Gone at Midnight, page 11
In 1964, “Pigeon Goldie” Osgood, who was known locally for feeding the birds in Pershing Square (friends said she was the “benefactor of the square’s bird population,” fed birds too small to forage for themselves and scared away bigger birds), was stabbed, strangled, raped, and killed in her room at the Cecil. A local laborer Jacques Ehlinger, who was found with blood on his clothes, was at one point suspected of killing her and another woman in the area who died a similar death, but police ultimately cleared and released Jacques. Goldie’s murderer was never found. Friends pooled a fund for flowers, which they laid in Pershing Square. “We just wanted her to know we remembered.”
In 1975, an unidentified female Cecil tenant jumped from her twelfth-floor window, landing on the Cecil’s second-floor roof.
At some point, residents of the Cecil and locals of the downtown area began to call the building the “Suicide Hotel.” It’s easy to see why. From its inception all the way through the 1970s, there were dozens of suicides there.
Over the next decade, a new gruesome phase of the hotel’s history played out: Two of the most grisly serial killers in recorded history took up residence at the Cecil and stayed there during their murder sprees.
THE NIGHT STALKER
In the early morning hours of July 5, 1985, twenty-year-old Whitney Bennett changed into her nightgown and lay down in her bed. Down the hall, her parents had already retired for the evening after hosting a get-together earlier in the night. Whitney had gone to her own party that night and didn’t return home until 1:00 A.M.
She fell asleep unaware that the killer was already in the house, in the hallway just outside her room, acclimating to the dark like a chameleon. The Night Stalker decided he was going to kill her with a knife for maximum pleasure. He later said that “you can feel your victim dying through the knife” in a way that is close to sex, better than sex.
When she woke up—a miracle in and of itself—the room was dark, and she was dizzy with pain. She was lucky to be feeling anything, for someone had ruthlessly beaten her with a tire iron. Her head and face were so badly swollen and bruised that she was barely recognizable. The weapon now lay on the floor next to bloody footprints leading to the open bedroom window.
She was one of the luckier victims of Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who terrorized Los Angeles in the mid-1980s with a string of brutal murders and rapes.
The tall, gaunt man had scruffy black hair and haunting eyes and carried a distinctive smell that victims described as “wet leather.” That night he couldn’t find the right kind of knife so he used a tire iron instead, planning to beat the entire family to death, rape Whitney, and then take anything in the house worth money.
He entered Whitney’s bedroom through an unlocked window and struck her numerous times with the tire iron. He then wrapped a cord tightly around her neck, intending to rape her as he choked her to death.
Ramirez unzipped his pants and tightened the cord. He was about to rip her underwear off when suddenly a series of sparks appeared on the wire cord around Whitney’s neck. A blue haze materialized in front of him. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before and it took his breath away. He assumed it was the power of Christ intervening in his murder, a thought that shook him to his core.
As he let go of the cord, Whitney gasped and gulped oxygen. Ramirez left through the window, leaving behind a badly injured but live victim whose court testimony would later help send him to prison.
He later told biographer Philip Carlo that he believed the blue haze departing Whitney’s body was her soul.
Like most killers, Richard Ramirez wasn’t born a homicidal satanist. As a boy, Richie was quiet and courteous; he protected his sister and other girls from bullies. But as he grew older, Richie developed an obsession with violence. As an early adolescent, one of his heroes was Jack the Ripper. This is where he got the idea of wearing all black. He fantasized about being more famous than the unknown Jack, of emerging from the fog to snuff lives like a living incarnation of death.
There are many explanations offered over the years regarding the origin of Richie’s violence: birth defects from nuclear testing in Los Alamos and/or industrial chemicals from his mother’s workplace; his dad’s horrific temper and domestic abuse; temporal lobe epilepsy; petit mal seizures; sexual abuse from a school teacher; and even emotional trauma from getting kicked off his high school football team
There was a near perfect storm of biological, genetic, and psycho-social factors contributing toward a pathology that would eventually turn Richard into one of the most feared serial killers of all time, a man who terrorized the city of Los Angeles in the broiling hot summer of 1985.
