For those who dream of winning the lottery, it pays to remember that beneficiaries of sudden financial windfalls are still themselves – only richer.
Money certainly doesn’t appear to have changed one North Carolina man for the better.
Michael Todd Hill, 52, who collected a whopping $10 million lottery prize just three years ago, has been charged with murder after a young woman was found lifeless in a hotel room.
The Leland resident was arrested Tuesday following the discovery the day before of a body identified as Keonna Graham.
Graham, 23, was in an “on-and-off” relationship with Hill, police said, according to Star-News.
Hill, who won big on an Extreme Millions scratch-off ticket back in August 2017, checked into the Sure Stay Hotel in Shallotte alone on Sunday, WECT reports.
None of the hotel staff saw Graham during Hill’s stay, the hotel’s manager told the station.
A housekeeper found Graham’s motionless body and blood in the room when she went to clean it after Hill’s scheduled 11am checkout.
Graham was a corrections officer at a prison in Burgaw, North Carolina, and had previously worked with mentally disabled people at a local rehabilitation center.
A relative remembered her as a generous, adventurous woman who loved hiking and riding bicycles.
Antionette Lee, her cousin, described the “unbreakable bond” between Graham and her 10-year-old sister.
“We are hurting. We are in pain,” Lee said. “Our family is devastated.”
“I think it’s horrible,” Tiffany Wilson, an acquaintance of Graham’s, told WECT. “I mean, he just won the lottery. I heard he just got married and you go and kill a young girl? A beautiful girl? I don’t understand.”
Hill bought his winning scratch-off ticket from a local gas station, according to the channel. Employees there said he would often stop by and “seemed like a nice guy.”
After collecting his huge prize, Hill reportedly returned to the store to give the woman who sold him the winning ticket $2,000.
He is being held in the Brunswick County Detention Center without bond, police said.