The Strange Fate of Abraham Shakespeare January 29, 2010 2 comments +	By Aaron

Most lottery winners say something to the effect of “…the money won’t change me,” or “I’m still on a budget”. But what most lottery winners don’t anticipate is that though they may not change themselves, others may change them. And if there were no others to begin with, there will be soon enough. Abraham Shakespeare claims to have given the last three dollars in his wallet to a homeless man just minutes before his winning lottery numbers were called. On Thursday, his remains were excavated from a shallow grave under a concrete slab behind a rural Plant City building. This is a true story of envy, greed, murder, and circumstances that seem to be straight out of a Norman Mailer novel. This is the strange fate of Abraham Shakespeare.

Photo: Shakespeare’s mug shot (AP)

Abraham Shakespeare didn’t have a high school education. He could barely read and write, lived with his mother, and found odd jobs between stints in jail for battery and burglary. The 43 year old truck driver’s assistant from Polk County, Florida, was constantly behind on his child support payments from multiple children he had fathered but had nothing to do with. If anyone needed a 30 million dollar jackpot in late 2006, it was probably Shakespeare. With a crumpled five dollar bill, he bought a lottery ticket in the small town of Frostproof that would soon change his life forever… and ultimately end it.

From the beginning, Shakespeare was accosted and hounded over his winnings. He claimed just under 17 million dollars in a lump sum payment, and began paying back his debts, including 9,000 dollars in child support payments. He purchased a Nissan Altima and had hopes of starting a foundation for the poor. But his phone never stopped ringing. “If someone asked him for help, he was always trying to help them,” his mother, Elizabeth Walker, said. She claimed that Shakespeare would pay rent and mortgage payments for people that he barely knew, apparently giving a million dollars to an acquaintance of his, known only as “Big Man”. But the first major enemy that Shakespeare made was a co-worker that claimed that Shakespeare had stolen the ticket from him and claimed the prize. Six months later, it took a jury less than an hour to side with Shakespeare. As it turns out, Shakespeare had given truck driver Michael Ford money in order to buy quick picks on one of their stopovers on an overnight delivery trip to Miami, thus the winnings were deemed his, despite appeals from Ford. Yet this challenge was just a sign of things to come. More characters would emerge from obscurity, trying to take advantage of a simple man with a new lease on life, and one of them would succeed above all others.

Dee Dee Moore soon approached Shakespeare in hopes of writing a book about his life. The 37 year old woman had earned a year of probation in 2001 for concocting a scheme where she had faked being carjacked and raped, but there was no way that Abraham Shakespeare could have known this information before allowing Moore into his life, and it is debatable about whether it would have mattered at all. Little is currently known about how their relationship developed, but  Moore began spending more and more time with Shakespeare at his new, 6500 square foot home in a gated community, and eventually she began managing his finances. In February 2009, she opened up a limited liability account with a million dollars of his money, with her listed as a signing authority. She quickly bought a corvette and a hummer. As if this weren’t suspicious enough, she produced a video of Shakespeare that featured Abraham claiming that he wanted to move to Jamaica to get away from all the relentless hangers-on that were constantly finding him and seeking money. “They don’t take no for an answer,” he claims in the video, which Moore supplied to a local newspaper, and which she claims was made to ‘protect herself’. April 2009 was the last time that anyone saw Shakespeare.

It wouldn’t have been hard to spot a missing Abraham Shakespeare. He stood six foot five inches, but only weighed roughly 190 pounds. His mother hoped that he was somewhere in the Caribbean, drinking rum from a coconut and enjoying a life that was growing ever distant from the one that had seemed to bring him nothing but trouble. But the plot would continue to thicken. Not only was it suspicious that seven months had elapsed between when Shakespeare was last seen and when he was reported missing, but the only signs of life in those seven months were text messages sent from his phone, and a simple birthday card addressed to his mother, containing cash. When he was reported missing in November, the case began to get media attention, and soon, a growing stack of evidence would begin to magnetically point toward one person: Dee Dee Moore.

Moore filed paperwork to claim five mortgages totaling 370,000 dollars that had been owed to Shakespeare from his previous lending. Stranger still is the 200,000 dollar house that she offered someone in exchange for a false sighting of Shakespeare. Financial records show that Shakespeare (or Moore) spent most of the lottery winnings, which is not hard to do when loaning a million dollars out a time. Records also show that Moore’s company, American Medical Professionals, bought his home for 550,000 dollars last January. In February, she ended her 17 year marriage to the owner of a fill dirt company owner. And all the while, the clues continued to lead nowhere in the direction of a hiding Shakespeare.

In December, Moore admitted to reporters that she had helped Shakespeare disappear, but was now hoping that he would resurface and clear the whole thing up… most likely because her car, home, and belongings were being searched by Polk County detectives. Then, the biggest break of all would come earlier this week, when a Lakeland police officer named Troy McKay Young was arrested and charged with passing information from police databases to Moore in exchange for money. Young became acquainted with Moore in August 2009 when she again used the excuse that the information she wanted and had successfully garnered was simply for a book that she was writing about Shakespeare. Young admitted to the crime, which is a 2nd degree felony. In the same arrest report, authorities claim that Moore was the one that had arranged the birthday card sent to Shakespeare’s mother, paying another relative 5,000 dollars to hand deliver the card. Moore’s story was beginning to unravel.

Days later, authorities began searching a wooded area in nearby Plant City, on the property of a man named Shar Krasniqi. Not surprisingly, Krasniqi is the owner of American Medical Professionals, and is allegedly the boyfriend of Dee Dee Moore. The property on state road 60 is deeded to Krasniqi and is currently rented out by a lawyer by the name of Howard Stitzel, who has ties to both Shakespeare and Moore. No one knows where the tip came from, or when it came, but perhaps authorities took the advice of Eddie Dixon, who, when approached outside of one of Shakespeare’s favorite haunts, told a reporter: “Y’all need to go ask that white woman where that man at.”

After excavating under a 30×30 foot concrete pad on the Plant City property, human remains were found. Reports around the internet range from the brief ‘Remains found in search for Lottery Winner’ to accounts of relatives weeping over the loss of a man with a giving heart, to the skeptical saga of a man who loitered, hit people, questionably came upon money, loaned that money out with greed as the driver, and caught the penalty for such behavior. Although the details may seemingly point in the direction of foul play, there are many stories to consider.

Barbara Jackson, the realtor that sold Shakespeare his home, explains meeting Moore at a small-business conference, where Moore had rolled up beside her in a wheelchair. When Moore recontacted Jackson about interviewing her for the ominous book that Moore had allegedly been writing, Jackson recounts, “When she came to the house, she jumped out of a Hummer, walking. And she was on heels. She said she healed herself through scuba therapy. It wasn’t even two weeks.”

“If it wasn’t for his criminal record, he kind of didn’t exist,” claimed an attorney in the lottery ticket case. “My sense,” another attorney from the same case explains, “was that some of his family members were unhappy with the amount of money he had parceled out to them. Were there people who were jealous? I would assume so.”

Whatever your take on the case, the story is really just beginning. Abraham Shakespeare didn’t just fall asleep in a five foot deep hole and awake to find that a concrete slab had been poured over his head. As open and shut as this case may seem, one cannot expect there not to be some unbelievable new developments as time goes on, leaving us only to wonder: Who really killed Abraham Shakespeare? What lengths will some people go to in order to steal? and What is the definition of justice in this case?

A full timeline of events in the case is being kept at this url. Many reports were compiled in this account, from ABC news to TBO to NBC. We at Brasky.org are not professionals or journalists.

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