FATHER ONCE COUNSELED TROUBLED YOUTHS IN ARIZ.
ly trimmed blond mustache and horn-rimmed glasses that framed strikingly light gray eyes. Pleasant, clean-cut and “incongruously cheerful,” he chain smoked through the interview, offering an gripping biography with a “fluent command of language.”
“He smiles frequently, sometimes winningly, shows occasionally just a touch of ruefulness,” the psychiatrist, William B. Mcgrath, noted. “No despair, alarm or concern about his fate is manifest.”
“I get the impression he enjoys being an interesting subject of examination,” the doctor wrote. He concluded that Paddock was bright, with no history of “mental defect,” and was able to stand trial. But, the doctor added, Paddock had a “sociopathic personality.”
The portrait of Stephen Paddock that investigators have assembled stands in stark contrast: Reserved, even boring, he was an accountant and investor who liked to gamble only after calculating all the risks. Before the shooting, authorities say, he had never broken the law. Among the many questions that are unanswered is what influence, if any, his father’s absence and infamy had on his life.
“We are establishing the timeline of the suspect’s life, his motivation and everybody else associated with him throughout time,” Metro Police Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said. The FBI has hundreds of agents on the case and more than 1,000 pieces of evidence, said Aaron Rouse, the special agent in charge in Las Vegas.
In the psychological evaluation, Benjamin Paddock boasted that his run-ins with authority started early and rarely stopped. He was an only child, pampered by his mother and not disciplined by his father. “I got away with an awful lot,” he told his evaluator. “I went where I felt like it, disrupting everybody’s schedule.” By 12, he was driving his own car.
He quit high school almost as soon as he started, then joined the Navy at age 15, but was discharged a few months later, he said, when the Navy figured out “I wasn’t going to do what they wanted me to.”
He drove buses in Los Angeles, but got fired for a game of bus tag with other drivers.
In 1946, he was caught stealing a car in Chicago and reselling it in “a fraudulent fashion.” He spent five years in prison, 70 percent of it, he said, “in the hole,” or solitary confinement, because he was “unable or unwilling to abide by rules.”
When he got out, he made good money selling used cars in Chicago, but quit because, he explained, “the thrill had gone out of it.”
During that time, he got married and fathered Stephen, who was born in 1953. He also set up a fraud ring that he said passed $90,000 in bad checks. He was caught and sent back to prison.
When he was released in 1956, he moved with his wife and son to Tucson, Ariz. The couple had three more sons, and Benjamin Paddock operated a service station, a nightclub and a garbage disposal franchise. He bought a house and a car and got involved in the local hot rod and ham radio clubs.
He also walked into the sheriff’s office and offered to counsel troubled youths.
“I only took the incorrigibles,” he told his evaluator. “I have a knack for social work with kids. I told them I had a degree in social psychology, and nobody bothered to check up on it. They regarded me as a leading light on juvenile delinquency.”
He boasted that none of his charges had ever ended up back in court.
While Stephen Paddock was playing at the family’s white ranch house, his father was robbing banks with a snub-nosed revolver and getting away in the family station wagon. He said the ham radio equipment he kept in the car was ideal for a robber because he could listen in on the police.
Benjamin Paddock was caught in 1960. But the bank robbery charges, he insisted to the psychiatrist, were a case of mistaken identity. A criminal syndicate was forcing him to take the rap.
In the long account of his life, Paddock never expressed remorse. A few months later, a judge sentenced him to 20 years in a federal prison. He broke out after eight and spent much of the rest of his life on the lam.