An Unlikely Retirement: The 2017 Las Vegas Massacre as an Exercise in Project-Based Deviant Leisure

Introduction

On the night of October 1, 2017, at approximately 10:05 p.m. Mountain Time, a 64-year-old Nevada resident, real estate investor, and retired accountant Stephen Craig Paddock opened fire using a series of modified assault rifles on a crowd of an estimated 22,000 concertgoers from the window of his hotel suite, located on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Before taking his own life ahead of a police tactical team reaching his room, Paddock would kill a total of 58 attendees at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival being held on Las Vegas Boulevard immediately below the hotel, an act that has since been widely cited as the deadliest mass shooting committed by a lone gunman in modern U.S. history (Vives, Ryan, & Serna, 2017). In addition to the record number of fatalities, another 547 people were ultimately injured to varying degree by Paddock’s gunfire, including a Mandalay Bay security guard shot through the wall while attending to an unrelated matter on the hotel’s 32nd floor contemporaneous with the start of the attack (Pearce, 2017). An additional 1600 rounds of ammunition and a significant cache of bomb-making materials were later located inside Paddock’s vehicle found parked at the hotel, their intended use and the potential target of any additional attacks remaining unclear at the time of this writing (Grinberg, 2017). The hotel video footage of Paddock in the hours preceding the attack reveal a calm, seemingly happy demeanor as he intermittently gambled and shuttled an arsenal of weapons to his suite.

In the aftermath of the massacre, a number of theories regarding Paddock’s motives for the mass murder were proffered by a wide range of pundits, law enforcement officials, news commentators, and even the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) who dubiously claimed that Paddock was a “solider of the caliphate” and that the attack was carried out to further the interests of the terror organization after Paddock converted to Islam and adopted the name Abu Abdul Barr al-Amriki (Abad, 2017). In fact, while it was later confirmed that Paddock and his common-law spouse had recently taken a cruise to some Middle Eastern ports of call, there is no evidence that Paddock had any contact with any person on location there, nor did he attend any areas known to be incubators of terror cell activity or recruitment. There is additionally no credible evidence that the massacre had any geopolitical, religious, or cultural motive whatsoever. One of Paddock’s three brothers, by all accounts the only person with whom he had any ongoing relationship, additionally confirmed that he had never known Paddock to hold any discernible political or religious leanings, much less any extreme views or ideologies (Vives et al., 2017).

In part the rationale for the media’s willingness to entertain, albeit only briefly and tacitly, any possibility of a terror-related motive was the fact that Paddock was initially categorized as an atypical mass murderer whose background, unlike many if not most mass shooters, was largely devoid of conventional warning signs. The lack of any coherent narrative surrounding the massacre and the dearth of any materials pointing to an obvious motive (social media posts or other writings, such as a suicide letter) as well as limited details—and, at times, conflicting details—being provided by law enforcement, later led to Paddock’s mental state being the subject of additional conjecture. To this end, some theorized that Paddock may have inherited the psychopathic tendencies exhibited by his late father Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, a career criminal, bank robber, and con artist who once spent 8 years on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Most Wanted List following a 1968 escape from a prison in Texas (Weiss, 2017).

Such a theory is, on its face, defensible given that, as confirmed through studies of identical twins, psychopathy is at least partially heritable (Tuvblad, Bezdjian, Raine, & Baker, 2014); however, there has been no direct evidence beyond anecdotal layperson accounts provided by immediate family members to suggest that Paddock’s father was a psychopath as clinically defined. Furthermore, the vast majority of mass shooters, while often not conforming to a single classification, are generally recognized to be either psychotically depressed or suffering from schizoid personality disorder, or both, rather than being necessarily psychopathic (Arntfield & Danesi, 2017). With this discrepancy in mind, others have instead pointed to Paddock’s reported daily cocktail of alcohol and antianxiety medications as having perhaps triggered a protracted psychotic episode in the months leading to the massacre, during which time Paddock’s purchase of firearms and ammunition also increased precipitously (Vives et al., 2017). In furtherance of this hypothesis, it was announced in late October 2017 that neuroscientists at Stanford University Medical Center would be analyzing Paddock’s preserved brain for indicators of pathology or physical abnormality (Fink, 2017).

