Question of the Day - 18 June 2007

Call it jealousy, call it sour grapes, but there's definitely something about human nature that means we love to cheer someone on the way up, then can't wait for the grisly details of their horrible fall from grace. Happy endings aren't half as compelling as disasters, and if the truth isn't dramatic enough or remains a secret, the urban-myth machine kicks in to fix that.

But, as with rock stars and Hollywood starlets, when it comes to mega-jackpot-winners, there's not much need for embellishment, with plenty of casualties who'll tell you that overnight celebrity and life-changing wealth aren't always all they're cracked up to be. For many, that old adage about being careful what you wish for rings only too true.

Here are some real-life stories to make you less depressed about your biggest win being a $1,000 royal at the Fremont.

• One of the most tragic stories is that of Megabucks winner Cynthia Jay-Brennan. On March 11, 2000, the 37-year-old cocktail waitress at the Monte Carlo, who had hit a $34.9 million jackpot at the Desert Inn just six weeks earlier, was left a quadriplegic by a car accident that killed her sister Lela Anne and left five others injured. The culprit was 58-year-old habitual drunk-driver Clark Morse, who already had at least 16 arrests for driving under the influence and was sentenced to between 28 to 92 years for slamming into the back of Jay-Brennan's vehicle at Boulder Highway and Indios Drive. "I would give everything back to go back to my regular job and be able to walk around. I'd give every cent I have," commented the now wheelchair-bound winner.

  This true story helped fuel a bunch of "curse of Megabucks" urban myths about a young winner who'd overdosed at the Palms, an elderly winner who'd lined up the three winning symbols and promptly had a fatal heart attack at the machine, and so on. While none of these has any basis in fact, there are plenty more real-life tragedies to relate, whether self-imposed, sheer bad luck, or a combination of the two.

• Terry Williams was Nevada's first Megabucks winner, hitting what now seems a trifling $4.98 million at Harrah's in Reno on January 1, 1987. Not a bad way to start the New Year, you might think, but for Williams it was the beginning of a roller coaster journey he wasn't prepared for. Both Terry's mother and sister contracted breast cancer, and while his win did allow him to pay for their treatment, his mother didn’t survive. Two years after his big win, he and his wife Barbara found themselves homeless when their house was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. Williams, who opted to take his payment in installments, admits that most of the first two checks were squandered and the third payment was needed just to pay off the debts he'd accrued since hitting the big one. Lessons were learned and from then on, the Williams have been saving and budgeting. Their last check came in 1996.
• John Tippin is another Megabucks winner who wasn't prepared for his instant wealth. A postal service worker, in 1996 he hit just under $12 million at the Las Vegas Hilton. While some winners choose to remain anonymous, Tippin did not and in his own words, he "spent the next five years hiding from the media and the scavengers coming from every crack." He describes winning as a psychological roller coaster. "Friends are lost (for reasons sometimes unknown). Your best friends become your CPA, your lawyer, your banker, your financial planners, and, yes, the IRS. The entire social structure of your life, that is your job and the people you spent most of your life with, your coworkers, are gone."

• Partly as therapy and partly to warn and help others who find themselves in the same position as him, Tippin, (who, as far as we know, currently resides happily in Hawaii with his wife, daughter, and cat) wrote a memoir titled, I Did It: My Life After Megabucks, in which he chronicles the ups of celebrity and the high-roller lifestylifestyle, coupled with the downs of excessive alcohol abuse, paranoia, and the attempts of others to get their hands on his money. It's still available on amazon.com and is a cautionary tale of the potential pitfalls of jackpot stardom. (Hint: If you ever do hit the Megabucks or the lottery, think long and hard about revealing it to anyone.)

• In 1996, Jeffrey Dampier Jr. won $20 million in the Illinois state lottery. Nine years later, after his marriage had already broken up, Dampier was kidnapped and murdered by a group that turned out to include his own sister-in-law.

• Evelyn Adams won the New Jersey lottery not once, but twice (in 1985 and again the following year), to the tune of $5.4 million. A big chunk of it she lost back to the slot machines; a lot more was squandered on handouts to unworthy causes. Today, all the money is gone and Adams lives in a trailer. "I won the American dream, but I lost it, too. It was a very hard fall. It's called rock bottom," she says.

• Among the most tragic stories is that of Powerball winner Jack Whittacker, a West Virginian construction worker and cowboy-type who, the day after Christmas in 2002, won $314 million -- then the largest undivided lottery jackpot in history. And that's when the nightmare began. With his grinning picture splashed all over the media, there was to be no anonymity for Jack. He opted to take his prize as a one-time payout of $113,386,407.77, after taxes, and was determined, as so many are, that he'd continue to live his life as if nothing had changed. Tough call. By New Year's, he was throwing thousands around in a strip club. In no time at all, the hard-luck stories were coming out of the woodwork, imploring Jack and his wife Jewell to help them out. Jack received so much mail he had to hire people to read the begging letters for him and a private investigator to try and weed out the genuine cases from the freeloaders.

• The stress exacerbated his already poor health, as did his tendency to stay out all night drinking and hitting on strippers. He left thousands of dollars in a case in his car and claims he was drugged and robbed. Suddenly finding herself socially isolated and with more money than she knew what to do with, his granddaughter Brandi, whom he'd partly raised, quickly descended into crack addiction. More robberies followed, while the formerly quiet and respectable Jack gained a reputation for being disheveled and obnoxious. Brandi's boyfriend was found dead at Jack's house, apparently of an overdose. He and his wife separated and Jack was convicted of DUI. Then came the final straw, when Brandi went missing and was eventually found dead, her body wrapped in a plastic tarp and dumped.

  "My granddaughter is dead because of the money," he was quoted as saying. "She was the shining star of my life, and she was what it was all about for me," he said. "From the day she was born, it was all about providing, and protecting, and taking care of her. You know, my wife had said she wished that she had torn the ticket up. Well, I wish that we had torn the ticket up too."

  Okay, so you get the picture. But it's not all bad. We figure many of the success stories are those who keep it to themselves, protect their anonymity, and get on with enjoying their windfall in a sensible manner. Here are a couple of known examples.

• In 1993, Fred Brown won $6 million in the Colorado lottery, shortly after graduating with a business administration degree. He and his wife were struggling financially, but the win set them up for life. All Brown had ever wanted to do was sell cars, and today he's the successful and happy general manager of a car dealership. (See, that's just not as exciting as Jack Whittaker's story, is it? But we're happy for him nonetheless.)

• Or how about Elmer Sherwin, to date the only person to hit Megabucks twice, once at the Mirage on opening night in 1989 and then again at the Cannery in 2005, for a total win of over $25 million. "I've always been lucky," comments the very low-key Sherwin. While the casino waited for one of his wins to be validated, they offered him a comp meal, but all he wanted was a humble hot dog. He said he'd already traveled everywhere he wanted to go before he hit the second jackpot, and has donated generously to the Hurricane Katrina fund from his subsequent winnings. It wasn't until 2005 that he finally bought a new car from his original win, although he has enjoyed the odd perk from his celebrity, like gaining access to the cockpit of Concorde. And his ambition is to hit a third mega-jackpot, although apparently now his sights are set on the Wheel of Fortune. Still, Elmer Sherwin seems like one of those extremely rare cases of someone whose life really hasn't been changed that radically by his extreme good fortune. And we wish him the best of luck for the future. Go on, Elmer, hit another one!