Gunman had notes to aid aim

UNITED STATES: Police have revealed that the retired accountant who killed 58 people in Las Vegas had prepared meticulous notes on how to shoot into a crowd.

Although Stephen Paddock seems to have planned his massacre for months, he appears to have committed America’s worst mass shooting in modern times without leaving any explanation of his motive.

When police broke into his hotel room and found him lying dead on the carpet, surrounded by empty bullet casings, they found a note on a coffee table at his feet.

However, the paper only contained handwritten sums, apparently calculating how to hit people at the nearby music festival from a range of about 400 metres.

‘‘I could see on it he had written the distance, the elevation he was on, the drop of what his bullet was gonna be for the crowd,’’ Officer David Newton said. ’’So he had that written down and figured out so he would know where to shoot to hit his targets from there.’’

Paddock, 64, fired on a crowd of 22,000 people from the hotel room. He appeared to have suffered a severe mental and physical decline in recent months, his girlfriend has told investigators. He is said to have been prescribed valium for anxiety.

His girlfriend, Marilou Danley, told investigators that ‘‘he would lie in bed, just moaning and screaming: ‘Oh, my god’,’’ according to an anonymous FBI official.

Paddock, who had bought and owned guns for much of his life, had begun increasing his arsenal in the past year.

He had booked a hotel room in Chicago in August, overlooking the Lollapalooza music festival, two months before he opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino hotel on a crowd at the Route 91 Harvest country music event. – The Times