Netflix’s latest documentary, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel has a connection to The Night Stalker. Crime Scene focuses on the strange case of 21-year-old Elisa Lam, who disappeared whilst in the middle of a trip to Los Angeles. Elisa disappeared during her stay at the Cecil Hotel, which is notorious for its history of being the center stage of some of the most gruesome crimes in LA. While the details of the Elisa Lam case are unsettling enough for viewers, the documentary revealed the hotel’s link to serial killer Richard Ramirez, also known as The Night Stalker.
Ramirez is the central figure of another Netflix docuseries, Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, which chronicles how one of the most infamous serial killers in history was hunted down and brought to justice. The Night Stalker terrorized the residents of Greater Los Angeles in the 1980s, having gone on a home invasion and murder crime spree that was unspeakably vicious in nature. Arrested in 1985, Ramirez was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries in total.
Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel reveals that Ramirez stayed at the hotel in question during his reign of terror, prowling the corridors at night before he ventured outside. Due to the fact that the Cecil is a budget hotel for travelers, shrouded in notoriety due to its long and bloody past, it became a nexus for criminals to hide out, especially serial killers like Ramirez, who wished to lay low while operating covertly. Per The Sun, historian Richard Schave states that Ramirez was known to “walk in his blood-stained underwear, barefoot, up to his floor and into his room” repeatedly. This has also been corroborated by former hotel employees and eyewitness reports, pointing to the fact that rapists and murderers would pay $14 a night at the Cecil, wherein they would return, often bloody, after their night-time terrorizing and heinous murder routines.
The Night Stalker was also regularly spotted in the surrounding Skid Row area during the time and had reportedly checked in at the hotel for several weeks in July and August 1985, shortly before his arrest. However, Ramirez was not the only serial killer to lay low at the Cecil. Not long after, serial killer Jack Unterwger reportedly stayed at the Cecil in the summer of 1991 after his previous prison sentence for murder that had been cut short due to the belief that he had undergone successful criminal rehabilitation. Apart from being the site for murders and other criminal activity, the Cecil Hotel was reportedly where aspiring American actress Elizabeth Short, posthumously known as the Black Dahlia, was seen days before her horrific and still-unsolved murder.
Due to the long-standing, infamous reputation of the Cecil Hotel, and its ties with serial killers like The Night Stalker, the strange circumstances around the Elisa Lam case were under intense public scrutiny, due to the possible involvement of foul play. While it has been officially stated that Elisa died due to accidental drowning amid a manic episode, the hotel’s murky and eerie past haunts the unexplained details of her case. This aspect is explored in great detail in Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, which attempts to look at every angle, criminal or not, that surrounds her tragic death. Owing to its infamous reputation, the Cecil has been the subject of numerous true crime documentaries, along with being the inspiration for American Horror Story: Hotel.