The Orbit Inn Motel and Restaurant was opened in 1964 at 707 East Fremont Street, between the El Cortez and the Western. It was a 73-unit, 3-story motel -- part of the Best Western chain -- and featured free TV and a rooftop pool. In its publicity blurb, the Orbit boasted that it was "cooled by refrigeration.
Basically a typical and unremarkable downtown budget joint, the motel was described by one former guest we came across as "a dump, but clean enough," which had cost $250,000 to build. The Orbit Inn was unremarkable, that is, until the night of January 7, 1967, when a massive blast ripped through the building, killing six and injuring eight.
The FBI investigation into the tragedy revealed that although the explosion was caused deliberately, it was not related to the mob or any kind of organized crime. It was instead the result of guest Richard James Paris, a 28-year-old Army deserter, committing suicide by firing a .25 handgun into a pile of some 50 sticks of dynamite, which he'd purchased in Phoenix. Among the dead were Paris' wife Christine, plus two other couples.
Local police, together with a Nellis Air Force Base demolition expert, estimated that the blast, which took out part of the roof and collapsed floors to the ground, easily involved ten times more explosives than would have been necessary to kill Paris or anyone else. An employee at the El Cortez who experienced the explosion said that it felt as if that hotel had "moved three inches," according to a report in the Las Vegas Sun, which also carried photographs of the devastation.
When emergency services arrived on the scene, they found utter carnage: All of the victims had been decapitated and one skull was found lying in an adjoining alley, having been blown through the roof and over the wall. A woman's leg was found embedded in a wall, while a severed female hand bearing a wedding band was found lying on a bloody paper bag.
As far as we could ascertain, no motive for Paris' actions was ever confirmed, although one report stated that he was "bent on suicide because of his troubles in the service." We read one report that said inexplicable wires were found in the back of Paris' car, suggesting that he had initially planned to detonate his bomb elsewhere, but instead just fired his weapon into the dynamite in the motel. As one particularly insightful expert at the time put it, "A man doesn't accidentally take 50 sticks of dynamite up to his motel room." Indeed.
As you can see from the photographs, the Orbit Inn was all but destroyed by the blast, but it did reopen in 1976 and remained in business until 1987. Thereafter, it became a Motel 6, then the Fremont Plaza, which is now closed and, we gather from your question (we hadn't heard), due to be demolished along with other properties in the vicinity, including the iconic Blue Angel Motel, as part of the redevelopment of downtown.
