Got your eye on the $1.15 billion Mega Millions jackpot Friday night? Winning the lottery is the dream for many Americans (and for some, their only retirement plan). One lucky purchase at a gas station or the local Publix and suddenly all your money problems get wiped away.
But for some people, it just means that now they have different problems. Wild spending. Gambling losses on a larger scale. Greedy friends and family. Scammers. Bad investments. Tax evasion. Angry co-workers and spouses who demand their fair share. Even murder.
According to the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, nearly one-third of lottery winners eventually go bankrupt, a higher percentage than for average Americans, and it’s worse for people with low incomes. A 2011 study comparing Florida Lottery winners who were previously financially distressed found that winning the lottery only postponed their inevitable bankruptcy.
Here are the biggest winners in Florida who also lost big.
7. Malcolm Ramsey: Mentally challenged man blows through hundreds of thousands in a month
Lottery winner Malcolm Ramsey, 55, sits in his room at the Loving Care assisted living facility in St. Petersburg with some of the shoes he bought recently with his winnings.
Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Malcolm Ramsey had been involuntarily hospitalized multiple times and spent time in a state mental hospital and a group home before ending up at Loving Care in St. Petersburg, where he received $54 every month as an allowance.
Some of that went for scratch-off tickets and he finally won the grand prize, $500 a week for life. Ramsey took a taxi to Tallahassee and claimed his prize, received a cashier’s check for $302,446, cashed it at an Amscot store which charged him more than $14,000 in fees, and then he started spending.
Investigators discovered he had bought $8,000 worth of flat-screen TVs at Walmart on Black Friday, so many new clothes he had to buy plastic bins to hold them all, stacks of new athletic shoes, and $19.95 Timex watches for everyone in his family.
It was the sudden appearance of his family members at the living facility that prompted an investigation, where it was discovered Ramsey had spent more than half his winnings in barely four weeks.
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6. Kathryn Faver: $400,000 house burned down on move-in day
Kathryn Faver, 58, hit it big in the lottery with a $50 scratch-off in the 500X The Cash game.
This one isn’t poor management as much as bad luck.
Kathryn Faver, then 58, of Santa Rosa Beach won $1 million with a 500X THE CASH scratch-off ticket in 2022. She took the lump sum of $820,000 (about $500,000 after taxes), paid $400,000 cash for a new home in Destin and began moving in the same day. Faver had her furniture and belongings moved in, went to get her dog from her mom’s house, and got a call from the sheriff’s department telling her that her beautiful new home was on fire.
The Destin Fire Department had to break through the front door of Kathryn Faver’s home. The fire started in the kitchen in the front of the house.
“I didn’t even get to spend the night in it, not even 10 minutes,” Faver said. She had been sick the two to three weeks leading up to the home purchase and hadn’t yet secured homeowners insurance. If you pay cash for a home, insurance isn’t required.
“It’s personally my stupidity,” she said.
The cause of the fire on moving day at Kathryn Faver’s home in Destin is still under investigation.
Faver alleges the movers left boxes on top of the counters in the kitchen and the glass-top stove that somehow got turned on, but the moving company is “not accepting responsibility,” she said.
That left Faver in a bind, as with no job and medical bills she has no easy way to pay for repairs.
“I have basically maybe $300 to my name right now,” Faver said in 2023, “because I put everything into it.”
5. Gloria C. Mackenzie: Sued her son for mismanagement
Powerball winner Gloria C. Mackenzie, 84, left, leaves the lottery office escorted by her son, Scott Mackenzie, after claiming a single lump-sum payment of about $370.9 million before taxes on Wednesday in Tallahassee, Fla. Officials say she is the largest sole lottery winner in U.S. history. She did not speak to reporters outside lottery headquarters, leaving in a silver Ford Focus with family members.Steve Cannon | Associated Press
On May 18, 2013, Gloria C. MacKenzie became the largest sole lottery winner in U.S. history at the time when the 84-year-old Zephryhills resident won thanks to a Powerball ticket she bought at Publix. Her payout was just under $371 million, which netted her about $278 million after taxes.
Five years later she sued her son and caretaker Scott Mackenzie, saying he and his investment manager each lived off her millions of dollars in winnings while poorly investing the proceeds. A $1.13 million home she bought in Glen Kernan Country Club had been transferred to her daughter and trustee Melinda Mackenzie in 2013 but later Duval County records showed it in her son’s name.
Mackenzie died in February 2021 before the case was concluded. It was unclear how much of her winnings she had left.
4. Alex and Rhonda Toth: Bankrupt and charged with tax evasion
Alex and Rhonda Toth hit it big in 1990 with a $13 million jackpot. They chose to get their winnings in annual payments, which came to $666,666 each.
But within 15 years the Pasco County couple had blown or gambled it all away, staying in expensive hotels, flying around the world and meeting celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump. The Toths declared bankruptcy twice.
They were charged in 2006 with filing false tax returns and owing the government $2.5 million in unpaid taxes. The couple split in 2008 when Alex Toth went to a medical facility to be treated for mental problems that had left him incompetent to stand trial.
