Gone at Midnight, page 21
The morning sunlight streaming in the window, the sound of children laughing and riding their bikes, the fact that it is Saturday morning and the birds are chirping, these external realities rush into you and crash into your face. The anxiety, the memory of the dream you had the night before in which you bared your soul to everyone you’ve ever known, and now they’re all gone and you’re stuck here, unable to flee, trapped with yourself in this wretched timeline where everything has gone wrong.
You want to make pancakes for your wife and kids but suddenly realize they don’t exist. There’s a glitch in the matrix, and you’re nostalgic for a Saturday morning that’s taking place in another universe.
I race out into the living room, hoping by some miracle that a new space will feel more reasonable. But I see through the window that cars are driving across the sun-baked bridge to go to the beach. The happy people, who are fulfilled with their lives—who are exactly where they should be—are taking trips with their families and friends. They are creating and absorbing the experiential legacy that will one day nurture them and allow them to know they lived their lives. They’re in the right universe.
I go back to sleep, climbing back into the dreamworld—the dimension where things fall my way, where I don’t sabotage myself, where maybe I can catch a glimpse of my wife, kids, dog, and white picket fence—where I long to stay.
This is what I have trouble explaining to a doctor.
“I’m tired.” I started to tear up, my voice cracking. I had never done this in front of a doctor. “I’m just so tired of not knowing what’s wrong with me. This illness—I’ve been battling for fifteen years. I’m just, fucking, sick of it.”
He nodded, soberly, printed out a one-page article, and handed it to me. To my surprise, the title was “Should We All Take a Little Bit of Lithium?”
I didn’t tell him about the synchronicities (unless you’re lucky enough to have Jung as your primary, what is a psychiatrist going to say about that?) but I did mention my upcoming trip as a source of anxiety.
“Traveling always makes me anxious, especially Los Angeles,” I said. “But the hotel I’m visiting is known for serial killers, suicides, and murders. It may be haunted, too.”
“Why in the hell are you going there?” My doctor, who I’d never heard swear, asked with genuine concern.
“I have to. I’m—I’m investigating it. Hopefully, it doesn’t destroy, uh, kill me.”
I laughed. He did not.
CHAPTER 17
The Last Bookstore
I PREPARED FOR MY RETURN to the Cecil Hotel, arranging for a drone operator to photograph the exterior. I also doubled-down on research, looking for any of the latest information. I can’t imagine that there’s ever been a case that is so popular for which so little is known.
What was Elisa doing on the 14th floor? Her room, though it had changed, was on the 5th floor. The upper floors are supposedly where the long-term residents live. Why was Elisa up there?
And speaking of her changed room, who were the supposed roommates that had complained of her behavior? Had the police questioned them? It seemed almost unbelievable that with a case this popular, no one had ever spoken to these roommates?
What was the apocryphal story of the allegedly disturbing postcard sent by Elisa to an “Amanda”? This was an online rumor that websleuths claimed had originated from the cousin himself. But there was no additional info about it.
What was Elisa doing on January 26 and 27? She was in LA but hadn’t yet checked in to the Cecil. Who did she stay with? In attempting to retrace Elisa’s steps, the question I kept returning to was whether Elisa had intended to meet someone in Los Angeles.
Some online commenters had questioned why Elisa was wearing men’s shorts several sizes too big for her. Not exactly characteristic of a fashionista while in Los Angeles, they observed. One insensitive commenter even floated the idea that such a garment looked “post-coital.”
THE TIMESTAMP MAP
One websleuth I met online had gone to great lengths to try and retrace Elisa’s movements in Southern California. I met Robin on a forum thread for the website Crisis Forums, where a number of websleuths were still toiling away on the case, desperately looking for any clue, any thread of a yarn that could be pulled on.
Like me, Robin had been studying Elisa’s blogs. But his work was less focused on the content of Elisa’s posts than the frequency, time, location, and device information. Using the metadata provided by the source code of her social-media pages, he had developed a unique kind of digital forensics, which he called a “timestamp map.”
