$47 million, in search of a home

Thursday, November 16, 2006 posted 12:16 PM EST

Who is Minnesota's $47 million Powerball jackpot winner?

It's been two weeks since lottery officials announced that two tickets — one sold in Minnesota and the other in Arizona — would split a $94 million jackpot.

A group of nine winners from Phoenix and Tempe stepped forward to claim their bounty Nov. 2, a day after the drawing.

But Minnesota's winner remains a mystery.

What's going on? Maybe someone misplaced the winning ticket and it's just waiting to be discovered in a purse or wallet. Perhaps someone accustomed to losing tore up the winning ticket without checking the numbers.

Or maybe the big winner is like Ron Cronkhite, the Moorhead man who won $18 million in cash after taxes in 1998 but waited nearly two weeks before claiming the prize. In the interim, he closed his family business, hired a lawyer and public relations firm and sent his wife and eight children to a place "far, far away."

Then he arranged to have the winning ticket delivered in an armored car to lottery headquarters in Roseville, where he picked up the check and said "don't bother to call" to a gaggle of reporters.

Whoever has the winning ticket has a considerable time to wait before redeeming it — 50 more weeks, to be exact. The state's one-year rule means the ticket expires at 5 p.m. Nov. 1, 2007.

After that, we're all winners. The cash value of the ticket — about $15 million — goes into the state's general fund.

"We'd rather that didn't happen," said Debbie Hoffmann, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota State Lottery. "It's (the winner's) money, so we certainly want them to come and get it."

Minnesota Lottery winners tend to be reasonably prompt. The longest wait for a jackpot winner to come forth was set in 1993, when George R. Shabatura of New Hope waited three weeks to redeem a ticket worth nearly $8 million.

During that time, Shabatura huddled with a cabal of financial planners and attorneys. He shared the good news with only his sister, brother-in-law, nephew and girlfriend.

No Powerball jackpot ticket sold in Minnesota has ever gone unclaimed, Hoffmann said, though smaller unclaimed winnings — some as high as $100,000 — have wound up in state coffers.

But nationally, some colossal prizes that were never claimed. The largest on record, according to Hoffmann, was a $51.7 million lottery ticket in Indiana that was drawn Sept. 14, 2002, and went unclaimed for 180 days, the limit under Indiana law.

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