To escape the terror of his father’s temper tantrums, Richie took to running away and sleeping in the nearby Cordova Cemetery, where eventually he would lose his virginity to a nice girl who later reported nothing negative about him. Richard also camped out in the desert and learned to navigate in darkness by reading the stars. When he was older, he took psychedelics under the desert moon, and in his hallucinations, he saw demons raping people.
As outlined in meticulous detail by Carlo in the biography The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez, Richie was practically groomed in his teenage years to be a criminal. His brothers taught him the art of stealth burglaries. His cousin Mike was Richie’s most substantial and darkest influence. Before Richie was even a teenager, Mike returned from Vietnam and regaled his wide-eyed cousin with stories of battling the Viet Cong in the jungles. But these weren’t Hollywood war stories: these were real war stories, the real legacy of America’s military intervention abroad; horrifying accounts of torture, cold-blooded murder, and rape.
It started when Mike told Richie that early in the war, U.S. soldiers learned that Viet Cong fighters believed they wouldn’t go to heaven if they were missing a body part. Mike and others took to cutting off the ears (and other body parts) of their enemies, which is the origin of notorious ear necklaces. Mike also showed Richie his photo collection, which contained images of distraught Vietnamese women being forced at gunpoint to perform oral sex. In one pic, Mike is actually seen holding the severed head of one of the women.
Not only did Mike teach Richie to shoot a .22, he added to Richie’s skill set as a criminal, coaching him on how to avoid gravel, clotheslines, garbage cans, and dogs. Mike taught Richard tricks of guerilla warfare: how to become invisible while on the hunt and how to kill with efficiency. And he instilled in Richie an ideological rebelliousness, a sense of social justice, us versus them, “the poor and downtrodden, against them, the rich and influential.” Kill or be killed.
Eventually, Mike’s lust for violence led to him shooting his wife in the head at point-blank range, a crime for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Richie observed this murder; he was standing only a few feet away when Mike pulled the trigger.
When Ramirez started his killings, he was fueled by cocaine, Satan, and rock music, the American Dream—the God, mom, and apple pie—of 80s counterculture. Ever since he was a teenager, Richard had fantasized about violent sex and brutal acts of torture and murder. It was as if extreme sadism was hard-wired into him. For years he was able to control these impulses but ultimately he had to find a release. He started with an attempted rape, for which he was caught, arrested, and released without any repercussions—certainly not therapy.
His first successful rape victim was a woman with whom he had smoked PCP. He left, then snuck back in through the fire escape. During the act, he relished the woman’s fear more than anything else. It was ultimate power, as though with Satan’s help he’d wrested control of the universe from God himself. He enjoyed the act so much he decided he had to have more.
His foray into physical violence was supported by his belief in Satan, whom he imagined was personally pleased by barbaric acts. As a young man, Richard read the Satanic Bible by LaVey and stole a car just to drive to San Francisco to meet him. Richard became a servant to the Dark Lord, but was a “lone practitioner” because he did not trust collectives and considered many in the Church of Satan to be cult-like. He also suspected that they may have been infiltrated by police.
Much later, the Church made Ramirez an honorary member.
Around this time, Richard started shooting up cocaine and before long he was so addicted, he spent upward of $1,500 a week, a habit he supported with burglaries. When injected directly into the bloodstream, cocaine unleashes a euphoric flood of dopamine that fueled his fantasies about sadistic killing.
Meanwhile, his ultimate dark fantasy, of owning his own mansion in which he could build a basement specifically for the purposes of torturing and murdering women, smoldered inside him. Richard saved up his burglary money for this future torture chamber.
Ramirez loved rock music and imagined his favorite bands wrote songs that channeled the spirit of Satan. And like Charles Manson before him, he was convinced some songs were written just for him. Although instead of classic Beatles tunes like “Sexy Sadie,” Ramirez was enraptured by AC/DC’s “Night Prowler” and Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face.” “Night Prowler” had to be for him—it was about sneaking into someone’s home and killing them.
