Vegas gunman’s girlfriend says she had no knowledge of plan
MARILOU Danley thought he was breaking up with her. A little more than two weeks ago, Danley’s boyfriend, Stephen Paddock, told her that he had found an inexpensive ticket to the Philippines so she could visit her family.
While she was there, he wired her money and told her to buy a house for her and her family.
It seemed to Danley that he might be letting her down easy. Never, she said, did she think her “kind, caring, quiet” boyfriend was capable of what he did on Sunday, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds more at an outdoor concert from his Las Vegas hotel room.
“It never occurred to me in any way whatsoever that he was planning violence against anyone,” she said on Wednesday in her first public comments since the shooting.
The statement, which was read by her lawyer, Matthew Lombard, came on the same day that a law enforcement official said she was questioned by FBI agents trying to determine a motive for the deadly shooting.
It is not clear what, if anything, she knew about Paddock’s methodical plans to stockpile weapons and ferry them into a 32nd-floor hotel suite to commit mass murder.
In the statement, she said she had no warning something so horrible was going to happen.
“I am a mother and a grandmother and my heart breaks for all who have lost loved ones,” she said.
Sheriff Joseph Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said on Wednesday at a news conference he thought Danley had responded as one would expect. “I think any person put in her situation would probably answer the same way,” he said, adding that he had not yet been briefed by the FBI on the interview.
During the news conference, the sheriff implied that Paddock had not left a suicide note in the room, and he said that there was evidence, which he could not discuss, that Paddock had planned to survive or escape.
After providing some details of the timeline of the shooting, Lombardo said it was hard to believe that Paddock had done all of it by himself or that the plan could have remained a secret. Given the amount of weaponry, ammunition and electronics stashed at more than one location, he said, rhetorically, “Do you think this was all accomplished on his own?”
Steven Wolfson, the district attorney of Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, said that investigators were examining the shooting from “every angle possible, and then some”.
“We don’t know what she knew, so I think a lot more will come about in the next 48 hours,” Wolfson said.
In her statement, Danley said she came back from the Philippines voluntarily to talk with the FBI and other law enforcement officials.
Danley has not been charged with a crime, but investigators are hoping she will have insight into Paddock’s motives.
A law enforcement official said they were aware Paddock had recently wired thousands of dollars to the Philippines.
In an interview with an Australian news station, two sisters of Danley said they believed Paddock had sent her away so that he could plan the attack without her knowing.
The two sisters were interviewed anonymously, with their faces obscured. Danley’s sisters, Liza Werner and Amelia Manango, live in Australia. They said that their sister was “madly in love” with Paddock and she “probably was even more shocked than us”.
Family members and former neighbours were shocked to see Danley’s name surface in connection with the shooting on news reports, as the police sought to find her hours after Paddock killed himself in his hotel room.
“She’s probably one of the most happy, outgoing, full-oflife people I’ve ever known,” said Dionne Waltrip, Danley’s former stepdaughter, who lives outside Fayetteville, Arkansas. “Everyone who has ever met her likes her.”
Waltrip said her father, Geary Danley, travelled the world as an auditor for FedEx and met his future wife overseas. But before the marriage ended, Marilou Danley met Paddock. She was working at a casino and he was a high-limit player, casino employees said. She worked there from 2010 to 2013, according to her LinkedIn account.
John Weinreich, an executive casino host at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa at the time, said he believed that Danley frequently attended to Paddock, serving him food and pointing out which machines might be ripe for a payout.
When she was around, Weinreich said, Paddock did not seem to break from his intense gaming persona at all. Eventually, Danley became his regular host.
“Then she was just gone one day,” he said. “I asked some fellow workers and they said she went off with Stephen.”
She and Geary Danley divorced in 2015. On the divorce papers, she listed her address as a condominium in Reno owned by Paddock.
At the hilltop subdivision where the Danleys lived in Sparks, Nevada, before the divorce, neighbours described Marilou Danley as a chatty extrovert who hosted cookouts and brought copious amounts of Filipino food to the semiannual block parties.
But when Marilou Danley was living with Paddock in a Reno subdivision, the couple were not viewed as sociable.
“I thought maybe he was sick or something, because they were always in the house and the shades were always drawn shut,” said Susan Page, a retired financial analyst who was the couple’s next-door neighbour.
Page said she occasionally saw Paddock working on an older sport utility vehicle that seemed to be Danley’s car, and other neighbours said he had a large safe in the garage.
“They weren’t outgoing,” she said. “They didn’t participate in anything. Everybody around here, they go over to each other’s houses, they have a drink and they chitchat.” Page added, “It wasn’t that they were unfriendly, they just didn’t socialise.”