Reflections on Stephen Paddock and the Las Vegas Shooting

Tucker Carlson's recent interview with Ian Carroll raises many fascinating questions.

I enjoyed listening to Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with independent investigative journalist, Ian Carroll about the October 1, 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas.

The official narrative of the shooting includes the following claims:

• Authorities initially claimed that 64-year-old Stephen Paddock checked into the Mandalay Bay hotel on September 28, but later revised the timeline to September 25.

• Paddock was regarded as a high-roller and was given two adjoining rooms (a suite and a standard room) on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel.

• Paddock initially checked in with nine pieces of luggage that a porter helped him haul up to his room.

• Paddock stayed in his suite for six days, during which time he repeatedly left the hotel and returned with additional pieces of luggage that porters assisted in taking to his room.

• Ultimately, he transported 21 pieces of luggage to his room containing a total a total of 23 weapons and 5,280 rounds of ammunition.

• Six days after his initial checkin—for ten minutes between 10:05 p.m. and 10:15 on October 1—Paddock allegedly opened fire on the crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip from his 32nd-floor suites in the Mandalay Bay hotel.

• In preparation for opening fire, Paddock allegedly set up multiple cameras in the hallway outside his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay. The purpose of these cameras was, according to authorities, to monitor the hall for approaching law enforcement or security personnel.

• According to the ATF, between October 2016 and September 28, 2017 (three days before the shooting), Paddock purchased 33 firearms, the majority of which were rifles.

• 12 AR-15-style rifles were fired, accounting for 1,049 rounds of ammunition. These were fitted with bump stocks, which allowed them to achieve a high rate of fire.

• Two AR-10-style rifles, which were equipped with scopes and mounted on bipods, were fired a total of eight rounds.

• One .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver was fired once, the round Paddock allegedly used to kill himself.

• Paddock allegedly fired more than 1,000 rounds, killing 60 people and wounding at least 413 others.

• About an hour later, he was found dead in his room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The motive for the shooting is officially undetermined.

• ISIS claimed that Paddock was a “soldier of the Islamic State” and that he committed the mass shooting as an act of terrorism in the service of ISIS.

I have never looked into the Las Vegas shooting apart from examining the strange person of John Pelletier—a 22-year veteran of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department who served as the incident commander on the Strip when the shooting happened.

Four years later, Pelletier was (for reasons that strike me as questionable) named chief of the Maui Police Department, where he was serving during on August 8, 2023 when the entire town of Lahaina burned to the ground.

One of the many bizarre features of the Maui PD’s response to the fire was Pelletier’s repeated claim that he was unaware that anyone died in the Lahaina disaster until the day after the town burned. Pelletier made this claim despite Maui police officers telling the public about fatalities in Lahaina a couple of hours after the fire penetrated the town.

Not having looked into the Vegas shooting, I cannot objectively evaluate all of Carroll’s statements. However, a few things come to mind that may be of interest to my readers.

• It strikes me as extraordinary that Stephen Paddock had no criminal record whatsoever and that no one had ever complained about him being violent or abusive. In my 23 years of researching crime, I have never heard of a man in his sixties, with no criminal record, committing mass homicide. Usually homicidal males begin showing signs of their aggressive and violent tendencies at a young age. His girlfriend at the time of the shooting, Marilou Danley, described him as “kind, caring, and quiet.”

• Shortly before the shooting, Paddock bought his girlfriend a plane ticket to the Philippines and then wired her $100,000 to purchase a house.

• IF Paddock inherited a genetic predisposition to commit crime from his father — a notorious bank robber named Benjamin Hoskins Paddock — this would have likely manifested at an earlier age. According to Paddock’s siblings, their father was never around and had no influence on their upbringing.

• Why did Paddock have any confidence that he could transport a large arsenal of weapons into a high security Las Vegas hotel without drawing scrutiny from the hotel staff? Surely he had to grapple with the possibility that the porters who helped him to transport all of the heavy bags to his room would tell security, and that security could invoke some legal grounds for asking him about the contents of his voluminous luggage.

• Here it is worth noting that MGM Resorts International was ultimately found liable for negligence, statutory violations, and other claims. Plaintiffs alleged MGM’s failure to use industry standard precautions, security measures, and other reasonable measures was a substantial factor in creating a circumstance where the shooter was able to bring over 20 bags of firearms and ammunition to his hotel room and carry out the October 1, 2017 shooting. The final settlement payout was for $800 million, with $751 million coming from MGM’s insurers (Zurich American), representing all of MGM’s available insurance, and the remainder coming from MGM.

