Gone at midnight, p.23
Gone at Midnight, page 23
“We should be glad there is a red-light district,” Unterweger said. “The dead [women] in the Vienna Woods are another argument for why society should do more to provide security for prostitutes.”
Unterweger took a keen interest in the murders and planned to report on them extensively. He peppered the police chief with questions, though he couldn’t divulge critical details. Jack wanted to know what they knew. What the police could disclose to the public was that there were seven victims, all sex workers, all strangled to death.
What the police couldn’t disclose to the public—details that had to be safeguarded because only the killer would know them—were far more disturbing.
The killer’s weapon of choice each time was the victim’s bra. Because of its elastic bands, a bra is by itself already a sufficient tourniquet by which to strangle someone. But the killer made a cut in a shoulder strap and reconfigured the bands and straps in such a way as to be able to use three ligatures and “tie the nooses at maximum tension.” Such complete and total constriction of the carotid arteries, which had the effect of actually compressing the neck by several inches, guaranteed a ferocious death.
Unterweger’s interest in violent crimes at the heart of cities—his so-called “underworld stories”—ultimately brought him to Los Angeles. Unterweger was fascinated by the idea of a glamorous, glittering city with a seedy underbelly.
He arrived in Los Angeles, wearing a white suit and a cowboy hat, in 1991 and checked into the Cecil Hotel, the perfect place for him to study and write about the seedy underworld of a great American city. In Entering Hades, John Leake writes that “the hotel embodied a motif that ran through all Jack’s magazine articles about L.A.—the existence of extreme destitution in the heart of a city known for its wealth.”
He’d also heard that one of the country’s most notorious serial killers, Richard Ramirez, stayed there during the ’80s, which delighted him.
Unterweger had big plans for Los Angeles. He was determined to ingratiate himself into the Hollywood “glitterati” the same way he had taken over the Vienne literary scene. He wanted to interview Charles Bukowski and on at least one occasion walked around Hollywood Park trying to find the famous writer. He wanted to interview Cher; he drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to her home in Malibu but couldn’t get past the gate.
Unterweger was certain he would meet a producer interested in developing one of his stories into an American movie.
Unterweger’s most pressing professional goal while in Los Angeles was research for his underworld odyssey, “The Dark Side of Los Angeles,” for which he wanted to document the nature of crime in the city. In order to do so, he met with a lieutenant at the LAPD and requested a ride-along, presenting himself as a journalist for an Austrian police journal, only half of which was true.
Unterweger’s primary research consisted of interviewing as many prostitutes as he could. He started by canvassing the neighborhood around the Cecil Hotel, equipped with a tape recorder and a microphone. And when he returned to his room at night, he conducted additional experiential research. He invited prostitutes to climb the fire escape up to his room on the 15th floor and service him.
He ventured out to the Hollywood strip as well, where a fantastical array of sex workers greeted him.
But what Unterweger didn’t know was that the Viennese police had received a tip regarding the murders in Vienna and Graz. And, in fact, before Unterweger had left Vienna, police had put him under surveillance because the method of death in the new Austrian prostitute killings matched the reformed criminal’s MO. But they still didn’t have enough evidence.
But then a curious thing happened. While the sex worker killings in Austria stopped, a murdered prostitute showed up in Los Angeles. In what must have been an eerie scene, hikers discovered her body in the Malibu hills during the solar eclipse of July 11, 1991. The cause of death for the victim, whose brain matter had been almost entirely consumed by maggots, was asphyxia due to ligature strangulation.
Los Angeles would soon be dealing with its own new string of murders. Less than five years removed from the terrifying reign of the Night Stalker, LAPD detectives were on guard.
Sure enough, two more murders followed, one of them on 7th Avenue only blocks from the Cecil Hotel. In fact, the red, larger-than-life marquee for the Hotel Cecil was visible from the location of the murder, looming in the smoggy, sun-baked air. The victim: twenty-two-year-old Shannon Exley. The murder weapon: Shannon’s own bra, tightly garroted in a way detectives had never before seen.
