Las Vegas Mass Murder

0:15 Stephen Paddock was sixty four years old, far out of the age bracket of your average mass shooter. He lived a normal life for a guy's age, working in real estate, and although he'd been married and divorced a couple of times, he didn't have any children. And twenty seventeen, Stephen was living in a retirement community located more than an hour's drive away from Las Vegas, where he was a regular at the casinos. Stephen's main vice was gambling, and he did it a lot, all with high stakes. Even though his gambling game had recently gone downhill, putting him into some serious debt, he'd paid it all off by the time October twenty seventeen came around. This all tells the story of a pretty ordinary guy with ordinary problems, albeit most of us don't have deep gambling debts. The most remarkable thing about Stephen was actually his parents, in particular his father, Benjamin Paddock. Benjamin had earned a spot on the FBI's most wanted list for almost ten years after carrying out a string of bank robberies. However, Stephen had never shown the same criminal tendencies as his father. In six decades, speeding tickets were the only run ins he'd had with the cops. On October first, twenty seventeen, Stephen stationed himself in one of the two suites that he'd booked in the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

1:38 It was on the thirty second floor, giving him a perfect vantage point of the crowds of the Las Vegas Strip below. He'd arrived at the hotel on the twenty fifth of September and decided to rent a second suite a few days later. Hotel employees remembered interacting with Stephen, but they hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. He spent most of his time gambling into the early hours of the morning, and even though he'd transported more than twenty suit cases up to his suite, he'd done it gradually enough that nobody had paid any attention or had noticed. On the thirtieth of September, Stephen hung a do not disturb sign on the door to both of his suites. The first of October rolled around, and Stephen sat in his hotel room looking down at the festival below. It was the last night of the Root ninety one Harvest Country music Festival, and at around ten pm, the closing act began to play.

2:35 In the months leading up to this day, Stephen had been researching events in different cities that would be attended by a large number of people. He previously went so far as renting a hotel room with a view of Chicago's Lallapalooza festival, but he never followed through and didn't show up for his room rental. Did he lose his nerve or change his plan. Between September and October two thousand seventeen, Stephen's Google searches had painted a picture of his plans. He typed out queries like swat weapons and do police use explosives? Now he was able to put his plan into action. At ten or five pm, Stephen broke two of the windows with a hammer and then started to shoot through the broken glass. Once he opened fire, he was relentless. He began with a few single shots from his rifle and quickly escalated to shooting bursts up to one hundred rounds at a time. Thirty one people died there at the scene, but the number of wounded was much higher. Many of Stephen's bullets hit their intended targets, injuring more than four hundred festival goers. Directly.

3:46 The strip was already busy with an estimated twenty two thousand people, who initially thought that the loud noises were just fireworks going off nearby. When the first bodies fell, a mass panic began. People tried to flee, trampling, climbing over, and shoving each other to try to save their own lives. There was a tall security fence around the lot, making it difficult for the festivalgoers to go anywhere. Quickly, it corralled them into one area, feeding the panic and making them frantic in their attempt to get away. Another four hundred were injured by those who were trying to escape the gunfire. Twenty seven of the shooting victims who were injured at the scene later died from their injuries at the hospital. Here is cell phone recorded audio from that day as it started and people were trying to take cover or run away. Yet with the

5:41 people on the strip that day, it must have felt like an eternity, but in reality, the shooting only lasted four round ten minutes, by which time Stephen had fired more than a thousand rounds, only taking short pauses to reload or change from one gun to another. At one point during the shooting, Stephen had taken a at a tank of jet fuel at the International Airport, hoping that it would explode. Although one of his bullets did pierce the tank, the jet fuel failed to ignite. Since the first gun shots, police had been scrambling to locate the shooter, but it was hard to pinpoint whether the shots were coming from the festival grounds themselves or the two nearby hotels. They located Stephen after seeing gunfire flashes from a suite at the Mandalay Bay Hotel, but by the time they had narrowed down what floor the shooter was on, they were too late. The shooting was over. Police arrived at the Mandalay Bay Hotel's thirty second floor at ten seventeen PM and encounter the hotel's security guard, Jesus Campos, who was bleeding from a bullet wound in his right thigh. Jesus had responded to a security alert about an open door on the thirty second floor, but it found that the access door to the floor had been barricaded shut. Then he'd been shot by Stephen through the closed door of the suite and quickly taken cover. Despite his Injuryjesus handed the officers a master key to all the rooms on that floor. Only then did he leave to seek medical attention. It turned out that the door Jesus had not been

