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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. According to Lottery USA, the odds of URI winning a Mega Millions jackpot is about 1 in 302.6 million. Your chances of getting struck by lightning
1 in 12,000. In November 2006, assistant truck driver and two-time incarcerated felon became that 1 in 302.6 million statistic. Florida native Abraham Shakespeare used $2 out of the $5 he had in his pocket and purchased a winning lottery ticket worth over $30 million.
The money didn't just have a profound impact on his life and the lives of his family and friends, but did becoming a Mega Millions jackpot winner also cost him his life? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 35, The Florida Lotto Murder.
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
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To support Forensic Tales, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales or simply click the link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive rating with a review. Now, let's get to this week's episode.
Hey, everyone. It's been a huge week in true crime news since our last episode together. There's been updates in two major cases, one case that I covered early on on the show and another about a case that I covered in a bonus episode available on the show's Patreon page.
The first is that the Golden State Killer, now known as Joseph James DeAngelo, has been officially and finally sentenced to over 40 years since his crime spree began in California.
If you haven't listened to the episode on GSK or just not familiar with D'Angelo, he's believed to have murdered at least 13 people, raped over 50 women, and burglarized over 120 homes all up and down the California coast. And just this past week, GSK was sentenced to 12 life sentences plus eight additional years. He managed to escape the death penalty as part of the terms of his plea bargain with prosecutors.
Now, the second big update in the true crime world is that this past week is in the Scott Peterson case. We all remember Scott Peterson was found guilty of murdering his then eight-month-old pregnant wife, Lacey Peterson, as well as their unborn son back in 2002.
I covered the Scott Peterson case in a bonus episode that is only available on our Patreon page, which is available for download right now. If you want to check out and listen to my thoughts on either the Golden State Killer case or listen to what happened on the Scott Peterson case, make sure you become a patron of the show at patreon.com slash forensic tales, and you'll get instant access to my thoughts and opinions on both case updates.
The case we've got this week is another crazy story out of the state of Florida. It's a murder case where the victim just won $30 million after purchasing a lotto ticket. And one of the biggest reasons I wanted to cover it on my show was that it involved a type of forensics that we haven't covered on the show. And that's the use of forensic accounting. The story begins on November 15, 2006 in Florida.
That day, 40-year-old Abraham Lee Shakespeare and a co-worker of his, Michael Ford, were traveling toward Miami, Florida, when the two men stopped for cigarettes and some drinks at a local convenience store. Abraham Shakespeare, born on April 24, 1966 in Lakeland, Florida, worked as a truck driver's assistant, making $8 an hour.
His life up until November 2006 wasn't perfect. He spent most of his childhood in different homes of juvenile delinquents. And as an adult, he had a lengthy criminal record. He'd been arrested for loitering, driving when he wasn't supposed to, stealing, and getting into fights. And then, when he had two children, he got in trouble for not paying child support for either of his young children.
Abraham was even sent to prison on two separate occasions. On November 15, 2006, Abraham worked as a truck driver's assistant with a guy named Michael Ford. He was assigned to ride shotgun with Ford on an overnight food route to Miami. Along the way, they made a delivery in Lakeland, where Abraham grew up, another delivery in Winter Haven, and then stopped at the Town Star Mini Mart in the city of Frostproof.
Michael Ford got out of his truck and asked Abraham if he wanted anything from inside. On this particular day in 2006, Abraham had only $5 in his wallet. Knowing that he only had $5, Abraham asked for a pair of quick-pick lotto tickets, leaving just $3 in his pocket for the rest of the overnight trip.
Michael Ford went into the mini-mart store and purchased some cigarettes, drinks, and two quick picks for Abraham. Like most people, Ford didn't select his own numbers. He just opted for random numbers. So Ford walked out with a ticket with the numbers 6, 12, 13, 34, 42, and 52.
A few days later, the tickets with numbers 6, 12, 13, 34, 42, and 52, the same numbers on Abraham's ticket, became the winning numbers. Abraham just won a $31 million jackpot. He went from $5 in his pocket to now becoming a multi-millionaire.
Abraham opted for the lump sum option of $16.9 million, which left around $11 million after taxes. He went from being essentially broke, $5 to his name, hustling for $8 an hour, to now walking away with over $11 million.
Shortly after receiving the lump sum, the Florida courts took back child support from Abraham's two children, which totaled about $9,000. He then gave $1 million to his stepfather. He gave $250,000 each to his three stepsisters. He paid off a $185,000 mortgage for a friend of his.
