Gone at Midnight, page 19
“Oh, thank you so much!”
They began walking and talking. Joe learned that she was an undergraduate studying at the University of British Columbia. She had a wide range of interests and Joe got the feeling that there was great passion boiling under the surface of Elisa’s demeanor. She seemed hungry, a quality he liked to see in young people—or, people younger than himself, people who weren’t yet jaded by life and ground down to the bone by stress and cynicism.
Joe turned back for a moment. There was something about the young woman, something in her eyes, her smile, a glimmer in her eye, that made Joe want to spill his soul to her. But, given that he didn’t even know her name yet, he decided just to extend his hand and introduce himself.
“I’m Joe, by the way” he said.
“Hey, Joe. I’m Elisa.”
Joe and Elisa befriended each other and over the course of several years shared their summers together at the PNE. There was indeed something special about Elisa. She would walk in and light up the room with her smile. She made people feel at ease; she acknowledged everyone around her. She evinced a deep empathy for people, even those she didn’t know. The Elisa Lam Joe knew loved life, loved participating and being involved. She was brave, a mover, a shaker.
She was so good with people that Joe had spoken with PNE management about giving her more work. He believed she was an asset to the company and could help people. She had an organic compassion for those around her. She had a bright future ahead of her.
Joe remembered all the schoolbooks she brought with her so she could study on her breaks, though she always made time to goof around and laugh.
He remembered the last time he saw Elisa, shortly before he left the company. She was walking up the ramp, walking toward her supervisor, and he waved at her, got her attention; she looked up and waved back, grinning broadly. Their final good-bye was a distant hello.
His time working in a morgue, his memories of securing an enclosed room filled with chambers of bodies, triggered a conjuring of an image in his head—something he didn’t want to see or think about but that he couldn’t control. Elisa laying in the morgue, awaiting her autopsy, the last physical contact with a human she would ever have before her earthly remains were committed back to the elements of nature.
We all live and die on this planet confronting our own mortality, Joe thought. But Elisa was taken far too soon. Her energy was stolen from this world.
He sat up from the floor with a jolt, as though awakened from a falling nightmare. Who—what—had taken his friend from him? At that moment, Joe decided he would get involved.
Soon after speaking with Joe, I decided I would get more involved. I decided to pursue a documentary about the case, enlisting Jared as my co-director. Many websleuths viewed the case as unsolvable, but I wanted to come at it from multiple angles, addressing not only the psychiatric angle but the sociological obsession. And, of course, I still held out hope that new evidence could be unearthed that might help solve the seemingly intractable mystery of Elisa’s death. One thing was for certain, it would not be a typical true-crime journey.
NEW SURVEILLANCE FOOTAGE
Websleuths asked why there was no additional surveillance from the lobby, other hallways, the sidewalk outside the hotel, all of which are surveilled?
If it was important for us to see a grainy, pixelated video of Elisa in the elevator that night, why was it not important for us to see other footage of her?
It turned out there was additional footage, which Tennelle corroborated with a disturbing new disclosure that poured gasoline on the websleuth forums.
“We did see her come in with two gentlemen. She had—they had a box, gave it to her,” he said. “She went up into her—to the elevator. We never saw them again on video.”
Who were these two men? How did they know Elisa? Were they questioned by the police?
Maybe they took her to dinner and the box was leftovers. Did they see her again?
I called the hotel and asked to speak to Amy Price, the general manager.
“Hello, Ms. Price. I hope you’re having a lovely day. I wanted to speak with you about the Elisa Lam case. I understand that this must be a sensitive issue but now that the civil case is over, would you be able to answer a couple of questions?”
“No comment,” she said.
“In all likelihood, the hotel was not responsible for Elisa’s death and all the conspiracy theories are wrong. If you simply cleared up a couple of issues, I think it would go a long way.”
“No comment.”
“Can you comment on why you have no comment?”
“No . . . I mean, no comment.”
