Gone at midnight, p.22
Gone at Midnight, page 22
Robin thinks Elisa would have been especially confused when she returned from The Last Bookstore on the 31st, her last day, to learn she had been moved to a different room. He thinks she may have napped in her new room until about nine or ten o’clock at night. Upon waking up, she was more disconcerted and alienated than ever. She had no entertainment and it was probably too late to go down to the lobby or the neighborhood surrounding the hotel, which would have been dangerous.
She got frustrated and in her restless state decided she wanted to walk around the hotel and explore. Robin thinks it’s also possible she intended to call her family (which was a daily habit of hers) from the lobby. Regardless, she left her room with her room key, which indicates she planned to return.
At some point during her exploration of the hotel, she ran into security. This could have happened in the lobby or elsewhere in the hotel. The security guards, Robin notes, would have been aware of Elisa’s entire situation. They knew she was a solo traveler and was essentially alone in a city she knew virtually nothing about; they knew she had been displaying questionable behavior and had been moved to her own room (in fact, said security guards may have accompanied her to the new room); and they would have known she was wandering around the hotel based on the surveillance feed from the 14th floor.
After the events of the surveillance video, Elisa may have run into one or more of the hotel’s security staff, who asked if she wanted to see the roof. Again, they knew she was acting “strange” and that she was alone. In many ways, she was an optimal victim. The security guard escorted her to the roof, deactivated the alarm and held the door open for her. These actions are critical because it means Elisa was able to access the roof without setting off the alarm and she did not leave any DNA behind on the door.
Robin also notes that it makes sense that Elisa was accompanied or guided to the roof. She did not know anything about the layout of the hotel, and it was dark and treacherous. I’ve always had a difficult time imagining Elisa scaling the fire escape on the side of the building. But if she took the main-roof entrance, how was the alarm not triggered?
The accompaniment theory takes care of this. The security guard would have known the layout of the roof and would have had a flashlight. Robin notes that it’s improbable that Elisa would have navigated through a dark rooftop to climb a random tank (that she would not have known anything about) by herself. Elisa, in her bored and restless state, would have been interested in the roof and would have been more likely to trust a stranger in a security uniform than a random stranger. She may have already established a rapport with this security guard from her stay at the hotel.
The security guard escorted her up to the roof (perhaps with a guest, a friend, or another employee) and showed her the view of downtown Los Angeles. Maybe this security guard—perhaps the one referenced by multiple guests as seeming predatory—regularly tried to seduce women on the roof; maybe not. At this point, Robin says, there’s a couple of different ways things could have played out.
The security guard may have presented the situation as a favor. “You’ve been causing us some trouble.” Or: “There, I showed you the roof... now what are you going to do for me?”
This man may have made a move on Elisa and freaked her out; they may have started to embrace; he may have outright attempted to force her to do something . . . but Robin thinks that they were either interrupted by something or Elisa realized what was happening and wanted to leave. The security guard may have ordered her to take her clothes off. However it played out, the security guard did not want Elisa coming back from the roof. Maybe he was worried she would report his advances. Or maybe she passed out from being drugged.
The security guard, Robin believes, ordered Elisa to get in the tank. Or he may have put her in himself. Or, and this is me thinking here, perhaps she tried to hide from someone on the roof—in the water tank—and then realized she couldn’t get out.
Either way, Robin believes Elisa was still alive when she entered the cistern.
This theory does not go so far as to state Elisa was actually raped (which independent coroners have stated is not ruled out by the autopsy). Robin thinks the act was interrupted in such a way as to cause the security guard to panic. That Elisa may have been alive in the tank for hours has always been a chilling hypothesis. Robin believes it’s also possible that the water was cold enough to cause Elisa to go into shock and render her unconscious (a merciful twist in an otherwise horrifying scenario).
The security guard theory, Robin says, is the most logical one if you think about motive and opportunity. All the anomalies of the case revolve around contingencies that the security guards would have direct involvement in: the ability to deactivate the alarmed door; access to and knowledge of the roof; access to and knowledge of the surveillance system; and access to and knowledge of Elisa’s specific situation in the hotel, including her vulnerable behavior and room change.
Additionally, and perhaps most crucially, they would likely have been the first people dispatched to look for Elisa when she did not check out the next morning. This would have given him (or them) ample time to edit the surveillance footage, dispose of any evidence, delay the discovery of the body, and present a credible narrative of mental illness that would be corroborated by the surveillance video.
The only part of the theory that doesn’t make sense to me is why the security guard would have left the cistern lid open. While it’s possible this detail was misreported, the official narrative states that the lid was open when Santiago Lopez discovered the body. Of course, as my investigation continued, new information about Santiago would surface that would force me to question whether the hotel employee depositions in the civil case were 100 percent truthful.
Robin is hardly the first or only websleuth to suggest that the Cecil Hotel security guards may have been involved in Elisa’s death. But is there any evidence for it? And is there evidence that Cecil Hotel employees have sexually harassed and/or assaulted guests?
Answering these questions triggered a new phase of my investigation, one in which I would find credible evidence of foul play and a cover-up.
