This apparently was Ohio’s week for true confessions of a nonsurprising nature. First, former major league baseball player Pete Rose, with an eye toward gaining admittance to baseball’s Hall of Fame before his eligibility runs out, admitted – after 14 years of denial – that he had bet on baseball while managing the Cincinnati Reds. Then Elicia Battle confessed that her teary tale of losing a winning $162 million lottery ticket in a snowbound South Euclid parking lot was bogus, with a capital B.

Of the two confessions, Battle’s was easily the more compelling, perhaps because it wasn’t 14 years in the making. The terse lead paragraph in a background story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Thursday morning, several hours before the Ohio woman came clean about her fib, was a grabber.

“Elicia Battle is hardly recognizable in her 1999 police mug shot,” was the one-line opener, and it was obvious that wherein it pertained to the credentials of Ms. Battle things were going to go down hill from there, and she’d probably not want to include the news clipping in her next job resume.

“Gone is the smart, cockeyed fedora she wore to tell the world she won last week’s $162 million Mega Million lottery,” the enterprise story by three Plain Dealer reporters continued. “Gone is her easy smile. And gone, South Euclid police now say, is the trust they first put in her story about losing the ticket. They are now investigating her for fraud after another woman, Rebecca Jemison of South Euclid, came forward with the only winning lottery ticket…”

There followed a detailed recounting of Battle’s petty-criminal past and history of litigation: convictions for misuse of a credit card, assault and criminal trespassing; a complaint of threatening the wife of one of her ex-husbands; lawsuits – both dismissed – against a gas company for $7,500 after a furnace allegedly blew up and burned an ex-husband’s face, and against the McDonald’s fast food chain for $75,000, claiming her children had gotten sick four years earlier after drinking a contaminated milkshake.

All that dredging up of the past was designed to make her look bad, the 40-year-old Battle told reporters when they asked about her trouble with the law. “I’m done with that. I paid the fines. End of story. Everybody has some bad in their past…”

The bottom line, she said, was that her ticket was still lost, and she was encouraging anyone who found it to turn it over to her. One could imagine what skeptics across the land might be thinking. (Right, honey. And O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife and her friend are still dead, too. Perhaps after searchers find that “lost” lottery ticket they can join Simpson in his hunt for the killer he’s been trying to find since1994.)

Then, on Thursday, it all came crashing down. Tears flowed in abundance as Battle went before news cameras to admit to what most rational people had suspected from the day the story broke: The lady had gotten in over her head in a scam gone bad. She had done it, she said, “for my kids.”

So much for a great sob story that had no doubt had seemed like a good idea at the time, causing police and a fair portion of the electorate to empathize with Battle, who had claimed she had lost the winning ticket as she exited the store where she had bought it. The winning numbers had been hand-picked, not machine-selected, and she had readily recited those numbers, explaining that they pertained to family birthdays and the like.

Upon learning of the lady’s alleged ill fortune, a gaggle of opportunistic bounty hunters descended upon the store’s parking lot with flashlights in their hands and greed in their hearts, hoping to come up with the ticket. Finders keepers, sweetheart, they said, in responding to Battle’s plea for its return. Sometimes you win $162 million and sometimes you lose $162 million. Better luck next time.

Even as Ohio lottery officials were presenting Jemison with her winnings, Battle’s lawyer was in court seeking to block the payout. According to the Plain Dealer, he asked for access to the winning ticket, possibly for DNA testing. He said his client had no intention of suing Jemison, “although he wondered aloud how difficult it would be to produce a fake winning ticket,” the story reported.

On that score the man wonders no more, aloud or to himself. Any residual curiosity presumably is confined to marveling at just how difficult it is to collect a handsome contingency fee when your client and your case self-destruct on prime-time television.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.