The Cecil Hotel opened its doors on December 20, 1924, with champagne flowing through a marble lobby that glittered under art glass skylights. Developer William Banks Hanner had spent over a million dollars building the 14-story, 700-room structure in the Beaux-Arts style, a palace of polished floors and stained glass meant to house businessmen, tourists, and families seeking affordable luxury in booming downtown Los Angeles. For a few years, the promise held. Then the stock market crashed.
The Great Depression emptied the lobby, and Hanner watched his dream crack as guests stopped coming. To survive, the Cecil lowered its rates from dollars to cents and opened its doors to anyone who could pay. Single-room occupancy turned the hotel into a last resort, and the neighborhood around it absorbed thousands of people with nowhere else to go. Skid Row pressed against its walls, and the darkness began to move in.
The first suicide came in 1927. Percy Orman Cook checked in after a fight with his wife and child, closed his door, and ended his life. Through the 1930s, at least six more people chose death inside the hotel, some by poison, some by blade, some by stepping out of windows into empty air. In 1934, Army Sergeant Lewis D.
Bordon was found in his room with a razor nearby. Four years later, Marine Corps member Roy Thompson climbed to the roof and leaped from the top of the building, his body landing on the skylight of a neighboring structure. The staff learned to recognize the signs: the guest with a small bag, the request for an upper floor, the stranger who seemed too calm. In the autumn of a year in the 1960s, a woman named Pauline Utton climbed through her ninth-floor window and fell.
Her body struck George Gianini, a pedestrian walking past at that exact moment. Two people died in an instant, one by choice, one by chance. The story spread across Los Angeles, adding another dark legend to the Cecil’s growing collection. The 1980s brought the night stalker.
Richard Ramirez was 24 when he first walked through the lobby doors, a thin man from Texas shaped by violence and horror from childhood. By 1984 he had moved to Los Angeles and discovered a hunger he could not control. He broke into homes while families slept and attacked without pattern, killing men, women, and children with whatever weapon he found. For $14 a night, he rented a room on the 14th floor of the Cecil.
The staff barely noticed him in a building full of people trying to disappear. He left at night and returned before dawn, and nobody asked questions. During the summer of 1985, terror gripped Southern California as the media called him the Night Stalker. He killed at least 13 people and assaulted many more, leaving pentagrams drawn on walls and carved into victims’ skin.
Police had no leads until August 30, 1985, when Ramirez tried to steal a car in East Los Angeles without knowing his face had just been released to the media. Residents recognized him, chased him down, and held him until officers arrived. In 1989 he was convicted of 13 murders and sentenced to death, but cancer claimed him on death row in 2013 before the state could execute him. Just six years after Ramirez was arrested, another killer passed through the same lobby doors.
Jack Unterweger came not as a fugitive but as a celebrated guest. Born in Austria in 1950, he had strangled 18-year-old Margaret Schaefer with her own bra in 1974. Sentenced to life in prison, he taught himself to write and produced an autobiography called Purgatory, which became a sensation. Intellectuals championed him, Nobel Prize winners called him proof of rehabilitation, and he was released in 1990 after serving just 15 years.
The prison warden declared they would never find a prisoner better prepared for freedom. Within months, women began dying again. Sex workers in Prague and Vienna were strangled with their own undergarments tied in a distinctive knot police would later recognize as Unterweger’s trademark. Authorities suspected him but had no proof, and his celebrity made him nearly untouchable.
In the summer of 1991, he traveled to Los Angeles on assignment for an Austrian magazine to write about attitudes toward sex work. He reportedly chose the Cecil deliberately, drawn to its connection with Richard Ramirez. He even convinced the LAPD to take him on ride-alongs through downtown, showing him exactly where sex workers gathered and how patrol cars moved through the area. During the five weeks Unterweger spent at the Cecil, three women disappeared: Shannon Exley, 35; Irene Rodriguez, 33; and Peggy Jean Booth, 26.
All were sex workers. All were strangled with their own bras. He claimed to have dated the hotel’s receptionist while bodies piled up outside. After leaving Los Angeles, Unterweger returned to Austria, where investigators had finally gathered enough evidence to connect him to multiple murders.
When police came to arrest him, he fled. Officers chased him through Switzerland, France, and back to the United States before U. S. marshals arrested him in Miami Beach on February 27, 1992.