CHAPTER 18
Return to the Cecil
AS THE JOURNEY INTENSIFIED, my anxiety and mental condition worsened. And synchronicities arose with greater frequency. It’s as if the hotel had dispatched thought-form sentries to sabotage me and prevent my return. It reminded me of in The Shining when the Overlook Hotel deputizes its ghosts to convince Jack he needs to constrain his wife and son. The hotel doesn’t want anyone meddling in its affairs. His son, Jack is told, has been “a very naughty boy.”
Checking in, the first thing I heard, once again, was the sound of laughter echoing through the ornate, expansive lobby of the Cecil. The phlegmatic chuckles traveled along the floor and crescendoed right before the concierge greeted me, eyeball to eyeball.
I was assigned a room on the same floor as the Cecil’s second known serial killer, Jack Unterweger.
This is what’s known as a happy accident.
DON’T LET THE BEDBUGS BITE
At the very last moment, I suddenly decided to run a bedbug search on the hotel. I had a traumatic experience with bedbugs years earlier, and the fear remained. Bedbugs don’t come out of the woodwork until very late at night, just before dawn. You’ve just entered that precious, nourishing stage of the REM cycle when suddenly you become dimly, unconsciously aware that a cabal of tiny creatures is systematically syphoning blood from your body.
Many landlords and hotel-management teams are awful about combating the problem because it’s expensive and tedious. A building near MacArthur Park where I lived refused to address the situation so I collected bedbugs in a glass jar for evidence in case of a lawsuit. I lost a lot of sleep and mental stability during that time.
Bedbugs are not to be trifled with. In sudden horror that I had forgotten about them, I looked up the Cecil Hotel on the bedbug registry and found multiple entries of people traumatized by bedbugs at the Cecil.
But I wasn’t leaving. I would just have to burn my clothes afterward.
I entered my room and immediately looked at the window. Last time I was here, it felt like the hotel was nudging me toward the window. This time, I sensed silence. But calculated silence. I didn’t trust the place.
It wants me to stay, I thought, and if it freaks me out too early, I might leave. This is a game it’s played before.
I was, of course, completely aware of the perverse flow of my logic, of the borderline schizo-affective nature of my paranoia. I’m one of hundreds, perhaps thousands who have come under the insidious spell of the Cecil. I spoke to one karaoke DJ who told me her ex-boyfriend almost lost his mind at the Cecil Hotel. He was convinced a demon infiltrated his mind while staying there and stayed with him for months afterward. This is just one of hundreds of similar stories.
I stripped the sheets of my bed and checked for bloodstains, the telltale mark of bedbug handiwork. No immediate signs, but those critters can burrow deep into the woodwork and floorboards, only to arise in the pre-dawn hours like disciplined farmers.
I learned that hotel maintenance may have eliminated any mattresses with bloodstains. In her investigation of the Cecil Hotel in 2012, Chelsea Damali and her Paranormal Syndicate acquired access to the hotel’s basement, where dozens of mattresses lay stacked and sheathed in black plastic.
Evidently, they remove all mattresses from rooms where guests have died. Former assistant manager Tasheyla MacLean interviewed on the show Haunted Encounters Face to Face, confirmed this to Chelsea. Employees wrap them in black plastic and store some of them in the basement. A Cecil employee may have glimpsed bedbug bloodstains and assumed they were from a suicide or murder.
In her on-camera interview, MacLean also confirmed something else, something shocking regarding the true death count at the Cecil. Someone has died, she said, in every room at the Cecil Hotel. That’s 600 rooms. Even if she’s way off, by hundreds even, the implication is clear: the building itself is sheathed in death.
Maybe that’s why it feels so claustrophobic.
“THEY KILLED ANOTHER GIRL”
While I was in Los Angeles, I met with a woman who had lived in the Cecil Hotel. What she told me shaped the way I would proceed with the rest of my investigation, especially after I was able to corroborate some of her claims with other former tenants. Sally wanted to remain anonymous because she feared retribution from the hotel.
Downtown LA changed Sally. In her heart, she was still a nice country girl from rural Maryland, but the necessities of sustenance as a low-income woman in a dangerous area brought out a survival instinct in her that, over time, hardened her demeanor.
Sally doesn’t take shit from anyone. When movie crews film in the downtown area, she bulldozes over actors in her power wheelchair, dog in lap. She earned a reputation for this. People would say “here she comes.”
She’s not as nice with actors, who she considers leeches. “Get out of my way before I hurt your pretty face,” she said to a B-lister. “You’re a loser with money.”
She treats the homeless with more respect, treats them as friends. The homeless in downtown LA are a family and they take care of each other, she told me.
But poverty, drug use, and mental illness can draw out the worst in people, and she saw this firsthand. Before moving to the Cecil, she lived in a Skid Row hotel with her Hispanic husband. Out in the hallway, she said, a white john who had been roughing up a prostitute was being stabbed by a group of six Mexicans. She needed to use the restroom and her husband told them to stop blocking the hall. So they moved down the hall and threw the john out the window.
