Gone at Midnight, page 31
After spending two hours writing the scenes involving the mirror on the 14th floor, the mirror in my bedroom collapsed. One of the wall fixtures had broken. Two weeks passed, during which we did not speak about the mirror at all. Then the very night I resumed work on the mirror sections, my mother brought it up, mentioning the mirror at the exact moment I was writing the word “mirror”; when I looked up, I saw myself in the living room mirror.
This kind of stuff had been happening over and over, nearly every day, for two years running. It got to the point where my rational side stopped making excuses for it. I don’t know what synchronicity is. It may be a legitimately meaningful narrative of archetypes supporting an as-yet unknown cosmic convergence of mind and matter; or it could be an evolutionary defense mechanism, a pattern-recognition utility that serves as a way for humans to acquire meaning in the chaotic information around us.
Then, Dred—the former Cecil tenant who was convinced of foul play involving, or at least covered up by, hotel management—disappeared, his cell-phone service cut off. The same thing went for Henry, another former tenant who had referred me to Dred. The most practical explanation was that these two men hadn’t paid their phone bills and had their service discontinued. But I couldn’t help but be suspicious given that other former tenants told me they were terrified of retribution by the hotel if they told their stories on the record.
The prohibitive nature of inquiring into the case is definitely real though and it goes beyond detectives refusing to talk. One websleuth wrote that she messaged one of her legal friends, whom she regularly consults with on various investigations, about the Lam case. This person had always been very forthright and kind, but she responded that the websleuth should not pursue the case any further.
I did not expect the level of secrecy I encountered with this investigation. I went into it assuming that, over time, I would be able to earn enough trust from the LAPD and certain executives at the Cecil Hotel to eventually extract statements clarifying certain anomalies. If there’s nothing to hide, I reasoned, it’s in their interest to set the record straight. An innocent corporation or agency that is accused of corruption or negligence should have no problem briefly discussing core elements of a high-exposure case to dispel damaging rumors and conspiracy theories.
I was wrong. The secrecy worsened; they doubled-down. Detective Stearns literally has a “policy” of refusing to discuss the case at all. There was a chokehold on all three major nodes of information: the family, the police, and the hotel. The silence was so widespread, so total, it felt orchestrated.
Even Elisa’s roommates at the Cecil Hotel have not spoken on the record. It’s as if they don’t even exist. We have every reason to believe they do, as GM Amy Price confirmed the women initially shared a room with Elisa on the 5th floor before requesting that she be relocated due to strange behavior. It drives me nuts that there’s no information on them—not one interview. We don’t even know their names.
These women could be enormously helpful in figuring out what happened. They would likely be able to characterize Elisa’s behavior to help determine if she was experiencing a manic or psychotic episode and, if so, the degree of severity.
Paul Brevik, a websleuth whose YouTube channel Lepprocommunist at one point contained several videos of his analysis of the case, told me that he spoke with a Cecil Hotel employee who said Elisa’s behavior included running around while maniacally laughing. This sounds like an extreme version of some of the behavior Elisa admits to in her blogs, when she talks about getting the attention of strangers in a strange, purposefully flamboyant manner. Brevik, who believes Elisa’s death was an accident and is a critic of homicide theories, took the statement as more confirmation that Elisa was experiencing severe psychiatric illness the night she died, which for him rules out foul play.
Elisa’s roommates might know if she was spending time with any of the tenants or employees (perhaps one of the full-time tenants on the 14th floor, for instance, or a security guard), or if she felt threatened by anyone during her stay. These women could fill in a lot of blanks but they have been completely scrubbed from the case. They are veritable ghosts, fictional characters. It is a total mystery to me why during the early days of the investigation—when police were asking the public for help and assuredly interviewed the women (one would certainly hope)—reporters did not receive enough information to know the importance of the roommates as witnesses and get them on public record.
They are great examples of the deep-seeded, unnatural silence that surrounds one of the most talked-about cases of the century.
There may be some legitimate reason for such silence. But given the level of hysteria that already surrounded the case, I don’t see the logical purpose of not answering a few basic questions to put public concerns to rest. This is exactly how the government deals with corruption scandals, and silence only makes the populace more distrustful while breeding conspiracy theories that persist for decades.
I understand why the family would not want to speak, which is why I only made one meek attempt at contacting them. As I noted earlier, they were persistently pestered by journalists and websleuths for years. One particularly conspiratorial websleuth told me a spokeswoman for the family emailed him that Elisa’s parents had sold the family restaurant in Vancouver and moved back to Hong Kong while Elisa’s sister remains in Vancouver. According to this websleuth, the family is at peace with the conclusion of the investigation and does not want to be involved with efforts to reopen the case, although they do not mind if others do.
While I don’t view this source as particularly credible, I visited the restaurant in Vancouver and spoke with the management in person; they confirmed that the Lam family sold the business a couple years ago. As for the rest of it, who knows? Though it is difficult to get a case reopened without the cooperation of the victim’s family, they are more than justified in remaining silent if doing so helps with their emotional health and managing the trauma. They experienced every parent’s worst nightmare and then witnessed that nightmare turn into a public spectacle.
