It was Jan. 17 in the offices of the Iowa Lottery in Des Moines when Mary Neubauer met Crawford Shaw for the first time, when he sat down with lottery officials for 90 minutes. In that time, he told them why he should be handed millions of dollars for a winning ticket purchased by someone else 13 months ago in a Des Moines convenience store. Mega lottery

The payout for the prize would have been $7.5 million in cash or $10.3 million in 25 years.

Neubauer describes him as “A tall, older gentleman, in good shape, wearing a suit and a ball cap, very gregarious, and a gifted talker.”

When the meeting was finished, he couldn’t answer questions like who bought the ticket, who had the ticket from Dec. 23, 2010, to Dec. 29, 2011 – when it was submitted to lottery officials, two hours before it was officially expired – or who is winning the prize.

“There was a lot of talking, but he couldn’t give us answers to those three basic questions,” Neubauer said.

Thursday evening, Shaw finally decided to no claim the prize, Neubauer said. So, the unclaimed money will now become jackpot money for someone else.

And Friday, the Iowa Attorney General’s Office and the State Division of Criminal Investigation announced they will be conducting a criminal investigation. Powerball lottery

Shay, did release a statement Thursday through a Des Moines law firm saying that he was never told the identity of the ticket’s purchaser, but that he was representing a group called Hexham Investment Trust. Shaw said he only knows his client was from Belize.

“Just when it seemed like the story couldn’t get weirder,” Neubauer said, “it got weirder.”

“There will be the investigation, but to be honest, we may never really know enough about what happened with this ticket,” she said.

One thing investigators don’t believe is that the ticket was stolen.

Still, lottery official insist that there has never been a situation like this anywhere else in the country.

Sometimes lottery ticket holders with certain financial or legal problems may try to sell a winning ticket at some fraction of the winning amount to keep any profits private, others say that the tickets got stolen after they sold it, and some others even claim aliens have something to do with the ticket. Lottery winning tickets have a particular way of impacting people and their lives.

But the truth is yet to be known, “We’ll see if the investigators come up with any clues,” Nuebauer said. “So many of us would love to know more of the story.”

At the same time, she said, lottery officials are happy that now that Shaw removed his claim to the ticket on Thursday night, “life might pretty soon get back to normal around here.”

“This issue has created such a frenzy of activity around here and such a crush of interest from the public,” she said. “It would probably be nice to have a little less international intrigue for a while.

And so, even when this story is officially over, somehow we get the feeling we’ll keep hearing about it for a very long time.