It is our position in this article, these same plausible theories notwithstanding, that Paddock was, in fact, not an atypical mass shooter. Thus, for our purposes here, there are not only intrinsic but also instrumental properties to this case that can provide important insights into other mass shooters apparently lacking a discernible motive or otherwise failing to evince conventional warning signs (see Stake, 2000). As we note here, Paddock’s personal background is also not lacking in evidence of a propensity to commit mass homicide; rather, his lifestyle and previously documented pastimes and avocations are all replete with tell-tale indicators of Paddock gravitating to activities that constitute deviant leisure (Rojek, 1999; Stebbins, 1996; D. J. Williams, 2016) or perhaps even edgework as a form of voluntary risk-taking that often involves personal injury or death through thrill-seeking activities involving extensive planning and execution (Lyng, 1990, 2004) While specific forms of deviant leisure vary considerably on dimensions of tolerability (tolerable or intolerable), criminality (legitimate, noncriminal, or criminal), and intensity (casual or serious), intrinsically motivated expressive homicide is already well recognized as the most extreme form of deviant leisure (Rojek, 1999; D. J. Williams & Walker, 2006).

Background: Serial and Mass Homicide as Deviant Leisure

Scholars increasingly have begun to recognize that offenders who commit multiple expressive homicides, particularly serial murders, may do so as an extreme form of leisure (Gunn & Caissie, 2006; Rojek, 1999; D. J. Williams, 2017a; D. J. Williams, Thomas, & Arntfield, 2017; D. J. Williams & Walker, 2006). Leisure science, as a distinct field of study, is similar to homicide studies, one informed by multiple parent disciplines, including biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics (Walker, Scott, & Stodolska, 2016). Leisure scientists, of course, are interested in what activities people choose to engage in for enjoyment and fun; what potential physical, psychological, and social benefits are derived from pleasurable experiences; how individuals structure their lifestyles; and the potential constraints (and how these constraints are negotiated) to people engaging in specific and preferred leisure experiences.

By definition, leisure experience must be relatively freely chosen (not coerced) and primarily intrinsically motivated; leisure also is generally associated with feelings of freedom, positive emotions, relaxation and/or stress reduction, and sometimes adventure and thrill seeking. A leisure approach, then, is compatible with Skrapec’s (2001) definition of serial murder which requires, “forensically-linked murders committed as discrete events by the same person(s) where the primary motive is personal gratification (p. 22—emphasis ours). Indeed, Rojek (1999) discussed examples of serial murderers who killed to achieve extraordinary emotional experience and intense pleasure, and noted that fantasies of murder, planning and rehearsal, and the general organizational process of killing is the dominant feature of such offenders’ leisure. Rojek also observed how serial murderers decide to kill based on customized fantasy content that is a common feature of typical leisure culture, and whereby visualizations of success, acclaim, and being recognized as exceptional in one’s chosen endeavor are informed by various media, including film and television. Recent research on the topic of literary criminology by Arntfield and Danesi (2017) has, for example, elaborated on how broader leisure culture shapes the manner in which specific homicides are planned, organized, and operationalized, with serial murderers and mass murderers alike having a noted penchant for documenting and diarizing their future crimes as interim fantasy development.

A recent empirical study by D. J. Williams et al. (2017) also found that across hundreds of cases, serial homicide offenders killed according to one or more leisure themes pertaining to (a) murder as a game, (b) murder for intense thrills and sensations, (c) killing for simple fun and enjoyment, and (d) killing as a form of personal celebration. This same study found that robust leisure constraints and negotiation theories also apply to serial homicide cases wherein a substantial motivation for murder involved the pursuit of enjoyment or pleasure in earnest. In other words, serial homicide offenders apparently negotiate specific intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural barriers to their preferred deviant leisure, just as people often must negotiate the same levels of constraints when engaging in all sorts of legitimate leisure activities. For the same reason that lightly used golf clubs, motorcycles, and surfing gear are all predictably available at discounted prices every autumn reflects this same reality: leisure pursuits that are found to be overly challenging tend to lead to frustration and abandonment of the activity by the participant; conversely, pursuits found to be understimulating lead to boredom and also to abandonment in favor of a more demanding endeavor. A comfortable middle ground is often only discovered heuristically, through a process or trial-and-error and often with significant expense and regret. This middle ground is theoretically conceptualized as flow, or the psychology of optimal experience, and is possible across virtually all forms of leisure (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). Flow theory is also applicable to serial homicide: if the challenge of committing murder is too great, the offender is frustrated and may abort previously planned acts of homicide. Conversely, if the challenge is not sufficient, the offender becomes bored with a particular form of killing; they respond by varying their modus operandi or by taking unnecessary but intrinsically rewarding risks, such as returning to the crime scene, calling the police themselves, or sending/leaving taunting letters or communiqués addressed to the authorities, the media, or victims’ families (D. J. Williams, 2017b). Thus, there are in many cases repeated attempts to plan and carry out the perfect murder(s), where a balance of skill and challenge are likely to produce an optimal leisure experience—flow—for the homicide offender.

