Atlanta police have reopened the case of a Denver physical therapist whose death in September was blamed on injuries sustained nearly 15 years earlier during an attack at the Westin Peachtree Plaza.
Pauline Cerasoli, who was in town attending an American Physical Therapy Association conference, was one of two women assaulted in the downtown hotel over a two-month period from Dec. 1995 to 1996. She was found beaten in her room with severe head trauma that left her in a coma.
Cerasoli, 71, was living in New Hampshire when she died. Two months before she was attacked, Peachtree Plaza maid Elia Banderas, 31, was found beaten to death in a room at the hotel.
"They do have similar MO's," Atlanta police spokesman Curtis Davenport said Thursday, "but we don't know if they're related."
Soon after the attacks, Atlanta police questioned Sonny James Hamilton, a Rock Hill, S.C. construction worker who resembled a computer composite made of a suspect in Banderas' murder.
Hamilton, 23 at the time, had been convicted of sample battery stemming from a 1993 incident at the Westin. According to police records, Hamilton chased two female guests and later shut off power to 10 elevators at the hotel.
He was released from Fulton County Jail in March 1996 after turning himself on a state warrant for violating probation in that case.
While detained he submitted to a polygraph test and gave Atlanta police samples of his hair and blood for comparisons with evidence seized in the hotel attacks.
"I was told by a homicide detective that I passed everything with flying colors, " Hamilton told the Atlanta Constitution in 1996.
However, then-Atlanta Police Chief Beverly Harvard said Hamilton hadn't been ruled out as a supect.
Davenport said he did not know if detectives planned to question Hamilton again now that the Cersaoli case has been re-opened.
