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Las Vegas Mass Murder · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:15
  Stephen Paddock was sixty four years old, far out of the age bracket of
• 0:19
  your average mass shooter. He lived a normal life for a guy's age,
• 0:23
  working in real estate, and although he'd been married and divorced a couple of
• 0:27
  times, he didn't have any children. And twenty seventeen, Stephen was living
• 0:32
  in a retirement community located more than an hour's drive away from Las Vegas,
• 0:37
  where he was a regular at the casinos. Stephen's main vice was gambling,
• 0:42
  and he did it a lot, all with high stakes. Even though his
• 0:46
  gambling game had recently gone downhill, putting him into some serious debt, he'd
• 0:51
  paid it all off by the time October twenty seventeen came around. This all
• 0:56
  tells the story of a pretty ordinary guy with ordinary problems, albeit most of
• 1:02
  us don't have deep gambling debts. The most remarkable thing about Stephen was actually
• 1:07
  his parents, in particular his father, Benjamin Paddock. Benjamin had earned a
• 1:12
  spot on the FBI's most wanted list for almost ten years after carrying out a
• 1:18
  string of bank robberies. However, Stephen had never shown the same criminal tendencies
• 1:23
  as his father. In six decades, speeding tickets were the only run ins
• 1:27
  he'd had with the cops. On October first, twenty seventeen, Stephen stationed
• 1:33
  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
• 1:41
  of the crowds of the Las Vegas Strip below. He'd arrived at the hotel
• 1:46
  on the twenty fifth of September and decided to rent a second suite a few
• 1:51
  days later. Hotel employees remembered interacting with Stephen, but they hadn't noticed anything
• 1:57
  out of the ordinary. He spent most of his time gambling into the early
• 2:00
  hours of the morning, and even though he'd transported more than twenty suit cases
• 2:06
  up to his suite, he'd done it gradually enough that nobody had paid any
• 2:09
  attention or had noticed. On the thirtieth of September, Stephen hung a do
• 2:15
  not disturb sign on the door to both of his suites. The first of
• 2:20
  October rolled around, and Stephen sat in his hotel room looking down at the
• 2:24
  festival below. It was the last night of the Root ninety one Harvest Country
• 2:29
  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
• 2:38
  in different cities that would be attended by a large number of people. He
• 2:43
  previously went so far as renting a hotel room with a view of Chicago's Lallapalooza
• 2:47
  festival, but he never followed through and didn't show up for his room rental.
• 2:53
  Did he lose his nerve or change his plan. Between September and October
• 2:59
  two thousand seventeen, Stephen's Google searches had painted a picture of his plans.
• 3:05
  He typed out queries like swat weapons and do police use explosives? Now he
• 3:12
  was able to put his plan into action. At ten or five pm,
• 3:15
  Stephen broke two of the windows with a hammer and then started to shoot through
• 3:21
  the broken glass. Once he opened fire, he was relentless. He began
• 3:27
  with a few single shots from his rifle and quickly escalated to shooting bursts up
• 3:31
  to one hundred rounds at a time. Thirty one people died there at the
• 3:37
  scene, but the number of wounded was much higher. Many of Stephen's bullets
• 3:40
  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
• 3:53
  thought that the loud noises were just fireworks going off nearby. When the first
• 3:58
  bodies fell, a mass panic began. People tried to flee, trampling,
• 4:03
  climbing over, and shoving each other to try to save their own lives.
• 4:08
  There was a tall security fence around the lot, making it difficult for the
• 4:12
  festivalgoers to go anywhere. Quickly, it corralled them into one area, feeding
• 4:17
  the panic and making them frantic in their attempt to get away. Another four
• 4:21
  hundred were injured by those who were trying to escape the gunfire. Twenty seven
• 4:27
  of the shooting victims who were injured at the scene later died from their injuries
• 4:30
  at the hospital. Here is cell phone recorded audio from that day as it
• 4:35
  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,
• 5:44
  but in reality, the shooting only lasted four round ten minutes, by which
• 5:48
  time Stephen had fired more than a thousand rounds, only taking short pauses to
• 5:53
  reload or change from one gun to another. At one point during the shooting,
• 5:58
  Stephen had taken a at a tank of jet fuel at the International Airport,
• 6:02
  hoping that it would explode. Although one of his bullets did pierce the
• 6:06
  tank, the jet fuel failed to ignite. Since the first gun shots,
• 6:11
  police had been scrambling to locate the shooter, but it was hard to pinpoint
• 6:15
  whether the shots were coming from the festival grounds themselves or the two nearby hotels.
