In November 2011, a man named
Philip Johnston, a Canadian attorney,
called in with the correct serial num-
ber from the winning ticket. But when
asked what he’d been wearing when
he bought it, his description of a sports
coat and gray flannel dress pants did
not match the QuikTrip video. Then,
in a subsequent call, the man admit-
ted he had “fibbed”; he said he was
helping a client claim the ticket so the
client wouldn’t be identified.
This was against the Iowa Lottery
rules, which require identities of win-
ners to be public. Lottery officials
were suspicious: The winner’s ano-
nymity was worth $16.5 million?
“I was convinced it would never be
claimed,” says Mary Neubauer, the
Iowa Lottery’s vice president of exter-
nal relations, of the jackpot.
And it wasn’t, until exactly a year af-
ter the drawing—less than two hours
before the 4 p.m. deadline—when
representatives from a Des Moines
law firm showed up at lottery head-
quarters with the winning ticket. The
firm was claiming the prize on be-
half of a trust whose beneficiary was
a corporation in Belize. Its president
was Philip Johnston—the same man
who said he’d worn a sports coat to
buy the ticket.
“It just absolutely stank all over the
place,” says Terry Rich, chief executive
of the Iowa Lottery. So they held on
to the jackpot while the attorney gen-
eral’s office opened an investigation.
But it went nowhere.
T
wo years later, a baby-faced
district attorney named Rob
Sand inherited the languish-
ing lottery file. In college, Sand had
studied computer coding before go-
ing to law school, where his specialty
was white-collar crime. Still, this case
stumped him. His best evidence wasthat grainy video of a man in a hoodie,
so he decided to release the footage
to the media, hoping it might spark
leads—and it did.
The first came from an employee
of the Maine Lottery who recognized
the distinct voice in the video as that
of a man who had conducted a se-
curity audit in their offices. A web
developer at the Iowa Lottery also
recognized the voice: It belonged to
a man she had worked alongside for
years, Eddie Tipton. Eddie was the
information-security director for the
Multi-State Lottery Association, based
in Des Moines. Among the games the
association ran: the Hot Lotto.E
ddie cut a big figure around the
lottery office. He wrote software,
handled network firewalls, and
reviewed security for games in nearly
three dozen states. His life revolvedFRIENDS WONDERED
HOW HE COULD
AFFORD SUCH A BIG
HOUSE ON HIS SALARY.rd.com 111True Crime