On Christmas morning 2002, Andrew Jackson ‘Jack’ Whittaker — a West Virginia construction-company owner who was already a self-made millionaire — won a Powerball jackpot of $314.9 million, at the time the largest single-ticket jackpot in American history. He took the lump sum of about $114 million after taxes. Within a few years he had been robbed, sued, arrested, and bereaved, and he later said he wished he had torn the ticket up.
Whittaker was not the stereotypical hard-luck winner. He ran a successful water-and-sewer pipe business, employed more than a hundred people, and was worth several million dollars before the win. That made his unraveling all the more striking: it was not naivety or poverty that undid him, but the sheer scale of the money and the way it warped everyone and everything around him.
The money made him a target. He was robbed of hundreds of thousands of dollars left in his car outside a strip club; he was hit with lawsuits and accusations; and the people closest to him suffered most. His granddaughter Brandi, on whom he lavished cars and cash, died of a drug overdose at seventeen in 2004, her body found wrapped in a tarp; her boyfriend had died in Whittaker’s home months earlier. Whittaker’s daughter, Brandi’s mother, later died as well.
By the end of the decade Whittaker said the money was gone and the lawsuits had consumed what the thieves and the spending had not. ‘I wish I’d torn that ticket up,’ he told reporters. He died in 2020, his fortune and most of his family gone — the most famous American example of the ‘lottery curse,’ and a case where the curse was less supernatural than the predictable result of a vast, sudden, public fortune landing on an ordinary life.
Abraham Shakespeare was a barely literate laborer who rode as a truck driver’s assistant in central Florida, owing back child support and living hand to mouth, when he bought a Florida Lotto ticket on a work trip in November 2006. It won a $30 million jackpot, and he took the discounted cash option of roughly $17 million. Almost immediately the money made him a destination: relatives, acquaintances, and total strangers came asking, and Shakespeare — a soft-touch who reportedly found it nearly impossible to say no — gave much of it away.
Into that swirl of need stepped Dorice “Dee Dee” Moore, who approached Shakespeare in October 2008 saying she wanted to write a book about how the lottery had brought him misery and hangers-on. Instead, prosecutors said, she methodically stripped him of what remained. She set up a company, Abraham Shakespeare LLC, took control of his accounts and real estate, and moved his assets and money to herself — prosecutors said she withdrew about $1 million and bought luxury vehicles, and had his home transferred to a company she controlled.
Shakespeare was last seen alive in April 2009. For months Moore told family and investigators he was alive and simply hiding from the people who wanted his money, even sending text messages from his phone and paying others to suggest he was in contact. On January 27, 2010, his body was found buried under several feet of dirt and a newly poured concrete slab behind a home connected to Moore in Plant City, Florida; he had been shot twice in the chest.
Moore was arrested on February 2, 2010, and charged with first-degree murder; on December 10, 2012, a Hillsborough County jury convicted her. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus a 25-year minimum for using a firearm in a violent felony. Shakespeare’s case is the starkest entry in this catalogue: not a slow squander or a self-inflicted ruin, but a man killed for a fortune that a predator decided was easier taken than earned.
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.
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.
Urooj Khan was a 46-year-old Chicago dry-cleaning businessman, an immigrant from India who ran Style Dry Cleaners on Devon Avenue on the city’s North Side. In the summer of 2012 he bought two $30 instant scratch-off tickets at a neighborhood 7-Eleven and one of them won $1 million on the Illinois Lottery — a stroke of luck made stranger by reports that he had recently sworn off gambling. He chose the single lump-sum payment, which after federal and state withholding came to roughly $424,000. The Illinois Lottery issued the check on July 19, 2012. The next day, Khan was dead.
He became violently ill at home overnight after a family dinner and was pronounced dead on July 20, 2012. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, finding no signs of trauma or foul play, initially certified the death as natural — attributing it to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease on the basis of an external examination rather than a full autopsy. That ruling stood only briefly. Khan’s brother, Imtiaz Khan, refused to accept that an apparently healthy man had died overnight and petitioned the medical examiner to look again.
When investigators retested preserved fluid samples, the final toxicology results in late November 2012 showed a lethal level of cyanide in Khan’s blood. The manner of death was reclassified as homicide, and in January 2013 his body was exhumed for a full autopsy to determine how the poison had been administered. By then the remains were too decomposed to retain cyanide, and the autopsy yielded no further clues — but the medical examiner, Dr. Stephen Cina, stood by the homicide ruling based on the original blood samples.
More than a decade later, the case remains open and unsolved. No one has ever been charged in connection with Urooj Khan’s death, and family members who were investigated have denied any involvement. Cursed Jackpot reports only what the medical examiner and investigators established — a death by cyanide poisoning, reclassified as a homicide — and makes no accusation against any living person. What is certain is the chilling sequence at the center of the file: a $1 million ticket, a check issued, and a man dead before he could spend a dollar of it.
Evelyn Marie Adams did something so improbable that statisticians have used it for decades to explain coincidence: she won the New Jersey Lottery twice, in October 1985 and again in February 1986, for a combined prize of about $5.4 million. She was the first person in the history of the New Jersey Lottery to win multiple million-dollar jackpots, and the odds against it made her, for a moment, a national curiosity — the woman luck simply refused to leave alone.