He bought a $125,000 house that he ended up using as a rental property. He gave his brother's son's best friend $40,000 and the list goes on. Abraham burned through a lot of money very quickly.
A sad truth about ordinary people who win the lottery, especially big jackpots like this, is that people start to take advantage of them. Suddenly, you've got friends and family, a family of friends, neighbors, and
and whoever else come out of the woodwork looking for money. And unfortunately, in Abraham's case, it was pretty well known that people in his life were constantly tugging on him after learning about him coming into this massive amount of money. And another sad truth is that it's not uncommon for people to win the lottery and then find themselves bankrupt not too long afterward.
Abraham purchased another house in January 2007 in the city of Lakeland, where he intended to live for a little over $1 million. Three months after purchasing the million-dollar home, in April 2007, Abraham was sued by his co-worker, Michael Ford, the guy that he was with when he purchased the winning lotto ticket.
Michael Ford, 34 years old at the time, said that the winning ticket was actually his, that Abraham stole the lotto ticket from him and said that it was his money and that he should get whatever was left and not Abraham.
Ford sued Abraham for the money, and the case went to trial later that year in October. Michael Ford's attorney argued that Abraham was a transient and said that if it wasn't for his, meaning Abraham's, criminal record, he kind of didn't exist, end quote. At the trial, Abraham brought a trash bag stuffed with hundreds of lotto tickets that he had purchased over the years.
He was trying to tell the jury, I've bought hundreds, probably thousands of lotto tickets over the years. This is something that is common for me. After an hour of deliberation, the jury ruled that Abraham didn't steal the ticket from Michael Ford and that it was, in fact, legally Abraham's money.
But this first ruling didn't stop the appeal process from dragging on. Michael Ford appealed the initial court order, still claiming that the winning lotto ticket was his and that it was stolen from him. The case was set to be heard for appeal on May 27, 2009, but Abraham didn't show up to the court hearing like he was supposed to. In fact, Abraham's friends and family hadn't heard from him since April of that year.
Once the family learned that he didn't show up to court that day, they became increasingly worried about his whereabouts. It wasn't like him to just not show up or be heard from in over a month. It was like he had just vanished. At first, family and friends hoped maybe he took the money, whatever was left at that point, and just wanted to get away. Get away from the lawsuit and get away from everyone under the sun asking him for money.
A reward of $5,000 was put out for any information about his disappearance. One of Abraham's friends, Eddie Dixon, came forward and was quoted to the media as saying, quote, one thing I know is that that's my best friend. Y'all need to go ask that white woman where that man at, end quote. The white woman Eddie Dixon was talking about was 37-year-old Dee Dee Moore.
DeeDee Moore lived on a property behind Abraham's. She married a man named James Moore and his son was born in 1995. When police knocked on her door to find out what she knew about Abraham or where he might be, she had a lot to say to investigators. DeeDee told police and reporters that she had met Abraham about a year before his disappearance.
She said she had met him at an annual small business conference in November 2008. Deedee supposedly told Abraham that she wanted to write a book about him, specifically write a book about him winning the lottery. According to Deedee, after the two of them met, Deedee and Abraham launched a business together in February 2009, Abraham Shakespeare LLC, a company that Deedee was in charge of the firm's money.
Barely a week after starting the company, Deedee divorced her husband of 17 years and moved into one of the homes Shakespeare had purchased for himself. Police quickly learned that in 2001, Deedee had been convicted of insurance fraud and sentenced to a year of probation.
In 2001, Dee Dee took her Lincoln Navigator, a car that she was thousands of dollars behind on payments, and parked it in a garage in Pasco County. She had an accomplice tie her up, take her several cities away, and throw her in a ditch. She then caught the attention of a passerby who she told was raped at gunpoint by three Hispanic men. They stole her car and then left her for dead.
But her story didn't add up, and she was found guilty of insurance fraud and falsifying a crime report. When police questioned Dee Dee about where Abraham might be, to their surprise, she knew. She told the police that Abraham was tired of everyone asking him for money, so she helped him skip town.
She said Abraham was falling behind on child support again. He recently had a third child and was so tired of people begging him for money that he said he no longer had. She told the police that Abraham was either in Texas, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, or Orlando. And at one point, she even said he might be sick in a hospital somewhere.
