.. “I get the impression he enjoys being an interesting subject of examination,” the doctor wrote. He concluded that Mr. Paddock was bright, with no history of “mental defect,” and was able to stand trial. But, the doctor added, Mr. Paddock had a “sociopathic personality.”
.. Benjamin Paddock had boasted during his psychological evaluation 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.”
.. 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.”
.. 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.