He also felt a strong connection to violent horror movies, especially ones that had occult undertones. The Exorcist, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These films captured for Richard the true terror and thrill of murder. Even as a kid, when Richard went to triple-feature horror movies, he smiled at the parts others screamed at. He imagined he was the monster from which the characters in the movie were running. The bad guys were the protagonists in his mind. The nightmarish killers were the real heroes of the story; they were being true to their inner nature, the inherently violent, chaotic nature of the universe itself.
Richard moved from El Paso to Los Angeles and immediately took a liking to downtown LA, specifically the Main Street area near the Cecil Hotel. He felt at home here among the downtrodden disenfranchised sector of the population. He gravitated to the dark alleyways and porn store marquees.
Violence poured out of him, animalistic and uncontrollable. While a .22 was his weapon of choice, he deferred to a blade fairly often because it brought you closer to the truth of death, a feeling that was sexual and almost spiritual. Some of his victims had gashes to their necks so deep they’d almost been decapitated.
Those who resisted him drew an especially inhuman ire. Maxine Zazzara, a confident attorney who fought back against Richard, angered the killer so much that he tried to cut her heart out. Thwarted by the thickness of the rib cage, he removed her eyes instead, keeping them as mementos.
“Be all that is evil, I, your humble servant, invoke Satan to be here and accept this offering.”
When he returned to his room at the Cecil that night, he pulled the eyeballs from his pocket, which had absorbed most of the blood, and placed them on the bedside table.
“Eyes without a face . . .”
He genuflected to the sad face of the moon waning outside his window and Billy Idol’s song, then laughed.
It had been written just for him.
SKID ROW
In 1989, a Los Angeles jury convicted Ramirez of thirteen counts of murder. The judge sentenced him to death.
Upon the conclusion of his trial, Ramirez held up his palm, tattooed with a pentagram, and stated to journalists, “Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”
After Ramirez, another serial killer, Jack Unterweger graced the “Suicide Hotel,” using it as a base out of which to hunt and brutally murder prostitutes.
Other, less-prolific murderers, sought refuge there: In 1988, a man accused of killing his girlfriend in Huntington Beach was arrested at the Cecil; in 1995, a murder suspect named Eric Reed was found at the hotel after breaking out of a jail in Castaic. In 2003, there was another homicide at the Cecil. Shortly after noon on a Saturday, police found a man who looked to have been strangled to death in his room.
And the hotel continued to bait people at the end of their tether with the allure of painless oblivion. In the early 1990s, a drunk woman determined to jump from the 10th-floor window was talked down by legendary local officer Larry Soeltz.
Long-term residents, like the seventy-seven-year-old Saverio “Manny” Maniscalco and Michael Sadowe, who lived at the hotel for thirty years, called the building “The Suicide.”
In all, at least sixteen people have committed suicide or been killed at the Cecil Hotel, many of them in gruesome fashion. In speaking with tenants there, I’m convinced the number is probably higher, as many crimes and deaths appear to have been covered up, misreported, or unreported completely.
One former tenant named Mike said he witnessed a lady jump out of the Cecil. She landed on the roof of a pawn shop and was still alive for a few moments when first responders arrived. One of them told Mike the lady was mumbling, “Why did you do this to me?”
The problems of the Cecil Hotel are, of course, greatly fueled by underlying systemic economic injustices that generate homelessness and poverty in the downtown Los Angeles area, which is home to Skid Row, regularly cited as containing the largest number of unsheltered people in any U.S. city.
The origin of the homelessness problem in this area is hotly debated—as are the remedies—as downtown Los Angeles has had a growing poverty problem for over a century. As far back as the late 1800s, area newspapers have documented a preponderance of vagrants, itinerants, and drifters. The “deinstitutionalization” of the mentally ill in the latter half of the twentieth century, in concert with the government’s failure to provide adequate social services, also played a role.