• 6:20
  They located Stephen after seeing gunfire flashes from a suite at the Mandalay Bay
• 6:25
  Hotel, but by the time they had narrowed down what floor the shooter was
• 6:29
  on, they were too late. The shooting was over. Police arrived at
• 6:33
  the Mandalay Bay Hotel's thirty second floor at ten seventeen PM and encounter the hotel's
• 6:39
  security guard, Jesus Campos, who was bleeding from a bullet wound in his
• 6:44
  right thigh. Jesus had responded to a security alert about an open door on
• 6:48
  the thirty second floor, but it found that the access door to the floor
• 6:53
  had been barricaded shut. Then he'd been shot by Stephen through the closed door
• 6:57
  of the suite and quickly taken cover. Despite his Injuryjesus handed the officers a
• 7:02
  master key to all the rooms on that floor. Only then did he leave
• 7:06
  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
• 7:15
  responding officers had to break it down to get inside. They swept down the
• 7:19
  hallway, scouring each room and evacuating terrified hotel guests as they went. Then
• 7:26
  they used explosive devices to gain access to the room that Stephen had been shooting
• 7:30
  from. Stephen was surrounded by a variety of twenty four guns and high capacity
• 7:35
  magazines scattered around his body, where bolt action rifles, revolvers, semi automatics,
• 7:42
  and sniper rifles. Forensics later discovered that Stephen had managed to use fifteen
• 7:47
  of the twenty four available guns at some point during the shooting, but the
• 7:51
  most recent round he'd fired had been from his Smith and Wesson revolver, and
• 7:57
  the target had been himself. Just minutes before police arrived, Stephen Paddock died
• 8:01
  from a bullet wound to the head. Investigators, grieving loved ones of the
• 8:07
  victims, and the curious public were left to piece together why Stephen had carried
• 8:13
  out such a heinous act before turning the gun on himself. Why would a
• 8:16
  sixty four year old man opened fire on innocent people at a music festival in
• 8:20
  Nevada. To this day, the question remains unanswered. The Clark County Sheriff
• 8:28
  revealed that they had found evidence that Stephen might have had an accomplice and intended
• 8:33
  to escape that day instead of dying by his own hand. However, the
• 8:37
  evidence has never been made public, and if that really was Stephen's plan,
• 8:41
  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
• 8:52
  left behind, nothing to suggest a motive behind the killing. In fact,
• 8:56
  the only note found in Stephen's hotel suite contained a series of calculations of the
• 9:01
  wind speeds and distance from his room to the Las Vegas Strip below. It
• 9:05
  was practical and showed how well planned the attack was, but he gave no
• 9:09
  insight into what he'd been thinking when he opened fire. Unlike almost all mass
• 9:15
  shootings, there seemed to be no message Stephen wanted to convey, and no
• 9:18
  lesson he wanted to teach. He didn't have links to any extremist groups.
• 9:22
  He wasn't a member of Occult, and he didn't seem to be having a
• 9:26
  psychotic break. The reason that sixty people had to die that day is still
• 9:31
  a mystery to everyone but the perpetrator himself. That is ten minute murder for
• 9:48
  today, brief and bingeible true crime. I'm Joe the host, and thank
• 9:52
  you for taking the time to listen. A question for today comes from Missy
• 9:56
  in Rome and I'm assuming that's Rome Georgia, not like Rome over and is
• 10:01
  it Italy? I feel stupid right now. Roma is in Italy. I
• 10:05
  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
• 10:16
  whether it's right. Sometimes Rome Georgia. I'm sticking with Rome Georgia. That's
• 10:20
  where it is. Dear Joe, are there some things you avoid saying because
• 10:24
  you have a hard time pronouncing them? Love the podcast, Please do Serial
• 10:28
  Killer Sunday more often, Missy, Thank you for the question and thank you
• 10:31
  for listening. Also a roll tide. Yeah, there are things that I
• 10:35
  do not say on this podcast very often. A few of those words I'll
• 10:39
  give you three of them. Rule rural rule like out in like out in
• 10:45
  the country, rule, rule, man rule, that's right. I think
• 10:50
  I got it right. Caramel caramel. Obviously I can say both of those,
• 10:56
  but I don't know which one's right. And if you say one,
• 11:00
  the other group of people will say you're saying it wrong, and you say
• 11:01
  the other one, you're saying it wrong. It depends on where you're from
• 11:05
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• 11:07
  so I don't know how to say it. I'll use them interchangeably in my
• 11:11
  own personal life. Camel carmel because I don't care. And the last one
• 11:15
  I think is documented on this podcast in a previous episode. Regularly. I've
• 11:22
  gotten much better at saying it regularly. Regularly. I have to think about
• 11:26
  it really hard before I say it, though, Regularly say it fast and
• 11:30
  tell me I'm wrong about how hard that word is. Regularly. See I'm
• 11:33
  doing it now, I'm doing it. Okay. Those are the three that
• 11:37
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• 11:41
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• 11:43
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• 11:52
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• 11:54
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• 12:09
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• 12:16
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  dot com. Have a good night rule, rule, rule, rural,
• 12:28
  rural, rule, rural. I don't know