jili tutorial

Body Under the Vegas Hotel Bed NOT a Myth After All

By jili tutorial · September 1, 2026

Body Under the Vegas Hotel Bed NOT a Myth After All

Last Monday, we proudly debunked the urban legend about a dead body found under a Las Vegas hotel bed. But our friend, defense attorney Dayvid Figler, quickly alerted us to at least one real case that matches this grim scenario.

A Real-Life Discovery in 2001

In 2001, a body was discovered under a bed in a Las Vegas hotel room. David Sygnarski, a 44-year-old gambler from Easton, Pennsylvania, was lured into a room at the off-Strip Maxim Hotel (now the Westin) on April 4, 2001. The room was rented by prostitute Paulette “Sissy” Perry and her boyfriend, Kenneth Grant, both from Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

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

The Crime and Its Aftermath

According to court records, the couple attempted to rob Sygnarski when he entered the room. He resisted, and they stabbed him to death. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported at the time that his body was “wrapped in garbage bags and stuffed under a bed in the hotel” — a detail we missed during our initial myth-busting. Both assailants are now serving life sentences.

The Missing Element: A Classic Legend’s Key Detail

Sygnarski’s case lacks one essential component of the classic urban legend: the hotel guests detecting a foul odor that leads them to the gruesome discovery under the very bed they were occupying. While this scenario (or something close to it) occurred multiple times in other cities, no news account of the Sygnarski case includes such a detail. Reporting from the time states only that a hotel employee found the body two days later.

Myth or Reality?

That omission — along with the fact that this crime happened nearly a decade after various versions of the Las Vegas bed-body story were already circulating — means the full story remains a myth until proven otherwise. Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand 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 wrote that “we can’t say with absolute certainty that this has never happened in Las Vegas,” we feel 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’d like to be. 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 [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Casino.org.