Story highlights
- "No winners" will be at a Tuesday news conference, a spokeswoman says
- A Kansas winner was the first to come forward last week
- Three winning tickets were purchased: in Kansas, Maryland and Illinois
The holder of one of three winning tickets in a record $656 million Mega Millions drawing has come forward to claim a share, Maryland Lottery officials said Monday.
They scheduled a news conference for Tuesday morning, at which "no winners will be present," said Carole Everett, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Lottery. When asked whether there was more than one winner, she responded: "Perhaps."
No other details were immediately available.
Maryland was one of three states where three tickets matched the winning numbers -- 2, 4, 23, 38 and 46, with a Mega Ball of 23 -- amounting to an equal share of roughly $218.6 million, before taxes, under the annuity option.
The other winning tickets were purchased in Kansas and Illinois.
The Kansas winner, who was the first to officially come forward last week, chose to remain anonymous -- as will the holder of the ticket sold in Maryland, said Everett.
Last week, Maryland Lottery officials were responding to a flurry of questions from the media after a Baltimore-area woman told the New York Post that she had one of the winning tickets. However, in a bizarre twist of the story, Mirlande Wilson, a 37-year-old single mother of seven who works at McDonald's, told the Post she wasn't sure where she last had the ticket.
"I'm still looking for it. I haven't even looked in my uniform pants yet," the Post quoted Wilson as saying. "I'm still looking everywhere to find it, in my purse, everywhere."
The state's lottery director said last Thursday he hadn't seen the ticket, but he also said then that no one else had come forward.
Spokeswoman Everett said last Tuesday she didn't "put much stock in that story."
"She claims she won," Everett said last week. "She can't produce a ticket. ... In our opinion, until they walk in that door, hold that ticket, produce valid identification and our security people can process and validate it, it doesn't matter."
Everett declined to comment Monday on whether the winning ticker holder was, in fact, Wilson.
