Hotel with corpse in water tank has notorious past.
"It's the place where serial killers stay," said tour guide Richard Schave.
Schave and his wife, Kim Cooper, conduct a "true crime and oddities" tour they call "Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice."
The new mystery surrounding Elisa Lam's death will be added to Cooper's spiel during the tour stops at the Cecil Hotel, she said.
Cooper and Schave have made it their job to compile details on those who have killed or been killed while staying at the Cecil.
The killers
The most famous on their list are serial killers Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger.
Photos: Body found in hotel water tank
Ramirez, known as the
"Nightstalker," now resides on California's death row, but in 1985 he
was living on the Cecil's top floor in a $14 a night room, Cooper said.
The Cecil, filled then
with hundreds of transients living in the cheap rooms, was a good place
for Ramirez to go unnoticed as he killed 13 women, Schave said. He was
"just dumping his bloody clothes in the Dumpster at the end of his
evening and going in the back entrance."
Jack Unterweger worked as a journalist covering Los Angeles crime for an Austrian magazine in 1991 when he moved into the Cecil.
"We believe he was living at the Cecil in homage to Ramirez," Schave said.
He is blamed with killing three prostitutes in Los Angeles while a guest at the Cecil.
The killed
During the 1950s and
1960s, the Cecil had a reputation as a place where people would kill
themselves by jumping out upper-floor windows, Cooper said. "It's just
what people do when they are at the end of their rope," she said.
Helen Gurnee, in her 50s, leaped from a seventh floor window, landing on the Cecil Hotel marquee on October 22, 1954, she said.
Julia Moore jumped from
her eighth floor room window on February 11, 1962, she said. She left
behind a bus ticket from St Louis, 59 cents and an Illinois bank account
book showing a balance of $1,800.
Pauline Otton, 27,
jumped from a ninth floor window after an argument with her estranged
husband on October 12, 1962, she said. Otton landed on George Gianinni,
65, who was walking on the sidewalk 90 feet below. Both were killed
instantly.
Not everyone on Cooper's list committed suicide.
"Pigeon Goldie" Osgood, a
retired telephone operator, was found dead in her ransacked room on
June 4, 1964, Cooper said. Osgood, known for protecting and feeding the
pigeons at nearby Pershing Square, was stabbed, strangled and raped. The
crime has not been solved.
Not an ordinary hotel
Schave and Cooper have theories about why the Cecil's past has been so sordid.
It was built in the 1920s as a hotel "for businessmen to come into town and spend a night or two," Cooper said.
But it was soon upstaged
by nicer hotels in a better part of town, she said. When the Great
Depression hit in the 1930s, it became more of a transient hotel.
Eventually, it transitioned into a single room occupancy business, known
as an SRO. Long-term tenants rented individual rooms and shared
bathrooms with neighboring residents.
"This was just a place
where people who were really down on their luck were going," Schave
said. "These hotels are filled with people who are at the edge of being
integrated in society."
During the 1970s, '80s
and '90s, hundreds of people who were "down on their luck" called the
Cecil home, he said. "They were all hustling to make ends meet."
"It's not like that any more, of course," Cooper said.
New owners converted three of the floors back to hotel rooms around 2007, but most of the building remains SRO, Schave said.
Another section serves as a hostel that is marketed toward European tourists, he said
It was not clear if Lam was staying in one of the hotel rooms, which offer more privacy, or the hostel.
