Time expires on $200,000 lottery win

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Somewhere, there exists a $200,000 Powerball-winning ticket that as of now is completely worthless.

The winning ticket was purchased in May at a service station in the St. Louis suburb of University City. The holder had 180 days to turn it in. The deadline was 5 p.m. Monday, and no one came forward.

"Typically, people claim it pretty soon," Breanne Gibson of the Missouri Lottery told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "One time, a woman had put away her white pants for the summer. When she took them out again, she found the ticket and claimed it at the last minute."

This time, there were no last-minute heroics.

Before the drawing on May 9, someone picked up a ticket at a Phillips 66 station and matched all five white-ball numbers -- 2, 13, 30, 44 and 52.

Since August 2005, when the Powerball payout was doubled to $200,000 for those matching the five numbers, only two of 81 winners have failed to come forward. One of those tickets was sold in Moody, near West Plains; the other in Eagle Rock in southwest Missouri.

The unclaimed winnings go into the state budget's education fund, where $79 million in unclaimed lottery winnings have ended up since July 2000, Gibson said.

In the multistate Powerball game, those who match five numbers are eligible for the $200,000 prize. Matching all six numbers wins the much larger jackpot.

The latest unclaimed prize isn't the most money ever left behind in Missouri. On Feb. 20, 1999, someone bought a $1.7 million Missouri Lotto ticket in Springfield. In Illinois, no one claimed a $14 million prize for a ticket purchased Jan. 31, 2004, in Frankfort.

In the Powerball game, only one jackpot winner has failed to come forward. That happened in September 2002 when two people -- one in Pennsylvania, one in Indiana -- each matched the winning numbers of a $103.5 million jackpot. The Indiana winner never claimed the prize.

At the Phillips 66 station in University City, clerk Karrar Abudarb said a regular customer had bragged that he was the $200,000 Powerball winner. But that customer hasn't been seen for weeks.

"It's kind of crazy," Abudarb said.

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Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com