• How on earth did Paddock manage to set up multiple cameras in the hallway outside of his room without being noticed by hotel security monitoring the hallway surveillance cameras? Las Vegas hotels are some of the highest security on earth, with hallways closely monitored for guests behaving badly.

• It strikes me as significant that Paddock was allegedly given two adjoining rooms (a suite and a standard room) on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel.

IF I were to “steelman” the official claim that Paddock was the lone gunman, I would propose that he decided to bring fourteen AR-15s and eight AR-10s as preparation for possible jamming and overheating. However, even if the weapons (equipped with bump stocks) fired with no jams or overheating as he cycled through them, it still would have taken him a prodigious amount of time to fire 5,280 rounds of ammunition.

This raises the suspicion that Paddock expected other men to come to the room to participate in the crime. I wonder if other men did participate and managed to leave the scene during the hour that elapsed between the guns falling silent and the police finally entering Paddock’s room.

Just toying around with hypothetical ideas, I wonder if it’s possible that Paddock was given the impression that his main job was to transport the weapons to one of the two rooms, and that he would be allowed to leave the hotel before the shooting commenced—perhaps with the plan of flying to the Philippines to join his girlfriend, to whom he’d just wired $100,000 with the proposal that she buy a house.

Did Paddock think he was just weapons delivery guy, not realizing that he was also the designated fall guy?

In writing three true crime books, I had the great privilege of working closely with a senior criminalist at the LA County crime lab named Lynne Herold. Lynne is the most rigorous professional I’ve ever encountered in any field. During her thirty-two year career, she was ruthless at eliminating biases, and she always refused to state her opinion unless she had obtained all possible data and analyzed it in accordance with the most up to date scientific research.

Over the years, she corrected me on several occasions about jumping to conclusions in my true crime research. She frequently scolded me for allowing my reflections on psychological and sociological factors to influence my interpretation of evidence. She herself was very disciplined about limiting her interpretations to the physical reality presented at actual crime scenes or displayed in crime scene photos.

She insisted that in order to draw any definitive conclusions about a crime, I needed obtain crime scene photos, taken in accordance with proper forensic standards, with no redactions.

Lynne acknowledged that police and medical examiners frequently make mistakes, and that even famous forensic pathologists and scientists—guys like Vincent Di Maio, Werner Spitz and Michael Baden—could be influenced by money to make unscientific statements, as she discovered during the murder trial of Phil Spector, during which she presented a bloodstain pattern analysis.

However, she emphasized that I shouldn’t allow myself to get distracted by the bungling of cops and medical examiners. Instead, she urged me to stay focused on obtaining evidence and finding reliable witnesses.

Over the years I learned that if—for whatever reasons—an investigating agency doesn’t properly investigate and document a crime, it becomes exceedingly difficult if not impossible for citizen investigative reporters to draw any firm conclusions about it.

It’s likely that many crimes have been covered up not by active concealment, but simply by not properly investigating and documenting them. Law enforcement can’t discover the truth about a crime if it doesn’t investigate it.

As investigative reporters, our best strategy is to obtain as much evidence as we possibly can, and establish as many facts as we possibly can. Then, and only then, can we start ruling things out, thereby shortening the list of explanations that are even possible.

If I ever found the time to look into this, I would start by asking two questions:

1). Is there any evidence that definitively rules out Stephen Paddock as a shooter?

2). Is there any evidence that definitely proves there was an additional shooter or shooters?

I would also investigate the ISIS claim that Paddock was a recruit. ISIS’s propaganda arm, the Amaq News Agency, made the following pronouncements:

• Paddock, whom they gave the kunya (nom de guerre) “Abu Abd El Bar,” had converted to Islam six months prior to the attack.

• The attack was carried out “in response to calls to target coalition countries” that were bombing its territories in Syria and Iraq.

• The attack on a country music festival targeted members of the “crusader alliance.”

To me, that the FBI and its media lackeys dismissed the ISIS claim out of hand suggests that it may be worth looking into. Stephen Paddock had a history of traveling abroad. He obtained a U.S. passport in 2010 and began traveling internationally—usually alone—in 2012.

Paddock took about 20 cruises, many of which included stops in Europe and the Middle East. Ports of call included locations in Spain, Italy, Greece, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates.

Paddock began his weapons buying spring in October 2016. This was a few months after the U.S. launched deadly airstrikes on civilians in Manbij (in July) and just one month after a strike near Deir ez-Zor on September 17, 2016, that mistakenly hit Syrian Army soldiers and caused international outcry.