A Greene County woman bought a ticket in a new lottery game and won a $20,000 prize.
“I just couldn’t breathe. I was shaking. It was an experience I had never had before,” Nicole Murphy, 46, of Jefferson told officials as she claimed her prize on June 14. “I’m guessing people who jump out of airplanes maybe get that experience, but I was on the ground and I was, like, lifted.”
Murphy won the first top prize in the Iowa Lottery’s “Top Dog” scratch game, which debuted on June 7. She bought a couple of tickets in the game at HyVee Fast & Fresh Express in Jefferson, thinking she’d have some down time to play them while working at the food truck she owns.
“Sometimes in the food truck if it’s really slow, I’ll usually have a scratch-off to keep me busy, but the festival was so busy for two days,” she said. “We were just non-stop and it was like 91 degrees out so it was really hot. I just didn’t have time.”
Instead, she scratched the tickets when she got home. The first was a non-winner, but she quickly uncovered a winning symbol on the second.
“I thought, ‘OK, it’s a $2 ticket, I won $2,’” she recalled. “Scratched it a little more and I was like, ‘OK, $20.’ Then I saw another zero and I was like, ‘Alright! $200! I’m going!’ And then I kept scratching it off and I was like, ‘$20,000?!’ I was just crazy, and yes, rolling around like a fool on the ground screaming.”
Murphy, a mother of four, said she had some plans for her winnings.
“I am going to pay off my car, I’m going to pay off my credit card and then I’m probably going to put the rest away and think about what I’m going to do,” she said.
Top Dog is a $2 scratch game that features overall odds of one in 3.83 and 10 top prizes of $20,000. For more information about this game, and the number of prizes still available, visit iowalottery.com
