WHEN the “funny-tasting” tap water in Hotel Cecil flowed black, guests saw it as just another annoyance – the truth was far more horrifying.
The water they had been drinking and washing in was contaminated by the ROTTING FLESH of a young woman missing for three weeks.
The remains of 21-year-old Canadian student Elisa Lam were found floating in one of the four 10ft water towers on the roof of the budget hotel in Los Angeles. Ahead of this gruesome discovery on February 19, guests had complained of weak water pressure, and there had been a flood in a fourth floor room.
Then one visitor noted that the water had gone a weird colour.
Sabrina Baugh, 27, a piano teacher from Plymouth, said: “The water had a funny taste.
“When you turned the tap on, the water was black first then went back to normal. We thought it was just the way it was there.” The plumbing has since been cleaned by specialists.
And questions about whether the water is now safe to drink are met with a curt “Yes” by the receptionist.
But then staff of this 600-room hotel near Skid Row, where a tiny room with shared bathroom costs £43 a night, are used to hiding the Cecil’s murky secrets.
Since opening its doors in 1927, the hotel of horrors has been witness to a murder, several suicides, drug and domestic abuse incidents, and has housed TWO serial killers.
The most infamous of these is Richard Ramirez, whose rape and murder sprees in the mid-80s saw him dubbed “The Night Stalker”.
These days he resides on Death Row in California’s San Quentin State Prison after being found guilty of 13 counts of murder, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries in 1989.
But back in 1985, when room rates at the Cecil were £9.28 a night, Ramirez used the hotel as a base to plot his sickening attacks.
Given the Cecil’s dark past, it is no wonder it is a stopping point on one of local firm Esotouric’s more ghoulish sightseeing trips.
Kim Cooper, who runs Esotouric with her husband Richard Schave, says: “Ramirez would come in through the back alley, which you can see off 7th Street, covered in blood at night.
“Skid Row and nearby neighbourhoods were such dangerous places then that he could show up reeking of blood, take his clothes off in the alley and go up to the 14th floor in his pants. It’s chilling.”
Several years after Ramirez checked out, another killer checked in. In 1991, Austrian author Jack Unterweger got a room claiming he was researching LA’s red light district.
During his five-week stay he strangled three prostitutes with their own bra straps and dumped their bodies nearby.
On June 29, 1994, after being sentenced to life for nine murders, Unterweger committed suicide.
Kim, 46, reveals: “He hanged himself using exactly the same ligature he had created out of the bras of the women he killed.
“It was his message to the authorities — ‘You were right, but you’ll never punish me’.”
Other ghoulish episodes in the Cecil’s history include the 1964 murder of Goldie Osgood, known as the “pigeon lady of Pershing Square”, who was strangled in her room.
In October 1954 Helen Gurneee leapt from a seventh floor window and landed on the hotel marquee.
In 1962 Julia Moore jumped to her death from the eighth floor. while Pauline Otton jumped from the ninth floor and landed on a pedestrian 90ft below. Both died.
Now the mystery of Elisa Lam is added to the death list.
CCTV from the hotel lift on January 31 shows Elisa acting strangely, pressing buttons for several floors, peering into the corridor then retreating to a corner of the lift.
There are no security cameras on the roof. But she would have had to go to the top floor, climb a staircase, pass a locked door, turn off an alarm and take a ladder to reach the water tank platform.
The cause of death is unknown. LAPD have not ruled out crime or a “very, very strange accident”.
As two 21-year-old female guests, who do not wish to be named, hear Elisa’s fate they can say just one thing: “Can we get our money back?”
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