What is the possibility that the hotel security guard, hotel management, police officers, and SWAT team members were all telling the truth, yet there is such a dispute in timeline?

Not surprising at all. Ask any lawyer in a situation where a car accident occurs on a crowded street, and there aren't but two witnesses who actually saw it and can be contacted and questioned. Odds are, one's going to swear the light was red and the other's going to swear the light was green, each will be as honest as the day is long and speaking in absolutely good faith, each will be describing it exactly as he or she remembers it, and that's about size of it. It's just the way of the world. Only one thing can be the truth, yet each witness is being absolutely truthful -- about his or her recollection of it, not necessarily what actually happened.



In the Las Vegas shooting, you had the shooter (who's not saying too much or answering questions right now), a couple of security guards, one or two maintenance guys, some Las Vegas cops, each member of an an entire SWAT team, hotel management, and the front desk staff involved. Each of them will have a unique individual perspective, they will each remember things differently. Each will have been, at the time, observing from a different vantage point in the hotel: some on the 32nd floor, some in the lobby. The only way we could know as close to the whole truth as is relevant is if somebody had been standing right next to the shooter at the time he started shooting, and lived to tell the tale.

But it didn't work out that way, and this investigation is going to be relying very heavily on security video, and reconciling the various individual perspectives and versions of the story.

How do celebrities stay in hotels under assumed names?

By not renting the room or registering as a guest. (How to pull that off, and still get a hotel room? You get someone else to do it for you.)

During televangelist Jim Bakker's trial on federal charges in 1989, arising from the previous year's PTL club scandal, he suffered a breakdown and was sent by the presiding judge to a federal medical facility for several days' observation and evaluation. 

Tammy Faye followed along . . . and stayed at a hotel at which I was working, the Days Inn in Durham, North Carolina. 



This was arranged very much on the fly and, even so, security was tight. It had to be. The trial, and particularly Rev. Bakker's breakdown, was a badly sensationalized news story at the time. There was a lot of 'tabloid' interest in that case as it progressed. Morning disk jockeys were making Jim and Tammy Faye the butt of cruel jokes, and even regular TV news programs had broadcast a tearful, rather unflattering reaction to the events by Tammy Faye. 

Yet, it all went so well because it was elegantly simple. The best way to keep a secret is to not tell anyone.