Gone at Midnight, page 6
Perhaps this is exactly why websleuths are needed. If disenfranchised victims or witnesses won’t talk to the police out of fear, perhaps they will talk to websleuths, who are not ordained by the state to wield coercive force. The thought of this makes police detectives cringe but, as Tricia Griffith emphatically claims, it’s a reality departments are going to have to face.
One reality I was going to have to face was that to learn more about the Elisa Lam case, I would have to get out of the academic definitions and studies of websleuthing and further into dark realms of the web itself. It was time to become a websleuth.
“BRAINSCRATCH”
Like many people who search for careers in Los Angeles, John Lordan tried multiple niches of the entertainment industry. But his heart was always in investigating true crime, unsolved cases, and conspiracies. It was a natural calling.
John launched a YouTube show devoted to tackling cold cases and murder investigations. His idea was to present a mysterious case and compile all the research he could, present that research and then use the comment threads to deputize his viewers as a decentralized crowdsourced investigation. By leaving behind all the breadcrumbs of his investigation, anyone could follow in John’s footsteps—including police detectives who might not ever admit to culling evidence from a websleuth—and anyone could participate and annotate an ongoing project.
With a small but rapidly growing circle of passionate followers spurring him on, John urged subscribers to introduce new evidence and ideas. He didn’t mind if his investigations forked into previously unforeseen directions. In that way, his new channel was like a multimedia Wikipedia, a transparent work in progress whereby you can actually witness, step-by-step, the formation of a theory and the research conducted to confirm or debunk it.
He called the show “BrainScratch” and one of his very first videos was about the mysterious case of Elisa Lam, the popularity of which launched his channel into motion with thousands of devoted subscribers. What he didn’t know at the time was that the Elisa Lam case would be a subject he returned to many times over the years. No one could have predicted the near-cult devotee status it would attain in popular culture.
One of John’s early goals with the Elisa Lam case was to eschew the paranormal angle, which he found distracting and stigmatizing. He vowed instead to focus only on demonstrable, empirical evidence. Of course, with a case like this one, such a goal became virtually impossible. And despite John wanting to avoid conspiracy theories, he couldn’t deny that there was something off about this case.
He started calling out the anomalies.
There should be more surveillance footage.
While it is common for police to release video of a missing person—especially if that person is a foreign national—the only practical purpose for that surveillance video was to help identify Elisa. But the footage is of such low quality that it does not really identify her. Ultimately, the surveillance video only served to stigmatize the victim and spawn conspiracy theories.
And it raised more questions than it answered. What about other footage from the hallways of the hotel? Footage from the lobby? From outside the hotel? Why have we not seen any of that footage that could actually help to retrace Elisa’s steps and identify anyone she might have been with? Why was the elevator video the only available footage?
The answer: it wasn’t, it’s just the only footage the police allowed us to see. In time, we learned there was additional footage of Elisa. And the content of that supplemental footage will give you goosebumps—but that disclosure wasn’t made until fairly late in the investigation.
Elisa’s cell phone(s) was never recovered.
The police were reluctant to talk about Elisa’s missing phone from the beginning. As I mentioned previously, the fact that at least one of her phones was missing prevented police from looking at who Elisa communicated with prior to her death. However, it is technically possible to track lost phones, and it seems that this could have been of assistance to the investigation.
More important, you do not need access in the phone to track the phone and to extract information—metadata, for example—from the carrier, provider, and cellular towers.
It is also not certain that the phone wasn’t recovered. An early statement by the LAPD suggested that Elisa’s possessions from her room had been stored in the hotel’s basement. Could her phone have been among these possessions?
Since the investigation was still active, the police would say nothing about the location of Elisa’s phone, adding the first of countless enigmatic wrinkles to the mystery.
Much later, an unlikely witness disclosed to me a shocking revelation regarding the location of Elisa’s belongings.
Elisa’s Tumblr account continued updating for several months after her disappearance.
A month after her death, Elisa’s Tumblr account posted something new, a Virginia Woolf quote that read:
Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night?
As bloggers and websleuths became more and more obsessed with the case over the next year, the account would periodically update with random images and messages from Elisa. A girl repeatedly saying “I like being alone . . . I like being alone.” A Scream-like abstract drawing of a person in a car with the title “Human Identity in the Urban Environment.” A Tarot card of the Hermit.
Throughout the course of the parallel investigations that would ensue, the blog would spit forth a new post on behalf of the deceased. Paranormal buffs said they were messages from the grave. Murder conspiracists said they were evidence that the killer had acquired Elisa’s lost phone and was using her Tumblr account to tease and mock investigators.
The most logical explanation for the posts is that Elisa had set up the auto-updater feature on her Tumblr account. This would have allowed her feed to automatically aggregate posts from her favorite accounts. But given that her phone was missing, it was hard not to wonder whether maybe the new Tumblr posts were messages from her killer.
