One of the most bizarre stories of 2017 was the October massacre of country music fans who were gunned down in cold blood while attending a festival in Las Vegas.
Few details have emerged on Stephen Paddock, the strange loner of a gunman who sequestered himself in a suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort with an arsenal of weapons and opened fire into the crowd.
By the time that Paddock was dead, the carnage included 58 dead and over 500 injured. Normally with a mass casualty event such as this one, you would expect that the authorities would quickly have been out with all of the details – but that was not the case with Paddock who seems to have been a ghost.
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In the initial weeks after the shooting, the Las Vegas Police Department provided details regularly but quickly clammed up as the feds got involved. Many speculated that there may be more to Mr. Paddock than meets the eye.
Now, new revelations have emerged that indicate that Paddock’s girlfriend Marilou Danley may have had advance knowledge of what was going to go down.
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The New York Times has published a bombshell report using details obtained from FBI search warrants that show the shooter and Danley worked to cover their digital tracks. In her case, she deleted her Facebook account mere hours after the bloodbath.
The Las Vegas gunman planned his attack with sophistication, taking "many methodical steps" to thwart investigators, new documents show https://t.co/IP3ESRUgvc
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 13, 2018
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Via the NYT “Las Vegas Gunman Took Elaborate Steps to Hide His Tracks, New Documents Show”:
The F.B.I. search warrants shed new light on the degree to which the gunman, Stephen Paddock, who killed 58 people and wounded more than 500 others when he opened fire on a crowd from a hotel room in October, planned the attack and prepared for the aftermath. One of the warrants described how Mr. Paddock “destroyed or tried to hide digital media devices.”
Investigators said he used anonymous communications devices, including a prepaid cellphone, to cover his tracks and employed a “level of sophistication which is commonly found in mass casualty events.”
“Paddock planned the attack meticulously and took many methodical steps to avoid detection of his plot and to thwart the eventual law enforcement investigation that would follow,” the F.B.I. said.
Mr. Paddock’s motive for the attack remains unknown.
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The search warrants, which were approved by judges shortly after the shooting, said three cellphones belonging to Mr. Paddock were found in his room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, including two that investigators searched and one that they could not unlock. An F.B.I. agent wrote that he believed “if there were any information related to a potential conspiracy, it would be found within” the locked phone, which used a Google operating system.
The search warrants detail how law enforcement focused on Marilou Danley, the girlfriend of Mr. Paddock. She has not been charged with a crime and has spoken to investigators several times, and her lawyer has said she was not aware of Mr. Paddock’s deadly plans. The investigation is continuing, and the warrants only reflect its early stages.
AND
Ms. Danley deleted her Facebook account just hours after the attack, investigators wrote in their affidavit. At 12:30 a.m., about two-and-a-half hours after the shooting began, she changed the status of her account to private. By 2:46 a.m., she had deleted the account entirely.
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The deletion of a social media account could probably be simply explained away as not wanting to get caught up in the media uproar and scrutiny by authorities. But the story doesn’t end there.
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The F.B.I. also discovered emails between two accounts connected to Mr. Paddock. One from early July indicated that Mr. Paddock had begun taking steps to carry out the attack, referring to a “bump stock,” an attachment that enables a semiautomatic rifle to fire faster.
In an email Mr. Paddock sent on July 6 to an account that also may have belonged to him, he wrote: “try an ar before u buy. we have huge selection. located in the las vegas area.” Another email sent between the accounts read, “for a thrill try out bumpfire ar’s with a 100 round magazine.” By “ar,” Mr. Paddock appeared to be referring to rifles.
The affidavit later adds that “investigators have been unable to figure out why Stephen Paddock would be exchanging messages related to weapons that were used in the attack between two of his email accounts,” and that it was possible that someone else was controlling one of the accounts. If that was the case, the investigator said, the F.B.I. needed to identify that person. Receiving a search warrant for that account “will lead investigators to determine the full scope of Stephen Paddock’s plan,” an F.B.I agent wrote to the judge.
Turns out, she deleted her account AFTER the attack, but BEFORE anyone knew her boyfriend was involved which would seem to indicate that perhaps she was manipulating Paddock for some reason or at the very least covering up for him.
There is also the as-yet-unknown other persons Paddock communicated with about the weaponry and the possibility of a much larger conspiracy.
But what’s truly shocking about these new revelations is that an FBI agent (identity unknown) would use the word “conspiracy” to describe what’s going on in the case.
This isn’t some online crazy person, or some low-level, no-name official. This is a member of the FBI with intensive, inside knowledge about the case.
Documents suggest Stephen Paddock took many steps to “thwart the eventual law enforcement investigation” into #LasVegasShootinghttps://t.co/Shl1TW4mAf
— Las Vegas RJ (@reviewjournal) January 14, 2018
The Las Vegas Review-Journal has the following to say about Ms. Danley:
Though investigators had previously said Paddock had no known social media accounts, the records also included requests to access at least four different Instagram accounts which may have been associated with either Paddock or his girlfriend, Marilou Danley.
Authorities also requested access to Danley’s Facebook account, which she deleted shortly after the shooting.
In an interview with the FBI in the days after the massacre, Danley, who was in the Philippines at the time of the attack, quickly corroborated many of the FBI’s findings but remained adamant that she had no foreknowledge of Paddock’s plans.
Email records reviewed by investigators confirm Paddock transferred an undisclosed amount of money to Danley in September for unknown reasons. And while, as of October, investigators had not found any conclusive evidence that Danley assisted Paddock in any way, she remained “the subject of intensive review,” according to the documents.
The shooting – as well as Paddock’s motives – continue to be a riddle wrapped in an enigma. It’s hard not to suspect that some powerful people want to keep it that way.
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