I called back a few minutes later and assumed a slightly different voice. I asked the front desk manager whether the hotel was hiring.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “The hotel is actually about to close for renovations.”
The grin I wore at the thought of infiltrating the hotel as a bellhop instantaneously turned into a horrified grimace. Aw no, aw no, I looked it up and sure enough the Cecil Hotel was slated to close indefinitely for renovations.
If we were going to make a documentary about the case, we needed footage from inside the hotel. And we had, uh, one week to trebuchet our asses down there and get it.
WEBSLEUTH WITCH HUNT
As I planned my travels, websleuths honed in on new people they deemed suspects. One of them was a musician with the cognomen “Morbid.” His real name is Pablo.
The whole fiasco started, Pablo told me, when he received a message from his friend, telling him he needed to check out a news clip about him on YouTube. Pablo clicked on the YouTube link and went to 2:56 in the video, as instructed, where there were a few shots of him from a music video he produced and directed in 2009 while visiting San Diego.
The video was for his band Death of Desire, since renamed Dynasty of Darkness, and in it, Pablo plays an alter-ego character of himself named Morbid; he looks like a shorter, slightly stockier version of Marilyn Manson mixed with a Rob Zombie character.
The news clip was from a Taiwanese news channel, which had downloaded clips from his video and used them to suggest that Morbid killed Elisa Lam. Pablo was shocked. Like a nightmare played in fast forward, his mind raced to put the pieces together while watching the full video.
The previous year, in February 2012, almost a year to the day of Elisa’s death, he stayed in the Cecil Hotel. While there, he recorded a video of himself laying in bed, talking about himself and his band. In the background was a picture of some iconic imagery, including a picture of the Black Dahlia, and featured prominently in the video are Morbid’s arms, which are sleeved with gothic tattoos.
It just so happens that Morbid has another band, called Slitwrist, for which he had done another music video that featured an artistically rendered scene of a girl lying dead in a forest. One of the band’s songs has lyrics about someone dead and slumbering in the ocean where no one can hear them scream. Then he ruminates on escaping to China.
These are the breadcrumbs some very irresponsible “websleuths” (though I hesitate to use that designation) used to manufacture a theory that Morbid killed Elisa. He tracked one of them, a woman from Hong Kong, who had seemingly made it her life’s mission to harass him. She had accessed his FB page and downloaded Pablo’s personal photos and posts, then circulated them on forums in order to “prove” he was Elisa’s killer.
There were dozens more doing this, and they filled up the threads of Elisa Lam tribute pages, Facebook threads, Reddit and Websleuth forums, and YouTube videos. Many of these posts went viral.
Morbid soon began receiving hundreds of messages from people on YouTube and other platforms. They called him a murderer and threatened to kill him.
Later, the name of another target, Dillon Kroe, began to surface in the forums. Apparently, the man wore a black trench coat, lived near the Cecil Hotel and had drawn a portrait of Elisa. This was somehow enough information for people to sketch together a scenario in which he was Elisa’s stalker.
Then, Kroe abruptly deleted the portrait image from his social-media accounts, which further fueled the suspicions. On a lark, I looked at his social-media accounts on Instagram and Tumblr and saw that he followed Elisa on these platforms. Moreover, on several of Elisa’s posts, Dillon had left a heart symbol comment. A minority of websleuths, practicing sloppy, arguably libelous speculation, publicly surmised that Kroe and Elisa met online prior to her trip and had planned to meet up while she was in town.
As with Morbid, I reached out to Dillon over Facebook to clarify things: “Hey forgive me for a random question from a stranger, but did you paint something related to the Elisa Lam case a couple years ago? Your name came up in a comment thread for a case I’m writing about.”
He responded quickly: “Hi Jake. Yes, I did. Unfortunately, I cannot answer anything regarding Elisa Lam or the Cecil Hotel at this time. Good luck on your book!”
“Thank you. I’m a bit puzzled by your response. You can’t discuss a painting you made?”
