June of 1966

June of 1966 stands as the most violent month in the Overlook Hotel's already checkered history, the moment when the establishment's secret life as a Mafia key club erupted into a triple homicide that would force its closure and reshape its future. The hotel, built between 1907 and 1909 by Robert Townley Watson, had passed through several hands before being purchased by Horace Derwent in 1945 and later sold to a Las Vegas group operating through dummy corporations. By the mid-1960s, the Overlook had become a playground for organized crime figures, a fact that would culminate in the bloodshed of June 1966.

The Gangland Execution

On an unspecified day in June 1966, the Presidential Suite—where Presidents Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt, and Nixon had once stayed—became the site of a gangland-style execution. Vittorio Gienelli, also known as "The Chopper" for his reputed involvement in a Boston slaying twenty years earlier, was shot to death inside the suite along with his two bodyguards, Victor T. Boorman and Roger Macassi. The men were killed with heavy-gauge shotguns at close range. Police were summoned by Robert Norman, the hotel manager, who reported hearing shots and said that guests had seen two men wearing stockings on their faces fleeing down the fire escape and driving off in a late-model tan convertible. State Trooper Benjamin Moorer discovered the two bodyguards dead outside the door of the Presidential Suite and Gienelli's body sprawled on the floor inside, apparently fleeing his attackers when he was cut down. A handwritten note below the newspaper clipping in the scrapbook Jack Torrance later discovered read: "They took his balls along with them."

The Aftermath and Cover-Up

The murder triggered a chain of events that would permanently alter the Overlook's trajectory. The hotel was sold following the shooting, as reported in a column by muckraking journalist Josh Brannigar dated early 1967. The scrapbook Jack found in the basement contained a folded newspaper clipping with a photograph showing the sitting room wall of the Presidential Suite splashed with blood and white flecks of brain matter, with a blank-faced cop standing over a corpse hidden by a blanket. The hotel's management, under Stuart Ullman, proved adept at keeping such scandals out of the papers—Watson later noted that Ullman "about split a gut tryin to keep it out of the papers" and managed to limit coverage to an item in the Denver Post and the local Estes Park paper. The Overlook's reputation, however, was permanently stained; as Watson observed, "Any big hotels have got scandals... just like every big hotel has got a ghost."

The Historical Context

The June 1966 murder was the culmination of a pattern of criminal activity at the Overlook that had begun years earlier. After Derwent sold the hotel in the early 1950s, it passed through a series of owners, including a California group and a Colorado group called Mountainview Resorts that went bankrupt in 1957 amid corruption charges. In 1963, a Las Vegas group called High Country Investments purchased the hotel as an exclusive "key club" for wealthy executives. Investigative journalist Josh Brannigar revealed in a 1964 column that High Country was headed by Charles Grondin, a former Derwent Enterprises executive, and that the club's membership included figures like Charles "Baby Charlie" Battaglia, Richard Scarne, Peter Zeiss, Vittorio Gienelli, and Carl "Jimmy-Ricks" Prashkin—all with extensive criminal records and ties to organized crime. The hotel during this period hosted meetings where "Organization overlords" made deals involving millions of dollars, and the basement archives—the rotting cartons of invoices, newspapers, and records that Jack would later sift through—contained the physical evidence of this sordid history, buried among the yellowed flimsies and bundled papers that chronicled the Overlook's entire existence.

The Legacy

The June 1966 murders marked the end of the Overlook's most notorious era, but the hotel's dark history did not end there. After the shooting, the property was sold again, and by 1967-68 it was being run by Sylvia Hunter, Derwent's former wife, as a high-end brothel where a U.S. senator died of a heart attack while wearing women's clothing. The hotel would later be purchased by Al Shockley and his associates, who hired Ullman as manager and eventually employed Jack Torrance as winter caretaker. The scrapbook that Jack discovered in the basement—a white leather-bound volume containing newspaper clippings, invitations, and handwritten notes documenting the hotel's entire sordid history—had been left there by an unknown hand, perhaps by the manager himself, as if the hotel itself wanted its story told. The bloodstains Danny saw on the wall of the Presidential Suite during the family's tour on closing day were a psychic echo of that June 1966 violence, a residue of the gangland execution that had soaked into the silk wallpaper and would never fully wash away.