The effect was chilling, as illustrated by a message written posthumously to Elisa by a former classmate:
What haunts me is that your Tumblr reblogged my posts at the end of February and beginning of March 2013, which distressed me to no ends at the time.
There was suspicious graffiti found on the roof.
In one of John Lordan’s early “BrainScratch” videos, he reported on photographs displaying graffiti on the roof of the Cecil. The photos were taken when the Fire Department removed Elisa from the tank. The vulgar tags included the Latin phrase Fecto cunt her suma, which is inscribed on a surface close to the water tank where Elisa’s body was found. According to some online accounts, Fecto cunt her suma translates either to “in fact she was a cunt” or “it’s the best pussy” in Latin.
There are a couple of reasons why the graffiti should be considered important. For one, in later statements the hotel management insisted that the rooftop wasn’t accessible, a determination that became legally critical when the Lam family eventually filed a civil lawsuit against the Cecil Hotel. The fact that someone or multiple persons had tagged the roof meant that at least one or more people had breached the security there.
Furthermore, tagging usually implies that there will be an audience, meaning there may have been the expectation that others would see it. All of which leads to the conclusion that hotel residents or others may have habitually occupied the roof. One former Cecil tenant told me that she used to drink beer on the roof on a regular basis. It can only be assumed that she wasn’t the only one. Could one of these occupiers have had something to do with Elisa’s death or known the killer?
Another point to consider is an oddly synchronistic post from Elisa’s blog. On 31 January, the day she went missing, Elisa posted the following statement on her Tumblr account:
Cunt again? It was odd how men . . . used that word to demean women when it was the only part of a woman they valued.
This was several days into her stay at the Cecil. Had Elisa already been on the roof and taken offense at the message? Perhaps she objected to the graffiti and offended the artist. Or (a more extreme possibility) had someone Elisa knew or someone who had followed her blog—on which she had published her traveling itinerary—tracked her to the Cecil, and left the graffiti tag as a kind of calling card?
WEBSLEUTH TRAVELS FROM HONG KONG
One websleuth, Kay Theng, journeyed all the way from Hong Kong with the intention of infiltrating the Cecil Hotel with a camera and documenting the layout.
Kay arrived at the 14th-floor elevators—ground zero of the entire case—and proceeded to ask and answer five questions:
1. Do the doors of the elevator remain open? Yes, the doors remain open when you push the buttons to other floors; they only close when you press the “door close” button, or if someone on another floor has pressed the elevator button outside the elevator to signal the elevator to go to their floor.
2. How many buttons and panels are there outside the elevator? There are just two buttons on the outside panel—up and down.
3. Does the hold button work? The hold button does work and John Lordan later tested it to learn that the doors remain open for approximately two minutes when it’s pressed.
4. What can you see from the inside? On the wall opposite the elevator is a round mirror which allows you to see if anyone is outside the elevator. The placement of this mirror also means Elisa would have been able to see a reflection of herself when she was standing in the hallway.
5. What can you see if you look outside the elevator? There are two blind spots that are impossible to see from the hallway in front of the elevator. When Elisa peeked out of the elevator and into the hallway, she was not able to see the entire corridor in either direction.
Kay’s next moves are to attempt to access the roof and as he does so he asks and answers three new questions:
1. How many paths are there to access the roof?
2. How accessible are those paths?
3. How close can you get to the water tank?
Kay first approaches the 14th-floor fire escape and finds it can be accessed easily and used to reach the 15th floor (top floor). He avoids the main roof access, the stairs used by the hotel employees to reach the alarmed, locked door, and instead climbs the fire escape to reach the roof. It doesn’t seem particularly difficult to reach the water tanks.
He concludes his video, “This is not a supernatural event, it is very likely to be a murder. We don’t want to see people exaggerate the truth. May the killer be captured soon, and the dead rest in peace.”
The paranormal interpretation is far more popular in Kay’s home country of Hong Kong but he wasn’t buying it. Like John Lordan, Kay didn’t want the idea of ghosts and demons to distract people from what was really going on. And he certainly was not the only websleuth who suspected foul play.
MURDER THEORIES
Without the Internet and its attendant websleuth community, the Elisa Lam case would have likely disappeared from the public radar soon after its initial reports had made the rounds. Depending on your point of view, it can be argued that this was either a blessing or a curse. The voracious consumption of the case is nothing short of amazing, a sociological phenomenon that would be haunting in its own right even if it were not predicated on the discovery of a corpse in a rooftop water tank.
The Elisa Lam case was a uniquely Internet-based phenomenon. While the initial investigation and subsequent discovery made both local and international headlines on cable TV stations, the case never became a featured darling on Nancy Grace or other cable exploits. Maybe it lacked a certain scandalous sexiness when compared to the cases of Scott Peterson, Jodi Arias, Casey Anthony, or Amanda Knox. Or, one could easily argue, Elisa Lam did not fit the criteria of a ready-for-TV celebrity victim.
