For most, bagging an eye-watering $3.1million (around £2.8million) on the lottery would be life changing for the better.
But for Willie Hurt – no pun intended – his life went downhill fast after picking up the huge sum on the Michigan Super Lotto in June 1989.
Willie was due to receive the prize in $156k (£123k) instalments every month for 20 years.
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This should have set him up for life, but within one year he was divorced and addicted to cocaine – and he very quickly spaffed most of his winnings up the wall.
And then things took an extremely dark turn when he spent at night at a local hotel called the Burkewood Inn with a woman called Wendy Kimmey.
The pair downed tons of alcohol and snorted a lot of drugs, and ended the night having an argument.
Sadly, Wendy was found dead in the room with a bullet wound in her head.
Willie turned himself in to Ingham County police, and admitted that they fought because he ran out of cocaine.
He was sent for psychiatric evaluation, and his lawyer Malik Hodari made a shocking claim hours later.
He said: “He doesn’t recall making or signing a confession, which I’m told he did.
“This is a very sad case, but we don’t know all the facts.”
Hurt, who had three children, was charged with open murder, which meant the jury had to decide if it was first or second degree.
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Despite the charges, it was confirmed that he would still have received the money every month whether he was in prison or not.
In a bizarre twist, what happened to Hurt after that is unknown.
No reporting was done on the case, and the verdict was never made public.
The last local media report relating to him was from the Orlando Sentinel on September 22, 1991 – which was oddly updated in July 2021.
It claims that the man was penniless by the time he turned himself in, and that he had been renting the hotel room where the woman was killed for around three weeks.
The Daily Star has reached out to Ingham County Police for an update on the situation.
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