Murder at Castaways Hotel

The murder of Cynthia Jo Dane at The Castaways Hotel on the Strip in 1982 garnered barely a mention in the local press. The Castaways was closed in 1987 and demolished in 2006. Pictured in the upper left corner is a room of the Castaways during the time of Dane’s murder. (LVCCLD/UNVL Digital Collection/Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department)

The Castaways Hotel occupied its spot on the Strip for decades before finally being demolished in 2006.  While the hotel no longer exists, the unsolved murder of a young tourist that occurred within its confines remains a dark footnote to the property’s history.

Among the over eleven-million visitors to Las Vegas in 1982 was 24-year-old Cynthia Jo Dane and her father, arriving in the city just a few days before Christmas.  Dane arrived from Dallas on a vacation from her employment with a computer company in the booming Texas tech industry.  Her father arrived from Nebraska, where Dane originally hailed from.  This wasn’t the first trip the two had taken to the city and the father-daughter duo stayed at their favorite spot – Castaways.

Cynthia Dane spent the night of December 23rd gambling at several casinos along the Strip and was last seen alive around 10:00 p.m. by her father while gaming.  At 1:50 a.m., Dane’s body was discovered by her father in her hotel room.  She had been stabbed repeatedly and sexually assaulted.  There is conflicting information on whether Dane was also robbed.

It is worth noting that The Castaways was a raucous little establishment at this time, where the clanging of coins and some of the purest distortion of reality offered by 1980’s Vegas resulted in an assortment of characters interacting in an environment where almost nobody was properly equipped to assess danger, especially that posed by a cunning predator. 

(LVMPD)

The murder of a tourist in a popular Strip hotel apparently warranted only minimal coverage in one of the leading newspapers of the city, with a short report of the crime appearing ten pages deep in the Nevada News section of the Las Vegas Review-Journal next to an ad for a local podiatrist and above an article about a college student bicycling between Reno and Vegas over his winter break. 

A blurb from the following month indicated Dane’s family was offering a reward for any information leading to an arrest in her murder.  As of early 2024, Cynthia Dane’s murder is among dozens in the cold case files of the Metro homicide division awaiting resolution with the advent of new technology that has already solved nearly half-dozen cold cases in the Vegas area.