The vast majority of leisure activities of all varieties can be classified along a continuum that begins with casual leisure, defined as leisure which is immediate, often spontaneous, and requires little training or skill (Stebbins, 2001). Following casual leisure is serious leisure which, by comparison, requires considerable effort, specialized knowledge, planning, and skill (Stebbins, 2001, 2015) Many forms of multiple murder—including both serial and mass homicide—are characterized by rehearsal of fantasy, planning, and some level of organization; thus, they appear to be experienced as deviant serious leisure while other acts of murder may be more be expressed more casually, in keeping with the spontaneity seen in casual leisure (D. J. Williams et al., 2017; D. J. Williams & Walker, 2006). However, a third form of leisure has been classified as project-based leisure.

According to Stebbins (2005), project-based leisure is “a short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time” (p. 2). Stebbins further explains that project-based leisure requires planning and effort, and sometimes a particular skill set. But while project-based leisure may exhibit elements of both casual and serious leisure, it is a separate form from both. Unlike serious leisure, project-based leisure is not intended to develop into a career and is often designed to be a single defining undertaking, one that might typically be reserved as a “bucket list” objective that takes years of planning, acquisition of knowledge, and training (scaling or hiking a significant mountain range, completing a triathlon, taking a once-in-a-lifetime trip, etc.) which in many cases amounts to what is known as edgework by virtue of the long-term planning and commensurate physical risk involved. According to Lyng (1990), the common theme of edgework activities is the threat to one’s physical or psychological well-being or one’s structured existence. The “edge” may be defined in diverse ways, including life versus death, sanity versus insanity, and coherent versus disordered sense of identity or environment (Lyng, 1990).

In the interim, project-based leisure, like other forms of leisure, offers the user similar personal rewards; this includes self-development, self-expression, self-gratification, and cherished experiences (Stebbins, 2005). Additional intrinsic rewards might include improved self-image (recognition by others), social attraction (associating with other participants in the project or being welcomed into a community of like-minded persons), and a general sense of productivity and accomplishment. Project-based leisure pursuits that do not necessarily evolve into edgework involving extreme risk-reward dichotomies often include benign activities like planning a conference, sporting event, or civic project; do-it-yourself tasks such a refinishing a bathroom or building a deck; and even artistic and creative (and usually unpaid) endeavors such as producing a play, skit, pageant, short film or video, etc.

While cases of serial homicide (two or more victims killed at separate intervals) often appear to function as serious or casual leisure for offenders, mass homicide (four or more victims killed at one time or in immediate succession), however, may be structured as the ultimate one-time project-based leisure experience. This is especially seen, among the recognized subcategories of mass murderers and their respective motivational models and methods of attack, in the case of the of pseudocommando mass murderer who will carefully prepare for their attack, targeting particular locations and victims (Fox & DeLateur, 2014; Fox & Levin, 2015). For example, Stephen Paddock, as a relatively obvious pseudocommando killer had, like other mass murderers conforming to the “adversarial homicide-suicide” category within the typology of homicide–suicide first established by Marzuk, Tardiff, and Hirsch (1992), accumulated a large arsenal of weapons, killed victims indiscriminately in a public setting after a long period of deliberation, was motivated by anger, hatred, or, and expected—or was at least prepared—to be killed during the incident by responding authorities (Dietz, 1986; Knoll, 2010).

