Strange Lottery Stories

I’ve been following the tale of the GBP 113 million EuroMillions jackpot win with interest, waiting – along with the rest of the UK – to see who will eventually step forward to claim this momentous prize. We’re nearly 2 weeks after the win and nobody has! Yesterday, an elderly woman announced that she had in fact won the lottery on those very numbers but she couldn’t prove it because her husband had thrown the ticket in the bin! “He loses everything I give him,” she was quoted as saying. The woman can prove the win because – she says -she  jotted the numbers down in notepad before she bought the ticket. I don’t know if anything will come out of this ‘win’ but it sure makes for a strange tale.

There have been other strange lottery stories in the history books. A guy who won $16 million in the Pennsylvania Lottery in 1988 died broke after he was sued by practically everyone who knew him. His girlfriend sued him for a good share of the winnings. His siblings demanded money to invest in a business – which subsequently went bankrupt, and his other brother hired a hit man to kill him so that he could inherit his share of the cash. At the end of his life, the poor man was living on food stamps and he eventually died at age 65, $1 million in debt.

And then there was the story about a woman who became suspicious of her husband after he took an unexplained leave of absence from work, disconnected the phones and TV and started acting very secretive around her. It was only in 2007, after she googled her husband’s name by chance, that she came upon a press release announcing that he was one of 17 Florida based airline mechanics who had gambled and won a $10.2 million lottery. The guy hadn’t bothered to tell his better half that he was the winner of over $600,000 (after taxes) and was planning to split with the cash without telling her. The woman is now suing for half the money … and she wants leave of the marriage!