Las Vegas gunman pictured dead on hotel room floor alongside weapons, camera and final note
High-powered guns, shell casings and two tripod-mounted weapons litter the room that Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock used as a sniper's nest.
Inside room 32135 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel, and near Paddock's lifeless body, officers also found a paper and a pen on a table, suggesting he may have left a note.
The first pictures from the scene also reveal that Paddock, 64, had mounted a camera inside the room, possibly to film the slaughter, and at least one outside it on an abandoned room service trolley. Another camera was in the peep hole of the door.
Sheriff Joe Lombardo said: "I anticipate he was looking for anyone coming to arrest him."
The pictures showed the door battered in with seven bullet holes near the base, where he had fired and hit an officer in the leg.
Paddock was already dead when armed police blasted their way into his 32nd floor suite at the hotel at 10.24pm on Sunday night, ending a nine to 11-minute killing spree that left 59 dead and more than 500 injured. Police said he had shot himself.
One photograph from the scene shows Paddock lying in a pool of blood from a head wound among dozens of spent cartridge casings. A revolver lies near the body.
Fresh details about the massacre and the arsenal Paddock amassed emerged on Tuesday.
A total of 47 firearms were recovered from three locations searched by investigators - Paddock's hotel suite, his home in Mesquite, and another property associated with him in Reno, Nevada, according to Jill Snyder, special agent for the US Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).
Ms Snyder said 12 of the guns found in the hotel room were fitted with so-called bump-stock devices that allow the guns to be fired virtually as automatic weapons. The devices are legal under US law, even though fully automatic weapons are for the most part banned.
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The rifles, shotguns and pistols were purchased in four states - Nevada, Utah, California and Texas - Snyder told reporters at an evening news conference.
Investigators sweeping the room found no fewer than 23 guns, including a Kalashnikov and AR-15 assault rifles, and a vast stockpile of of military grade .223 calibre ammunition.
At least two of the weapons had been set up on tripods at windows overlooking the concert site.
Police said they believed he had used 10 suitcases to smuggle the weapons up to the room, which he had checked into using an ID belonging to his girlfriend, Marliou Dandy, four days earlier. Officers also found Ms Danley's slot machine card, which he had apparently been using to gamble with.
"Danley arrived in the Philippines last month, and then there was a wire transfer to her account for $100,000 from Stephen," Nick Suarez, spokesman for the Philippines' National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), said.
Relatives said Paddock, a former accountant, was worth at least $2million and obsessively gambled tens of thousands of dollars.
The gunman's brother, Eric Paddock, said he recently received a text message showing his brother had won $40,000.
"He'd grouse when he'd lost. But he never said he'd lost $4million or something. I think he would have told me," he said.
But Paddock appears to have been gambling particularly heavily in the weeks ahead of the massacre, with records kept by Las Vegas casinos showing he engaged in 16 transactions of more than $10,000 in recent weeks. It was not clear if they represented wins or losses.
Police were still trying to find a motive to explain why Paddock fired hundreds of bullets into crowds who gathered for an open-air concert on Sunday night. Unlike other mass shooters in recent history, Paddock appears to have left no manifesto to justify his actions.
FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt said usually after a mass shooting "people two or three days later say 'Ah, now I understand, I know what was going on in this guy's life'." But with Paddock "we don't know," he said.
"He knew what he wanted to do. He knew how he was going to do it, and it doesn't seem like he had any kind of escape plan at all."
Early on Monday, police found another arms cache including 19 weapons, several pounds of a commercially available explosive, and thousands of rounds of ammunition at his home in Mesquite, 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas.
They found traces of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which can be used to make homemade bombs, in his car.
Paddock's arsenal of high-powered weapons appears to have been assembled over several days in preparation for the massacre.
Paddock began his killing spree at 10.08pm on Sunday night, opening fire from his hotel room windows on concert goers at the the Route 91 country music festival below.
Craig Herman, 57, a contractor, told the Telegraph: "I was right in front of the stage. I heard 'pop, pop, pop' over and over again. When he was reloading I ran. I stepped over a guy with blood pouring out of his head. He was dead. Gone. I saw maybe 15 others like that before I got out.
"There were people screaming, lying on the ground. I've never seen so much blood. I kept thinking what type of person would do this, who would be that kind of stupid? Was it the Taliban? Mexican cartels? Gang related? But it was someone a bit like me."
Videos filmed by concert goers show that Paddock’s first volley lasted only about ten seconds - a time scale consistent with emptying the magazine on an automatic assault rifle. He fired several similar volleys over a period of about ten minutes.
As casualties mounted, dozens of bystanders, including off duty soldiers, policemen, and nurses, but also ordinary civilians scrambled to attend to the wounded.
Recognising the sound of automatic fire, Woodward and two other off duty soldiers from the Welsh regiment ran towards the scene to tend to the wounded and shepherd people to safely.
"He just said that he helped the injured and to get people to safety and that was it really,” Curtis Dyer, his brother, told the Press Association. "I'm dead proud of what he's done, that he was able to do it."
Julian Ness, 31, one of the first paramedics on the scene, told the Telegraph: "I started treating someone who'd been shot in the leg. Then someone ran up telling me about someone shot in the head, then there was someone shot three times in the chest.
"There was blood everywhere. I never imagined seeing anything like this. We wanted to help everyone but we just had to make difficult decisions based the ones we could save. It breaks your heart."
Taylor Winston, a 29 year old former US marine who was attending the concert with his friend, Jenn Lewis, also used skills learnt on the battlefield to save lives.
“Jenn and I luckily found a truck with keys in it and started transporting priority victims to the hospital and made a couple trips and tried to help out the best we could until more ambulances could arrive,” the Iraq war veteran, from San Diego, told the Daily Beast.
He and an off duty trauma nurse then set up a makeshift triage point, prioritizing casualties and telling victims to apply pressure to their wounds to stop the bleeding.
Officers had identified the source of the shooting and arrived outside room 32135 by 10.24pm, 16 minutes after the massacre began. Paddock shot through the door as they approached, wounding a hotel security guard in the leg.
Sonny Morgan, who was on the 32nd floor at the time of the shooting, said: "I could smell the gun powder. It just kept going and going. I honestly thought it was like a terrorist attack, that someone was trying to blow up the hotel."
