What happens in this hotel?
"How can a place become an accomplice to a crime?" asks the director Joe Berlinger (Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, Paradise Lost). We normally think of a person as an accomplice, not a place. Although they exist sites, spaces, buildings, cities that have been especially magnets for murders, kidnappings or the most gruesome stories.
“What happens in Seattle to produce someone like Ted Bundy? And what is it about South Boston that produced someone like Whitey Bulger and a bunch of mobsters? And what about West Memphis, Arkansas, which led to the case of the Robin Hood Hills child deaths and the wrongful conviction of the West Memphis Three?” continues Berlinger.
With that idea born Crime scene, new documentary series Netflix that continues to explode true crime fever and open a new path for that black tourism that takes us to dark places with too many secrets or terrible pasts. The series changes the focus of the genre and Instead of choosing the crime itself or the criminal as the protagonist, it focuses on the place where it happened. And also in some of its victims, as is the case in this first season Disappearance at the Cecil Hotel.
All-inclusive hotel: even mysteries.
The choice of the first crime scene is not accidental, Cecil Hotel is a legendary space in the city of The Angels, precisely because of the number of strange and sad stories that have passed through its rooms and corridors. Shortly after its construction, in 1924, they started calling it The Suicide because of the number of self-inflicted deaths that occurred there. After that nickname changed to Hotel Muerte.
Some will say that the Hotel was born cursed: a large investment by three partners, a large building in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles, in Beaux Arts style, a marble lobby that is still envied today, but with the country's almost imminent economic crash, the Cecil was slow to raise its head. The 1940s experienced a certain splendor, but it would not take long to fall into a spiral of decline that ended up relegating it to being a hotel as huge as it was old, located, moreover, near one of the poorest and most dangerous areas of the city: Skid Row, neighborhood occupied by the growing homeless population from the 70s to today.
The Cecil has been a refuge for many of them over the last few decades. With prices under $50 a night, they could afford it seasonally. As he says, his last manager, Amy Price, parts of the hotel were even reserved for long-term, low-income residents. In this sense, the hotel has also done some social work. But in an area where drugs and crime are a daily problem, the Hotel also ended up being the scene of deaths and strange cases.
The key to the crime: Cecil Hotel.
“Shortly after I started working there, someone died. I was surprised and I remember asking one of the employees if he passed by often. He told me yes. And that was just the first. I saw around 80 deaths in my 10 years there." says Price, who also insists on the good parts of the Cecil, such as the conversion a few years ago into a modern and cheap hostel, stay on main, with which the hotel recovered a bit.
Until 2013 the most famous guest of the Cecil was the serial killer Richard Ramirez, who, it is said, lived here in his cruelest time. But in 2013 the legend of this hotel became viral due to the disappearance of another guest: the student Elisa Lam. The videos of this girl getting in and out of the elevator, wandering through the corridors were shocking and made me think of darker forces and less real inside the Hotel. Sadly, Elisa's body was later found in one of the rooftop water tanks, after customers complained about the taste of the water and the low pressure.
Crime scene.
“After that the hotel became an amusement park”, explains Price, who speaks of the hotel in the feminine, "because she is a woman." “From my office, I would see people climbing the fire escape trying to get to the roof. Every time I went out there were people with cameras. People came to shoot their documentaries. you couldn't trust anyone because everyone just wanted to know what had happened to (Elisa).”
In spite of everything, the Cecil is today a historical monument in Los Angeles. maybe sometime the strength of its architecture surpasses fame of what has happened within him.