A man with a winning smile and ‘sociopathic personality’
Facing prison for a string of bank robberies, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock beamed cheerfully at a psychiatrist evaluating his fitness to stand trial, and mused at length — at times with “becoming modesty” — about his life stealing cars, running cons, enduring solitary confinement and getting fired from a job as a bus driver after playing tag with the buses.
“I’m a third-time loser,” Paddock, the father of the Las Vegas gunman, Stephen Paddock, told the doctor with a smile, according to a summary of the doctor’s evaluation. Though he was in a jail cell in Phoenix, Paddock expressed no regrets, and claimed to have a genius IQ.
“Maybe,” he wondered aloud, “I’m an alert psychotic.”
A few years later, he ended up on the FBI’S most wanted list.
More than two weeks after the shooting in Las Vegas, investigators have found few clues to explain why Stephen Paddock amassed an arsenal of assault-style weapons and turned them on concertgoers at a country music festival. FBI profilers are trying to construct a psychological makeup of Paddock, which probably includes the family history of mental illness.
If so, one of the most telling documents might be a yellowed, four-page psychiatric evaluation from 1960 that details the father who raised Stephen Paddock until he was 7 and who loomed over the family even after he disappeared.
When Benjamin Paddock sat for the examination, he was built like a refrigerator and wore a neat-
Background of shooter’s father may hold clues
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