In 2006, Police Chief William J. Bratton began enforcing the “broken windows” campaign, which resulted in thousands of tickets being written for homeless people who violated petty laws such as jaywalking and littering with cigarette butts. Potentially successful plans, such as the county’s proposal to invest $100 million into five regional homeless shelters, were rejected. In 2006, a bit of progress was made when the Jones agreement decriminalized sleeping on the sidewalk; of course, this resolution had the effect of exponentially increasing the number of homeless encampments.
The criminalization of homelessness also overlapped with the “reinstitutionalization” of mental illness. Author Stephen Hinshaw notes that the Los Angeles County Jail might as well be thought of as the country’s largest mental facility, admitting around 150,000 people with mental disorders every year. People, he notes, who are without treatment plans and are susceptible to “drug trafficking, sexual exploitation, and recidivism.”
The Cecil Hotel sits at the nexus of these troubled streets, where a cycle of poverty, drug addiction, and mental illness pumps through generations of tortured souls. Yet, when the gentrification of downtown finally transformed the area back into a moneymaker, new developers still sought to invest large amounts of money into hotels and bars marketed to college students, working professionals, and tourists.
When the Elisa Lam case went viral in 2013, the hotel’s macabre past was litigated and highlighted for the entire world to see. Once again, the Cecil was known as a rotten flophouse, one of the most dangerous hotels in the world, haunted, and rife with corruption and crime.
Mysterious violence persisted at the hotel, meanwhile. In 2010 firefighter Charles Anthony MacDougall was stabbed inside the Cecil. He was about to receive the Paramedic of the Year Award when suddenly he was placed on administrative leave after police investigators found inconsistencies in his account. The story has essentially been buried. We may never know what MacDougall was really doing inside the hotel and what really happened to him. My request for information on the case was denied by the LAPD.
But seemingly no matter how many times the ownership changes hands, no matter what new policy change or renovation is ordered, no matter how much lipstick they put on the pig, the curse carries on. In 2015, the body of another suspected suicide victim was found on Main Street in front of the Cecil Hotel.
Or perhaps he was murdered. I don’t know because the LAPD refused to disclose any information about that case either.
I drove into the Historic Core district and immediately felt the dark pulse, an almost magnetic pull, of the Cecil Hotel. Like a through-line, a raw nerve of the universe, had been exposed.
I imagined Elisa arriving here, likely with a misconception of the layout of Los Angeles. Most people who are unfamiliar with the city don’t grasp how large and spread out it is. The Hollywood area, which contains some of LA’s most iconic streets, is 7.5 miles from downtown; the nearest beach is 17.5 miles away and, due to perpetually congested traffic, takes at least an hour to reach by car, much longer by public transportation.
Pulling up to the Cecil Hotel, I stared up at its bulking mass. Its call to me, a susurration of overlapping whispers, had grown louder. This is just in my imagination, I told myself.
CHAPTER 9
The 14th Floor
WHEN ELISA ARRIVED HOME she expected to be greeted by her puppy. It was instinct, a neural pathway in her brain paved by the primal love forged between a human and a hound.
Two days earlier, he’d scampered out into the normally vacant street in her Barnaby neighborhood and was struck by a car. It was a freak accident, but the repercussions were eternal. The details were too gruesome to ponder, so she buried them deep inside.
This loss triggered memories of another death—her grandpa’s. Elisa had been by his side for the last twenty-four hours of his life. The hospital granted the family their own private waiting room, which someone described (she couldn’t remember who) as the nurses’ way of letting you know death is imminent. It was the place where you said your good-byes. In the final hours the nurses explained to the family—with Elisa translating from English—that grandpa needed a respirator tube. She said yes on behalf of the family.
They put him on a dialysis machine, too. His skin color looked off, probably the result of his failing kidneys and liver. She was convinced the hospital made a mistake and marked the test wrong, causing the wrong tube to be used. Or had she misunderstood the nurse . . .