Meanwhile, Unterweger grew sick of the Cecil Hotel. Apparently, even serial killers are turned off by the place. He’d been robbed there and wanted to leave. But not before he stalked, manipulated, and seduced a young receptionist who worked there. She agreed to travel out of the country with him.
By this time, the Viennese police had assembled more hard evidence linking Unterweger to the crimes in Austria. But Unterweger still had strong support in the literary community and among social activists and members of the intelligentsia who believed that police couldn’t catch the real killer so they were blaming it on Jack.
The mythology Jack Unterweger created in his apocryphal autobiographical stories while in prison had overshadowed the violent crime of his youth. Many Austrians at the time had an emotional and ideological connection to the idea of criminal rehabilitation, and using his charm and rhetoric, Unterweger manipulated the country by creating an image of innocence. He may be the only serial killer in history to use literature to extend a murder spree.
Jack was on the run, however, and as his true nature became clear to investigators, a stunning realization set in: Unterweger had been reporting on murders he himself committed. And his pathology, later diagnosed as narcissistic personality disorder (a psychiatric illness common to many serial killers), also expressed itself in the way Jack continued to interview detectives while they built a case against him. Jack carefully questioned them to determine what they knew about the crimes and what they knew about him.
Ultimately, Unterweger was arrested, extradited back to Austria, and convicted of eight counts of murder. He knew that this time around, there was no chance of pardon. Only a few hours after his verdict, Unterweger killed himself in his cell in the Graz-Karlau Prison. He fashioned a rope out of his shoelaces and a cord from his tracksuit and made a noose using the same meticulously crafted ligature he’d used to strangle his victims.
A government spokesman later called it “his best murder.”
REMOTE VIEWING
As I loitered in the alley, I could almost see Unterweger perched on the fire escape twelve floors above, looking down, his spirit marooned in the Cecil Hotel—his new purgatory.
Psychic Chelsea Damali did a “remote viewing” session for the Lam case and felt that Elisa was running from something that only she could see. A human coerced her into the tank but Chelsea believes the murderer was influenced by dark spirits. Later, when her Paranormal Syndicate conducted their physical investigation of the Cecil Hotel, they studied Unterweger’s room on the 15th floor. Chelsea had to leave in a hurry because she felt his sadistic brutality as viscerally as one might feel a bee sting. He’s still there, she said. He’s in between life and death but probably isn’t aware of it. He’s still looking for new victims. As is Ramirez, who lived only one floor down.
Remote viewing sessions involve trying to remotely gain information about an event or place using only the mind. Some parapsychologists, like Russell Targ, who ran the legendary Project Stargate (portrayed in the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats), believes psychics can tap nonlocal information through quantum entanglement.
Though many people remain skeptical about such psychic abilities, the declassified CIA documents I mentioned earlier show that the U.S. military did, in fact, use remote viewing for psychic espionage during the Cold War, and the Soviets did the same. Other documents describe how law-enforcement agencies around the country regularly employ psychics for remote viewing sessions to help with missing persons and other cases.
Chelsea’s statements made me wonder why Elisa was wandering around on the upper floors, which are reserved for longer-stay residents. This is also where Unterweger and Ramirez lived and where many suicides occurred.
What drew Elisa to those floors?
If there’s some fragment of those killers still residing in the hotel, traces of predatory pathos entombed in the walls, does it affect the other tenants? Is this why guests who stay in murdered tenant Goldie Osgood’s room continually report feeling like they’re being strangled by an invisible assailant? Is this why people’s minds become suddenly infected with suicidal ideation when they enter rooms where past guests took their own lives?
Did this dark energy affect Elisa? Did it affect the man or men who may have killed her?
Will it affect me? I thought, walking back into the lobby.