By studying the metadata of Elisa’s posts, he determined that (1) Elisa was on Tumblr pretty much every day without fail for two years prior to her West Coast tour and (2) Her most common time of activity was late at night. (3) Elisa definitely arrived at the Cecil Hotel on the twenty-eighth, not the twenty-sixth, as some believed. (4) Elisa did not use her laptop for any Tumblr posts for 2.5 days before her disappearance. (5) She did not use her Blackberry for Tumblr posts because she had lost her phone, and possibly another phone while in San Diego
In his day by day breakdown of Elisa’s posts, Robin distinguishes between queued posts and non-queued posts. Tumblr allows you to schedule when you’re going to post something and it appears Elisa used this feature quite a bit. [This would also explain Elisa’s posthumous posts, though it doesn’t make them any less eerie.] A queued post does not signify where or when Elisa was when that post was published; a non-queued post does.
Robin’s map shows Elisa arriving in San Diego on the twenty-fourth after a missed flight that kept her up almost all night. As a result, she slept most of the day, which we know because she posted about it from her hostel. On either the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth, she went to the San Diego zoo.
Robin believes that Elisa didn’t arrive in Los Angeles until the twenty-eighth. Therefore, he says, Elisa’s post about “creepers” on the twenty-sixth was referring to the area around her San Diego hostel, possibly in Little Italy.
Her Speakeasy visit would also have been a San Diego venture. Robin says that on the twenty-sixth at 11:31 P.M., Elisa wrote a non-queued post about how the Italian and Mexican guys come at her strong, calling them “creepers.” It then appears that she went to a midnight Speakeasy show for a couple hours. She tweeted about it at 12:57 A.M. using her Blackberry. So at some point between 1 A.M. and 2:30 A.M. when she returned to her hostel, she lost her Blackberry. Her next post, at 3:50 A.M. was with her laptop, when she posted that she had lost her phone.
Robin believes she traveled via bus to Los Angeles on the twenty-eighth and arrived at the Cecil Hotel in the late afternoon when it was getting dark.
Robin even had a theory as to why Elisa was in LA. Or at least he was aware of one of the activities Elisa was excited about there. Evidently, Elisa attended a taping of the Conan O’Brien show. In fact, there is video of her sitting in the crowd. Robin stated that she attended this taping on January 30, when Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon, was a guest. Elisa follows Gupta on Twitter, and Robin supposes that she was interested in the neuroscience of mental illness.
Her last non-queued post was on the twenty-ninth. On this day, in the late afternoon, Elisa went out and bought gifts at The Last Bookstore. This was the last time she would be seen outside of the hotel. Two and a half days later she was filmed in the elevator, whereafter she disappeared.
THE LAST (KNOWN) PERSON TO SPEAK WITH ELISA
The Last Bookstore used to be a bank. Its walls are lined with ornate marble, and the rooms the books are stored in are old vaults, complete with pressured locking doors. Some of the hallways veer into curving labyrinthine sections, with a tunnel made of hardbacks. They used one of the old bank vaults to house a few genres. They have a section for vinyl records, too.
The manager of The Last Bookstore, Katie Orphan, made headlines when she reported that she had spoken with Elisa on the day she vanished. This was widely reported to be the last conversation with Elisa and the last sighting of her outside of the hotel.
Katie told reporters that Elisa was “very outgoing, very lively, very friendly.” Their conversation was apparently pretty surface level, though, centering around whether her purchases would be too cumbersome for the remainder of her trip. “It seemed like she had plans to return home, plans to give things to her family members and reconnect with them.”
Orphan, like so many others, did not have a good feeling about the case. “The fact that it doesn’t feel like a very satisfying conclusion to her story, I think, has helped keep it fresh in my mind. But it also just seems almost a dismissive way of looking at her death and just saying: ‘Well, it was an accident and we’re done.’ . . . Mysteries like this should not remain unsolved.”
But Orphan, it turns out, was not the only person who had an encounter with Elisa at The Last Bookstore.
