The Hotel Cecil
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Sources:
https://www.discovery.com/exploration/Cecil-Hotel-LA-Haunted-Reasons https://allthatsinteresting.com/cecil-hotel-los-angeles
https://thecrimewire.com/multifarious/Los-Angeles-Cecil-Hotel#:~:text=The%20Cecil%20Hotel%2C%20renamed%20Stay,and%20why%20did%20it%20close%3F
Elisa Lam Video: people.howstuffworks.com/did-elisa-lam-end-up-dead-in-hotel-water-tank.htm
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/kinda-murdery-true-crime-murder-stories--5496890/support.
Zevon Odelberg is a true crime podcast host and disability advocate. Zevon has cerebral palsy and he wants Kinda Murdery to be welcoming community for people with disabilities and for people living with challenges of any kind. Life can be hard, but being together makes it better.
Warning. Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of
violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening
now. I'm Zevan Odelberg, and this is kind of Murdery. I'm back
from my summer vacation and thrilled to be reunited with all of you. And
by way of greeting, I'd like to say simply this, there's Johnny.
Many of you probably recognize that terrifying greeting as Jack Nicholson from Stanley kubrick seminal
horror movie The Shining. Now, if you've never seen The Shining and you're
at home right now, stop listening to this podcast this minute and start watching
The Shining. And if you've never seen The Shining but you plan to keep
listening the kind of Murdery right now, then this is your spoiler alert.
There are Shining spoilers ahead. Okay, if you like me, love The
Shining, you probably know that the movie name for the remote winter lodge in
The Shining is the Overlook Hotel. And you're probably aware that the Overlook Hotel
is haunted, and it's not benignly haunted. Oh no, The Overlook is
full of scheming, ravenous ghosts who want to steal and eat your soul and
maybe get you to commit some murders while they're at it. Now, obviously,
the Overlook Hotel is a fictional hotel from a fictional movie based on a
fictional book by Stephen King. But if the Shining proves anything, it's that
fictional can still be very scary. But I think we all know what's scarier
than fictional haunting and fictional suicide and fictional murder. That's right, true crime
is scarier. I'm talking about real haunting, real suicide, and real murder.
And today I'm going to tell you the true story of a real hotel
in downtown Los Angeles, a real building that still stands. And it's no
tantalizing over exaggeration to say that this hotel could accurately be described as LA's real
life Overlook. Several articles were instrumental to putting this episode together, especially at
twenty twenty three article from All That's Interesting dot Com by Katie Serena and another
written in twenty nineteen for Discovery dot Com by Reuben Westmass. As always,
all my sources are in the show notes, and now, if you're ready,
please join me as we uncover what truths we can and solve what mysteries
we may kind of murderies. The Cecil Hotel starts now. Nestled within the
busy streets of downtown Los Angeles lies one of the most infamous buildings in horror
lore, the Cecil Hotel. You may remember it as a stopover for Frank
Lindsay, the Fry cook Killer from my last episode with Anson Mattox. Since
it was built in nineteen twenty four, the Sezil Hotel has been plagued by
unfortunate and mysterious circumstances that have given it perhaps an unparalleled reputation for the macabre.
At least sixteen different murders, suicides, and unexplained paranormal events have taken
place at the hotel, and it's even served as the temporary home of some
of America's most notorious serial killers. The Sezil Hotel was built in nineteen twenty
four by William Banks Hanner. It was supposed to be a destination hotel for
international businessmen and social elites. Hanner spent one million dollars on the seven hundred
room beau Art's style hotel, complete with a marble lobby, stained glass windows,
palm trees, and an opulent staircase. If you, like me,
are all too aware of inflation these days, you might be curious to know
that a million dollars in nineteen twenty four is approximately eighteen million dollars today.
William Banks Hanner would come to regret his investment. Just two years after the
Sezil Hotel opened, the world was thrown into the Great Depression, and Los
Angeles was not immune to economic collapse. Soon enough, the area surrounding the
Cecil Hotel would be dubbed skid Row and become home to thousands of homeless people.
