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.
A few years later, he ended up on the FBI’s most wanted list.
Nearly 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 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. The doctor 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.
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.
Benjamin Paddock was caught in 1960. But the bank robbery charges, he insisted to the psychiatrist, were a case of mistaken identity. 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.
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