The police weren't exactly satisfied or sold by Dee Dee's story that Abraham just ran away. Still, without any solid evidence linking her to his disappearance, they were forced to let her go and keep investigating. The police started to do a little digging into the finances between Dee Dee and Abraham, and they began to do some forensic accounting work.
Forensic accounting is a highly specialized subfield that combines accounting and investigative techniques to try and uncover any type of financial crime. Police knew that Abraham and Didi had started a business together. She lives in one of the homes that he bought, and now he's missing. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. A forensic accountant uncovered a lot of financial information about Abraham and Dee Dee's relationship.
The accountant confirmed that in January 2009, the ownership of Abraham's home was transferred to American Medical Professionals, the company that Deedee created and owned. But it wasn't just Abraham's home that was transferred to Deedee's company. Of the $570,000 that Abraham owned by early 2009, more than two-thirds of it was owned by American Medical Professionals.
A forensic search of purchases made by this company revealed even more about where Abraham's money was going. They found that on February 21, 2009, Dee Dee purchased a 2008 Chevy Corvette for her new boyfriend for a little over $70,000.
The car was purchased with a cashier's check from none other than her American Medical Professionals LLC business account, where we already know was made up of two-thirds of Abraham's money. About two weeks later, on March 2nd, she purchased a 2009 Hummer for about $90,000 using the same business account. These purchases were made just a few weeks before Abraham was last seen.
He was supposed to be in court on May 27, 2009, but friends and family of Abraham hadn't seen or heard from him since April. The results from the forensic accounting work gave the police enough reason to go back and question DeeDee a little bit more about where Abraham might be and why he's gone missing.
She had reportedly told three different local reporters that she could prove Abraham was still alive and that she could even set up an interview with him. She told reporters that she could arrange for Abraham to meet up with his mother, neither of which happened.
A search of Abraham's cell phone records revealed that the last activity on his cell phone came from April 6, 2009, right around the time he was last seen or heard from around the Lakeland area of Florida. Seven months go by and people still have yet to see or hear from Abraham. His disappearance just doesn't make any sense to those that knew him and were close to him.
Friends of Abraham didn't believe Dee Dee's story that he ran away because he was tired of people asking him for money. One of Abraham's friends, George Macy, recalled that winning the lottery made him go from absolutely nobody to somebody of importance. That Abraham thrived off being able to give people in his life money. It made him feel important, something that he's never felt before in his life.
In early November 2009, police questioned Dede Moore again about Abraham's disappearance, which is when the Polk County Sheriff's Department officially declared Abraham Shakespeare a missing person. They had enough evidence to believe that he didn't just walk away from his life. The police confronted Dede Moore about why Abraham was taken off the Abraham Shakespeare LLC business account, the business they reportedly started together.
According to Deedee, she said he didn't want his name on his account because he didn't like paying taxes. So she says that he asked her to take his name off of it and leave her the sole account owner. But here's another thing.
She couldn't explain to the police why Abraham's name was taken off the business account they shared together just days after $1 million had been withdrawn from the account.
Deedee also told investigators that two-thirds of Abraham's assets were moved into her company's account because she said Abraham told her he didn't want to pay child support, that he didn't want people to have access to his money. Somehow, having his money in her bank account would protect him.
The following month in December 2009, Abraham's mother, Elizabeth Walker, received a letter in the mail that claimed to be from her son, Abraham. In the letter, he said that he was completely fine, alive and well, and that she shouldn't worry about him. This is now over eight months since anyone had heard from him.
A few weeks later, on December 27, 2009, Abraham's mother received a phone call from someone claiming to be Abraham. Elizabeth Walker received this phone call while she was out to eat with Dee Dee Moore herself. But there's a problem here. Elizabeth Walker, Abraham's mother, doesn't think the letter or the phone call came from her son.
If anyone recognizes what Abraham sounds like, it's going to be his own mother. The following day, December 28th, Abraham's mom received another phone call from someone claiming to be her son, saying once again that he was alive and well. This time, however, Elizabeth Walker isn't buying it. She contacted the police and told them that she thought someone was pretending to be her son.
The police trace the phone call from the 28th to a phone number belonging to a man by the name of Gregory Smith. And when police go to speak with Gregory Smith, they're surprised to find out that he's a close friend of Abraham's. So the police want to know why Gregory Smith, a friend of Abraham's, would call his mother and pretend to be him.