I don’t expect them to read this book, but my hope is to reverse the narrative and turn a gruesome public spectacle into a call to action. This is a two-part mission, which I will explain shortly.
THE EVIDENCE
On the eve of 2019, while most of the world stayed up all night partying, I stayed up all night writing. I had already been granted a generous three-month extension. Now my manuscript was due. It was time to play my hand.
In summarizing the findings from my research, I knew I lacked hard evidence. I didn’t have a murder weapon, a confession, or even a suspect (at least no one I was willing to accuse on record), but I had a small mountain of circumstantial evidence at the top of which lay an eagle’s nest of damning new revelations.
I broke this summary down into sections, starting with some of the circumstantial anomalies and building toward the strongest evidence.
The police investigation was flawed or negligent at best, corrupt at worst.
The LAPD did not process a rape kit even though the coroner’s department collected evidence for it and noted anal bleeding in their autopsy. Likely distracted by the Dorner manhunt, the LAPD searched the roof (the “crime scene”) twice—with a K-9 unit—without finding Elisa’s body, causing the loss of critical forensic evidence, such as blood, DNA, and drug remnants. The LAPD either failed to find, or neglected to disclose, any trace evidence (DNA) that could help reconstruct Elisa’s movements on the roof. The LAPD didn’t consult with their own department’s psychology department about the nature of bipolar disorder and Elisa’s behavior in the surveillance tape.
The Cecil Hotel has a long history of systemic criminal activity, some of it perpetrated by employees or management.
The hotel has a history of unsolved murders, unexplained deaths, and sexual assaults, the latter of which is corroborated by three former hotel residents who claim employees sexually assaulted female tenants. Multiple guests and tenants allege predatory employees and exploitive, criminal business practices (such as withholding rental deposits under threat of arrest for drug possession). Three employees, including the general manager, chief engineer, and maintenance worker, may have perjured themselves in depositions regarding access to the roof and whether the lid to the water tank was open—two critical aspects of the case. The corporate executives finalized a major financial partnership, worth tens of millions of dollars, during the week Elisa’s body was finally found, which, according to some researchers, constitutes a motive for delaying the discovery of the body.
The autopsy contains a number of anomalies and critical flaws in methodology and analysis that may disqualify its conclusions.
Several independent coroners have noted major inconsistencies and flaws with regard to the cause of death. One prominent forensics expert says the autopsy does not establish that Elisa drowned and that it’s just as likely, if not more so, that Elisa was already dead when she entered the tank. There is a possible injury suggestive of a traumatic sexual attack that was not ruled out with a rape kit. The victim wasn’t tested for GHB (or any date rape drug) intoxication. The Coroner’s Department took an unusual amount of time to declare the cause of death and crossed out and changed its conclusion. Only a few years after the chief medical examiner released the Lam autopsy, he was sued in court and charged with falsifying an autopsy and misclassifying a decedent’s cause of death.
Some of the case’s most important mysteries and questions have not been explained or answered.
The surveillance tape of Elisa Lam from inside the hotel contains multiple anomalies, including missing time, spliced frames, and timecode cuts and errors that indicate it may have been doctored. Another surveillance tape of Elisa with two unknown men has not been made public or explained. Still other surveillance, which should have been available from cameras on the 14th floor staircase, was not released or disclosed. The civil case seems to have been thrown out prematurely by a judge who was accused by a credible witness (an associate attorney) of being a serial sexual harasser and misogynist. A former LAPD officer, who was part of the original search of the roof, says the lid to the tank that held Elisa’s body was completely shut when first responders arrived, a claim that contradicts testimony given to police by the hotel employee who discovered Elisa’s body.
There are multiple new bombshell allegations that need to be fully investigated.
A new witness claims an off-duty cop told him investigators found Elisa’s belongings in a Skid Row dumpster. A family member of the hotel employee who discovered Elisa’s body alleges “someone” paid this employee a large sum of money to move his family out of the country soon after testifying in a deposition in which he may have perjured himself. A police informant, who worked closely with the LAPD for years, claims independent investigators that worked on the case privately concluded (1) the surveillance tape was doctored, (2) foul play was likely, and (3) that there may have been be a financial quid pro quo between the Cecil Hotel and the LAPD. A statement by a deputy coroner who worked on the autopsy says that one of the main detectives believed an employee was either with Elisa on the roof or gave her access to the roof (claims that could have been verified by the 14th-floor cameras).
I am not making allegations of criminality against any specific individuals associated with the LAPD or the Cecil Hotel. However, I am reporting here new evidence, allegations, and disclosures from a wide array of sources that implicitly identify both as being in some way involved with (potentially) criminal negligence or conspiracy.
