The Hotel Cecil

0:00 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.

0:50 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.

1:22 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.

1:56 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.

2:34 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.

3:22 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.

3:53 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.

4:23 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.

5:02 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.

5:38 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.

6:22 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.

7:00 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.

7:37 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.

8:15 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.

8:56 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.

9:32 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.

10:07 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.

10:39 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.

11:09 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.

11:43 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.

12:21 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.

12:52 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.

13:42 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.

14:20 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.

14:55 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.

15:25 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