In the course of our investigation, we found a man named Tosh Berman who spoke with Elisa at The Last Bookstore on January 31, 2013.
Tosh Berman, an LA native born and raised, lives in Silverlake but frequently goes downtown. He likes the mixture of cultures and ethnicities there, the bustle of working-class denizens, students, tourists, and homeless people all bouncing off each other. But most of all he loves the eclectic architecture.
However, there is at least one part of downtown that Tosh avoids: Broadway and 5th, a couple blocks from the Cecil Hotel, which he calls the Gates of Hell. He says the intersection and neighboring blocks are well-known for weird occurrences, car accidents, disturbed transients and a general dark energy. When he walks through the area, he says, his spider senses are activated.
On January 31, 2013, Tosh journeyed downtown to present some books to the public for his press TamTam Books. He had time to kill, so he browsed for vinyl records at The Last Bookstore. The vinyl vault was mostly empty except for him, another man, and a young woman he later identified as Elisa Lam. Elisa had a stack of records and, like Tosh, was browsing for more.
But, contrary to manager Katie Orphan’s description, Tosh noticed something peculiar about Elisa. Though she was friendly, her disarmed, unguarded demeanor unnerved him.
Elisa asked him which album would be better, a Herb Alpert or a Miles Davis. This bothered him as a music lover, he joked, but as the conversation went on, he began to sense an affectation to Elisa that was both aggressive and desperate. He got the feeling that Elisa needed to communicate. While the other guy in the room avoided her and wandered off, Tosh remained and spoke to her. But Elisa’s behavior became more erratic and Tosh sensed that she was psychologically disturbed.
“I was worried because she seemed mentally unwell. It was alarming how open she was with me, too open for a stranger in downtown LA. You have to be careful,” he said.
Tosh found her appealing at first but her behavior made him uncomfortable. She never asked him his taste in music, he said, disappointed. She didn’t ask about his life. It was more like she was talking at him.
“It felt like a medicine issue, like a manic phase . . . and I didn’t want to get involved, didn’t want to be in her world or sucked into her internal landscape.”
Finally, he politely said good-bye and left.
Weeks later, when he saw the surveillance tape on the news, he was shocked. But Tosh couldn’t recognize Elisa by the person in the elevator footage, couldn’t even determine the ethnicity. He only recognized her after the local news showed a picture of Elisa wearing a scarf, the same scarf she had been wearing at The Last Bookstore.
Tosh described the footage as compelling but creepy, as it seemed like Elisa was fluctuating between many moods. Tosh, remembering how Elisa acted in person, feels she was seeing things in her own head. He didn’t get the feeling that someone else was outside the elevator. Elisa was, once again, painfully alone.
“It’s almost more scary to me that no one was chasing her. I was more afraid of her than what could be outside the elevator.”
A friend of his with law-enforcement connections told him to contact the police and he did, leaving a message for a detective. But no one ever returned his call. Here was a man who had conversed with the victim on the day she disappeared, and the police did not question him at all.
But Tosh says the way she was acting in the elevator footage was not on display earlier that day when he saw her. However, he had found it odd that she was communicating so openly with a stranger. He felt she endangered herself and could have easily been manipulated, exploited, and possibly physical harmed.
“It felt like I had a power over her, like I could have easily invited her for a drink, and it bothered me because mentally I don’t think she was prepared to be talking to strangers alone in a dangerous city in her state.”
He was particularly surprised by the interview with Orphan because his perception was so different. While she struck Tosh as a fundamentally nice and interesting young woman, Elisa seemed to be in a disturbed state of mind and was a danger to herself.
Overall, the case is haunting and mesmerizing for Tosh.
“It’s like Twin Peaks or a David Lynch narrative,” Tosh said. “It’s dreamlike. Most stories have a beginning, middle, and an end. This story just has these bizarre circumstances that are unexplained. It’s still unclear what happened to her.”
Did she climb up the ladder to the water tank herself? he wonders. Or did someone put her over their shoulder and carry her up there? They’re both improbable, neither makes sense. Part of the weird fascination of this case, he believes, is the non-narrative nature of the mystery. There’s no sense that this story will ever have resolution and that disturbs and entices people on a fundamental level.
