Author: Kate Maltby / Source: CNN
Kate Maltby is a regular broadcaster and columnist in the United Kingdom on issues of culture and politics, and a theater critic for The Times of London. She is also completing a doctorate in Renaissance literature, having been awarded a collaborative doctoral degree between Yale University and University College London.
The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion articles on CNN.(CNN)There’s a line in the hit 1988 film “Heathers” — now running as a musical in London’s West End — when the clique of popular girls takes an inane straw poll of their high school cafeteria. “You inherit $5 million the same day aliens land on the Earth and say they’re going to blow it up in two days. What do you do?” The answers are as diffuse as they are wild: vows of selfless charity, fantasies of luring Madonna into prostitution, designs for suicide-bombing zoos “so you and the lion die like one.”
This week, the winners of two high-rolling lottery jackpots may get to live out their own big-spending fantasies. Tuesday’s MegaMillions drawing currently stands at $1.6 billion and Wednesday’s lesser Powerball is still no snip at $620 million. There isn’t even a promise of alien invasion to cut short the spending window.
But in life, as in fiction, there’s always still a catch. Is an overnight windfall of this magnitude really worth the hassle? Earlier this year, a New Hampshire woman sued for the right to retain anonymity while claiming her Powerball prize of $560 million. Most states still consider the identity of lottery winners a matter of public record.
If that sounds like a price worth paying for a half a billion life change, bear in mind the number of lottery winners who’ve met grisly ends after the news of their winnings spread.
In 2006, Abraham Shakespeare won $30 million in Florida; less than three years later, he was found buried under a concrete slab. Doris “Dee Dee” Moore, a woman who mysteriously befriended Shakespeare after his win, was eventually convicted of his murder. She’d offered to help Shakespeare manage his winnings, and killed him for them instead.
Shakespeare isn’t the only winner who’s been killed after becoming a high-profile target. In November 2015, Craigory Burch Jr. won $400,000 in Illinois and posed with the check. Two months later, he was killed in a targeted home…
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