By Dominic Taylor-
A North Carolina man who won a huge $10 million lottery prize in 2017 has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole over the 2020 fatal shooting of his girlfriend.
Michael Todd Hill, 54, of Leland, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced on Friday in the killing of 23-year-old Keonna Graham of Navassa. Graham was reported missing on July 20, 2020. She was later found dead in a hotel with a gunshot wound to the back of the head.
In a news release from the 15th Prosecutorial District of North Carolina, prosecutors said surveillance footage from the hotel showed Hill was the only person in the room with Graham. They said Hill later confessed to shooting Graham after he caught her texting other men while at the hotel.
He was also sentenced to 22 to 36 months for possession of a firearm by a felony, to which he guilty to before trial.
Following his mega win in 2017 from an Ultimate Millions scratch-off ticket, he rejected the option of 20 annual payments of $500,000, opting for the lump sum of $6m, taking home around $4.2m after tax. At the time, he said he planned to use some of the money to invest in his wife’s business.
His fate of winning such a huge amount of money on the lottery, only to end up spending the rest of his life in jail, is a strange one.