Apr. 15--A $4.6 million settlement was reached Monday in a lawsuit filed by the parents of a Florida woman against the owners and managers of a Crestwood hotel where she was beaten to death in 1996. 

Attorney James Velasco of Chicago, who represented Lin and Sol Toder of Pennsylvania, said the case was to have gone to trial on April 28, which would have been Nan Toder's 40th birthday. 

Toder, a wholesale floral saleswoman from Hollywood, Fla., was killed at the Hampton Inn in Crestwood where she was staying while attending a training seminar for a wholesale floral distributor. 

Christopher Richee, 34, who was the hotel's maintenance manager, was convicted of her murder last year and was sentenced to life in prison. 

Richee disabled a lock on a door between Toder's room and one that was vacant, choked her with pantyhose and struck her in the head with a machetelike instrument. 

Velasco said hotel owners were negligent by not doing a background check on Richee and not adequately monitoring the actions of its employees. The Hampton Inn on Cicero Avenue had no key control and some employees used master keys at will, he said. 

"The hotel industry as a whole has done a very good job of fooling their customers," Velasco said. "People have assumed that hotels are safe. And they would assume you wouldn't give a grand master key, which would open anybody's door, to anybody who works at the hotel." 

An attorney for the defendants declined to comment on the settlement. The defendants include Crestwood Hotel Partners Limited Partnerships, the owner of the hotel, and the Hampton Inn franchiser, Promus Hotels, of Memphis. 

Sol Toder said in an interview from his suburban Pittsburgh home that he has no plans for the settlement money other than to spend it on the family's efforts to raise awareness about hotel safety and to press for laws requiring hotel safety measures, such as background checks for employees. 

He said background checks can cost as little as $20, but the hotel industry resists doing them. 

"The single biggest thing is who has keys," he said. "And in this case, this was a real, real, real bad guy. He was terrible." 

Lin Toder said she hopes their efforts to change laws will make people aware of the risks they face in hotels. "I think what we're after is awareness," she said. "People have to be aware of their safety." 

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