FAMILY FORTUNE
Inside the life of ‘UK’s luckiest family’ who won £61m on EuroMillions after call from US…but one member missed out
'THE UK's luckiest family' saw their lives change forever when they scooped £61million.
Stephanie Davies, from Monmouth in Wales, bought the winning lotto ticket in 2016 - after hearing the news her mum had been given the all clear from cancer.
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Sonia, 53, had just undergone keyhole surgery to remove a tumour in the parathyroid gland in her neck.
After hearing her operation was a success, she had a gut feeling a winning streak was on the cards - and she was right.
Her daughter rushed out and bought six Lucky Dips from the Overmonow Gargage in Monmouth.
One evening she headed upstairs and said to her 30-year-old boyfriend Steve: “If I shout down it means we’ve won the lottery and if not, I’ve gone to bed.”
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And, very quickly the house was filled with joyful screams as the young sales executive realised they'd bagged the eye-watering £61million jackpot.
Her winning EuroMillions numbers were 01, 21, 26, 40 and 50, while the lucky star numbers were 02 and 04.
Stephanie said at a press conference at the time: “I came back downstairs to find Steve and couldn’t take my hand away from my mouth in shock.
"I kept saying ‘we’ve won and I’m not joking’.
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"I could see Steve was trying to read me to see whether I was telling the truth but I was so emotional, he decided to check.
"And he checked again. We giggled. We memorised the numbers and checked again. We checked the draw date again.
"We locked all our windows and doors and spoke in hushed voices just in case someone could hear that we had won.
"It was all very MI6 – very secret service!”
When she called her mum to share the amazing news, all Sonia could hear was sobbing.
“I was worried there was a problem. All I could hear was Steph sobbing down the phone and the odd muffled word," she explained.
"I thought she’d told me she’d lost her dog.
"Then I heard Steve shouting ‘we’ve won £61m’!"
She added: “Winning is just like living the dream."
'I JUST PUT MY HEAD IN MY HANDS'
However, there was someone who wasn't too pleased to hear about the massive win.
After becoming a multi-millionaire, Stephanie decided to split the cash five ways with her family.
Mum Sonia and sister Courtney, 19, each enjoyed a £12,220,488.58 share of the enormous jackpot.
Stephanie's partner Steve, 30, and Sonia's partner Keith Reynolds, 55, were also handed the same fortune.
But, Daniel White, Courtney's ex-boyfriend narrowly missed out on the same privilege.
The childhood sweethearts had split up just months before the cash windfall, after the pair parted ways when they went to university.
Daniel said: “It was a school and teenage romance which just tailed off.
"We had different interests and different friends.”
To add insult to injury, he was living next door to Courtney’s lucky sister.
He said at the time: “All my mates are savaging me - the first I knew of their win was my phone going nuts.
“The boys were all sending me links and jokey Snapchats asking if I was gutted.
"One said ‘how much have you cried since you found out mate?'
“I just put my head in my hands. I'm happy for them - but obviously I feel like it could have been me.”
Daniel later joked: "Courtney could give me a million a year for the two years I went out with her – I wouldn’t say no to that."
And, he had to watch his ex's new partner enjoy the winnings.
Stephanie had called her younger sister at 1.45am while the teenager was in Reading with her boyfriend Kieran.
Courtney said: “Steph just kept saying she didn’t know what to do.
"She then said we’d won the lottery.
"We kept repeating ‘oh my god’ to each other, over and over. In the end we had to say bye and hang up as we were so in shock we weren’t actually talking to each other.”
Kieran, a student at the time, was over the moon about his girlfriend's win and had "high expectations" about his 21st birthday gift.
However it does appear Daniel, who used to work for the Welsh Rugby Union, has found again love and bought a house with his new partner.
Photos shared on Facebook show the grinning couple holding a set of keys outside the property.
READ MORE SUN STORIES
It comes after the Sun shared the baffling story of the world's unluckiest lotto winner, who claims to have cheated death seven times before scooping a £600,000 jackpot.
And a lottery-winning couple were overjoyed when they took home a £1million jackpot - before tragedy struck.
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