WHEN Mike and Sabina Baugh noticed a strange taste and low water pressure at the Los Angeles hotel where they were staying, they complained and were moved to another room.
But the couple, from Plymouth, could never have guessed the horrifying truth behind the foul taste and brown tinge of the tap water at the Cecil Hotel.
Hours after they moved, the decomposing body of tourist Elisa Lam, who had been missing for over two weeks, was found in the water tank on the roof.
The mysterious death of the 21-year-old Canadian in 2013, which features in Netflix documentary The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, has never been solved.
The new series, available from today, examines the unsolved case through the eyes of the hotel staff, police officers and witnesses who were at the scene, as well as web sleuths who have their own theories about Elisa’s death.
In an exclusive interview with the Sun, 35-year-old composer Mike recalled the moment he discovered they had been brushing their teeth, showering and even drinking the water containing Elisa’s rotting flesh.
“A reporter outside the hotel told us there was a body in the tank and I realised this was what caused the water pressure problem, the discolouration, the taste,” he says.
“I was speechless. I felt unclean, like I wanted to drink 12 bottles of water to flush it out of my system and have a shower, then have another shower.
“I felt physically sick.”
Dirty, smelly rooms and dark past
From its grand lobby, with marble pillars and glass fronted coffee shops, the Cecil Hotel, in downtown Los Angeles, looked the height of luxury.
But behind the imposing facade, Mike and Sabina – who were staying in the US for the first time – found the decaying hotel’s 700 rooms left a lot to be desired.
“When we walked in, it looked like it had on the website,” he says. “It was marble, very big and grand, European in style. But the minute you got into the elevator and went up, it was like a time machine, taking you back to an old, abandoned derelict hotel.
“The rooms were very bare and dirty. It felt like the carpet had never been cleaned, and everything had a strange smell, from the walls to the old appliances.”
When they booked the holiday through a well-known travel agent, the couple were also unaware the hotel was in LA’s Skid Row, home to addicts, criminals and thousands of homeless people.
“We were going out, exploring and coming back late at night and we realised the people gathering around and congregating outside were not the kind of people you’d expect to see around the hotel,” says Mike. “It was a bit of a shock.”
Dark past of serial killers and suicides
The grandiose lobby of the Cecil, built in 1924, also hid a dark past, with a history of suicides, murders and prostitution taking place within its walls.
Serial killer Richard Ramirez – known as the Night Stalker – was a former resident and dumped his bloody clothes in the basement after committing a string of murders, in 1985.
Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger also stayed in the hotel in 1991 to pay homage to Ramirez.
It was also the last place actress Elizabeth Short – dubbed the Black Dahlia – was seen before her mutilated body was found in a local park, in 1947.
Retired telephone operator ‘Pigeon’ Goldie Osgood was raped and strangled in her room in 1964, too.
Many of the city’s prostitutes used the cheap rooms to entertain clients and numerous guests took their own lives, including one, Pauline Otton, 27, who jumped from a window, landing on pensioner George Gianinni on the pavement below and killing them both.
Amy Price, who managed the hotel for 10 years from 2007, says in the documentary: “When the maintenance manager gave me a tour he would say ‘suicide in this room,’ ‘guest died there…’
“There were overdoses, suicides, murders. I never got used to that.”
Bizarre CCTV video sparks online mystery
Vancouver-born Elisa checked into the hotel for four days, in 2013, and was sharing room 506 – a female bunk room – with three strangers.
Elisa, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was offered another room after the girls said she was “acting strangely” but, before she moved, she mysteriously vanished, leaving behind her clothes, wallet and prescription medication.
On February 1, the day she was due to check out, her parents reported her missing after not hearing from her for three days.
Knowing she usually called her parents daily, police put a team of 18 detectives on the case and conducted a search of the hotel, before releasing the last known footage of Elisa, taken by CCTV camera in the lift.
The bizarre video, which shows Elisa hiding in the corner of the lift before gesticulating wildly at someone or something that appears to be in the corridor outside, went viral.
But when Mike and Sabina arrived at the hotel, almost two weeks after Elisa’s disappearance, there was still no sign of her.
“We got out of the cab and the first thing we saw was an A4 piece of paper pinned to a lamppost with Elisa’s picture, saying ‘Missing person’,” says Mike.
“We put it to the back of my subconscious and didn’t really think about it again until the day we found out what had happened.”
