The $16 million lottery jackpot mystery winner in Iowa will have to come forward with some explanations on how he got the ticket before Friday; otherwise he will fail to get the prize. Lottery checker

Even when the winning ticket in the December 2010 Hot Lotto drawing was purchased in a Des Moines convenience store, almost a year later, the winner from New York has not being able to came up with anything but, a vague story that has lottery officials confused. Lottery winning numbers

On Dec. 29, 2011 two Des Moines attorneys presented the winning ticket to the Iowa lottery office, saying they had gotten it by Federal Express earlier that day. The ticket came from a P.O. Box in Bedford, N.Y., and was signed by a man named Crawford Shaw, who represented the Hexham Investments Trust.

Nevertheless, Lottery officials still don’t understand how the Hexham Trust or Crawford Shaw got the ticket. On top of if, Shaw wrote the name of the trust incorrectly on the ticket, spelling it “Hexam” instead.

“This was a really unusual situation. We’ve never seen it before. We were asking the attorneys what took so long and where has this ticket been, and they didn’t know,” said Mary Neubauer, spokeswoman for the Iowa Lottery.

“Normally, when a winning ticket comes in, we find out who purchased it, and where the ticket has been, and we find all that out before announcing the winner,” Neubaeur said.

All this lottery procedures and rules are to ensure that the ticket wasn’t sold illegally after purchase or bought by someone prohibited from playing the Iowa Lottery, like lottery employees.

Since that day lottery officials have had only two questions: who purchased the ticket, and where the ticket went after initial purchase.

“There is security camera footage showing what’s occurring in the store when ticket was purchased. So we want to follow the trail of possession from that individual to the folks who turned it in here a year later so we can ensure that there’s been nothing amiss with the purchase and presentation of the ticket,” Neubaeur said.

Many people have alleged that the ticket was stolen from them, to which Neubaeur said, “In order to address those claims we need to have basic information, and it hasn’t been given to us. We keep asking, ‘Why don’t you have that information?’ and the questions simply haven’t been answered.”

Neubeauer noted that since Crawford Shaw is involved in criminal and bankruptcy proceedings in New York and Delaware, this needs to be looked into.

“We have never seen a situation like this in the 26 year history of our lottery. Usually the process of claiming a prize is pretty quick and pretty easy,” she said.

So, if no one comes to satisfactorily explain the situation by Friday’s 3 p.m. deadline, rules dictate that the lottery will be forfeited.

“We want there to be a happy ending to this story, but it’s just an incredibly strange story,” she said.

We’ll see Friday, if this story does have a happy ending after all.