Some evidence suggests that pseudocommando offenders were bullied or isolated as children; felt excluded; were generally suspicious and resentful; showed obsessional, narcissistic, and grandiose traits; and relied on externalization (Mullen, 2004). Similar to those serial homicide offenders who spend extensive leisure time immersed in fantasy involving extreme violence, pseudocommando mass killers have also been noted as retreating into a realm of revenge fantasy, focusing on large-scale murders and the obliteration of large numbers of specific victims or victims representative of a particular tormentor (Knoll, 2010). In the case of 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, for instance, the University of California at Santa Barbara student spent months composing his autobiography and manifesto that would ultimately serve as his rationale for mass murder, and later recorded a YouTube video outlining his “retribution” against “attractive” college-age females and “sexually active” males, two identifiable groups he perceived as having thwarted his own right to romantic success and popularity on campus (Arntfield & Danesi, 2017, pp.143-144). Rodger’s subsequent stabbing and shooting rampage on May 23, 2014, in the coastal town of Isla Vista, California, went on to claim seven lives while injuring over a dozen more. A mass murder spends months, perhaps even years in the planning, and Rodger’s motive, given the breadth of victims ultimately and often indiscriminately targeted (including a middle-aged cyclist Rodger intentionally ran down with his speeding BMW), would not have been patently evident were it not for the associated writings and multimedia materials he left to be found upon his death. It also became evident that Rodger enjoyed the murder planning process as an end in itself, having spent considerable time and effort drafting his manifesto, My Twisted World, and, in particular, recording his YouTube testimonial in which he is often seen smirking and generally savoring the creative process.

In the case of project-based leisure mass murder, we must, therefore, consider the fact that the effort put into planning a rampage as a mephitic, one-time project may not always reflect an obvious motive or “trigger” in the conventional sense. Consistent with the typical intrinsic rewards of project-based leisure outlined by Stebbins (2005), in lieu of revealing the motive to justify one’s homicidal actions, the mass homicide offender may instead be satisfied with the project’s ability to impart self-expression (utilizing knowledge and skill), the self-gratification obtained through the project (exacting revenge and pursuing “justice”), or improved self-image as a result of the project (hoping to gain notoriety). The offender may even feel as though he is contributing to societal justice (a social reward) by drawing attention to a perceived injustice, however delusional.

The Las Vegas Massacre as Project-Based Leisure

There is little doubt that Stephen Paddock spent extensive time planning and preparing to commit mass murder as a special one-time project, doing so in a manner consistent with pseudocommando-style mass murderers. As noted, Paddock was also chronically lacking in significant social relationships. His father had been an infamous career criminal, which certainly would have an impact on parental attachment, early psychological development, and, to some degree, social interaction (see Agnew, 2007). Paddock was, however, considerably older and wealthier than most mass homicide offenders, and his overall career success suggests he was not lacking in intelligence or motivation with respect to noncriminal endeavors.

By all accounts, Paddock was a loner and kept important aspects of his life secretive, particularly during the last 2 years leading to the attack in Las Vegas. Regarding his earlier and extant leisure interests, they can all be defined as one or both serious leisure and project-based leisure: he traveled extensively, he was a licensed pilot and owned two planes, he held a fishing license in Alaska, and he enjoyed country music, his having attended a number of live concerts similar to the one he targeted for massacre (Liston, Somashekhar, & Davis, 2017). However, Paddock’s primary frequent leisure interest was gambling, and similar to recreational drug or alcohol use, gambling for some participants can begin as a relatively benign leisure activity yet progress into serious problem, known as pathological or degenerate gambling. Paddock reportedly gambled tens of thousands of dollars per day, including at least US$160,000 in Las Vegas casinos the week prior to the massacre (Tuttle, 2017). He had also previously disclosed to the Internal Revenue Service that he gambled roughly US$1,000,000 annually, at one point citing gambling as his primary vocation and source of income (Grinberg, 2017).

An important consideration here, is that a summary of recent longitudinal research involving 5,450 participants found that intensive gambling involvement, gambling being ones preferred leisure pursuit, and having a big win during the past 12 months were all the strongest predictors of imminent problem gambling (R. Williams, 2015). Studies have also consistently indicated that problem gambling is a major public health issue and is linked to numerous potential threats to personal safety, including suicidal behavior and ideation (Black et al., 2015), domestic violence (Afifi, Brownridge, MacMillan, & Sareen, 2010; Dowling, 2014), and clinical psychological maladies such as anxiety and depression (Shaffer & Kidman, 2004; Suomi, Dowling, & Jackson, 2014). In other words, heavy gambling as a frequent leisure pursuit is a predictor not only of future problem gambling but also of other psychological comorbidities, many of which are also common traits in pseudocommando killers.

Like other pseudocommando mass murderers, Paddock was likely also a quiet “collector of injustices” (see Dietz, 1986). While his heavy gambling behavior and inevitable severe losses (which could not continue for a prolonged period) were not the sole cause of his ultimately committing mass murder, gambling was most likely a salient risk factor and strongly influenced his decision as to where to inflict widespread violence and suffering. In Paddock’s mind, there was a logical reason for choosing Las Vegas, after first reportedly scouting sport and music venues in Boston and Chicago (Winter, Dienst & Schuppe, 2017) for his ultimate and final leisure project.

