For millions of us, would be a dream come true - but the reality of scooping riches can turn into a nightmare. and Awkwafina star in new action-comedy movie Jackpot!, which imagines a future lottery game where the winner has to evade hunters trying to kill them to claim their multi-billion prize. Here we reveal some deadly around real-life lotto wins.
.. When Sydney salesman Bazil Thorne and wife Freda scooped the equivalent of £1.
5million in today’s money on a lottery to raise funds for the city’s Opera House in 1960 they became overnight celebrities. But tragedy struck when on July 7 their eight-year-old son Graeme was kidnapped on his way to school. A hefty ransom demand was issued with threats to throw the lad to the sharks before sadly the boy’s tied up body was found on waste ground in a suburb.
He’d died from head injuries. Soil and dog hair samples on a rug used to wrap his corpse led police to Hungarian-born Stephen Bradley. It emerged he’d put Graeme in the boot of his car, but panicked when he found him unconscious, hit him over the head and dumped the body.
Bradley was sentenced to life in prison. In 2006 US labourer Abraham Shakespeare won £17million on a lottery in Florida. A couple of years later he was befriended by con artist Dorice DeeDee Moore who offered him financial advice, while siphoning off nearly £1million of his cash, to spend on cars and a holiday.
Then, in 2009, Abraham went missing. A tip off led detectives to find his body buried und.