It makes quite a big difference – it would have been very difficult – impossible perhaps – for Elisa Lam to have shut the hatch after getting in herself so it would mean someone else was involved in her death. An LAPD spokesperson at the time said on camera that he believed the police found the hatch closed, but in this documentary the maintenance man insists that the lid was open when he found her. Whether the hatch to the water tank where Lam’s body was found was open or closed is a major point of contention. The body was discovered by a maintenance worker investigating low water pressure and reports from other guests that the water in their rooms was discolored and had a strange taste. She was naked, and her clothes were in the tank with her as well as her watch and room key. On February 19 Elisa Lam’s body was discovered in a water tank on top of the Cecil. The elevator footage was released by LAPD on 15 February, at which point Lam’s body still hadn’t been found, in the hope that it might help move the investigation forward. There are all sort of theories about what’s going on here – that she might be hiding from someone in the corridor, or even playing a game with them, that she’s trying to escape from someone who is holding the lift doors open or that she might have been experiencing hallucinations. The CCTV footage was taken in an elevator in the Cecil on the 1 February and sees Lam behaving very strangely, pushing several different buttons, appearing to hide, then jumping in and out of the elevator and making some unusual hand gestures. To truly get a sense of this you need to watch for yourself. The hotel itself was still home to long term residents and Cecil guests and all floors were accessed via the same elevators. Parts of The Cecil were rebranded in 2011 as the Stay On Main, which had its own entrance and a separate website and was marketed as budget accommodation for travellers. Some think it’s haunted but even if you reject that, it’s certainly been the centerpoint of some very dark activity well before Elisa Lam checked in.
Several people have been murdered or taken their own lives at the location and The Night Stalker Richard Ramirez stayed there during the time he was terrorizing LA. The Hotel itself which is situated on Skid Row (an area rife with drugs, crime, poverty, and homelessness) has a long established reputation for weirdness. Initially sharing a dorm with several other girls, Lam exhibited some erratic behaviour including leaving odd notes on the other girls’ beds, until eventually she was moved to her own room. In LA Elisa stayed on the 5th floor of the Cecil Hotel, which had had a partial makeover and rebranding calling it the Stay On Main.
She called her family every day until January 31, when her parents reported her missing. Lam travelled to the US by herself in January 2013, visiting San Diego before she arrived in LA, with plans to go to Santa Cruz and San Francisco. She loved fashion, The Great Gatsby, and Harry Potter and had been studying at the University of British Columbia. Who was Elisa Lam?Įlisa Lam, whose Cantonese name is Lam Ho Yi, was a 21-year-old Canadian former student born to parents from Hong Kong. We break down the evidence, theories and what might have happened. Featuring new interviews with the police officers who worked on the case, the hotel manager of the Cecil, guests who were staying at the Cecil at the time, LA historians as well as web sleuths who were obsessed with the case, it’s a grounded and thorough look at what might have happened to Elisa, while attempting to address some of the anomalies that make this case so strange and compelling. Was she murdered? Was it suicide? Was it an accident? Or could it even have been something supernatural? This four part docuseries from Joe Berlinger, who made the excellent documentary Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, delves into the case in a way that is sensationally un-sensationalist. More than two weeks after Elisa was last seen her body was discovered in a water tank on top of the hotel, after guests at the hotel reported a drop in pressure and discoloration of the water. It’s a very famous case with many theories posited across the internet, which captured people’s imaginations after some very odd footage of Lam was released by the LAPD, hoping to find out what happened to her. Netflix documentary Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel explores the strange case of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian woman who disappeared in January 2013 while she was staying at the Cecil Hotel in downtown LA.
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