Retired people, with a comparable abundance of time available for leisure, often find project-based leisure attractive (Stebbins, 2005). Being retired and financially secure, in spite of his problem gambling and recent losses, Paddock had considerable free time to plan and orchestrate a massacre with the goal of inflicting as much harm as possible. His sizable wealth also allowed him to purchase a formidable arsenal of guns and ammunition, which likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (Tuttle, 2017). Beyond his familiarity with Las Vegas, specifically the Mandalay Bay hotel where he was a regular customer and was often offered complimentary rooms, his having attended previous country music concerts allowed for careful observations of crowd behavior specific to that form of leisure. This may, in fact, have been his primary purpose for visiting similar concerts at other cities (rather than necessarily attending to select a particular city) during the project planning stage of the massacre.

Although Paddock acted alone, it is important to remember that others (victims, community members, law enforcement, etc.) are assigned meaning by the offender and are viewed as important contributors to the project; this, despite the fact that these same stakeholders are being manipulated and objectified by the offender. To carry out his leisure project, Paddock, therefore, needed to negotiate a substantial interpersonal constraint (his girlfriend) to his ultimate objective, which was successfully accomplished by sending her on an overseas vacation at a time coinciding with the planned attack (Oliphant & Allen, 2017). Interestingly, the negotiation of this same interpersonal homicide-as-leisure constraint has been observed among some serial murderers (D. J. Williams et al., 2017). By sending his girlfriend far away on vacation, Paddock could be alone and uninterrupted in carrying out the attack; he would also appear to be a kind and thoughtful partner (a “good person”), thus avoiding any suspicion. Planning, preparing for, and committing mass murder as a final leisure project would have allowed Paddock to feel personal satisfaction, develop and utilize specific skills, and attain widespread public recognition—all of which are consistent with rewards of legitimate project-based leisure. It is noteworthy that public recognition, or seeking fame, has also long been recognized to be a strong motivator for many mass murderers (Lankford & Madfis, 2017).

Conclusion

As a discursive category of offenders, mass murderers’ motivations may vary wildly; however, they would all seem to center primarily around one or more common themes: revenge, power, loyalty, terror, or profit (Fox & DeLateur, 2014). A family annihilation/suicide motivated by loyalty would not seem to also qualify as an act of leisure; neither would mass murder for profit, given that the motivation, money, or financial reward, is primarily extrinsic. However, it is conceivable that mass homicides primarily motivated by revenge, power, and to elicit terror, while carefully planned, highly anticipated, and experienced as pleasurable and rewarding, are consistent with deviant leisure, particularly project-based leisure and edgework. More research is warranted into how different motivational themes of mass homicide may or may not relate to leisure and how the subjective difficulty level or challenge—whether real or perceived—of these murders relates to flow theory.

According to Fox and DeLateur (2014), a pseudocommando offender, such as Paddock, is likely to be motivated primarily by the exhibition of power. The fact that Paddock apparently did not leave writings about his motives could be interpreted as an attempt to exert unusual power and notoriety even for a mass murderer, in essence forcing the public to guess at what he already knows, thus maintaining a degree of power posthumously. However, given Paddock’s chronic serious leisure pursuits around heavy gambling and purposeful selection of Las Vegas for a massacre site, it appears that both power and revenge may be key themes underlying the careful planning, preparation, and execution of the massacre as a one-time leisure project years in the planning and centered, based on his existing gambling experiences, on flow and edgework.

It appears that in Paddock a constellation of important developmental, psychological, sociological, and leisure variables eventually crystallized into planning and carrying out his ultimate retirement project. While Paddock was considerably older than the majority of mass murderers, we also note that, demographically, America is starting to gray. The future reflects a shift in that there is a significantly greater percentage of older Americans, compared to previous generations. With this in mind, perhaps it would not be surprising, then, to begin to see a greater number of older mass homicide offenders in the future, simply reflective of changes in population demographics.

To conclude, our preliminary analysis here has focused on how a leisure science approach complements traditional understandings of mass homicide, yet also yields valuable new insights. Despite numerous limitations to our approach herein—including still incomplete information and retrospective analysis—we hope that a theoretical exploration of the Las Vegas massacre might prove useful in illustrating how deviant leisure and edgework, directly and peripherally, often may go unnoticed, yet play a significant role, in understanding how fantasies of pseudocommando mass homicide offenders are developed, planned, and ultimately operationalized.