Inside ‘Murder Hotel’ as manager reveals endless suicides, overdoses and murders

When it was first opened its doors in the 1920s, the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles was an opulent destination for business travellers who would admire the marble lobby with stained-glass windows and potted palms.

But whilst the lobby remained polished and tasteful for decades to come, the 700 rooms and the characters within them soon turned it into one of the most notorious hotels in the world, where hundreds of people died and serial killers “let their hair down”.

For nearly a century the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles was linked to some of the city’s most notorious activity, from untimely deaths to housing serial killers like The Night Stalker Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger.

Now a new Netflix documentary will reveal many of its dark secrets, including the inside story of what happened to college student Elisa Lam in 2013, sparking a global internet inquiry.

Recalling her experience when she went to work there, Amy Price, who was the Hotel Cecil’s general manager from 2007-2017 says: “There are a lot of unique challenges when you are running a hotel like the Cecil, a lot came with the place.

“It wasn’t even the first few days in the job when the maintenance manager said that we had a problem and I said ‘what do you mean?’.

“One of the guests died at the hotel. It was hard to process. Before working at the hotel I never had any experience with a dead body, a coroner, or even the police. That was a real eye-opener for me.

“Come to find out, this happens all the time. The maintenance manager, walked me through the entire hotel. Along the way, he would point and say ‘someone died here, someone died there’. Suicides, overdoses, murders.

“At one point I think I asked him ‘is there a room here that maybe somebody hasn’t died in?’. I never got used to that.”

She went on: “It was just so shocking. I remember asking one of the other employees, ‘Does this happen a lot?’ He said yes.

“We consistently saw people pass away. I saw around 80 deaths over my 10 years there. There were thousands of 911 calls.”

But decades before Amy joined the hotel, it had more than it’s fair share of death and dangerous behaviour.

Building began in 1924 amidst a financial boom, only for downtown LA to suffer when the Great Depression hit America. The area around the hotel later became Skid Row, where the City’s poorest and homeless people lived, alongside sex workers and villains.

The first documented suicide at the Cecil was reported in 1931 just a few years after it opened when a guest named W.K. Norton died in his room after taking poison capsules. Another resident slashed their throat in 1934.

In 1964, a retired telephone operator named “Pigeon” Goldie Osgood, who had been a popular and well-liked long term resident at the hotel, was found dead in her seventh-floor room. She had been raped, stabbed, and beaten in her own room. Nicknamed because she liked to feed the birds, a paper bag of seed was found amongst her ransacked room by police.

In 1985 the hotel was the residence of serial killer Richard Ramirez, nicknamed the “Night Stalker”. For a number of weeks, he paid £9 a night as he plotted his attacks murdering and raping women and children in the district.

LA Crime Historian Kim Cooper tells the documentary: “The Cecil was a place where serial killers can let their hair down. One was the figure who stayed on the 14th floor who was paying $14 a night for his room and liked to scare, torture, rape and kill human beings.

“After committing some of the most brutal murders ever in South California, Ramirez would come back to the Cecil. He would be in the back alley, covered in blood, taking off his clothing and go up in his pants. And that would be cool, because it is that kind of place.”

Former resident Kenneth Givens who stayed there in the early Eighties says you avoided going to the top floors where there were residential rooms, and also parties, drugs, and danger.

Givens says: “When I had money that was where I used to go for two or three dollars a night.

“Believe me there was a lot going on in the Cecil, drugs, robberies, prostitutes. I was out there doing my dirt too, but back in the day, it used to be a scandalous hotel.

“It was pretty much lawless. I would never go no further than the sixth floor. Usually, the higher floors people used to get killed up there. Once they got a guy up there in a room they would rob him, beat him up, and throw him out the window. So if you didn’t watch yourself you went flying out there with no wings.”

The hotel has also been the spot of a series of suicides. Helen Gurnee, in her 50s, leaped from a seventh-floor window, landing on the Cecil Hotel marquee, on October 22, 1954.

