Investigators struggling to determine the motive behind the las Vegas massacre for nearly three days were on Wednesday hoping to get valuable clues with the questioning of shooter Stephen Paddock’s longtime girlfriend upon her return from abroad.
Marilou Danley, described as a “person of interest”, arrived in los Angeles from Manila late on Tuesday night and was immediately whisked away by FBI agents for questioning. The 62-year-old woman, an Australian citizen of Filipino origin, had been in a live-in relationship with Paddock for some years.
Danley, according to travel records obtained by ABC News, showed that she travelled to Manila on September 15 -- two weeks before the las Vegas massacre. She then flew to Hong Kong on September 22, returning to Manila three days later on September 25.
It also emerged that Paddock had in recent months transferred large sums of money, totalling about $100,000, to someone in the Philippines. It was not immediately clear if the money transfer was meant for Danley.
“Currently she’s a person of interest,” las Vegas Sheriff Joseph lombardo told a news conference on Tuesday, hours before Danley’s arrival in los Angeles. A day earlier, the police had initially said that they were “continuing the investigation into that female”, but subsequently established contact with her and put out a statement that she was “no longer being sought out”.
In Australia, one of Danley’s sisters suggested that Paddock had sent her out of the US in order to plot his attack, telling Channel 7 in an interview: “I know she (Marilou) don’t know anything as well, like us. She was sent away. She was away so that she will be not there to interfere with what he’s planning.”
Danley, according to reports, was married to fellow-Australian Geary Danley in 1990 and that the two lived together in Queensland till 2003, when they moved to Nevada. The couple filed for divorce in 2015, but court records cited by media reports suggested that she may have been living with Paddock as early as August 2013.
The US investigators are apparently keen to ferret out information about the large arsenal of guns, ammunition and explosives that Paddock had put together over a period of time. The focus of questioning Danley, according to former FBI agent Steve Gomez, would be on the arsenal.
“How did he accumulate all of those weaponsIJ Did she see him operating these weapons, training, working on these weaponsIJ Did she know where he obtained these weaponsIJ Were there associates that were obtaining the weapon for himIJ … Those are very important questions to answer,” Gomez told ABC News.
Prior to the arrival of Danley, police concluded their raid on Paddock’s second home in Reno, Nevada that yielded another five firearms, taking the total number of weapons recovered to 47. While 23 had earlier been found in his 32nd floor room of Mandalay Bay hotel, another 19 along with a large quantity of ammunition and explosive material was seized from his Mesquite home, 125 km away from las Vegas.
New information released by the authorities pointed to the meticulous planning that the gunman had made to carry out what turned out to be the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. His arsenal of firearms included devices to that enable a shooter to file bullets rapidly, similar to the speed of automatic rifles. Paddock had outfitted 12 of his firearms with these devices, called bump-stocks, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.