Pauline Cerasoli, a 71-year-old White woman, died on September 11, 2010, at a long-term care facility in New Boston, New Hampshire, nearly 15 years after a savage attack in downtown Atlanta left her with injuries she never overcame. She had traveled to the city in February 1996 for an American Physical Therapy Association conference and was staying at the Westin Peachtree Plaza, where what should have been an ordinary hotel stay turned into the defining tragedy of the rest of her life.
When she was found in Room 6414 on February 16, 1996, authorities said she had been badly beaten and strangled. The violence was so severe that she suffered devastating head trauma and fell into a coma, and from that point on, according to later reporting and family accounts, she never truly recovered.
The case took on an even darker shape because Cerasoli was not the only woman attacked inside that hotel during that period. About two months earlier, hotel maid Elia Banderas had been found beaten to death in another room at the same property. Investigators publicly acknowledged the similarity in the methods used in the two attacks, saying the cases appeared to share elements, though police stopped short of declaring them definitively connected. For years, Cerasoli’s case remained an assault investigation because she survived, but after her death in September 2010, Atlanta police reopened it as a homicide, finally recognizing that the beating in 1996 had become a murder stretched across time.
As for suspects, public reporting shows that investigators focused early attention on Sonny James Hamilton, a South Carolina construction worker who resembled a computer composite created in the Banderas investigation. Hamilton had a troubling history tied to the hotel, including a prior conviction for simple battery stemming from a 1993 incident there in which police records said he chased two female guests and later shut off power to multiple elevators. After the 1995 and 1996 attacks, he turned himself in on a probation violation, was questioned by Atlanta police, took a polygraph, and provided hair and blood samples for comparison with evidence gathered in the hotel attacks. Hamilton later said he had been told he passed the testing, but police also said publicly that he had not been ruled out as a suspect. Even so, the available reporting does not show that he was ever charged in Pauline Cerasoli’s death.
No public record surfaced in the sources reviewed showing an arrest, prosecution, trial, or conviction for the killing of Pauline Cerasoli. The Atlanta Police Department still lists her among its cold homicide cases, a stark acknowledgment that the person who entered that hotel room and changed the course of her life has never been brought to court. What remains in the public record is the long, haunting arc of the case: a respected physical therapist comes to Atlanta for professional work, is found brutalized in a hotel room, survives only in the most fragile sense for years, and then dies far from the city where the attack happened, leaving investigators to reopen an old file that still has not been closed by justice.