I actually lived in a loft right above Los Angeles' skid Row back in
two thousand and ten, the Little Tokyo Lofts, in fact, and I'll
never forget one almost nightly occurrence. Sometime after midnight on most nights of the
week, you could suddenly hear a rolling, chittering, clattering sound, and
if you looked out the window, you would see a living, undulating carpet
of cockroaches moving down Fourth Street like a chittness army from Hell. But back
to the Cecil. The Ones Beautiful Hotel soon gained a reputation as a meeting
place for junkies, runaways, and criminals. Worse yet, the Siegel Hotel
ultimately earned a reputation for violence and for death. In the nineteen thirties alone,
the Siegel Tell was home to at least six reported suicides. A few
residents ingested poison, while others shot themselves, slit their own throats, or
jumped out of their bedroom windows. In nineteen thirty four, for example,
Army Sergeant Louis D. Borden slashed his throat with a razor. Less than
four years later, Roy Thompson of the Marine Corps jumped from atop the Cecil
Hotel and was found on the skylight of a neighboring building. The next few
decades only saw more violent deaths. In September nineteen forty four, nineteen year
old Dorothy Jean Purcell awoke in the middle of the night with stomach pains while
she was staying at the Cecil with Ben Levine thirty eight. She went to
the bathroom so as not to disturb a sleeping Levine, and to her complete
shock, gave birth to a baby boy. Dorothy had no idea, as
she'd been pregnant. Mistakenly thinking her newborn was dead, Purcell threw her live
baby out the window and onto the roof of the building next door. The
infant did not survive, and at her trial, Purcell was found guilty of
murder by reason of insanity and was admitted to a hospital for psychiatric treatment.
In nineteen sixty two, sixty five year old George Giannini was walking by the
Cecil with his hands in his pockets when he was struck to death by a
falling woman, Pauline not in twenty seven, who had jumped from her ninth
floor window after an argument with her estranged husband Dewey. Pauline's fall killed both
her and Giannini instantly. Police thought the two had committed suicide together at first,
but reconsidered when they found Gianini was still wearing his shoes. You see,
if he had jumped, his shoes would have fallen off midflight. In
light of the suicide's mishaps and murders, Angelino's promptly dubbed the Cecil the most
haunted hotel in Los Angeles. While it's true that tragic calamities and suicide have
contributed heavily to the hotel's body count. The Cecil Hotel has also served as
a temporary home for some of the most famed and grizzliest murderers in American history.
Trust Me, I'm glossing over a lot of awful stories as I skipped
forward from nineteen sixty four to nineteen eighty four, twenty years to a bloody
time span of less than a year and a half between April nineteen eighty four
in August nineteen eighty five, when Richard Ramirez, better known as the night
Stalker, was the terror of coastal California and murdered no fewer than thirty eight
people ages nine to eighty three in a killing spree that spread all the way
from Orange County to San Francisco, and when he was operating in Los Angeles,
his base of operations was, yes, you guessed it, the Cecil
Hotel. He even disposed of evidence, including bloody clothes, in the hotel's
dumpster. After killing someone, he would throw his bloody clothes in the dumpster
and saunter into the hotel lobby, either completely naked or only in underwear,
none of which would have raised an eyebrow, wrote journalist Josh Dean, since
the Cecil in the nineteen eighties was quote total unmitigated chaos at the time,
Ramirez was able to stay there for a mere fourteen bucks a night, and
with corpses of junkies reportedly often found in the alleys near the hotel and sometimes
even in the hallways, Ramirez's blood soaked lifestyle surely raised nary and eyebrow at
the notorious Cecil. Richard Ramirez the Nightstalker was ultimately convicted of thirteen counts of
murder, five attempted murders, and eleven sexual assaults, but as I mentioned
earlier, he suspected of having committed at least thirty eight murders. Fast forward
just a few years to nineteen ninety one. An Austrian serial killer, Jack
Unterviger, who strangled prostitutes with their own bras, also called the hotel Home.
Rumor has it he chose the hotel because of its connection to Richard Ramirez
the night Stalker has pretty high name recognition, yeah, and his crimes were
particularly heinous, But the story of Jack Unterviger has another particularly creepy wrinkle.
