00:01Abraham Shakespeare.
00:03According to the New York Daily News,
00:0570% of lottery winners end up broke within seven years.
00:09Even worse, several winners have died horribly
00:12or witnessed those close to them suffer.
00:15That's brutal, bro.
00:18And it brings us to Abraham Shakespeare.
00:21Hello.
00:21In 2006, this 42-year-old assistant truck driver from Florida,
00:26a man who could barely read or write,
00:28won a $30 million lottery jackpot.
00:32He took the lump sum of $17 million,
00:35and almost overnight, his life became a nightmare.
00:39He was known for his extreme generosity,
00:42letting homeless people stay in his house
00:44and handing out cash to anyone with a sob story.
00:47He told his brother,
00:48I'd have been better off broke.
00:50In late 2008, he met Doris D.D. Moore.
00:55She approached him pretending to want to write a book about his life,
00:58but her real goal was his money.
01:00She convinced him she was the only one he could trust
01:04and took control of his finances,
01:06creating an LLC in his name and appointing herself as the manager.
01:10She transferred his funds, his home, everything into her control.
01:15Then, she isolated him from his family.
01:19In April 2009, Abraham Shakespeare was last seen alive.
01:25D.D.'s cover-up was a series of stupid mistakes.
01:28She sent text messages from Abraham's phone to his family,
01:31but they knew he was illiterate and couldn't write texts.
01:35She paid someone to impersonate him on a call to his mother,
01:38but his mother knew it wasn't his voice.
01:40The police zeroed in on her, and an undercover officer befriended her.
01:45She eventually confessed she knew where the body was.
01:49On January 28, 2010, police found Abraham's body buried under a concrete slab
01:55in the backyard of a home D.D. had purchased with his money.
01:59He had been shot twice in the chest.
02:01D.D. Moore was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
02:07A man who just wanted to be generous, eaten alive by the greed he attracted.
02:14David Lee Edwards
02:15If Abraham Shakespeare's story is a tragedy of being too trusting,
02:20David Lee Edwards' story is a masterclass in self-destruction.
02:25In 2001, David, an unemployed ex-con from Kentucky, won a $27 million share of a Powerball jackpot.
02:33This was his chance to turn his life around.
02:36He held a press conference, flanked by his fiancé, and promised to use the money responsibly.
02:42He said,
02:43I'm not going to blow this.
02:46He blew it. Immediately.
02:48In the first year alone, he burned through $12 million.
02:52He bought a $1.6 million mansion in a gated community,
02:56a fleet of luxury cars including a Lamborghini,
03:00and a $1.9 million private jet.
03:03He bought a fiber optics company and a limo business.
03:06He filled his home with medieval armor and expensive antiques.
03:10He was living out a fantasy,
03:13a whirlwind of spending fueled by a lifetime of poverty and bad decisions.
03:18But the money only amplified his demons.
03:21Both he and his wife developed severe drug addictions,
03:25reportedly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on narcotics.
03:29The mansion became a den of decay, littered with needles and filth.
03:35Within five years, all the money was gone.
03:38The businesses failed, the cars were repossessed, the mansion was sold.
03:43He and his wife ended up living in a squalid storage unit surrounded by their own feces.
03:49His wife eventually left him and remarried.
03:53David Lee Edwards died in hospice care in 2013 at the age of 58,
03:59completely penniless and alone.
04:01His cause of death was listed as natural causes,
04:04but it was a death brought on by years of hard living and addiction,
04:09all funded by a lottery ticket that was supposed to be his salvation.
04:13It was a golden ticket that led directly to a slow, painful, and pathetic end.
04:20Uruj Khan
04:21Sometimes the lottery curse doesn't wait for you to go broke.
04:25Sometimes it strikes with the speed and precision of a professional assassin.
04:31In 2012, Uruj Khan, a 46-year-old immigrant from India who owned three dry-cleaning businesses in Chicago,
04:39won $1 million on a scratch-off ticket.
04:42He was a hard-working family man and his plans for the money were modest,
04:46pay off his bills, his mortgage, and make a donation to a children's hospital.
04:51He opted for the lump sum payment, which, after taxes, came to about $425,000.
04:58On July 19, 2012, the state of Illinois cut him the check.
05:04The very next day, Uruj Khan was dead.
05:08He had eaten dinner with his wife, daughter, and father-in-law and went to bed.