RELAPSE
When I got back to the Cecil, I decided I would have to buck it up and do some sleuthing. But first . . . a nap.
Naps are always dangerous for me. Sometimes when I wake up, I feel emotionally raw to the point of terror. This time around, I awoke with the visceral sensation that someone was watching me. I’d had an intense dream, but I couldn’t immediately recall the details except for colorful textures and edicts of the future. As expected, it saddled me with dysphoria, rendered me nostalgic for a life I’d never known, a world that didn’t exist.
Then something unexpected and unfortunate happened. I opened my laptop and saw that there was a new email awaiting me. When I opened it, my heart stopped. It was from Lauren, my ex. I looked away before I could see the contents. The only thing I caught was the subject, which was “Hiiiii.”
Something inside my mind broke. Instantly, the untallied weight of the trauma from our breakup descended upon me. I remembered the night I found a love letter sent to Lauren by a much older man, which marked only the beginning of a small cabal of middle-aged sociopathic predators entering my life.
They ranged in social rank from the homeless anarchist to a university professor. But before I could even start to process this information, Lauren claimed the Professor had raped her. It happened, she said, after we broke up, while I was driving to Albuquerque. Perhaps when I was pulling off the freeway to have nervous breakdowns, I was absorbing her trauma from afar.
I had friends cast doubts on the rape, but I believe assault victims unless given a credible reason not to. And I could tell by the trauma she was going through that it was real. Though I was angry at her for betraying me, I didn’t let my anger stop me from supporting her when she needed it.
Lauren’s behavior melted down to the point where I believed there was a very real danger of suicide or fatally self-destructive behavior. The Anarchist, who used to hug me at meetings of the activist group we attended, tried to aggressively control Lauren, using her psychological instability as leverage. He also continued trolling me, inflicting as much damage as possible. In a series of vitriolic Facebook messages, he called me a coward for having to take meds for depression.
I shouldn’t have responded, but I did. I had spoken with another young woman affiliated with a website I wrote for who told me the Anarchist aggressively courted her and used her psychological and personal problems to manipulate her. So I responded to his message by informing him he was just as bad as the Professor. Like him, I wrote, you’re a predator who grooms and manipulates young women.
His next attack really hurt. Because I had forbade him from entering my apartment, the Anarchist accused me of being responsible for Lauren’s sexual assault. If he had been having an affair with Lauren at my apartment on the night of the attack, he argued, the Professor wouldn’t have come over and the assault wouldn’t have happened. This kind of stuff escalated until I finally blocked him on Facebook.
My attention turned to the Professor, who I fantasized killing. The Professor, an investigation revealed, stood accused of grooming college-aged young women at San Diego State for years and was at the center of multiple sexual harassment complaints being arbitrated by the university. Prior to his tenured job at SDU, the professor taught at the University of Delaware, where other students accused him of sexual harassment. Maybe it was a case of “pass the harasser,” which is evidently almost as common in higher education as it is in the Catholic Church.
I looked up his address, planning a confrontation, but ultimately talked myself down from that ledge. This made me feel like a coward, which made me recall the Anarchist calling me that. To this day, the word “coward” makes me withdraw, as though the syntax of the word enforces its very meaning.
I internalized the pain, all of it. The cognitive dissonance of wanting to comfort Lauren, though I was mortally wounded by her actions, fractured me. It brought my brain back to that period at the end of high school when I found out the girl I was in love with—who had sprinkled my first kiss upon me like pixie dust—had been raped. I watched her slowly come apart thereafter, same as Lauren.
In a way, then, my obsession with determining whether a sexual predator was involved in the Lam case could have been my subconscious needing to externalize past pain by bringing rapists to justice.
In the immediate aftermath of Lauren’s attack, we still shared an apartment, the Cave of Despair. I watched her become more and more erratic and I saw the Anarchist pursuing her more intently, like a cult leader, hoping to twist and shape her trauma into an artificial love for him. He got one of his friends involved with her, too. Clearly, his infatuation was about control, not love.