She saw a man crossing a parking lot get stabbed by a guy, who removed the victim’s shoes to see if he had money in them. “I just killed a guy for a penny,” he said, laughing.
Sally lived on the 12th floor of the Cecil Hotel for much of the 1980s and all of the 1990s, moving out in 2000. The stories she relayed paint a bleak, hostile scene. The smell of dead bodies from drug overdoses wafting through the hallways; maids turning tricks; blackmail and extortion; rampant drug use. Sally propped her wheelchair against the door at night to delay would-be intruders.
And if they ever did do a proper inspection, they would find a lot of dead bodies, maybe even some in the elevator shaft, she said. As a result, tenants at the Cecil were afraid to walk the halls because dead spirits passed through.
“They need to burn that bitch to the ground and condemn the property,” she said of the Cecil.
Then Sally got deadly serious. Cecil employees would use the master key to break into the rooms of young women and rape them, she said. They were told that if they said anything or reported it to the police that they would get kicked out onto the street and would lose their deposit. One woman, Sally’s friend, was so terrified of retribution that she would not speak on record about it. “I have no money,” she said crying. She was waiting for her Section 8 just to have money for groceries.
The deposit scam was a racket that management kept up for years, she said. Management kicked people out and stole their deposits. Sometimes drugs were planted in their rooms as a pretext. Since these tenants had no money, they had to turn to the streets and try and find a cubby hole to sleep in. Even if they had told the police, it wouldn’t have changed anything because she said the police were scared of the Cecil and avoided it at all cost. The Cecil operated outside the bounds of law and order.
Sally said she and others regularly drank on the roof in the ’80s and is certain she once saw Richard Ramirez in the elevator.
When she heard about the Elisa Lam case, the first thing she said is: “They killed another girl.”
“They don’t care about nothing,” she said. “That poor child died because they wanted to have sex with her and she probably fought them.”
Sally was convinced Elisa was targeted for rape and then killed—a theory she based on her direct experience with hotel employees raping young female tenants and extorting them into silence under threat of eviction. Sally says Elisa’s death fits the profile points of sexual predation she saw firsthand. Elisa, she said, probably fought back and must have proved to be too much trouble and too risky to be left alive.
“Her soul is not at rest.”
“HIS BEST MURDER”
The second serial killer to live at the Cecil Hotel was Jack Unterweger. In Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer, author John Leake documented the incredible history of how Unterweger managed to carry out brutal murder sprees on two different continents while becoming an international celebrity.
In 1974, Austrian Jack Unterweger began serving a prison sentence for the murder of an eighteen-year-old girl, who he’d raped and strangled to death with her own bra. While imprisoned he produced a prolific portfolio of works, including a play called Purgatory, in which he meditated on the Dantesque idea that he was between Heaven and Hell, neither dead nor alive, but rather undergoing punishment in hope of redemption.
Unterweger also wrote children’s stories and in the late 1970s, the ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk) Austrian state broadcasting company began airing them. He later used this platform to craft a narrative of his childhood—one in which he yearned for his absent mother, and was traumatized by the murder of his aunt, a prostitute who “was killed by her last customer.” Unterweger gave televised readings of his work from prison and slowly built a following in Vienna’s literary circles, where the idea of a murderer rehabilitating himself through art struck a chord among the nation’s intellectuals.
Unterweger’s boyish good looks and charm further endeared him to his fans and before long, Unterweger was himself a celebrity. After he served the minimum fifteen years of his sentence, there was a full-fledged campaign to get Unterweger paroled. Literature had cleansed Unterweger’s violent instincts, Vienna’s intellectuals and political ideologues argued. With the goal of a new resocialization program in the justice system and the dream of a “prisonless society,” Jack Unterweger became the poster boy for criminal rehabilitation. Jack Unterweger was not a killer—he was an artist now.
Jack walked out of prison on May 23, 1990 at the age of thirty-nine. Shortly thereafter, Unterweger gave his first reading as a free man. Always one for flair and grandiose style, Unterweger’s newfound celebrity curried favor with the nation’s rebellious art scene. For a magazine photo spread, he posed in a cobwebbed attic in only blue jeans, his surprisingly muscled and tattooed chest and legs bare. There happened to be a long rope lying about, which Unterweger fashioned into a noose and posed as both the hangman and the executed.
The next year, eerily contemporaneous with the release of the horror film The Silence of the Lambs, three prostitutes from Vienna’s red-light district were found brutally murdered—and a year later, another was found murdered in the nearby town of Graz. Just as a new kind of serial killer blew up the cinema—the brilliantly sadistic Hannibal Lecter—Vienna received its first real one. It was as though Hannibal had transmogrified from the screen to reality. Terror seized the streets of Vienna.
As the police searched for the killer, Unterweger got involved, writing an article about the murders in which he advocated for the safety of sex workers in the red-light district and criticized the sensationalist angle most reporters took. He accused middle-class readers of “greedy voyeurism” and said that hysteria over the crimes was preventing investigators from finding the murderer, a phenomenon that closely paralleled the Black Dahlia investigation in Los Angeles decades earlier.
