It's February 19, 2013, Hotel Cecil, LA, California.

After guests complain of discolored in foul water coming from taps and showers,

maintenance workers discover the body of a girl in the rooftop water tank. Police would

identify the body as 21-year-old Canadian student Eliza Lamb, who had been

reported missing at the beginning of the month. Is this a case of death by misadventure? Was it

murder or could it have involved something more mysterious? I'm your host

Cambo. Grab a beer and pull up a deck chair. This is True Crime Island, another

True Crime podcast. So Eliza had been a student at the University of British Columbia and had left her Vancouver home in January 2013 for a trip to Santa Cruz, California.

She would be using Amtrak and public buses.

She would describe her trip as her West Coast tour and plan to stop in San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Francisco.

She arrived in LA on the 26th of January and checked into the Cecil Hotel a couple of days later.

Initially she was assigned a shared room but was moved to a room of her own after two days because her roommates complained of her odd behaviour.

Now the Cecil Hotel has a bit of a reputation. Built during 1920s it fell on hard times during the

great depression of the 1930s the road on which hotel stood main street quickly

declined into the area known as Skid Row, with as many as 10,000 homeless people

living within a four mile radius.

And by the 1950s it had gained a reputation as a residence for transients.

Elizabeth Short, victim of the Black of Dahlia murder, the city's best known unsolved killing supposedly made the Cecil her last stop

before her death in 1964 Goldie Osgoode the pigeon lady of Pershing Square was raped and murdered in her room at the Cecil.

Serial killers Jack Unterwager and Richard Ramirez, the Nightstalker, both resided at the Cecil while active.

Some long-term residents still call the Cecil the suicide because of the number of people

who have jumped to their deaths from the building

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