Billie Bob Harrell Jr. — $31 Million and 20 Months to Tragedy

Billie Bob Harrell Jr. was a devout Pentecostal man who had struggled to provide for his wife, Barbara Jean, and their three children, working at one point as a stocker at a Home Depot in the Houston area after a series of job losses. In June 1997 his Quick Pick ticket won a $31 million Lotto Texas jackpot, paid as an annuity of 25 annual installments of about $1.24 million. For a man who had felt the shame of not being able to support his family, it seemed like an answered prayer.

Harrell’s first instincts were generous and characteristic of his faith. He gave heavily to his church, bought vehicles and homes for relatives, paid off debts, and famously bought turkeys for the poor. But the giving and the requests quickly outran even a multimillion-dollar annuity, as family, friends, fellow congregants, and strangers pressed him for more, and he found it agonizing to refuse.

Under mounting financial pressure, Harrell made a deal with Stone Street Capital, a company that buys future annuity payments: he traded roughly ten years of his installments — worth about $6 million in face value — for a lump sum of about $2.25 million, a transaction that compounded his losses. The strain corroded his marriage, and he and Barbara Jean separated. He reportedly told a financial adviser that winning the lottery was “the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

On May 22, 1999 — roughly 20 months after the win — Billie Bob Harrell Jr. died by suicide at his home. His story is one of the most sobering in this catalogue not because of crime or spectacular excess, but because generosity, social pressure, a predatory financial deal, and a collapsing marriage combined to crush a fundamentally decent man in less than two years.

Gerald Muswagon — the ‘Friendly Giant’ Who Won $10 Million

Gerald Muswagon, born at Norway House in northern Manitoba in 1963 and a member of the Norway House Cree Nation, won a $10 million Super 7 jackpot in 1998 on a single $2 ticket — one of the largest wins recorded by an Indigenous person in Canada at the time. Remembered as warm and generous, he spent the fortune within a handful of years on expensive vehicles, a large house turned party venue, electronics, and open-handed gifts to a wide circle of family and friends, alongside lavish parties fuelled by drugs and alcohol. He poured some of the money into a logging business that failed, and invested little that lasted. When the windfall ran out — within only a few years — he was forced back to minimum-wage manual labour to support a girlfriend and six children, and he struggled with addiction and depression. He acquired a criminal record in the aftermath, and in 2005 he died by suicide at age 42, about seven years after the win. His story became Canada’s most-cited counterpart to the American “lottery curse” cases — a reminder that the pattern is not a quirk of one country’s lottery system or culture, and a sober illustration of how sudden wealth, landing on a person already carrying vulnerabilities and without structure or support to absorb it, can accelerate a tragic decline. Reported respectfully, his case is also a window onto the specific pressures that fall on a windfall winner with deep community ties, where need is real and refusal is costly.