THE HOTEL OF HORRORS
MURDERS AND STRANGE DISAPPEARANCES HAVE ALL HAPPENED WITHIN THE WALLS OF THE CECIL HOTEL
It’s a hotel with a dark past. Over the years the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles has harboured murderers and rapists. It’s been the scene of suicides and grisly killings, and holds the secrets to numerous strange and mysterious accidents.
The hotel’s terrifying history has led some to believe it’s inhabited by evil, and others, more practically, to reason that its position in one of the most dangerous corners of the United States means crime is an inevitability.
Two of the hotel’s most infamous residents include Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker, and the Austrian serial killer, Jack Unterweger.
Ramirez lived on the hotel’s 14th floor, while he terrorised surrounding neighbourhoods in the mid-1980s.
Californians were terrified as the months
rolled on and Ramirez, who often broke into his victims’ homes while they were sleeping, carried out his crime spree. He raped, murdered, and terrorised his prey with guns, knives and machetes.
Nobody was immune. His first victim was a 9-year-old girl, who he raped and beat before stabbing her to death. From there he targeted men and women. Age and race didn’t matter to the killer, and sometimes he attacked several people in one night.
Ramirez was only identified in August 1985 after a shocking 13 murders.
His final victim, Inez Erickson, survived the attack and was able to give a detailed description which, along with a single shoe print and a fingerprint from two other crime scenes, helped police piece together that Ramirez was their man.
In 1989 he was convicted of 13 murders, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries. Chillingly, in his first court appearance, he raised a hand emblazoned with a pentagram and yelled out, “Hail Satan!”
The same satanic evil was present in the multiple killings of Unterweger, who stayed in the Cecil Hotel in 1991. He was on a journalistic assignment about sex workers in the area, but a marked uptick in murders became evident following his arrival. Three sex workers were strangled with their bras, with a signature knot which police later identified as being Unterweger’s. It enabled him to strangle his victim into unconsciousness, loosen it so they came round, before torturing them in this way until they died. The sick killer was eventually found guilty of nine murders back in his native Austria. He died from suicide the same night he was sentenced to life in jail. Unterweger and Ramirez’s links to the Cecil added to the dark drama surrounding the place and, alongside at least 14 sudden or unexplained deaths in or around the hotel, the stage was set for the Elisa Lam mystery. Lam’s disappearance is the subject of a new Netflix docuseries, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. The 21-year-old Canadian student was travelling alone and staying at the Cecil when she was reported missing by her parents on January 31, 2013.
An intensive search of the area didn’t throw up any clues and led to police releasing what became the notorious
‘UNTERWEGER AND RAMIREZ’S LINKS ADDED TO THE DRAMA SURROUNDING THE PLACE’
‘elevator video’. The two and a half minute CCTV footage shows Lam’s last sighting, which was in the hotel’s elevator. She is shown in the video pushing numerous buttons, jumping around erratically and gesticulating to someone or something.
It became one of the first videos to go viral, and hooked web sleuths all over the world. When Lam’s naked body was found the next month, on February 19, in the water tank on the roof of the Cecil, followers went crazy.
Conspiracy theories and cover-ups were mooted; parallels were drawn to the horror film Dark Water, and a man was wrongly identified as a suspect by people obsessed with the case, and trolled until his near death.
When the coroner recorded that Lam, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression, died accidentally by drowning, there was an outcry.
How did she get on the roof, which was locked and alarmed? How did she get into the water tank unaided? How did the police dogs not find her on their initial search of the roof ?
Subsequent enquiries have since laid most of these questions to rest, but not without years of discussion about Lam’s mysterious demise. Many still believe there was a darker force involved, not least because of the location of her death.
The Cecil Hotel has since been sold and is due to reopen this month. Whether its reputation as ‘Hotel Death’ will attract or repel tourists remains to be seen.