He repeated himself, this time in even more blatant legalese. “Due to confidential subject matter, I cannot in any regard comment or make a statement about anything relating to or about Elisa Lam or the Cecil Hotel (Stay At Main) at this time.”
My first guess was that like Morbid, Kroe had been harassed online by some of the websleuths and had either filed a cease-and-desist order against someone, or had conferred with a lawyer on how to address people who asked him about the case.
Kroe is a talented artist. As I looked through his portfolio, I was impressed. The portrait of Elisa, which was hard to find because Kroe had seemingly scrubbed it from all his pages, featured a strange mark on her forehead. I was interested in the backstory of the painting but would have to wait to learn more.
DISTURBING VIDEOS
My flight to LA was scheduled for 6 A.M., which meant I wouldn’t sleep that night. I drank and sleuthed instead.
I discovered the YouTube account of a Norwegian websleuth named Wilhelm Werner Winther, who appeared to be obsessed with the Lam case. But the nature of his obsession marked a new phase in my investigation.
His first video, posted on June 13, 2015, featured piano music with children singing in the background. A series of still images, annotated with explanations, diagrams, quotes by Elisa, and photoshopped tribute images of Elisa.
Right from the start, his content gets controversial and disturbing. A still image of a Cecil Hotel hallway is photoshopped with an arrow pointing down it, declaring: “The last official observation of Elisa, January 31st, 2013, she walked this way at 11:58 P.M.—with a pistol pointed at her.”
The next image features a diagram of a body in a tank with the metrics (240 cm by 82.5 cm). The text reads: “When Elisa was dropped into water tank by her murderer–Mr B.O. (the graffitist ‘Booger’)–the sudden pressure change created a pipeline interaction described by hotel tenants as a loud ‘bang’ . . . Feb 01 2013 at 00:20 AM).”
The bang Winther referred to likely came from tenant Bernard Diaz, who reported a loud sound coming from the floor above him, which would have been the floor Elisa was moved to on the night she disappeared.
I had no idea who Mr. Booger was, but apparently Winther believed he had identified the killer. He then analyzed the graffiti on the roof, claiming that one of the graffiti symbols scrawled on the water cistern where Elisa’s body was found is an Egyptian hieroglyph from 2100 BCE that means “women enclosed in cylindrical structure.”
Winther knew the case extremely well, down to some of the most obscure details that only someone who has meticulously researched it would. For example, in the next video, he addressed the “sand-like particulate” that is buried deep in the autopsy and never explained.
But his analysis took a dark turn. In video after video after video (there are over a dozen devoted to the case), Winther described in graphic detail the “sodomizing and subsequent killing of Elisa Lam . . .” One section included a picture of a skull and a medieval torture device he claimed was taken by Elisa’s murderer.
His next video and several subsequent videos from the following year contained images from inside the lobby of the Cecil Hotel that show part of the face of a young Asian woman that Winther claimed was Elisa. The implication here is that these are leaked images from the days Elisa checked into the hotel. One of them shows her outside the Cecil with two other young Asian woman, ostensibly the roommates who later complained about Elisa’s bizarre behavior and requested that hotel management move her to a different room.
Of course, it’s extremely unlikely the young woman in the images is actually Elisa, which means Winther either sourced the photos online or traveled to the Cecil at a later time and photographed young Asian women inside and outside the hotel.
I messaged Winther about the case and his claims of Elisa’s murder.
“The rape were [sic] videotaped by Elisa’s would-be abductors/ killers,” he responded. “We can’t reveal our modi operandi or expose personnel on our side in this case. To the extent the USA already has been punished for the official corruption obstructing formal justice in Elisa’s case, it’s impossible to give further details. What we can say, however, is that failure to provide a formal solution will cost the lives of millions of Americans . . . because they won’t have access to 100 percent effective anticancer drugs.”
This went on and on. Another elaborate conspiracy. What was it about this case that triggered so much detailed hysteria?
I was still curious as to whether he had gone to the Cecil. I asked him.
“Yeah—and Elisa has visited me in Norway in 2012.”
