Katharina Buczek
The Beginning Of The Horror
In the first decade that the Cecil Hotel was open, at least six guests committed suicide inside the building. Some victims jumped out of bedroom windows, others used guns or knives, while a few ingested poison.
One victim was Army Sergeant Louis D. Borden, who, in 1934, used a razor to slash his own throat.
Then, just under four years later, thirty-five-year-old Marine Corps fireman Roy Thompson leaped from the Cecil Hotel’s rooftop and was discovered on the skylight of a building next door.
But, the horrific tragedies did not stop in the 1930s. The seemingly cursed hotel only witnessed more and more brutal acts of violence over the following decades.
One fall evening in 1944, for example, a nineteen-year-old woman named Dorothy Purcell woke up to severe stomach pains in the middle of the night. After heading to the bathroom, though, she unexpectedly birthed a baby boy.
Dorothy had no clue that she was pregnant, though, and, after delivering him, supposedly thought the newborn was still birthed. So, she tossed her baby out of the window, and he landed on a neighboring rooftop building.
Tragically, the baby boy was born alive and only passed after being thrown by Dorothy. And at her trial, Dorothy was ruled not guilty due to insanity and was placed in a psychiatric hospital.
A Serial Killer’s Hideaway
The Cecil Hotel is not only home to brutal suicides and tragic accidents, though. The building has also housed some of the most egregious serial killers in history.
Richard Ramirez, who was known as the “Night Stalker,” was one of the hotel’s patrons in the mid-1980s. Ramirez went on to murder thirteen people– including men, women, and children– in the Los Angeles area.
