$900,000 for Returning Lottery Ticket : With Persistence, Montreal Man’s Honesty Is Rewarded

Welfare recipient William Murphy searched his soul when he found a lottery ticket worth $5.4 million on a Montreal street. Then he decided to give the jackpot to its rightful owner. The door was slammed in his face.

Not to be turned away, Murphy returned to the owner’s home the next day and repeated his story. The reward for his honesty was a one-sixth share of the check--$900,000.

Murphy, 28, found a wallet containing identification, $18 (about $13 U.S.) and six Lotto tickets last Sunday. He dropped the wallet and money into the owner’s mailbox but kept the tickets, hoping that one of the tickets might win him a small prize in the weekend draw.

It turned out to be the first-prize ticket picked by Jean-Guy Lavigueur, a 51-year-old widower with three children, who also was on welfare.

“For two hours, I thought of keeping the whole thing,” Murphy, a bachelor, said. “But then I said, ‘That’s not the way to be.’ So I decided to take it back, whether I got a share or not.”

Murphy--who speaks only English, one of Canada’s two official languages--went to Lavigueur’s house and rang the doorbell. Lavigueur’s son, Yves, speaks only French and could not understand what Murphy was trying to tell him. He told Murphy to get lost.

“Yeah, I threw him out,” the youth recalled. “The guy had $7 million to give me, and I told him to get out.”

Murphy returned the next day with a French-speaking friend who acted as a go-between. In gratitude, Lavigueur offered Murphy a beer and one-sixth of the prize, which he already was sharing with four other family members.

“When he (Murphy) showed me the ticket, I told him he deserved a million too,” Lavigueur said. “There are still honest people around, believe it or not.”

Murphy had 56 cents in his bank account when he found the wallet and was living on welfare payments of $122 ($88 U.S.) a month.

“I’ve gone from the ranks of the unemployed to the ranks of the idle rich overnight,” he said.