Tosh then noted, in a statement that I wasn’t sure what to make of, that he felt he had a certain power over Elisa and could have “invited her over for a drink.”
This brings us to an important point related to the connection between mental illness and predation. Young women with mental illnesses are more vulnerable to crime. That Elisa had bipolar disorder and may have suffered a psychotic episode while at the Cecil Hotel does not preclude homicide or some kind of foul play being involved as well. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Predators target people who are vulnerable and alone. Someone who may be less likely to be believed when she claims someone is following her—such as Elisa, who it seems had developed a reputation as a troublesome guest within the hotel—is an even more ideal target for the strategic predator.
The question of what danger Elisa faced is one of the central investigations here and is a two-part question. To what extent was Elisa endangered by sexual predators, drug abusers, or violent transients or locals outside the hotel and inside the hotel (possibly even employed by or affiliated with the hotel)? This question would take some time to answer.
The second part of the question was: To what extent was Elisa a danger to herself because of her worsening mental state? She describes the problem pretty explicitly in her blogs:
“I’m fine if I don’t open my mouth but as soon as I do and start talking, I can get in trouble,” she wrote. “My mouth is my downfall and it will get me in trouble. I already do so many stupid things. I have troubles knowing where the boundaries are.”
Elsewhere, she wrote: “I take things too far and I have no filter, little self-control and that’s something I have to work on.”
While traveling, Elisa seemed to feel especially socially inept. She wrote a post about it called “How to meet people (and possibly make friends) in TWO easy steps!”
Her plan, which she probably jokingly said she researched during her weeklong stay in an Ontario hostel on December 6, 2012, called for the following: “1. You go up to them and SHOUT talk very quickly with a maniacal smile. 2. And then run away.”
Despite her social alienation, Elisa seemed determined to overcome it and meet new people. She expressed a strong desire to have a group of friends. But this desire conflicted with an intense anxiety she feels as well as a fear of “creepers.” She refers to creepers approaching her days before she disappeared but this wasn’t the first time, nor was it the first time she openly discussed the idea of being stalked.
“Thanks to the internet we record our lives and put it on some stage for creepers to stalk and follow so they can stop thinking about their own troubles for a moment and escape into someone else’s.”
This is a double-edged comment: She fears online followers turning into real-life stalkers; and she also recognizes that the Internet she loves so much turns into escapism.
“The INTERNET IS FULL OF PEDOPHILES,” she writes. “They’ll suddenly pop out of nowhere and try to attack you.”
This falls in line with what she blogged on January 10, 2013, only twenty-one days before her disappearance: “If you’re a young girl and an older attractive man notices you and is chatting you up, he wants to have sex with you. It really is that simple and sad.”
Robin, the websleuth from England who analyzed Elisa’s digital forensics trail, does not believe Elisa was in Los Angeles to meet anyone, nor does he even believe Elisa met with a potential suitor. Robin thinks Elisa’s demise was an inside job.
WHY WAS ELISA ON THE 14TH FLOOR?
After the bookstore, we do not have a direct chronology of what happened next. In fact, this is the million-dollar question. But Robin has a hypothesis. And what happened to Elisa was no accident, he says.
Based on his digital analysis of Elisa’s Internet habits, Robin believes Elisa was severely restless and agitated while at the Cecil. He does not think she was having a psychotic breakdown, though manic symptoms from (then untreated) bipolar disorder may have exasperated her restlessness.
When speculating on what “bizarre” behavior she may have been exhibiting that caused her roommates to request a room change, he imagines she was pacing around the room while they tried to sleep. This was a young woman who was used to Internet activity every day prior to coming to Los Angeles and suddenly has no phone and her laptop is getting a bad wifi connection. Therefore, she can’t use the Internet unless she is in the lobby. She was a creature of habit and accustomed to reblogging before going to sleep. So she is restless, frustrated, lonely, and having trouble sleeping.
