CULVER CITY, CA—After weeks of stories about how he likes to restore vintage Pontiacs, proposed to his fiancée with a message on the Yankee Stadium scoreboard, and once met Nick Nolte on an airplane, a 16-game winning streak reportedly left a Jeopardy! contestant with nothing but dark anecdotes to share Tuesday. “It was really then, when I’d drunk every drop of alcohol in a house that had just been foreclosed upon, that I decided I had nothing left to live for,” returning champion Arthur Tapper told host Ken Jennings, who after returning from commercial break had attempted to engage the 35-year-old marketing analyst in lighthearted banter with a question about his home brewing hobby. “My wife had taken the kids and moved in with her parents a couple months before. My last paycheck had been pissed away on the roulette wheel at Bally’s. But the knife just missed my radial artery, so that’s why I’m here today, Ken.” According to reports, Jeopardy! taping was temporarily halted after Tapper’s harrowing account of discovering his mother’s dead body at the age of 6 had left Jennings too shaken to tell the man he had selected the Daily Double.