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TORONTO — Peter Kaczmarczyk, a Polish veteran of the Second World War and retired Toronto cab driver, was already an old man when he won nearly $8 million in the lottery in 2010. It turned his life upside down in a most unusual way.

Kaczmarczyk had been buying tickets with his regular coffee shop waitress, Krystyna Skwira, 52, with whom he split the winnings. It made a cute promotional story.

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“Krystyna didn’t believe that we were going to win, but we did,” Kaczmarczyk said in a press release at the time. In the 1994 movie It Could Happen to You, based on a true story, this sort of scenario led to romance between the two winners, played by Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda.

In Kaczmarczyk’s case, however, the publicity of his win led to his long running prosecution on multiple charges of child rape, after a woman claimed to recognize him as her childhood tormentor.

Now, after a tense hearing in a Toronto courtroom Wednesday, the unusual case threatens to fall apart because of Kaczmarczyk’s claim that he is deathly ill, and unable to attend his own trial, which was supposed to start this week. His lawyer told a judge it would probably kill him.