In June 1994, an Austrian jury convicted him of nine murders. The next night, alone in his cell, he tied a ligature using the same distinctive knot he had used to kill his victims and hanged himself. Even in death, he confessed through his final act. The Cecil’s darkest chapter was still to come.
In 2011, the hotel underwent a partial rebranding, with some floors renamed Stay on Main to distance itself from its reputation. Among the new guests was 21-year-old Elisa Lam, a student from Vancouver traveling down the California coast and documenting her journey on a blog called Ether Fields. She wrote about her struggles with mental health and her hopes for the future. On January 26, 2013, Lam checked into the Cecil.
Within days, her roommates complained of odd behavior, notes left on beds saying “go home and go away,” and demands for passwords before anyone could enter the room. The hotel moved her to a private room. She was escorted out of a talk show taping in Burbank for disruptive actions and had an outburst in the lobby. Lam had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was supposed to take medication.
Those close to her knew that when she stopped, hallucinations and paranoia would creep in. She was supposed to check out on January 31 and continue her trip to Santa Cruz. She called her parents every day, but that day the call never came. By February 1, her parents contacted the Los Angeles Police Department.
Her belongings remained untouched in her room: laptop, identification, luggage, as though she had stepped out for a moment. On February 13, police released security footage from the hotel’s elevator. The video shows Lam entering wearing a red hoodie and pressing multiple buttons, all of them. The doors do not close.
She peers out into the hallway, looking left and right. She steps out of the elevator and stands to the side, her hands visible, gesturing strangely. She moves back in, presses more buttons, steps out again, and the video cuts off. Within hours, the four-minute clip went viral.
Millions watched and theorized, some claiming she was running from a killer, others suggesting the paranormal. Police saw a young woman in the middle of a mental health crisis. Five days later, guests at the Cecil began complaining that the water pressure had dropped. When water came out, it was dark and discolored, tasting strange.
Maintenance worker Santiago Lopez climbed to the roof, where four large water tanks supplied the building. The access route was open, and the heavy hatch on one tank lay pushed aside. Looking into the dark water, Lopez saw a body floating face up about twelve inches below the surface. It took firefighters hours to drain the tank and cut it open to remove Lam’s body.
She was naked, partially decomposed, her clothes floating in the water beside her along with her watch and room key. Her phone was never recovered. The autopsy found no signs of trauma, no evidence of assault, no alcohol or illegal drugs. The only substances present were her prescribed medications, but at levels suggesting she had not been taking full doses.
The coroner ruled her death an accidental drowning, with bipolar disorder as a significant factor. The official theory held that Lam, suffering from hallucinations brought on by not taking her medication properly, fled to the roof seeking safety, somehow bypassing restricted access. She climbed onto the tank, pushed aside the 20-pound lid, and lowered herself into the water, perhaps thinking she was hiding. As other guests used water throughout the hotel, the level dropped, and what might have been shallow enough to escape became too deep.
Her heavy clothes pulled her down. Not everyone accepted this explanation. Online investigators pointed to inconsistencies and accused innocent people of murder, sending death threats to strangers based on coincidence. One musician harassed by web sleuths nearly ended his own life.
In September 2013, Lam’s parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Cecil, claiming it had failed to secure dangerous areas. The hotel argued the death was unforeseeable. In 2015, a judge agreed and dismissed the case. Today the building no longer operates as a hotel.
After renovations delayed by the pandemic, it reopened in December 2021 as affordable housing for low-income residents, many of them formerly homeless. The marble lobby shows its age, the stained glass has dulled, and the 700 rooms that once hosted businessmen and tourists and serial killers now shelter people with nowhere else to go. From Percy Orman Cook in 1927 to Elisa Lam in 2013, the Cecil witnessed at least 16 deaths that made headlines. It housed Richard Ramirez during his most active killing period and Jack Unterweger during his Los Angeles murder spree.
Its water tanks became a tomb and its windows became exit points for people seeking permanent escape from their pain. The building itself is not evil; concrete and steel cannot be malevolent. But the Cecil collected stories of evil, housed them, witnessed them, and became synonymous with them.
And those stories have seeped into the walls like water damage, permanent and impossible to erase.
