GREAT LOTTERY STING
says she gave the entire amount to charity. That this hitherto unreported settlement was agreed shortly after Camelot worker Giles Knibbs committed suicide was not coincidental.
For soon after Knibbs’s death, the rape victim says, her lawyers were approached by police investigating the supposed Lotto fraud, and, fearing the £2.5 million might be confiscated, they were eager to recoup what they could.
So who was Giles Knibbs, how had he become friendly with a man such as Putman, and how was the alleged plot hatched?
Giles was born into a respectable Oxfordshire family. He got a degree in cognitive science and worked briefly as a food inspector for the Wetherspoon pub chain before joining Camelot in 2004. Photographs show a handsome, outdoorsy young man, who was, by all accounts, much loved by friends for his kindness and generosity.
He is said to have encountered personal difficulties in his teens, when he came out as gay, and had apparently self-harmed and attempted suicide.
He first met Putman when the older man did some building work on his house. At the time, they both lived five miles from Camelot’s HQ, on an industrial estate outside Watford, and Putman must soon have learned that his new mate had a key job there. Friends say that one of Knibbs’s roles was to check dubious and belated claims — a task which not only gave him access to the sequence of numbers on winning tickets, but also knowledge of where they had been bought.
If Knibbs had given Putman this information, he could visit the shop where the unclaimed ticket had been bought (said to have been in Worcestershire), purchase a new ticket bearing the same winning numbers, then alter the date and barcode so as to make it appear that he had the winning ticket.
Although sources say this is what happened, it is not clear how the alleged plot was hatched and who first suggested it. But, as I was told: ‘I can well imagine Giles telling Eddie how easily it could be done, and Eddie saying: “Come on, let’s go for it!” ’
In the autumn of 2009, after claiming he had a winning ticket, Putman got a congratulatory phone call from Dame Dianne Thompson, then Camelot’s chief executive, and went on to bank the £2.5 million.
Thereafter, I am told, he and Knibbs visited each other socially once a month, which could have allowed Putman ample opportunity to hand him his share of the money.
While Putman behaved like a millionaire (buying a new house and splashing out on clothes, cars and holidays), Knibbs continued to live modestly. The only sign that his fortunes had changed came in 2010, when he quit his job at Camelot. But when anyone wondered aloud how he had sufficient funds to live without working, he alluded vaguely to property investments.
Looking back on events, friends — who of course had no idea the pair were in cahoots — believe the cosy arrangement began to unravel in 2012, when Putman was jailed for nine months for benefits fraud.
KnIBBS, whom they depict, perhaps wishfully, as an essentially moral man unable to resist the temptation that Camelot’s lax security system placed before him, would have been disgusted to have learned that his ‘partner-in-crime’ was a convicted rapist.
Putman, for his part, left prison with plans to use the Lotto money to become a business tycoon. He flirted with the idea of selling health foods, and asked for planning permission to build a 30-bedroom hotel on land beside his house.
When it was refused, he bought dozens of rusting cars, apparently intending to restore and sell them. They remain unrepaired.
Putman also appears to have purchased property in Florida.
This week, when I called the sister of his partner, Lita Stephens, who lives in Florida, she mentioned this, as well as describing a brush he’d had with the FBI (about which she declined to elaborate).
At all events, Putman’s grand ambitions might explain why it is believed he stopped making the agreed payments to Knibbs, who started to run up card debts.
When he returned to Oxfordshire, some six months before his death, a family member says he seemed ‘withdrawn’. He told friends that Putman had ripped him off in a business venture and owned him a large amount of money.
In June this year, his simmering fury came to a head. He stormed round to Putman’s house, smashed his CCTV cameras and vandalised his BMW.
Rather than respond with violence, Putman reported the matter to the police. He also accused Knibbs of blackmailing him during the six years since he won the Lottery, saying Knibbs had threatened to tell his girlfriend about his conviction for rape unless he handed over large sums of cash and other items.
He had already paid Knibbs £400,000, he said, but he was demanding £500,000 more. It seems unlikely, however, that Putman was worried Miss Stephens would find out about the rape. His conviction was exten- sively reported in the media, so she surely knew about it already.
Why would he make such a claim, knowing it could spark an investigation into the questionable Lottery win? One reason could lie in his inherent greed and arrogance.
‘He probably thought he was invincible such a long time after the payout,’ a source says. ‘That he could get Knibbs off his back by putting him in prison — and maybe even recover the money he’d given him by claiming compensation.’
If this is true, Putman certainly got rid of Knibbs — albeit in a manner that not even he could have envisaged.
For three months following his arrest for blackmail and other revenge attacks on Putman, Knibbs had been brooding on his options, concluding, friends believe, that prison would ‘destroy him’ and there was no way out.
His solution was to prepare the elaborate evidential trail that he hoped would bring him posthumous vengeance, before driving off and killing himself.
Knibbs left an estate valued at £420,000, but this included the net value of his house. Only about £70,000 was cash, says a relative.
‘If he did have £400,000 off Eddie, I don’t know what he did with it. He did not even have a new TV: it was given to him by a friend.
‘His partner, who lived with him, did not know anything about this either, until after Giles’s death.’
Whether in death he will be successful and Britain’s first mega Lotto winner will have to pay back his prize and face jail for fraud depends on the investigative abilities of Hertfordshire Constabulary and Camelot. Millions of honest punters will be watching with interest.
How the rapist who faked a £2.5m win was unmasked by his Camelot accomplice who killed himself – after leaving police a tantalising trail of evidence