An Austrian serial killer. He committed his first murder in his home country in
nineteen seventy four and was convicted and sentenced for his crime. About ten years
later, he released a memoir entitled Purgatory or the Trip to Jail Report of
a Guilty Man. The memoir became a best seller and helped convince officials he
had reformed. Spoiler alert, he hadn't. Unterviger had fooled more than just
the cops. His story was soon told as an example of the prison system's
success, and eventually he even began working as a journalist and public broadcasting host
on the true crime beat. His specialty the heinous murders of sex workers,
just like the crime that had led to his conviction. In nineteen ninety one,
he checked into the Cecil to cover a story about street crime in Los
Angeles. While he was in the city, three sex workers were attacked and
killed in a way that mirrored Unterviger's crime, and police were able to definitively
tie the journalist to the murders. Most disturbing of all was the fact that,
as police on both sides of the Atlantic began to more closely examined the
case, they realized that Underviger had also committed many of the very same murders
that he had covered on the air jack. Underviger killed himself in prison shortly
after his second conviction, tying the ligatures with the same distinctive knot that he
used on all of his victims. While some of the episodes of violence in
and around the Cecil are attributed to known serial killers, such as we just
discussed, some murders have remained unsolved. To pick one of many, a
local woman known around the area named Goldie Osgood was found dead in her ransacked
room at the Cecil. She had been raped before suffering a fatal stabbing and
beating. Though one suspect was found walking around with bloodstained clothing near by,
he was later cleared and her killer was never convicted. It was just another
instance of disturbing violence of the Cecil that had gone unresolved. Another grimly noteworthy
guest of the hotel was Elizabeth Short, who came to be known as and
I'm sure some of you know this already, so go ahead and say it
with me. Elizabeth Short, who came to be known as the Black Dahlia
after her nineteen forty seven murder in Los Angeles. The Black Dahlia had reportedly
stayed at the hotel just before her mutilation, which remains unsolved. What connection
her death may have to the Cecil is not known, but what is known
is that she was found on a street not far away on the morning of
January fifteenth, with her mouth carved ear to ear and her body cut in
two. Such stories of violence are not simply a thing of the long past
at the Cecil, decades after short one of the most mysterious deaths ever to
take place at the Cecil hotel happened in two thousand and thirteen. In two
thousand and thirteen, Canadian college student Elsa Lamb was found dead inside the water
tank on the roof of the hotel, three weeks after she had gone missing.
Her naked corpse was found after hotel guests had complained of bad water pressure
and a funny table east to the water. Although authorities ruled her death as
an accidental drowning, critics believed otherwise. Before her death, surveillance cameras caught
Lamb acting strangely in an elevator, at times appearing to yell at someone out
of view, as well as apparently attempting to hide from someone while pressing multiple
elevator buttons and waving her arms erratically. After the video's surface publicly, many
people began to believe that the rumors of the hotel being haunted might be true.
Horror ficionados began drawing parallels between the Black Dahlia murder an Lamb's disappearance,
pointing out that both women were in their twenties traveling alone from Ela to San
Diego, last seen at the Cecil Hotel, and were missing for several days
before their bodies were found. I'm not suggesting that you do, but if
you'd like to watch the deeply disturbing video of Elisa Lamb in the elevator,
check the show notes for this episode. The last body was found at the
Cecil Hotel in twenty fifteen, a man who reportedly took his own life,
and when his body was found, the ghost stories and rumors of the hotel's
haunting swirled once more. The hotel Cecil even served as the chilling inspiration for
a season of American Horror Story about a hotel that's home to unimaginable murder and
mayhem. Before we move on to the latest chapter for the Cecil Hotel,
and especially in light of the subject matter of this episode, I would like
to take a moment to remind you, as I often do, of the
free three digit lifeline number nine eight eight, that you can call anytime,
twenty four hours a day, seven days a week to receive free immediate professional
counseling four substance use, mental health or suicidal thoughts. So if you find
yourself in a dark, dark place, please do call nine to eighty eight.
Program it into your phone now. Please do remember that you are loved
and the world is a better place with you in it. Now. I
am not qualified to help you if you find yourself in truly dire straits,
but if you're just feeling down and you would like to connect with someone,
or if you'd like to share your story of coping with a disability, or
even a kind of murdery story that you hope can inspire an episode, please
do feel free to reach out to me kind of Murdery at gmail dot com,
at kind of Murdery on all social media, or you can call the
kind of Murdery hotline eight eight eight Murdery. That's eight eight eight six to
eighty seven three three seven nine. I'm here, I care and I would
love to connect with you all right back to the Cecil the hotel. Cecil
has developed a reputation for horror that defines its legacy to this day. In
twenty eleven, this, of course, would be prior to the deaths of
Alisa Lamb and the suicide victim that I just referred to. But in twenty
eleven, the Cecil attempted to shake off its macabre history by rebranding itself as
Stay on Maine Hotel and Hostel, a seventy five dollars per night budget hostel
for tourists. Several years later, New York City developers signed a ninety nine
year lease and began gut renovating the building to include an upscale boutique hotel and
hundreds of fully furnished micro units in keeping with the surging co living craze.
It's now in the midst of these hundred million dollar renovations and will ultimately become
fifteen hundred dollars a month micro apartments. Perhaps, with enough renovations, the
Cecil Hotel can finally shake its reputation for all things bloody and eerie. The
reputation that has defined the ill fated building for the better part of a century.
But I gotta say, after hearing this episode, if you'd still like
to rent an apartment at the Cecil Hotel, you're either a lot braver or
a lot dumber than me, or maybe neither, maybe your reasons or your
own. And somebody ought to tip off the FBI. I'm Zevan Odelberg,
and miss has been kind of murdering
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