She wasn’t white. TV true-crime producers often gravitate toward white victims. This phenomenon has an actual psychological designation, the “missing white woman syndrome” (MWWS).
Elisa’s case also brings up un-TV-friendly issues. How often do shows on ID (Investigation Discovery) delve into mental illness? Even when the station did eventually run a three-part series, Horror at the Cecil, which devoted an episode to the Lam case, her struggle with depression and bipolar disorder were hardly touched upon at all.
Or perhaps it was because the case didn’t have a clear antagonist. There was no cinematic murder suspect lurking in the shadows.
Enter the Internet.
A variety of homicide theories would soon follow: They included Elisa being drugged and either dying from accidental overdose or malicious poisoning (perhaps by a romantic interest who had an expectation that prolonged exposure to water would eliminate the trail); another theory posited that Elisa was killed elsewhere in the hotel, possibly in a bathtub where she was already naked, and then transported to the roof and deposited into the water tank; a frequently articulated theory held that Elisa had been killed by a hotel employee, or a friend of a hotel employee, who subsequently edited the surveillance tape so as not to appear.
As people waited for the LAPD detectives to make an announcement or release the results of the autopsy and toxicology reports, speculation was rampant, and more and more websleuths deputized themselves to investigate the mystery. There was something about the case that called to people.
Two body language analysts pored over the surveillance video, studying Elisa’s movements and micro-expressions. A YouTuber analyzed the timecode of the surveillance footage and discovered some anomalies. One rogue websleuth actually believed she had found the killer and organized a trolling campaign to make the suspect know he was being hunted.
Perhaps the most important discovery came about without much fanfare. It turned out Elisa had scrupulously documented her life online through blogs and social media. This made it possible to reverse engineer Elisa’s final weeks and days in her own words.
Shortly before she went missing, it turned out, Elisa had posted a message saying she had been harassed by “creepers.”
CHAPTER 5
The West Coast Tour
IN ANY CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, phone calls, text messages, or any communications from the deceased are highly prized pieces of information. Sometimes these missives and dispatches are enough in and of themselves to solve a case or to put investigators on the fast lane to identifying and interviewing key suspects.
In Elisa’s case, there were no known text messages because her phone was missing. Nor were there phone calls—besides verbal recall of the conversations with her parents while traveling—available for analysis. No friends or acquaintances from the trip immediately came forward with information except for two women who shared a room with Elisa at the Cecil Hotel. These women appear to have been impromptu roommates that Elisa met upon arriving in Los Angeles. At some point during their stay, these two roommates reported to the hotel management that Elisa was acting bizarre and they requested that she be moved to a different room. They have remained unnamed by the LAPD, and no additional information about them has been released, constituting yet another missing puzzle piece.
The Elisa Lam case presented a vexing twist: there were no apparent eyewitnesses, but there was a first-person autobiographical record left behind by the deceased. In time, these records would become just as fascinating and haunting to me as the surveillance video itself. A public memoir she left behind detailing the mercurial journey of her life from the ages of nineteen to twenty-one. In certain passages she reached back even further, summoning memories from childhood and late adolescence.
ETHER FIELDS
The last tweet on her Twitter page (@lambetes) states simply “SPEAKEASY” and is dated January 27, 2013, which is approximately five days before she disappeared. The second most recent tweet is from ten days earlier.
These tweets took me back to December of 2012. I needed more recent information and was hoping her Tumblr would have it.
Her Tumblr blog was entitled Nouvelle/Nouveau. A wall of lively media-filled thumbnails greeted me like futuristic crenellations on a digital facade. At a cursory glance, Elisa had varied and eclectic tastes in art, and her Tumblr blog contained a vast assortment of different photographs, digital images, gifs, and quotes filling up the screen.
A representation of the personality of Elisa, a young woman who no longer existed, suddenly levitated before me. A Great Gatsby reference; a book reading another book; TVs talking at a dinner party; Kurt Vonnegut slowly smiling; a rainbow threading through a family of otters; shadowy figures emerging from a misty, ethereal swamp; a fork and spoon parental unit holding their baby spork; David Lynch; Inglourious Basterds; a witchlike skeleton in robes; a gif asking, “are you expanding your mind or just going crazy?”; Waiting for Godot; “Travel with Hogwarts Express.”
One post, in particular, mesmerized me. It was a digital illustration of a body falling from a building. I remember an article I read about the horrifying history of the Cecil Hotel, one that included serial killers, murders, and a great number of suicides. A considerable number of the suicides were people jumping from the windows of their upper-floor rooms at the hotel. The falling man image posted to Elisa’s Tumblr was posted on January 31, the day she was recorded in the elevator, the day she disappeared and, presumably, died.
Her final written post appears to have been on January 29, when she wrote:
