The body of a dead 21-year-old woman was found in a water tank on the roof of the Cecil Hotel, reported The Los Angeles Times.
The roof of Cecil Hotel, located in downtown Los Angeles, Calif., contained a water tank and residents and guests of the hotel pointedly asked hotel to figure out why the water tasted strange.
After a string of complaints, the hotel's maintenance worker made a roundabout the rooms and found a fourth-floor room with weak water pressure in both the faucet and toilet plumbing. Eventually, maintenance was prompted to tend to the matter and discovered a horrific scene: The body of a 20-year-old woman at the bottom of one of the hotel's water cistern.
The woman was identified as Elisa Lam and a tourist from Vancouver, Canada. Authorities reported she was last seen on Jan. 31 at the hotel.
The Los Angeles Police Department's Robbery-Homicide Division was brought in to investigate, and found Lam had arrived from Vancouver on Jan. 26. And after following through the hotel's surveillance footage, she was last seen inside the hotel's elevator pushing buttons then peeking out the opened doors and waving her arms.
Lam was first reported missing three weeks ago and LAPD searched the premises and the roof with police dogs at hand, however they don't know whether the tanks were overlooked. Detectives haven't uncovered why Lam was visiting or where Lam intended to go.
In the 1980s, the Cecil Hotel was infamously recognized as the usual homes to Richard "Night Stalker" Ramirez who was convicted of 13 murders and Jack Unterweger, an Austrian journalist was involved in a 1974 murder and released on parole, but later convicted of murdering 11 prostitutes during his parole period, reported TIME.
According to The Times, a locked door to the fire escape was the only way to get to the roof, and only hotel employees have access to it. In addition, it has an alarm system, so the hotel staff would have heard it or notified if it was forced open.
