Millionaire gunman spent time on the run with bank robber dad Planes, property and
millionaire madman who unleashed death from a cowardly sniper’s nest, was the son of a psychopath who was arrested in a shootout with the FBI in Las Vegas more than 40 years ago.
Stephen Craig Paddock, who killed at least 59 people and injured more than 500 as he sat perched on the Mandalay Bay Hotel’s 32nd floor, firing up to 800 rounds a minute on Las Vegas revellers at a country music festival below him for 72 minutes, had a dark family history with the party town.
And he had even attempted to sue the Cosmopolitan Hotel just 5km down the road from his horrific crime back in 2012, following a fall at the venue. He failed.
After Paddock took his own life following his killing spree, police found 23 guns in his hotel room, carried up to his room over the weekend in 10 suitcases.
Among them were several scopes and many semiautomatics, at least one of which had been made automatic by use of a bumpstock, a legal workaround to laws preventing ownership of virtual machineguns.
The former accountant, who had made a fortune from real estate deals, owned two planes and several properties and had a penchant for gambling big sums on casino tables, owned an arsenal of 42 weapons.
Several kilos of ammonium nitrate, a fertiliser used in bomb-making was also found in his car.
Paddock had no political affiliations and no criminal record, not even traffic tickets. But he did bear a family grudge decades long.
Paddock Jr’s father Benjamin Hoskins Paddock – also known as Big Daddy, Chromedome and Old Baldy – was a notorious bank robber, who was on the FBI’s “10 most wanted” list for a decade.
A “wanted” poster from 1969, after Paddock Sr had busted out of a federal prison, labelled him a psychopath who had suicidal tendencies and used guns in his robberies. He was considered “armed and very dangerous”.
Paddock Sr had been doing 20 years after being convicted for a bank robbery in Phoenix, in 1960.
He had actually committed other robberies and it was when he took his crime spree to Las Vegas that he came undone, when his vehicle was identified. FBI agents fired on him and he attempted to run them down before they finally took him in.
Just as neighbours were baffled by Paddock Jr’s evil rampage now, Paddock Sr’s neighbours also reported being puzzled as to why the “colourful businessman”, who had four children, would commit such crimes.
He was first jailed in Las Vegas, but was caught trying to escape and sent to the Texas federal prison. Six months after the federal prison breakout, Paddock Sr was at it again, committing an armed robbery of a San Francisco bank in June 1969.
Sitting at home, taking in his old man’s exploits was the boy who would grow up to become the worst mass-murderer in US history.
He was eight when his dad committed the robberies, then about 16 when Paddock Sr escaped.
In their hometown, an investigator told the local paper that Paddock Sr was “glib” and “smooth talking” but also “egotistical and arrogant”.
“We didn’t grow up under his influence,” Stephen’s brother Eric Paddock said yesterday outside his FlorTHE