In the 1970s, Los Angeles tried to confine homeless people to nearby Skid Row, and the Cecil became a kind of quasi-shelter like many of the formerly grand hotels along Main Street - and the site of the kind of crime that generates fear rather than sympathetic victims. Even before Richard Ramirez lived there during his Night Stalker killing spree in the 1980s, there were stories: the woman who jumped from the ninth floor and flattened a man on the sidewalk below the Elizabeth Short sighting there shortly before she was cut in two and became forever known as the Black Dahlia, victim of L.A.’s most notoriously unsolved murder. But in many ways, Lam’s story has proven to be an anomaly for the Cecil, which has been infamous for nearly all of its 94 years: She appears to have only died at the hotel rather than somehow because of it. It was the kind of horrific noir tale that always felt like an echo of some other rainy, black-and-white Los Angeles playing out in real time in the drought-stricken modern city. The fact about the hatch, and the timing of its revelation, presents a serious problem for the series: How is there a “Crime Scene” if there never was a crime?Įven before it became an online sensation, the story was followed breathlessly by Los Angeles cable news in 2013. Although her body was naked when she was found, it showed no signs of trauma, and the only major red flags in her toxicology report were the prescription medications she took for bipolar disorder and depression that were not present in her blood. This detail, which was gleaned from a 2015 lawsuit Lam’s family brought against the downtown Los Angeles hotel and corroborated in an interview with the former employee who found her, pretty effectively eliminates years’ worth of conspiracies about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of the 21-year-old Canadian tourist. Despite the video, Lam appears to have either fallen or jumped into the tank and drowned.
So consider this both a spoiler alert and a giant asterisk to place next to the first three episodes: When Lam’s body was found in a water tank on the Cecil’s rooftop, the access hatch on top of the tank was open, not closed as the police initially reported. There is one thing you should know before watching the Netflix docuseries Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel - but it isn’t revealed until the fourth and final episode. The last, unnerving glimpse of Lam in the elevator went viral and it has sparked a wild online afterlife, a season of American Horror Story, and now a new Netflix docuseries that puts her life and death, and that of the infamous Cecil Hotel, into the ever-popular true-crime format - which is a troubling approach to take for a story in which it is increasingly clear that no crime ever took place. Nineteen days after she was recorded in the elevator, her body was found in one of the water tanks on the roof. The video, released by LAPD in 2013, is the last known sighting of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian tourist who disappeared while she was staying at the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Nothing dramatic happens, but there’s a shiver-inducing sense that something is wrong.
She hides in the corner for a time, and her movements become more odd and exaggerated. She then begins to peer up and down the hallway, stepping in and out of the door (and out of the security-camera frame), as if she’s waiting for - or trying to avoid - someone. It’s one of the more indelible and eerie moments in internet video history: A girl in a red hoodie walks into an empty elevator and presses the buttons for more than a handful of floors. Spoiler alert: Major plot details revealed within.
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