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INSIDE THE SHOOTERS LAIR: Surveillance cams, 23 guns and BRASS bullets

– Paddock wanted room overlooking Life is Beautiful festival
– Festival the week before his attack was headlined by Lorde and Chance the Rapper
– Paddock was on anti-anxiety meds such as Diazepam
– Shooter set up CCTV to keep an eye on Law Enforcment Officials

CHILLING photos of Stephen Paddock’s sniper lair show how he turned his Las Vegas hotel suite into DEATH factory complete with 23 guns and brass bullets.

The killer made extra sure he created as much carnage as he could by keeping a close eye on the cops as they moved in — with a surveillance camera hidden in a room-service cart outside his door, authorities said Tuesday.

“This was premeditated. The fact that he had the type of weaponry and amount of weaponry in that room, I’m pretty sure he evaluated his actions, which is troubling,’’ said Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo.

In total, Paddock installed three cameras — two outside and one in the peephole so he could see when police closed in, officials revealed Tuesday night.

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“I anticipate he was looking for anybody coming to take him into custody,” Lombardo said.

By the time the 64-year-old ­retired accountant’s rampage ended Sunday night, the floor of Room 32-135 at the Mandalay Bay hotel was littered with spent high-caliber shell casings — including at least one shell from the revolver that he used to blow his brains out.

“You couldn’t step anywhere without stepping on dozens of shells,” a law-enforcement source told The Post. “The room was full of brass shells.”

Paddock — a former IRS agent and US Postal Service letter carrier — was found dead on the floor surrounded by the spent ammo and at least one tricked-out rifle to maximize his killing spree, as well as other guns.

He also had tripods on which he had equipped two rifles with high-tech scopes to stalk his prey from broken windows.

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Police on Tuesday night also updated the total number of guns owned by Paddock and seized by investigators to 47. They also found 12 “bump stock” devices, which can dramatically increase the number of rounds that can be fired in a short amount of time, as well as the hammer he apparently used to smash the sealed windows.

Police didn’t reveal how many of the firearm attachments were used in the slaughter.

It was unclear how long Paddock had been planning the massacre, but the Route 91 Harvest Festival might not have been his first choice as a target, sources revealed to The New York Post.

The prior weekend, Paddock attempted to rent a room overlooking a music festival a few miles from the scene of his carnage Sunday night, one source said.

But Paddock couldn’t get a room that overlooked the Life is Beautiful Festival, headlined by Chance the Rapper and Lorde, from Sept. 22-24, the source said.

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Meanwhile, as all hotels in the area tightened security and weapons-detection systems, Paddock’s brother, Eric, suggested that it would not have been difficult to get so many guns into his 32nd-floor suite.

Stephen, who was wealthy, wouldn’t have even had to carry them in himself, Eric said.

Police say Stephen hauled the weapons to his room in 10 suitcases, but chances are “he gave a kid $100 and [the kid] brought them up on a golden trolley,” Eric said. “Steve didn’t carry stuff.”

Iraq War veteran Chris Bethel, who was staying in a room two floors above Paddock, helped cops locate the killer when he recognized the familiar sound of gunfire coming from inside the building and saw police searching outside.

“I could just see everybody running.. and I kept looking at the windows to see if I could see any kind of muzzle flash, to see if I could see where the shooter was,” the trained former soldier said.

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Bethel said he immediately called 911. The entire time, he said, he could hear exactly what the shooter was doing.

“Changing weapons, changing calibres,” he told CBS. “You can hear the difference in the gunshots of the different rifles that he is shooting.”

About 10 minutes later, police called Bethel to tell him that they had gotten Paddock.

For all his cruelty, Paddock seemed to have wanted to make sure his girlfriend had a nest egg after he was gone.

In the week before the slaughter, he wired $100,000 to the Philippines, where his live-in girlfriend, Marilou Danley, was vacationing.

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“The $100,000 for Marilou — that’s the Steve I know,” Eric Paddock said. “As he was descending into hell, he wanted to take care of her. He manipulated her to be as completely far away from him and safe while he did this.”

But the brothers’ mother always knew Stephen was no good, one of her former neighbours said.

The neighbour said Mrs Paddock called her son a “bad boy” when she lived in Texas about 12 years ago, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Eric Paddock shrugged at the description. “We were bad kids, OK? We were troublesome kids,” he admitted. “We grew up poor on the side of the freeway in the San Fernando Valley. Was he an angel? Of course, he wasn’t an angel.”

But he said their single mum never let them near guns as kids, because their father was a convicted bank robber. Eric figured that Stephen’s first time with a firearm was likely when he was in his “late teens.”

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More details of his early working life also surfaced.

Paddock was a mail carrier from 1976 to 1978, according to a spokeswoman for the US Postal Service. He then went on to work as an agent at the IRS until 1985.

After that, Paddock, who graduated in 1977 from Cal State Northridge, held a defense auditing job for roughly 18 months.

He also did auditing work for a predecessor company to Lockheed Martin from 1985 to 1988, before investing in real estate and becoming a professional gambler.

Also on Tuesday, the Las Vegas Review-Journal cited state rec­ords showing that in June Paddock had been prescribed the anti-anxiety drug Diazepam — better known under its brand name Valium.

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