Rhonda Toth accepted a plea agreement and eventually served two years in prison. Alex Toth died broke in 2008 of a heart attack at age 60 before he went to trial.
3. Jeffrey Dampier Jr.: Murdered by mistress
Dampier won his $20 million in the Illinois lottery in 1996, but he makes the Florida list because he moved here to open a gourmet popcorn store in Tampa and was killed by his mistress (who was also his sister-in-law) and her boyfriend.
Dampier divorced his wife after his windfall, married Crystal Jackson and moved to Tampa where he became the owner of Kassie’s Gourmet Popcorn. He also developed a sexual relationship with Crystal’s sister Victoria, showering her with gifts and a free apartment, according to Victoria Jackson’s attorney.
In 2005, prosecutors said Victoria Jackson and her boyfriend Nathan Jackson (no relation) kidnapped Dampier, tied his hands with shoelaces and forced him into a van.
Hillsborough County deputies said Victoria Jackson drove while Nathaniel Jackson threatened him with the gun, then struck Dampier several times in the head while demanding money. As they drove around, Nathaniel Jackson handed the gun to his girlfriend and said, “Shoot him or I’ll shoot you,” prosecutors said. Victoria Jackson squeezed the trigger, firing once in the back of Dampier’s head.
Victoria Jackson said later she didn’t know the plan that night was to kill him. Victoria Jackson and Nathan Jackson were found guilty of first-degree murder, armed kidnapping and armed carjacking and were sentenced to life in prison.
2. David Lee Edwards: Died in debt in hospice care
David Edwards of Ashland, Kentucky, had just been fired from a telecommunications company in Florida and needed money for back surgery when he became one of three winners of a $295 million Powerball jackpot in 2001.
Edwards, 46 and divorced at the time, opted for the single lump sum of $41.1 million. “I think I can handle my own money, with the help of advisers,” he told Good Morning America.
He and his new wife, Shawna, returned to Florida and bought:
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A $1.6 million house in a private tennis and golf community in Palm Beach Gardens
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Another home for $600,000
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Two businesses worth $4.5 million
Edwards spent $3 million in the first three months, the Broward Palm Beach New Times reported, and $12 million within the first year.
Edwards, who had a former felony robbery conviction, and Shawna contracted hepatitis from their needle drug use and both were arrested multiple times for possession of crack cocaine, pills and heroin, the New Times reported.
By 2006, the money was all gone and the couple were living in a storage unit surrounded by “dirty clothes, rotting food,” the New Times reported. Shawna Edwards left him and remarried.
The lottery winner died alone and penniless in Kentucky hospice care in 2013 at the age of 58.
1. Abraham Shakespeare: Murdered by financial advisor
Abraham Shakespeare was murdered three years after winning $17 million in the Florida Lottery.
In 2010, acting on a tip, investigators found the body of Abraham Shakespeare under a concrete slab behind a Lakeland home. The lottery winner had been missing for nine months at that point. The body had been shot twice in the chest.
Shakespeare won a $17 million lump sum Florida Lottery jackpot. The former janitor could barely read and wrote his name in block letters, and by the time he met Dorice Donegan “Dee Dee” Moore he had already spent, lent or given away most of his winnings. Moore befriended him in 2008, claiming she was writing a book “about how people were taking advantage of him,” according to assistant state attorney Jay Pruner.
Prosecutors said Moore became his financial advisor, eventually controlling every asset he had left, including an expensive home, debts owed to him and a $1.5 million annuity.
Shakespeare disappeared in April 2009 and was reported missing in November. Prosecutors said that during that time Moore attempted to make it appear Shakespeare was still alive, including writing a letter purportedly from Shakespeare to his mother and getting a person to pretend to be him in a phone call to her. The mother of one of Shakespeare’s two sons, Sentorria Butler, testified that Moore offered to give her a home if she would lie to Shakespeare’s mother about seeing him.
Dorice “Dee Dee” Moore was found guilty of first-degree murder in the shooting death of lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare.
An undercover officer testified that Moore offered him $50,000 to take the blame for Shakespeare’s death and told him where to find the body, although she blamed his death on drug dealers. The body was buried five feet under a slab behind a Plant City home that Moore had purchased with one of Shakespeare’s checks.
Moore was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. During the sentencing, Hillsborough Circuit Judge Emmett Lamar Battles called her “the most manipulative person” he had seen. She appealed in 2015 and again in 2019, saying her lawyer was ineffectual and evidence of Shakespeare being alive after the date prosecutors say she killed him was ignored, but her conviction was upheld both times. Moore is currently appealing again.
A year after her sentencing a judge ordered that Shakespeare’s $1 million Lakeland home and some other mortgages be stripped from Moore and returned to Shakespeare’s estate.
In a bizarre coincidence, in 2017 Antionette Andrews, the mother of Shakespeare’s other son, won $1 million in a $20 scratch-off $5 million Monopoly game.
Contributors: Tina Harbuck, The Destin Log; Jason Geary, The Ledger, Taylor M. Riley, Courier Journal
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Mega Millions, Powerball, Florida Lottery: Bad times for big winners