VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: Body Under the Vegas Hotel Bed NOT a Myth After All

Just days after we tackled the urban legend of the body under the Las Vegas hotel bed, defense attorney Dayvid Figler reached out with a chilling reality check: he personally handled a local case where a corpse was discovered in that exact location.

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 Casino.org. (He represented Grant.)

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

Both assailants are now serving life sentences.

The Myth-ing Piece

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

While that exact scenario has played out in other cities, no contemporary reporting on Sygnarski’s murder includes that detail. News accounts at the time stated only that a hotel employee discovered his body two days later.

That omission—along with the fact that this crime occurred nearly a decade after variants of the story were already circulating—means the legend in its fullest form remains unproven in Las Vegas. (Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand documented several earlier versions in his 1993 book, The Baby Train.)

Even so, a body was found beneath a Las Vegas hotel bed. Although we previously noted that “we can’t say with absolute certainty that this has never happened in Las Vegas,” this comes close enough that we feel corrected. And we always admit when we get it wrong—except, of course, to our wife.

This marks just our third mea culpa in more than 200 weekly columns. We hold ourselves to a high standard because the nature of myth-busting demands it, but perfection remains an aspiration.

Just 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.