The second win arrived only months after the first, both paid out as mandatory annuities rather than cash. But the money did not stay. A compulsive gambler, Adams lost large sums across the gaming tables of Atlantic City, an hour or so down the Garden State Parkway, where high-stakes play turned a fortune into a habit. More went into unsuccessful business deals, and a great deal went outward — to relatives, friends, and acquaintances who came with requests she found impossible to refuse.
By the early 2000s the winnings were gone, and Adams was reported to be living in a trailer, the double-jackpot winner reduced to ordinary means. Unlike the violent or fatal cases elsewhere in this catalogue, hers is a story of slow, voluntary dissipation: no thief, no hitman, no lawsuit-driven collapse, just gambling, generosity, bad deals, and the absence of a plan strong enough to hold back two fortunes at once.
Adams herself summed it up with rueful clarity. ‘Everybody wanted my money,’ she has been quoted as saying. ‘Everybody had their hand out. I never learned one simple word in the English language — No.’ She also reflected that she had won the money but not the common sense to manage it. Her case endures as the textbook example of how fast even an extraordinary windfall can vanish when it meets a casino and an open hand.
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.
In June 1989, Willie Hurt of Lansing, Michigan, won $3.1 million in the state’s Super Lotto. By accounts of those who knew him he was a married father of three. Within roughly two years he had lost much of the money, descended into a crack-cocaine addiction, and entered divorce proceedings — and in September 1991 he was charged with murder.
Hurt’s story is one of the most starkly compressed in the canon of lottery ‘curse’ cases. Where some winners take a decade or more to exhaust a fortune, the core of his collapse unfolded over about twenty-four months. The arc from a multi-million-dollar jackpot to a murder charge is brutal in its speed, and the surviving public record — drawn largely from contemporary reporting — is correspondingly limited.
The murder charge is a matter of public record and is stated here as such. According to that reporting, Wendy Elizabeth Kimmey, aged thirty, was fatally shot in the head in September 1991 at a Lansing boarding house Hurt had been renting; a county prosecutor was quoted saying the confrontation arose after a drug binge, when Hurt was enraged that no more crack cocaine could be found. He turned himself in the day of the killing and was arraigned on 20 September 1991 on a charge of open murder. He reportedly signed a confession, though his attorney said he had no memory of doing so, and a judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation before trial.
What happened after that is not clearly established in the widely available public record; reporting appears to stop after September 1991, and this account does not speculate about how the prosecution was ultimately resolved. The story is recorded here factually, with respect for the victim and for the human cost behind the headline — a compact illustration of how quickly sudden wealth can intersect with addiction and catastrophe.
Is the “lottery curse” real, or is it a story we tell because the spectacular failures are the only ones we remember? This entry steps back from the individual tragedies catalogued elsewhere on Cursed Jackpot to ask what the evidence supports. The popular version of the curse rests on a famous claim — that roughly 70 percent of big winners go broke within a few years — that turns out to have no traceable, peer-reviewed source. But the absence of that one statistic does not vindicate the lottery. Careful academic work, most notably a study of nearly 35,000 Florida winners, finds that large prizes meaningfully raise the probability of bankruptcy a few years out rather than reducing it, with many recipients merely delaying rather than escaping financial collapse. At the same time, other rigorous research — survey work on Massachusetts winners, longitudinal studies of large winners in Britain and Sweden — finds that, on average, winners are no less happy and often slightly more satisfied with life than non-winners. The honest verdict is a split decision. A windfall does not doom most people who receive one; the median winner is fine or better. But a windfall sharply raises the variance of outcomes, and for the unprepared, the isolated, or the already-struggling, it can be the accelerant that turns a difficult life into a ruined one. The curse is not supernatural and not universal. It is a real elevation of risk, concentrated among the people least equipped to absorb sudden money.
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.
In 2006, Sandra Hayes was a Missouri state social worker and single mother of three from Florissant, near St. Louis, living on less than $26,000 a year when she and a dozen co-workers shared a $224 million Powerball jackpot. Her portion, taken as a lump sum after taxes, came to roughly $6 million. By the financial measures of this catalogue, that should have been the end of the story — a hard-working public servant lifted into security and comfort. Hayes did not gamble it away, did not get robbed or sued into ruin, and did not go broke. She paid off her debt, put the rest into savings, and remained financially stable.
What she lost instead were people. In the book she later wrote, ‘How Winning the Lottery Changed My Life: Windfall, a Blessing or a Curse,’ and in interviews, Hayes described a relentless siege by relatives and friends who turned predatory once they learned of her money. ‘I had to endure the greed and the need that people have, trying to get you to release your money to them,’ she said. ‘That caused a lot of emotional pain. These are people who you’ve loved deep down, and they’re turning into vampires trying to suck the life out of me.’
Her account is valuable precisely because it is the comparatively happy-ending case. Hayes is proof that a windfall need not destroy a person’s finances — she kept her money and managed it carefully. But she is equally proof that the lottery curse is often social rather than financial: the same money that secured her future cost her relationships she had assumed were unconditional, and forced her to defend her boundaries against the very people she had expected to celebrate with.
Hayes did not retire the instant she won; she stayed in her social-services job for about a month afterward. Her measured, deliberate handling of the prize is part of why she survived it. Yet she has been candid that the emotional toll was real and lasting, and her central message to new winners is sober: that they are, as she put it, ‘in for the ride of their life,’ and that the hardest part is not the money but the people it changes around you.