7:11 able to open had been deliberately screwed shut by Stephen, and several of the responding officers had to break it down to get inside. They swept down the hallway, scouring each room and evacuating terrified hotel guests as they went. Then they used explosive devices to gain access to the room that Stephen had been shooting from. Stephen was surrounded by a variety of twenty four guns and high capacity magazines scattered around his body, where bolt action rifles, revolvers, semi automatics, and sniper rifles. Forensics later discovered that Stephen had managed to use fifteen of the twenty four available guns at some point during the shooting, but the most recent round he'd fired had been from his Smith and Wesson revolver, and the target had been himself. Just minutes before police arrived, Stephen Paddock died from a bullet wound to the head. Investigators, grieving loved ones of the victims, and the curious public were left to piece together why Stephen had carried out such a heinous act before turning the gun on himself. Why would a sixty four year old man opened fire on innocent people at a music festival in Nevada. To this day, the question remains unanswered. The Clark County Sheriff revealed that they had found evidence that Stephen might have had an accomplice and intended to escape that day instead of dying by his own hand. However, the evidence has never been made public, and if that really was Stephen's plan, for some reason he decided not to follow it. If he did have an

8:45 accomplice, that person has never been identified. There was no note or manifesto left behind, nothing to suggest a motive behind the killing. In fact, the only note found in Stephen's hotel suite contained a series of calculations of the wind speeds and distance from his room to the Las Vegas Strip below. It was practical and showed how well planned the attack was, but he gave no insight into what he'd been thinking when he opened fire. Unlike almost all mass shootings, there seemed to be no message Stephen wanted to convey, and no lesson he wanted to teach. He didn't have links to any extremist groups. He wasn't a member of Occult, and he didn't seem to be having a psychotic break. The reason that sixty people had to die that day is still a mystery to everyone but the perpetrator himself. That is ten minute murder for today, brief and bingeible true crime. I'm Joe the host, and thank you for taking the time to listen. A question for today comes from Missy in Rome and I'm assuming that's Rome Georgia, not like Rome over and is it Italy? I feel stupid right now. Roma is in Italy. I don't know why I ask that. I'm confident Roma is in Italy, right.

10:11 Yeah, when something is so simple and obvious, it makes you question whether it's right. Sometimes Rome Georgia. I'm sticking with Rome Georgia. That's where it is. Dear Joe, are there some things you avoid saying because you have a hard time pronouncing them? Love the podcast, Please do Serial Killer Sunday more often, Missy, Thank you for the question and thank you for listening. Also a roll tide. Yeah, there are things that I do not say on this podcast very often. A few of those words I'll give you three of them. Rule rural rule like out in like out in the country, rule, rule, man rule, that's right. I think I got it right. Caramel caramel. Obviously I can say both of those, but I don't know which one's right. And if you say one, the other group of people will say you're saying it wrong, and you say the other one, you're saying it wrong. It depends on where you're from how you say it, and I'm kind of from all over the place, so I don't know how to say it. I'll use them interchangeably in my own personal life. Camel carmel because I don't care. And the last one I think is documented on this podcast in a previous episode. Regularly. I've gotten much better at saying it regularly. Regularly. I have to think about it really hard before I say it, though, Regularly say it fast and tell me I'm wrong about how hard that word is. Regularly. See I'm doing it now, I'm doing it. Okay. Those are the three that I'm giving you. They're probably more that I can't say that I'm not thinking of right now. But anyway, if you have a question for me or

11:43 a story idea for an episode, you can email me Joe at ten minute Murder dot com and I don't get a chance to directly respond to all of those, but I promise you I do read each and every single one of them. And hey, if this is your first time listening to ten Minute Murder, please subscribe so that you can catch up on all the back episodes and never miss any of the new ones. Connect with me on social media see the visuals of what we're talking about here in the podcast. And if you like this episode, please leave a rating and review on Apple or any place that's possible. Your positive feedback is very much appreciated. And of course for all the information about ten minute Murder you can go to ten minute murder dot com. Have a good night rule, rule, rule, rural, rural, rule, rural. I don't know