As they settled in, the couple noticed the odd-tasting water in their room, but assumed that it could be used for cleaning their teeth.
“I can’t describe the taste because I have never drunk anything terrible enough to compare it to,” says Mike.
“We knew that it might not be safe to drink so we had bought lots of bottled water anyway but we were showering, brushing our teeth, drinking coffee and tea and all the utensils we used had been washed with the water from the water tank on the roof.
“Also some nights were so hot and, being from the UK, we weren’t used to the heat so we drank all of our bottled water.
“Then we got thirsty in the middle of the night, but we couldn’t go down to the lobby, because we didn’t want to walk through the stinky corridors. It was creepy at night because there were lots of mentally unwell, homeless people staying there. So we ended up drinking water from the tap.
“After they moved us, we noticed the water was more discoloured. It was transparent, but with yellowy-brown tinge. But what we really noticed was the low water pressure.”
Mike and Sabina weren’t the only guests to complain, and on Feb 19, Amy Price asked the caretaker Santiago Lopez to check out the four tanks on the roof.
After climbing a ladder to the top, Lopez opened the hatch and saw a horrific sight.
“That’s when I saw her,” he tells the show. “She floated up, she was white. I was surprised. I thought ‘this is the one we are looking for.’”
LAPD detective Tim Marcia, who led the investigation says when the police arrived: “Elisa Lam was floating face up, she was in a considerable state of decomposition and naked.
“Her clothes were found at the bottom of the tank.”
Held in lobby for 12 hours
When Mike and Sabina woke the next morning, all hell had broken loose.
“We planned to complain about the water again but we didn’t get the chance because when we woke up, helicopters, ambulances, fire engines and every police car in the universe seemed to be heading to this one location.
“We went down to the lobby but because of what was happening, I walked straight to the entrance of the building and spoke to a reporter who told me about the body in the tank.
“He kept talking but I had nothing to say because I was just kind of adding it all up in my head.
“What made the matter worse was that we were then in a kind of hostage situation because the hotel decided to keep us in the lobby, for 12 hours.
“They wouldn’t let us get anything from our room or use our phone and they cut off the internet.
“We didn’t have anything to eat or drink but we felt so sick we couldn’t have stomached it anyway.”
Web theories suggest supernatural cause or murder
Elisa’s death was ruled as accidental drowning, and there was no evidence of sexual assault or physical trauma.
But many theorists believe that Elisa couldn’t have got through the door to the roof, which was locked by staff, or opened the heavy hatch to the tank and climbed inside.
Her bizarre behaviour in the lift has also led to multiple theories, with some believing she was trying to escape a pursuer and others suggesting that supernatural forces were at play.
One theory was that it was a copycat murder of the Jennifer Connelly and Tim Roth horror film Dark Water, where discoloured water comes out of hotel taps and a little girl falls into the water tank on the top of the building.
Mike also doesn’t believe that Elisa’s death was accidental.
“Based on just the logistics and the kind of person I’ve heard her to be, it seems to me that it was murder,” he says.
“Yes, mental illness is probably a part of it in some way but people take advantage of those with mental illness as well.
“Given how she ended up where she ended up, and also the circumstances around the clothes, it doesn’t seem to me something that she did of her own accord.”
Nightmares and unanswered questions
Mike and Sabina were eventually moved to a separate hotel, paid for by an LA local who also took them to dinner.
“A lot of Americans wanted to help us out because they felt bad that two British people had a really bad experience and those acts of kindness really helped and distracted us,” says Mike.
But the trauma of their holiday experience hit home when they arrived back in the UK and Sabina suffered nightmares.
“After a while, we started thinking about it again,” says Mike. “I don’t think about it every day but it does play on my mind.
“Sabina is more in touch with her sensitivity so she thinks about it a lot deeper than I do. I will stop myself from going down that rabbit hole, which is not necessarily a strength on my part.
“It takes bravery to confront these experiences so in some ways she’s dealt with it in a better manner but it has affected her.
“I try to think about how I’d feel if this was my daughter.
“It’s easy to think ‘I drank this water and that’s terrible’ but how do her parents feel? How does her family feel to still not have answers? It puts things into perspective.
“That’s the reason Sabina and I wanted to do the documentary, because it sheds more light on the case.
“Maybe one day, they’ll find out what happened and there’ll be closure, because I don’t imagine her family have any closure at the moment.”
Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel starts on Netflix on February 10
