A North Carolina man, Michael Todd Hill, 54, who won a $10 million lottery prize in 2017 has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in the 2020 fatal shooting of his girlfriend.
TheNewsGuru.com (TNG) reports that the lottery winner, a resident of Leland, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced Friday to 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 the letter winner later confessed to shooting Graham after she had been texting with other men while at the hotel. Hill won $10 million from a scratch-off ticket in August 2017.
At the time of the incident, a hotel manager said that Hill was the one who checked in, and none of the employees had seen Graham.
Housekeeper found the body after Hill did not check out.
Graham’s mother had also reported her missing after she did not show up to work on July 19, 2020.
“She was very loved, and she’s very beautiful,” family friend Tiffany Wilson said of Keonna in 2020.
Hill went from a being a millionaire to being an accused killer, telling the court at the time that he could not afford an attorney. The clerk who sold him the winning lottery ticket reportedly said that he gave her $2,000 as a thank-you. Employees said he seemed like a nice guy.
But the autopsy report noted that the couple had domestic problems in the past, according to WECT.
Hill confessed to murdering Graham, saying that he discovered at the hotel that she was texting other men.
Graham and Hill were in a relationship for more than a year and a half after he won the lottery.