When you add all of it up besides the voluminous cases of major corruption within the LAPD as well as the allegations of predatory behavior and sexual assaults committed by Cecil Hotel employees, even the most diehard of skeptics should smell the sulphur of a smoking gun. We have a more than reasonable justification for the commission of an independent legal body to audit the LAPD’s case files and launch a new investigation of Elisa’s death.
REVISITING OCCAM’S RAZOR
You’ve heard it a thousand times if you’ve heard it once: The simplest explanation—that which requires the least amount of assumptions—is the most likely explanation. Some have captured its essence with pithy maxims like, “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras.”
Unfortunately, there are those who would repeat this while inside a zebra enclosure.
Occam’s Razor has long been a weaponized philosophical concept. This abductive heurism is a favorite among government and law enforcement officials when deflecting accusations of wrongdoing or corruption. Over time, it has accumulated significant and, some would argue, misguided utility.
Many philosophers and scientists say that when you look at the nature of reality—cosmology, biological evolution, and even developmental psychology—Occam’s Razor rarely applies. Some of the shocking discoveries made by physicists in the field of quantum mechanics, for example, discoveries that exposed our universe to be wildly bizarre and inscrutable at the most fundamental level, fly in the face of Occam’s Razor.
In the medical profession, some physicians argue that the Occam’s Razor mentality frequently causes misdiagnoses. Doctors may become overly reductionist and look for a single cause to explain multiple symptoms. In response, a counterargument to Occam’s Razor, its rarely cited philosophical nemesis and inverted doppelgänger, Hickam’s Dictum, states that a multitude of symptoms should not necessarily be distilled down and explained by one common ailment. Expanded to a larger context, Hickam’s Dictum suggests that the answer to an enigma is more likely to be a complex and pluralistic web of causes.
In the Lam case, I ask you, which is more practical, which is more reasonable: that the young woman seen on surveillance looking terrified, and thereafter found dead and naked in a water tank, died as the result of a skinny-dipping accident in a tall, difficult-to-access metal cistern on a near pitch-black, difficult-to-access roof, or that she was the victim of some kind of foul play in an area and hotel rife with sexual predators?
Hickam’s Dictum could apply to the Elisa Lam case very specifically, in that there may have been a complex situation, like involuntary manslaughter, that unfolded. Maybe there was no single cause of her death, but rather a constellation of interacting factors.
As the years ticked by, I spent countless nights, logged countless hours, pondering what actually happened that night on the roof of the Cecil. Despite my discoveries, the absence of hard answers began to drive me nuts—as if I needed any help in that department.
This sense of frenzied urgency to excavate the truth was compounded by Kickstarter supporters complaining that our documentary was taking too long. Let me remind you, I felt compelled to argue (in my head), that it’s been well over half a century since the President of the United States had half his head blown off on live television and we still don’t know the full truth of what happened.
Thus far, I’ve tried to refrain as much as possible from indulging in uncorroborated conjecture. For the purpose of transparency, it’s now time to depart ever so slightly from that framework and occupy a space where analysis and narrative co-exist.
It’s certainly possible that Elisa’s death really was an accident with no foul play involved. She may have, during an intense mixed episode of mania and depression, removed her clothes and climbed into the tank on her own. Or she may have climbed in with suicidal intent.
It is possible either of these actions could have been the result of Elisa taking a med like Ambien, a sleep aid that has been known to facilitate people accidentally or purposely killing themselves—sometimes in their sleep. This includes cases of drowning. Elisa mentions in her blog at one point that she was out of sleep meds, indicating she was not opposed to taking them. Ambien can cause unusual sleepwalking-type behavior, even psychosis, and also has a very short half-life, meaning it would have likely been out of her system for the autopsy.
When I first started writing this book, I deferred more to the reality of mental illness and believed that to be the more likely cause for her being discovered in the water tank (by a factor of something like 60 to 40).
However, based on the evidence I’ve uncovered, I now believe it is more likely that Elisa was not alone on the roof and that something unexpected happened involving other people; furthermore, it’s more likely Elisa was not alive when she entered the water tank. Which means, someone (or, likely, more than one person) placed her there.
This conclusion is based on Dr. Hiserodt’s forensic analysis of the autopsy, the multiple reports of sexual predators employed by the Cecil, and a series of allegations and disclosures reported to me: that some of Elisa’s belongings were found in a dumpster; that private investigators looking into the case concluded foul play was involved; and that the man who discovered Elisa’s body was paid to leave the country shortly after the police investigation.
Based on this evidence, I am convinced that something criminal was and is being covered up. As important as the mental illness narrative is to this story—and to me, personally—no one is served when law enforcement agents scapegoat victims’ mental illnesses to evade hard questions or due diligence in a criminal investigation.
So then, what the hell happened? Much to my dismay, I don’t know. My hope is that this book will help reignite a discussion over the case that forces the LAPD to disclose more evidence.
In the meantime, I’ve constructed what I call my “walking narrative,” a supposition with legs. It’s a blend of hypothesis and evidence; creative non-fiction applied to the scientific method: what is the most likely scenario?
