Did killer wire $100,000 to lover before massacre?
LAS Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock transferred $100,000 to a bank account in the Philippines in the week before the massacre, it emerged yesterday.
As police scrambled to decipher the motive behind his murder spree which left 59 dead and 527 injured, sources revealed Paddock had made the large transaction, but it was unclear who the recipient was.
His girlfriend, Marilou Danley, is an Australian of Filipino extraction and friends say she had returned there to visit family at the time of Paddock’s attack.
Las Vegas sheriff Joseph Lombardo last night described Miss Danley as a ‘person of interest’. Investigators said yesterday Miss Danley, a former casino hostess, was in the Philippines. She is expected to return to the US in the next day or so.
As relatives and neighbours described a reclusive man who barely connected even with his own family and lived only for gambling, it emerged he found time to gamble frenetically even as he was putting the finishing touches to his carefully planned murder spree.
Staff at the Mandalay Bay casino, out of whose smashed hotel windows Paddock shot at concertgoers across the Las Vegas Strip, said he celebrated at least two ‘big wins’ there 48 hours before the massacre.
They said Paddock, a 64-year-old retired accountant and millionaire property developer, scooped the jackpot on the highvalue slot machines at the hotel’s casino on Friday night.
A casino worker said: ‘He was known to some of the staff here. He was gambling on Friday night and won on the slot machines. There was nothing unusual about him.’
Paddock’s success came just a day after he checked into one of the hotel’s ‘Vista’ suites on the 32nd floor.
Attention has focused on Paddock’s manic gambling in the last weeks before the massacre. At least 16 times in the past couple of weeks, casinos recorded transactions involving Paddock – either gains or losses – of at least £7,500 and sometimes as much as £23,000 a night.
Anonymous ‘senior law enforcement officials’ told NBC News and CNN that Paddock wired $100,000 (£76,000) to an account in the Philippines at some point before Sunday’s shooting.
Meanwhile, pictures from his high school yearbook showed him as a fresh-faced teenager in the early 1970s. Paddock clutches a tennis racket and poses in one picture with his school varsity team. In another photo, he looks emotionless and avoids eye contact with the camera. He graduated from John H Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, California, in 1971.
A picture also emerged showing Paddock
‘He was gambling on Friday night’
enjoying a traditional Filipino meal with his girlfriend’s family and friends.
Paddock’s brother Eric said she was ‘absolutely the closest person to Steve’ and would be best able to shed light on what drove him to become a mass killer.
Meanwhile, new evidence showed the extent to which Paddock’s life revolved around gambling.
At Caesar’s Palace, just along the Strip from the Mandalay Bay, Paddock was a frequent player with the ‘highest status’ and accorded such privileges as free hotel rooms and gambling credits.
He lived in casino hotels for up to four months at a time.
Security video footage emerged yesterday showing Paddock – sloppily dressed in a baggy jumper and flip-flops – slipping and falling inside the city’s Cosmopolitan Hotel casino in 2011. He claimed he tore a hamstring and sprained his wrist after stepping into a puddle of liquid.
Paddock was stretchered out of the Cosmopolitan and sued the hotel for $100,000 but got nothing after an arbitrator noted from the video that scores of other people had walked over the same spot without apparently noticing a puddle.
Investigators remain at a loss to explain why Paddock carried out his atrocity.
Police have searched several of his homes but have yet to find a suicide note or any explanation for his attack.
Family members have portrayed Paddock as harmless and lawabiding, a man whose only vice was his passion for high- stakes online poker and fruit machines. ‘He was the least violent in the family during my childhood. So, it’s kind of like, “Who?”,’ said his younger brother, Patrick, who admitted they hadn’t been in contact for 20 years. However, neighbours say they found Paddock a disconcerting presence in the quiet, sociable retirement communities where he bought a string of houses.
Diane McKay – who lived next door to Paddock and Miss Danley at their home in Reno, Nevada – described him as unfriendly. ‘He was weird – kept to himself,’ she said. ‘It was like living next to nothing... You can at least be grumpy, something. He was just nothing, quiet.’
Miss Danley, a fellow gambling addict, was unforthcoming about her background, Miss McKay said. The couple kept their blinds closed, but sometimes Paddock would open the garage door and reveal an enormous safe the size of a refrigerator, she said. Investigators believe that safe contained some of the dozens of guns that Paddock stockpiled, taking 23 of them into his Las Vegas hotel suite.
It has emerged that Paddock had a bizarre, itinerant lifestyle, continually moving from one barely furnished home to another, or living in casino hotels. His homes contained barely any furniture. Jorge Juertes, who used to live next door to Paddock’s mother in Clear Lake, Texas, agreed he ‘wasn’t very sociable’. He recalled Paddock’s mother once describing the killer, one of four children, as a ‘bad boy’.
Another former next-door neighbour, Donald Judy, said Paddock was always on the move, carrying a suitcase and driving a hire car.
Although his brother Eric said Paddock earned $ 2million (£1.5 million) from a single property deal, the gunman never flashed his wealth and dressed down in khaki cotton trousers and polo shirts.
Jordan Knights, a nephew of Miss Danley, visited the couple only a few weeks ago and said he had no inkling Paddock even ‘knew about guns’, let alone that he was amassing a vast arsenal.
‘He was weird – kept to himself’