True Crime
Articles about true crime in Los Angeles.
What do Lindsay Lohan, Bugsy Siegel and Charles Manson have in common? It’s obvious really – Sunset Boulevard! Find out if there are any other common denominators on the Sunset Strip: True Crime & Ghost Tour, a deep dive of this historic neighborhood (you’d be surprised). The Sunset Strip is one of the most famous…
Amongst Los Angeles hotels the Hotel Cecil holds a unique place. It’s a marquee name that not only a lot of Angelenos know, but also many visitors too. It’s been the subject of numerous documentaries, articles and, even, a TV horror series, yet you can’t actually rent a room there (at time of publication). In…
The Ambassador Hotel was one of Los Angeles’ most famous hotels, which is no mean feat in a city that boasts the Biltmore, the Beverly Wilshire, the Chateau Marmont and many other famous, and infamous, establishments. The Ambassador’s renown came from its reputation as a place of entertainment and glamor from its opening in 1921 all…
Visitors to Los Angeles may not know Griffith Park by name (although many do), but you would struggle to find anyone in the world not familiar with its best-known landmark, the Hollywood Sign. The park’s 4,300-acres make it five times the size of Central Park in New York (it’s not a competition – but if…
The Black Dahlia is one of the most famous unsolved murder cases in criminal history and a subject for numerous documentaries, books, TV episodes and movies. Law enforcement agencies, criminal experts, on-camera presenters and amateur sleuths have all attempted to solve the case, all without success. Rather like the Jack the Ripper murders in London…
America is almost unique among developed countries for its ban on alcohol, beginning in January 1920 (104 years ago this month) with the passage of the Volstead Act, which is known as Prohibition. Although it’s now synonymous with the corruption and organized crime that it later spawned, at the time the intention was to address…
Victor Ponet, a Belgian LA land developer, undertaker and diplomat, bought 240 acres of the old Rancho La Brea in 1890. His new estate consisted mostly of poinsettia fields and was a couple of miles west of a small village that was only just becoming known as Hollywood. Fourteen years later Ponet had a six-hundred…
One of the things we believe in at the Real Los Angeles Tours is talking about the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of history. It’s really the only way of looking at our past, if we ignore the nasty and ugly episodes then we are almost certainly dooming ourselves to continue making the…
The Barclay Hotel is, more or less, right in the navel area of the dark underbelly of downtown Los Angeles.The Hotel Cecil has become famous in the last few years, reaching a peak in 2021 with the Netflix mini-series The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. However the Barclay has just as dark a history as the Cecil,…