line up a shot in the initial sightings.

Holzmair reportedly told the others that the search would get easier by 7 p.m., when the lion, accustomed to having his dinner at that time, would begin roaring.

The prospect of hunting the big cat as nightfall neared wasn't comforting to the group.

"All we could think of was it might get lost from us after dark, and then we would really have a problem," Little Rock Police Department Sgt. Bill Carloss told the Democrat. While the main search party made its way through the woods, Little Rock police officers, Arkansas State Police troopers and circus officials armed with rifles patrolled a perimeter aimed at keeping the lion from fleeing into another part of the city.

"One circus worker said that anytime a lion gets loose, it becomes frightened and will attack if hungry or cornered," the Gazette story said. "He was advising persons in the area that if they confronted the lion, they should stand perfectly still."







After about two hours of searching for the lion in the woods, the main party tracked it to a patch of tall grass across Fourche Creek some 2 miles south of Roosevelt Road.

The zoo veterinarian fired once from the tranquilizer gun, but the dart failed to penetrate the lion's skin. Holzmair then told the rest of the group there was only one option: The animal would have to be shot.

Three Little Rock officers and a state police trooper fired more than 100 rounds, according to the Democrat account, at first with little success.

"The lion then came at the officers and state trooper Bill Bounds finally felled it with a .223-caliber military rifle," the group told the Gazette. The lion at that point was only about 15 yards away.

Holzmair told reporters that the lion appeared nervous as it was being tracked, and killing it ultimately proved the only reasonable choice.

"It could have killed somebody," he was quoted as saying, "and then I'm in trouble with the law."

Holzmair, who was said to own 19 other lions, estimated the deceased animal's value at $2,000 and said its death wouldn't change his act.

And even that night, the show went on.

"The evening performance of the circus was presented as scheduled," the Gazette story concluded. "The final performances will be at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. today."