Dale Miller's laundry may have cost him a life on easy street.
The Florida Lottery announced Sunday that two tickets had been sold with the winning number drawn Saturday for a $20 million jackpot.One was sold in the Daytona Beach area, and Miller was sure he had it.
"I know all the numbers," he said. The other was sold in Fort Walton Beach.
But Miller says he accidentally left the ticket in the pocket of a shirt he washed Sunday morning. After the laundry was done, he found a fat ball of lint, including the ground-up ticket, in the washing machine.
"There were no letters or numbers on it. It was just a ball, so I threw it away," said Miller, a groundskeeper for the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
He reluctantly wrote it off.
But on Monday, his girlfriend, Linda Hayward, told him she was informed by a Florida Lottery employee that tests could be carried out to authenticate a mutilated ticket if they could produce at least part of it.
By then, Miller's trash had already been picked up by a garbage truck.
He and Hayward hurried out to the Tomoka landfill and arrived in time to meet the truck carrying his trash.
They braved the stench to pick through the truck's load.
"I knew I would probably find the trash, but with my luck a couple of the bags were ripped or wide open," Miller said. "(Then) I had a gut feeling I wouldn't find anything."
He didn't. And neither did landfill workers who were told about it later.
In the six-year history of the Florida lottery, no prize has been awarded without a ticket, officials said.
"Courts have generally held that you have to have a lottery ticket to win a prize," said lottery spokeswoman Angie Raines.
As of Wednesday morning, no winning ticket had been turned in for Saturday's big prize.
"I felt sick to my stomach ever since this thing began," said Miller. "You know you had it, but you can't find it. It's awful."