A North Carolina man who won a $10 million lottery prize in 2017 was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the fatal shooting of his girlfriend in 2020.
Michael Hill, 54, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced on May 27, 2022, for the killing of 23-year-old Keonna Graham. On July 20, 2o20, Graham was reported missing, and was later found dead in a hotel with a gunshot wound to the back of her head.
Prosecutors said that surveillance footage from the hotel showed that Hill was the only person in the room with Graham. Hill then confessed to shooting Graham after she had been texting other men while at the hotel.
Three years before the murder, Hill won $10 million from an Ultimate Millions scratch-off ticket, and after winning, he gave $2K to the cashier who sold him the ticket, WECT-TV reported.
At the time, WECT described Hill as a nuclear power plant worker and said he intended to use the lump-sum winnings of over $4 million, after taxes, to pay off bills and help his wife’s business.
