The Death
About a year ago, some residents at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles complained about the water quality. Sent to inspect the cause of the blackened and odd tasting water, a maintenance worker made a grisly discovery: the decomposing body of Elisa Lam in one of the roof’s water tanks. For about 19 days, residents at the Cecil Hotel bathed, drank, and brushed their teeth with corpse contaminated water. Even weirder, the hotel remained open and guests continued to check in and out as firefighters removed Lam’s body.
Lam was a 21-year-old college student visiting LA from Canada. An autopsy showed that there were no drugs or alcohol in her system and Lam’s death was subsequently ruled “‘accidental due to drowning, other significant conditions: bipolar disorder.’”
The police eventually released the following video, most likely to prove the bipolar diagnosis. It shows Lam acting oddly on an elevator:
Many questions have been raised following Lam’s “accidental” death. How did she get to the roof without setting off alarms? How did she open the supposedly locked roof door? How did she manage to close the lid of the water tank from the inside? If she truly was having a psychotic episode, how did she get to the roof undetected?
Maybe it really was unfortunate circumstance. The alarms might not have been set (or malfunctioned). The door might have been left unlocked. In a frantic state, Lam might have figured out how to close the water tank lid (people have done stranger things with high amounts of adrenaline coursing through their veins). Maybe no one was around to see her.
Of course, my attempts to explain away the mystery might not satisfy everyone. I’ve seen some speculation that the murder was a “Twin Peaksesque twist [and] that her death was caused by the supernatural.” Others give the more practical explanation that a hotel worker was involved.
The Cecil Hotel
Ah, nothing like a creepy hotel as the backdrop of a mysterious death–and the Cecil Hotel is definitely fitting for that kind of narrative. It’s a few blocks from LA’s infamous Skid Row, frequently allows long-term housing for drifters, and at one point housed two different serial killers.
via NBC:
Kim Cooper of Esotouric, a tour company, has included the Cecil on a bus tour called “Hotel Horrors” since 2007 but says its history doesn’t strike her as particularly eerie considering its size and location.
“You have 700 rooms in constant business since 1927 at what was mainly a transient hotel,” she said. “You have two unsavory people who stayed there, one murder in 1964 and a number of jumpers. But considering it’s 80-plus years of history, I wouldn’t say it’s some sort of portal for weirdness.”
Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger stayed at the Cecil in 1991 after he was dispatched to L.A. by an Austrian magazine that wanted him to report on American crime, according to a 2007 book about him, “The Vienna Woods Killer.”
At the time, Unterweger was a celebrated figure in his homeland. Convicted in 1976 of killing a hooker, choking her with her bra, he launched a writing career from his jail cell and was held up as a model of prisoner rehabilitation when he was released after 15 years.
During his three-week stay at the Cecil, three prostitutes were killed in Los Angeles; in each case, their bra was turned into a noose. Unterweger was questioned about the slayings and denied them, the book says.
He was never charged in the U.S. but back in Austria he was actually tried for the L.A. slayings — along with eight other local killings. He hanged himself in his prison cell after being found guilty on nine murder counts, according to the Los Angeles Times.
It’s unknown why Unterweger chose the Cecil for his stay, but six years earlier it had been linked to another infamous murderer — Richard Ramirez, dubbed the Night Stalker for a terrifying series of stabbings, shootings and beatings.
Ramirez, who is on California’s death row after being convicted of 13 counts of murder, lived at the 700-room hotel for several weeks, the Los Angeles Times reported when he was arrested in 1985. Fellow residents recalled loud music and marijuana smoke coming from his 14th floor room.
Unterweger and Ramirez didn’t commit any murders at the Cecil, but it has been a crime scene.
In 1964, a kind-hearted woman, known as “Pigeon Goldie” because she fed the birds in nearby Pershing Square, was found raped, stabbed and strangled in her ransacked room.
Police suspected a serial killer could be the culprit because another middle-aged woman had been murdered the same way in a nearby hotel, but no one was ever charged.
Less unusual are a handful of suicides that have occurred through the years. A 30-year-old woman who took a bus from St. Louis to L.A., and had only 50 cents in her purse, leaped from an eighth-floor window in 1962, the L.A. Times reported.
Just nine months later, another young woman leaped or fell from the ninth-floor after an argument with her estranged husband — and killed an elderly man walking on the street below, the newspaper said.
We’ll probably never find the true cause of Elisa Lam’s death. Maybe she did kill herself during an episode or maybe a hotel employee was involved. Or maybe, just maybe, it was something even more sinister.
Sources:
“How did woman’s body come to be in L.A. hotel water tank?” Alan Duke, February 23, 2013. CNN.com
“Elisa Lam Death Accidental: LA Coroner” The Huffington Post, B.C. June 20, 2013.
“What Happened to Elisa Lam?” Peter Tieryas Liu, Punchnels.com
“LA hotel where body was found in water tank has chilling history” Robyn Beck, Feb 21, 2013, NBCnews.com