The discovery of Lam’s body in a hotel rooftop water tank that February - after guests complained about the foul odor and taste of the hotel’s water supply - became the kind of gruesome detail that again captivated true crime sleuths and the media.Īnd when the police found no evidence on her body of a crime - despite her being nude - and the forensic expert initially deemed it unsolved, the crime community online went into overdrive. But rather than commenting on that, or providing additional insights into their coverage, a moderator of a Lam Facebook group and a YouTuber who started his channel thanks to the Lam case restate the same points made in the endlessly replayed footage. In retrospect, the Lam case was noteworthy as one of the first to play out online from the start, almost in real time. For instance, that the timestamp in the video is suspiciously scrambled, or that it looks like there’s someone else’s foot outside of the elevator. The documentary features an endless parade of YouTube videos and Facebook post voiceovers, representing the army of amateur investigators making multiple unsubstantiated, or ultimately easily explainable, claims. The most crucial aspect of the case - which turned it into an online obsession - came when, in an effort to spark leads, the police department chose to release grainy elevator footage of Lam seemingly acting erratically, as if someone were following her.Īfter the release of that video, true crime sleuths swarmed the case. And as Lam’s body remains undiscovered for over two weeks, speculation builds that she might have fallen victim to violence from someone in the hotel or nearby skid row.
The hotel is close to skid row, the epicenter of the city’s homelessness crisis.
#ELIZA LAM ELEVATOR SERIAL#
The documentary features interviews with the hotel manager, employees, fellow guests, and law enforcement who unspool the story as a mystery, playing up the Cecil Hotel’s “haunted history.”Ī self-styled historian and “esotouric” (an allusion to esoteric tourism) talks about the hotel’s gory past, as the place, where, for instance, the serial killer Richard Ramirez reportedly stayed after committing some of his crimes. The story of the attractive young tourist’s disappearance immediately made the local news in Los Angeles. And the case begins when Lam was reported missing by her family in Canada, whom she was usually in constant contact with. And the series’ relitigation of the mystery’s unanswered questions ultimately makes it an awkward attempt to exploit the hunger for crime mysteries, while simultaneously attempting to comment on that appetite.Ĭrime Scene starts with a dramatic reading of Lam’s Tumblr posts, about her desire to see the world, which leads to her trip to Los Angeles. Presenting itself as a study of the cultural appetite for crime, it revisits the hotel’s infamous history and rehashes the online conspiracy theories around Lam’s disappearance.īut the story is an odd fit for a commentary on online sleuths because the case was neither solved by sleuths nor really disrupted by them. The new four-part Netflix documentary on the case, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, is a muddled attempt to revisit the story. A final report released later that summer ruled the death an accidental drowning. Nineteen days after she went missing, her body was discovered in the hotel’s rooftop water tank. When police released footage of her acting strangely in a hotel elevator right before her disappearance, the then-emerging community of internet true crime sleuths latched on to the story in a speculative frenzy. In January 2013, the 21-year old Canadian tourist traveled to Los Angeles and went missing at the seedy Cecil Hotel in downtown LA. And the Elisa Lam disappearance was one of these stories.
Theories about these cases are debated in Facebook groups and on Reddit, parsed in YouTube videos and podcasts. (Murray’s case became a book about one sleuth’s obsession, tellingly titled True Crime Addict.) Maura Murray, a Massachusetts college student, is another big name in these circles, after she got in a car accident on a snowy road in 2004, supposedly walked into the woods, and was never heard from again. The stories always feature relatable middle-class protagonists whose deaths or disappearances remain unexplained.īrian Shaffer, an Ohio med student who walked into a college town bar in 2006 and was never seen again, became one such enduring object of fascination.
There’s a subgenre of internet-famous mysteries that don’t capture national attention at first, but get endless attention online.
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