After disappearing from her room at the Los Angeles hotel in February 2013, the 21-year-old’s body was drowned in a water tank on the roof of the hotel two weeks later.
Nearly a decade and dozens of conspiracy theories later, Lam’s case remains unsolved.
The Cecil Hotel’s infamous past
The Cecil Hotel’s dark past earned it a spot on tours of Los Angeles long before a woman’s body was found in the rooftop water tank.
“It’s where serial killers reside,” Hollywood guide Richard Schave told CNN in 2013.
Schave and his wife Kim Cooper made it their job to gather details about those who died or were killed while at the Cecil.
The killers
The most famous on their list are serial killers Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger.
In 1985, Ramirez, known as the “Nightstalker,” was living on the top floor of the Cecil in a $ 14 a night room, Cooper said.
The Cecil, then filled with hundreds of transients living in the cheap rooms, was a good place for Ramirez to go unnoticed when he murdered 13 women, Schave said. He “just threw his bloody clothes in the trash can at the end of his night and walked into the back entrance.”
Jack Unterweger was working as a Los Angeles crime journalist for an Austrian magazine in 1991 when he moved to the Cecil.
“We think he lived at the Cecil as a tribute to Ramirez,” said Schave.
He is blamed for murdering three prostitutes in Los Angeles while a guest at the Cecil.
The dead
In the 1950s and 1960s, de Cecil had a reputation for being a place where people would commit suicide by jumping out of the top-floor windows, Cooper said. “It’s just what people do when they’re at the end of their rope,” she said.
Helen Gurnee, in her 50s, jumped out of a seventh-floor window and landed in the tent of the Cecil Hotel on Oct. 22, 1954, Cooper said.
Julia Moore jumped out of her eighth-floor room window on February 11, 1962, she said. Moore left behind a St. Louis bus ticket, 59 cents, and an Illinois bank account with a balance of $ 1,800.
Pauline Otton, 27, jumped out of a ninth-floor window after an argument with her estranged husband on Oct. 12, 1962, Cooper said. Otton landed on George Gianinni, 65, who walked 30 yards down the sidewalk. Both were killed instantly.
Not everyone on Cooper’s list has committed suicide.
“Pigeon Goldie” Osgood, a retired operator, was found dead in her searched room on June 4, 1964, Cooper said. Osgood, known for protecting and feeding the pigeons in nearby Pershing Square, was stabbed, strangled, and raped. The crime has not been solved.
Not an ordinary hotel
Schave and Cooper have theories as to why de Cecil’s past has been so nasty.
It was built in the 1920s as a hotel “for business people who could come to town and spend a night or two,” Cooper said.
But it was soon overshadowed by nicer hotels in a better part of town, she said. When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, it became more of a temporary hotel. Ultimately it transitioned into a single room occupancy business known as an SRO. Long-term tenants rented individual rooms and shared bathrooms with local residents.
“This was just a place where people who were really unlucky went,” said Schave. “These hotels are filled with people about to be integrated into society.”
In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of people who were “unlucky” called the Cecil home, he said. “They were all rushing to make ends meet.”
“Of course it’s not like that anymore,” Cooper said.
New owners reduced three of the floors to hotel rooms around 2007, but most of the building remains SRO, Schave said.