Gregory Smith immediately cooperated with the police. He knew he was in trouble, and what he decided to tell the police was completely shocking. Gregory Smith told the police immediately that Dee Dee Moore approached him and offered him money to call Elizabeth Walker, Abraham's mother, and pretend to be her son.
He admitted to the police that he was the one who called Abraham's mom pretending to be him on both December 27th and the 28th. Gregory Smith began fully cooperating with law enforcement, who are now convinced that Dee Dee Moore knew much more about Abraham's disappearance than she was letting on to.
One week after the second phone call, Dee Dee contacted Gregory Smith again in January 2010. This time, though, she doesn't ask him to call and pretend to be Abraham. This time around, she asked Smith if he knew anyone willing to admit to the police that they were responsible for murdering Abraham Shakespeare.
Because Smith is fully cooperating with law enforcement by this point, they are all over this. So the police decided to arrange a meeting between an undercover police officer, Gregory Smith, and Dee Dee Moore.
Officer Mike Smith of the Lake Wells Police Department is the one who pretends to be the person who Smith allegedly contacted to be this person who would agree to take responsibility for Abraham's murder as Dee Dee wanted. Little does Dee Dee know that this person is an undercover police officer.
At the meeting, Deedee offered the undercover cop $50,000 if he would take responsibility for Abraham's death. During their conversation, the undercover cop Smith agreed to do it, but he told Deedee that he wanted to know where Abraham was killed or where his body was buried.
Four days after this meeting, on January 25, 2010, Deedee took the undercover cop and Gregory Smith to a concrete slab in her backyard. She pointed to the concrete slab and handed over the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver she used to shoot and kill Abraham, fully believing that she was just about to get away with the perfect murder.
Immediately after Dee Dee showed the undercover officer the concrete slab that covered where Abraham's body was buried, she was put in handcuffs and arrested for murdering Abraham Shakespeare. The gig was finally up.
While Deedee Moore is in custody, a forensics team is called to her property to try and recover Abraham's body. On January 29th, a body was discovered at the Plaint City house belonging to Deedee and was properly identified as Abraham. In addition to Deedee, police also arrested her ex-husband, James Moore. And that's because after questioning and being backed up by cell phone records,
It's discovered that in April 2009, Deedee called her ex-husband and asked him to dig a large hole in the yard. According to James, Deedee told him the hole was to bury concrete and trash. James told police that he did in fact dig the hole as requested by Deedee and was called back two hours later to come back and fill up the hole.
But according to James, he never saw what was buried in the hole. So James Moore was also arrested and charged with accessory after the fact for Abraham's murder. On February 19, 2010, D.D. Moore was officially charged with the first-degree murder of Abraham Shakespeare.
Even with the circumstantial evidence, the work from the undercover cop, and the forensic accounting, she denied any involvement in the murder and entered a plea of not guilty. But the jury didn't believe her, and on December 10, 2012, she was found guilty of first-degree murder.
She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole with an additional 25 years for possessing a firearm during the commission of a felony. Dee Dee Moore will spend the rest of her life behind bars. This is a case of pure evil and utter greed. The motive was simple, money. I think Dee Dee Moore, before she even met Abraham Shakespeare, was a con and a fraud.
Before the murder, she had already been convicted of insurance fraud and staged an entire elaborate crime to go with it. I think she wanted to live a life filled with money, nice cars, big homes, but decided that instead of putting in the hard work for that type of lifestyle, she resorted to cold-blooded murder. She met Abraham Shakespeare and just saw dollar signs all over him.
I believe she knew that she was going to kill Abraham and take his money from the very first time that they met at that business convention. It's even possible that Abraham started to catch on to the fact that Dee Dee was stealing money from him and his accounts, and she decided to kill him. She took advantage of a man who was known by his friends and family for sharing his good fortune around. He wasn't greedy.
She lied, she befriended him, and then she murdered him. To share your thoughts on the murder of Abraham Shakespeare, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions about the case.
Don't forget to subscribe to Forensic Tales so you don't miss an episode. We release a new episode every Monday. If you love the show, consider leaving us a positive review or tell friends and family about us. You can also support the show through Patreon. Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please join me next week. We'll have a brand new story and a brand new case to talk about.
Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings. Forensic Tales is a Rockefeller Audio production. The show is written and produced by me, Courtney Fretwell. For a small monthly contribution, you can gain access to bonus content and be one of the first to listen to new episodes. Or if you simply want to support my show, head over to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash forensic tales.
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Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.
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