Julia Moore jumped from her eighth-floor room window, on February 11, 1962.

Pauline Otton, 27, jumped from the ninth floor after an argument with her estranged husband, on October 12, 1962. Otton landed on George Gianinni, 65, who was walking on the sidewalk, 90 feet below. Both were killed instantly.

Historian Cooper says: “Throughout its history, the Hotel Cecil has always had a dark persona. It has always been a hotbed for death.

“The earliest suicide was WK Norton and then in 1934, a hotel resident committed suicide by slashing their own throat with a razor. And the death didn’t stop.”

Several years after serial killer Ramirez checked out, another killer checked in.

In 1991, Austrian author Jack Unterweger booked a room claiming he was a journalist researching LA’s red-light district. He even went out with the police to watch them work.

But during his five-week stay, he strangled three prostitutes with their own bra straps and dumped their bodies nearby. On June 29, 1994, after being sentenced to life for nine murders.

Then in 2013, with the hotel now a place for travellers on a budget or residents short of money on the higher floors, the Cedil was front-page news again.

College student Elisa Lam was staying there when she was reported missing on February 1, sparking a global internet frenzy as amateur detectives tried to solve the mysterious case.

Footage of her in a lift, where she appeared to be talking to someone who could not be seen led to dozens of internet theories.

An avid blogger of her thoughts online, forums and YouTube presenters quickly began to analyse the case and jump to conclusions as they felt the lift footage appeared to be altered or edited.

Tim Marcia a retired LAPD Homicide Detective who worked on the Elisa case, remembers: “Elisa was supposed to check out on February 1, which was also the day she was reported missing.

“As a parent who had a daughter who was 19 at the time, I had a connection and was praying that we would find her. In watching the CCTV footage we never saw her leave. So if she never left where could she be?

“We looked in the hotel at who could be a potential suspect or who had her under their control. We felt she had to be in there somewhere.”

Eventually on February 19 guests had begun complaining about a lack of water pressure in their rooms and the tap water tasting funny.

Elisa, who was bipolar and had stopped taking her medication, was found dead and naked in a water tank above the hotel. Death by accidental drowning was later ruled.

But that does not stop some people from feeling there is more to the story, particularly because it took police over two weeks to find a body that was within the hotel on a roof they were supposed to have already searched.

Marcia adds: “We started to get a picture of her mental state. We focused on how she got in the tank. You can see the emotion it stirs up in me. In this case, we figured out what happened but the answer hurt. It is unfortunate people think there is a conspiracy, but there is not.”

Elisa’s tragic death ended the hotel’s chances of being successful, even after it had rebranded several floors as ‘Stay on Main’ for young travellers to get away from the Cecil’s reputation.

Hotel manager Ms Price adds: “After all that happened, the hotel turned into an absolute amusement park. I would be sitting at my desk, and I had a fairly large office off the alley, and I would see people climbing on the fire escape trying to get to the roof.

“Every time I walked out of the building, there were people with cameras. People were constantly checking in, trying to do their own documentaries. You felt like you couldn’t trust anyone anymore because they just wanted to know what happened to her. Everyone seems to want to know what happened to her.

“The story of the Cecil is a story of adventure and a story of things you just can’t predict. I just hope that they see the correlation between the area and the specific circumstances surrounding the hotel versus the ghosts and the goblins. Homelessness is a huge issue in LA, and the Cecil is two to three blocks up from Skid Row.

“I feel that if there’s some money put in there and they can add some bathrooms and create a product that is desirable for the mass market, I would like nothing more than to see it become a popular place and have a drink there in the future. That’s what I’d like to see. I know she could be a showstopper.”

The hotel closed in 2017 and is now being redeveloped for residential housing and potentially a new upmarket hotel.

There is even talk of a rooftop swimming pool, although how many people will want to take a dip just metres from where Elisa was found, remains to be seen.

Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel is a four part series launching on Netflix on February 10.

Originally from https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/former-cecil-hotel-manager-details-23431149