Body Under the Vegas Hotel Bed NOT a Myth After All

After we proudly busted the urban legend about the body under the Las Vegas hotel bed last Monday, our friend, defense attorney Dayvid Figler, informed us of at least one body he knows of that was discovered in Las Vegas in precisely this unwelcome configuration.

On April 4, 2001, David Sygnarski, a 44-year-old gambler from Easton, Penn., was lured into a room at the off-Strip Maxim Hotel (today’s Westin) rented by prostitute Paulette “Sissy” Perry and her boyfriend, Kenneth Grant, both of Greensburg, Penn.

“I only knew because it was my case,” Figler told us. (He represented Grant.)

According to court records, the couple attempted to rob Sygnarski when he entered the room. He resisted, and they stabbed him to death. His body was “wrapped in garbage bags and stuffed under a bed in the hotel,” the the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported at the time — a detail we missed last week.

Both assailants are now serving life sentences.

The Myth-ing Piece

Still, Sygnarski’s case lacks one essential element of the classic urban legend: the hotel guests detecting a foul odor that leads them to the gruesome discovery under the very hotel bed they’re occupying.

Though this scenario (or something close to it) happened multiple times in other cities, no news account about the Sygnarski case includes this detail. Reporting at the time stated only that a hotel employee discovered the body two days later.

That omission — along with the fact that this crime occurred nearly a decade after several versions of the Las Vegas bed-body story were already circulating — means the story in its entirety remains a myth until proven otherwise. (Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvard documented those earlier versions in his 1993 book The Baby Train.)

Still, there was a body found beneath a hotel bed in Las Vegas. And even though we did write that “we can’t say with absolute certainty that this has never happened in Las Vegas,” we feel like we were proven wrong. And we always admit when we feel that way. Except to our wife, of course.

This marks our third mea culpa in more than 200 weekly myth-bustings. We like to think we hold ourselves to a higher standard than most reporters — the nature of this column demands it — but we’re not always as perfect as we aspire to be.

Ask our wife.

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on Casino.org. Click here to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email corey@casino.org.