£3.6m National Lottery Windfall Separated British Couple

Kirk Stevens, a 39-year-old engineer at Rolls-Royce in Derby, UK, and his 40-year-old live-in girlfriend Laura Hoyle were over the moon in March last year when it turned out that the lottery ticket Laura was buying on a weekly basis instead of paying rent scooped £10,000 ($11,800) a month for 30 years net of taxes.

Naivety Cost Him His Fair Share of the Winnings

The couple posed for pictures and press releases with both of their names on the cheque but less than a year later, their fairy tale is over after Laura ditched him and cut him off from the lottery winning.

She moved to the new £500,000 ($590,000) house for which they both made a deposit after the lottery win, took a lot of stuff from his house in which they had lived together, and even is demanding over their two dogs.

According to Stevens, who was interviewed by The Sun, it was all ebb and flow for the couple who met in 2018 and wasted no time as Laura moved into Steven’s three-bedroom detached home almost immediately and he could not ask for rent from his girlfriend.

It was Laura’s idea to spend around £25 ($30) a week playing the lottery with the informal arrangement that any win would be for the benefit of them both.

“Our arrangement was never any more formal but I didn’t think I needed anything more. We were a couple, living together in my home. Besides, I never expected to win,” Stevens told the media.

His girlfriend had recently been let go from a senior management role in a logistics firm and sold her home in Wolverhampton when she moved with Stevens. She was out of work but had money from the sale, yet Stevens never asked for rent. Later on, she was hired by the delivery firm Hermes.

Money Influx Changed Everything

As soon as she realized that her lottery ticket won the prize, Laura quit her job, the couple bought a luxury Porsche Cayenne and started pursuing their dreams: hers, to become a ghost hunter, and his, to complete his master’s degree in engineering. Laura even paid him £1,000 ($1,800) a month from the winnings.

“We had plans for the future. We were going to buy properties together and build an empire,” Stevens added.

Twice he had considered proposing to her to marry him and twice he had changed his mind having returned the rings, feeling she was reluctant to commit.

Following their split up in June, Laura told him that she had considered the monthly £1,000 payment from the winnings as rent payment but as she had moved out, she would not be doing even this now. She was clear that the lottery winnings were not theirs but hers.

And although Stevens insists he is owed at least something from the monthly allowance, he is unlikely to get anything as Camelot was clear that, despite that the fake cheque for publicity featured both of their names, all lotto wins are paid to an individual account, in this case, Laura’s.