05:13He woke up screaming in agony and collapsed.
05:16The medical examiner initially ruled his death was from natural causes, a hardening of the arteries.
05:22But a relative, who remains unnamed, was suspicious and pushed for a more thorough investigation.
05:29Six months later, the results of a full toxicology screen came back.
05:34Uruj Khan had died of a lethal dose of cyanide.
05:38The case was officially reclassified as a homicide.
05:42The problem? There was no evidence.
05:45No container for the poison, no witnesses, no motive that could be proven.
05:50His body was exhumed, but the investigation stalled.
05:54To this day, no one has ever been charged in his murder.
05:59The timing is just too perfect to be a coincidence.
06:02He wins the lottery, gets the check, and is dead 24 hours later from a poison that is notoriously difficult
06:09to obtain.
06:10It's a perfect, unsolved murder.
06:13A man who worked his whole life for a piece of the American dream,
06:17only to have it turn into a death sentence the moment he cashed it in.
06:23Donald Savastano
06:25This next story is a different kind of cruel.
06:28It's not about murder or greed.
06:31It's about the brutal, cosmic irony of fate.
06:35Donald Savastano was a 51-year-old self-employed carpenter from upstate New York.
06:40He was the kind of guy who worked with his hands his whole life.
06:43A blue-collar man without health insurance.
06:46For a while, he hadn't been feeling well.
06:48But like a lot of guys in his position, he put off going to the doctor.
06:52It was too expensive.
06:54He'd just tough it out.
06:56In December 2017, he bought a Merry Millionaire scratch-off ticket.
07:02He won a million dollars.
07:04Suddenly, everything was different.
07:07He had plans.
07:08He was going to buy a new truck, take a trip, and finally go see a doctor.
07:14He told a local news station, this is going to change our lives.
07:18He wasn't wrong, but not in the way he hoped.
07:22He went to the doctor, and the news was devastating.
07:26He had stage four cancer.
07:29It had already spread to his brain and lungs.
07:32It was aggressive, and it was terminal.
07:35The money that was supposed to give him a new life was now only enough to give him a diagnosis
07:40for the thing that was killing him.
07:42The irony is almost too much to bear.
07:45The one thing that could have saved him, an earlier diagnosis, was something he couldn't afford until he won the
07:52money that was now useless.
07:55Donald Savistano died on January 26, 2018, just 23 days after he won the lottery.
08:03He never got to buy his new truck.
08:05He never took his trip.
08:07He won a million dollars, and all it bought him was the knowledge of how he was going to die.
08:13A heartbreaking story of a man who got everything he wanted, just a little too late.
08:20Tiffany Hill
08:21Sometimes, it's hard to tell if the lottery money is the cause of the tragedy, or just gasoline poured on
08:28a fire that was already burning.
08:30That's the case with Tiffany Hill.
08:32In November 2020, the 31-year-old California mother won over $2 million on a scratch-off ticket.
08:40It was a life-changing amount of money.
08:43Shortly after, she married her boyfriend, John Donato, and they moved with her young daughter to Calera, Oklahoma, for a
08:50fresh start.
08:51But the fresh start quickly soured.
08:54According to Tiffany's family, the relationship was abusive, and the money only made it worse.
08:59It became a constant source of conflict.
09:03Tiffany, feeling trapped and isolated in a new state away from her family, decided she had to leave.
09:09She was making plans to escape the abusive marriage.
09:13She never got the chance.
09:14On July 30, 2021, less than a year after her win, police were called to their home.
09:21They found Tiffany and John Donato dead from gunshot wounds.
09:25Their one-year-old daughter, Leanne, had also been shot.
09:29She was rushed to the hospital, but died from her injuries.
09:33Tiffany's three other children were in the home at the time, but were physically unharmed.
09:38Police ruled it a murder-suicide.
09:41Donato had killed Tiffany, their baby, and then himself.
09:45The family's attorney later said,
09:46Could that have sparked that argument?
09:49We'll never have any way of knowing.
09:51But I do know there were times it caused conflict between them.
09:55The money that was supposed to be a ticket to a better life became the catalyst for a domestic nightmare.
10:00It gave her the means to marry her killer, move with him, and become trapped in the very situation that
10:07led to her death.
10:35We'll see you next time.
10:37We'll be back.
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