William “Bud” Post III had bounced through life as a cook, a truck driver, and a carnival worker, and in February 1988 he had about $2.46 in the bank when he pawned a ring to buy Pennsylvania Lottery tickets. One of them won $16.2 million, paid as an annuity of 26 annual installments of about $497,953. Within roughly three months he was reportedly some $500,000 in debt; within a few years the fortune was effectively gone.
The money detonated his relationships. A former landlady and onetime romantic acquaintance, Ann Karpik, sued him claiming they had agreed to share any winnings, and a court awarded her a substantial portion of the jackpot. Post’s own brother, Jeffrey, hoping to inherit, hired someone to kill Post and his wife — a plot that was uncovered and led to the brother’s arrest. Post spent heavily and badly, sinking money into a used-car lot, a restaurant or lease venture, an airplane, and property, much of it with relatives.
The legal and financial wreckage compounded. Post was convicted of assault after firing a shotgun at a debt collector who came to his mansion, and he eventually declared bankruptcy. The annuity that might have provided a steady income for life had been borrowed against, litigated over, and squandered, and he ended up living on Social Security and food stamps — the man who had won $16.2 million reduced again to public assistance.
William Post died on January 15, 2006, at age 66, of respiratory failure, in the Pittsburgh area. He had said more than once that he was happier when he was broke. His case became one of the foundational “lottery curse” stories in American journalism precisely because nearly every failure mode arrived at once: predatory litigation, a murderous relative, reckless spending, and a slow slide back into poverty.
In 1993, Janite Lee — a South Korean immigrant who ran a wig shop in the St. Louis area of Missouri — won an $18 million jackpot in the Illinois Lottery. Unusually among lottery ‘curse’ stories, her downfall was not driven mainly by reckless luxury or vice. She was, by most accounts, extraordinarily generous, giving heavily to political causes, to education, and to community and charitable organisations.
The prize was paid as an annuity, delivering roughly $620,000 a year before tax over about twenty years — a structure that should have provided a comfortable income for life. Instead, Lee committed to giving and spending at a pace her annual payments could not sustain, and financed the gap with debt: buying her home on payments rather than outright, leasing luxury cars, borrowing millions from banks, and running up credit-card balances. She also gambled, reportedly losing close to $347,000 at St. Louis-area casinos in a single year.
In 2001, about eight years after her win and at the age of sixty, Lee filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Court records showed less than $700 to her name against roughly $2.5 million in debt. A fortune that had funded a named reading room at a major law school had collapsed into near-total insolvency, even after she sold the rights to future lottery payments for a lump sum in a failed attempt to stay afloat.
Lee’s case is widely cited in financial-education literature as a paradoxical cautionary tale: proof that even open-handed generosity, pursued without limits and financed by debt and gambling, can be as ruinous as extravagance. The figures below reflect what was reported in the press and in her bankruptcy filing. Her story is unusual precisely because so much of the money went to others — and because that did not save her from losing everything.
Suzanne Mullins won a $4.2 million Virginia Lottery jackpot in January 1993, a prize she split three ways with her husband and daughter and which was paid out the old-fashioned way — in equal annual installments rather than a single lump sum. Her own share came to twenty annual payments of about $47,778 after taxes. On paper she was a millionaire; in practice she had a modest income now and a fortune that would arrive slowly, over two decades. Wanting cash sooner — driven, by her attorney’s account, partly by more than $1 million in uninsured medical bills for a dying son-in-law — she did what a whole industry exists to encourage: in 1998 she borrowed nearly $200,000 against her future lottery payments from the People’s Lottery Foundation, pledging her annual checks as repayment. When Virginia changed its rules in 2000 to permit winners to convert remaining annuity payments into a lump sum, the arrangement unraveled. Mullins took her remaining money as a lump sum and stopped repaying the loan; the note had been assigned to Singer Asset Finance Co., which sued. A court ordered her to repay $154,146.50 — money she no longer had, the fortune having already been spent or pledged away, leaving her, by her own lawyer’s account, with no assets. Mullins’s story is less lurid than the murders and overdoses elsewhere in this catalogue and, in a way, more useful: a clean, almost clinical case study in how borrowing against future payments — at steep discounts and worse terms than the borrower understands — can quietly convert a real fortune into nothing.