Sensing she needed to escape her current environment entirely, I spoke with Lauren’s mom, a health-care practitioner, who agreed to drive out and take her back home for therapy. She got her on Celexa, which may have saved her from ruin. Going full circle, the person who used to doubt my need for antidepressants now went on one herself.
I threw my computer on the floor.
I’d made considerable progress on cutting back the drugs and alcohol prior to the trip. After the email, I literally jogged to the nearest liquor store and bought a bottle of whiskey. I swallowed a couple painkillers, puffed on my e-cig, and waddled back down Main Street, oblivious to anything peripheral to the smoggy shimmers of tangerine on the horizon.
As I neared the Cecil Hotel, I stopped and, in my stupor, crouched down to rest. I looked up at the fire escape ladders snaking up the side of the building. I focused on the 14th floor and tried to imagine Elisa climbing out and scaling up to the roof.
I lowered my gaze two floors and imagined Jack Unterweger standing on the fire escape, smoking cigarettes and peering down to the alley below, where he profiled sex workers, surveying their movements, casing up the right victim.
Jack stood there, toying with a bra, adjusting the ligatures for maximum torque so that he could methodically control the pace at which he choked the life out of his next victim. He grinned at me and winked.
I went back inside and sat in the lobby, sinking further into despair, adrift in a universe that felt like nothing more than a cathedral of plunder.
Maybe I should just check out for good, I thought. From the Cecil, from the cathedral at large.
Panic seized me. I had to move, I had to get up. But I didn’t know where to go or what to do. There was nothing I could do in the present tense to turn my life around. Maybe this was the demon, feeding off my pain. Or maybe it was the destructive information from the past reverberating in the present.
It’s going to be a long night, I thought, taking another pull from the whiskey bottle.
PREDATORS ON THE PAYROLL
There are many accusations of creepy, predatory, and criminal acts by the employees of the Cecil. I recalled several Yelp reviews I read in which guests mentioned this kind of behavior specifically from the security guards. It’s relevant to the Elisa Lam case for obvious reasons and after speaking to Sally about her time at the Cecil, it was not something anyone seriously investigating this case could ignore.
After weeding through the most frequent complaints of grime, street noise, bad wi-fi, putrid smells, bugs, bloodstains, and an insufficient continental breakfast, I got to more substantive material buried deep in the review threads of Yelp and Travel Advisor.
One reviewer described his stay as like “a scene out of the Saw horror movies.” Another said his stay was one of “sleepless terror.” I know this feeling exactly.
A complaint I saw frequently pertained to guests feeling like they were defrauded out of the security deposit.
And, of course, during a specific two-week period of time, there were complaints about the water. We know how that ended.
One commenter noted the unusually high number of sex offenders in the area and in the actual hotel. “Apparently, the Cecil can boast an extremely high concentration of child molesters among its guests. City lockdown is just down the road, and its relatively child-free downtown setting makes it an ideal place for said perps to stay.”
When I looked into Intelius criminal background records, I found that there were no less than six sex offenders on Main Street and about three in Cecil itself.
After speaking to Sally, who reported that hotel employees have used their master key to enter rooms and sexually assault women, the reviews that interested me the most were the ones describing employee interactions.
Another contact, named Tina, who I was referred to by the bouncer from the Speakeasy, confirmed Sally’s accusation. She said that many employees, including maintenance workers, had been sexually abusive to tenants. Her account, I should note, pre-dated maintenance worker Santiago Lopez’s employment at the Cecil.
The online reviews document more than a few instances of people feeling creeped out by certain employees.
One man wrote that security guards mean-mugged him as he and his girlfriend entered the hotel and then stared at his girlfriend “disgustingly.” He said this behavior continued during the check-in and that two armed guards stood nearby, gazing at his girlfriend and then laughing with each other.