EXHIBITION
Joe flew to Vancouver to participate in our documentary. We met up with him right as the 2016 Pacific National Exhibition (PNE) got underway. This was where he and Elisa had worked together for years. The timing was an incredible coincidence and added to the emotional resonance of our time with him.
Joe wanted to let the world know who Elisa was as a person. Her humanity had been covered up in the sensationalism of the case.
But his portrait of Elisa differed from mine. Joe never saw a depressed side to Elisa, had not read her blogs, and seemed skeptical of the mental illness narrative.
After the sun had set, we boarded the fairground’s Ferris wheel with our cameras. Streaks of purple wispy clouds were still backlit by the afterglow of dusk.
I casually reminded him once that people will often hide their depression in public, only exhibiting symptoms unconsciously. He agreed with this and, to my surprise, stated that he had struggled with his own depression for years.
“Everybody has a side of them that they don’t present to the public,” Joe admitted.
His depression, he believed, stemmed from the trauma of his parents getting divorced when he was five years old. He tried to repress this feeling but it was too raw and real to ignore.
As we reached the top of the Ferris wheel, a cold breeze blew in from the ocean. The panoramic glow of the amusement park rides below made for a dizzying spectacle. It was a weird moment, sitting with Joe so high in the night sky, watching him occasionally stare into the distance in silence. Then he would remember something, smile, and start talking again.
Presently, his eyes glazed over and he seemed lost. He shook his head. “What was she doing on that roof that night? It haunts me—it keeps me up at night.”
As we entered the fairgrounds, the hustle and bustle reminded me of the most recent book I’d read, The Devil in the White City, which chronicled and compared the simultaneous construction of the historic Chicago fair—then the biggest civic project ever undertaken—and the killings by H. H. Holmes, generally considered one of the first serial killers. Holmes used the fair to lure young women to his nearby mansion, which he constructed for the express purpose of torturing and killing.
By contrasting humanity at its entrepreneurial best, striving to outdo itself in all manners of architecture, and humanity at its worst, the book shows the duality, the bipolarity, of the human mind, inspired by both angels and demons.
Serial murder of this magnitude of evil was so completely unheard of and shocking at the time that it literally pre-dated the term “serial killer.” The modern diagnosis of “psychopath” was similarly unborn. That such evil could exist in the human mind as a matter of neuropathy was so alien to people, they didn’t even have the language for it.
If it turned out that Elisa wasn’t killed, it may be another instance of humans not having the language to describe something, not being able to conceptualize the reality and power of mental illness.
A LITTLE TASTE OF HELL
Joe recalled that when he learned about the additional surveillance of Elisa entering the hotel with two men, he became determined to question the LAPD about their investigation. This was prior to the release of the autopsy, after which Stearns and Tennelle closed the case. For weeks, Joe had been trying to get in contact with one of the LAPD detectives working on the case. He had already spoken to an RMCP agent, who hadn’t been very helpful but had at least empathized with him.
Joe couldn’t shake his suspicion that there was still more to the story than was being told. In general, he felt there was an unseen world of corruption and evil behind the curtain of our everyday reality. He didn’t believe in conspiracy theories, he believed in conspiracy reality.
There had to be some explanation for Elisa’s behavior in the surveillance tape and her subsequent demise. The Elisa he knew wouldn’t have wandered onto that roof and climbed into that tank. The Elisa he knew was a bright light in a world of darkness.
Then, Joe saw something else online that got his mind racing. The controversial celebrity Tila Tequila had posted a shocking message on Twitter about Elisa.
No stranger to bizarre online posts, Tila had previously advocated for both the Flat Earth and Hollow Earth theories—an oddly paradoxical viewpoint. She believed in a vast alien conspiracy and an Illuminati base on the moon. She once posted that she had already died seven times. Her most controversial activity involved anti-semitic statements and gestures that drew outrage online. She later blamed some of these statements on her own history of mental illness, claiming that in March 2012 she was suicidal and had to check into rehab.
