The body of Elisa Lam, also
known by her Cantonese name, Lam Ho Yi (藍可兒;
April 30, 1991 – February 2013), a Canadian student at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was recovered from a
water tank atop the Cecil Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles on February
19, 2013. She had been reported missing at the beginning of the
month. Maintenance workers at the hotel discovered the body when
investigating guest complaints of problems with the water supply and
water pressure.
Her disappearance had been widely
reported; interest had increased five days prior to her body's
discovery when the Los Angeles Police Department released a video of
the last time she was known to have been seen, on the day of her
disappearance, by an elevator security camera. In the footage, Lam is
seen exiting and re-entering the elevator, talking and gesturing in
the hallway outside, and sometimes seeming to hide within the
elevator, which itself appears to be malfunctioning. The video went
viral on the Internet, with many viewers reporting that they found it
unsettling. Explanations ranged from claims of paranormal involvement
to bipolar disorder, which Lam took medication for. It has also been
argued that the video was altered prior to release.
The circumstances of Lam's death, once
she was found, also raised questions, especially in light of the
hotel's history in relation to other notable deaths and murders. Her
body was naked with most of her clothes and personal effects floating
in the water near her. It took the Los Angeles County Coroner's
office four months, after repeated delays, to release the autopsy
report, which reports no evidence of physical trauma and states that
the manner of death was accidental. Guests at the Cecil, now
re-branded as Stay on Main, sued the hotel over the incident, and
Lam's parents filed a separate suit later that year; the latter was
dismissed in 2015. Some of the early Internet interest noted what
were considered to be unusual similarities between Lam's death and
the 2005 horror film Dark Water. The case has since been referenced
in international popular culture.
Background
Lam, the daughter of emigrants from
Hong Kong who opened a restaurant in Burnaby, just outside Vancouver,
Canada, was a student at the University of British Columbia although
she was not registered at the beginning of 2013.
For her trip to California, Lam
traveled alone on Amtrak and intercity buses. She visited the San
Diego Zoo and posted photos taken there on social media. On January
26, she arrived in Los Angeles. After two days, she checked into the
Cecil Hotel, near downtown's Skid Row. Lam was initially assigned a
shared room on the hotel's fifth floor; however, her roommates
complained about what the hotel's lawyer would later describe as
"certain odd behavior," and she was moved to a room
of her own after two days.
Built as a business hotel in the 1920s,
the Cecil fell on hard times during the Great Depression of the 1930s
and never recaptured its original market as downtown decayed around
it in the late 20th century. Several of Los Angeles's more notable
murders have happened at or have connections to the hotel: in 1964,
Goldie Osgood, the "Pigeon Lady of Pershing Square,"
was raped and murdered in her room at the Cecil, a crime that has
never been solved. Serial killers Jack Unterweger and Richard
Ramirez both resided at the Cecil while active. There have also been
suicides, one of which also killed a pedestrian outside the front
entrance of the hotel. After recent renovations, it has tried to
market itself as a boutique hotel, but the reputation lingers. "The
Cecil will reveal to you whatever it is you're a fugitive from,"
says Steve Erickson, a journalist who spent a night in the hotel
after Lam's death.
Lam had been diagnosed with bipolar
disorder and depression. She had been prescribed four
medications—Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Seroquel, and Effexor—to treat
her disorders. According to her family, who supposedly kept her
history of mental illness a secret, Lam had no history of suicidal
ideations or attempts, although one report claimed she had previously
gone missing for a brief period.
In mid-2010, Lam began a blog named
Ether Fields on Blogspot. Over the next two years, she posted
pictures of models in fashionable clothing and accounts of her life,
particularly her struggle with mental illness. In a January 2012 blog
post, Lam lamented that a "relapse" at the start of
the current school term had forced her to drop several classes,
leaving her feeling "so utterly directionless and lost."
She titled her post, "You're always haunted by the idea
you're wasting your life" after a quotation from novelist
Chuck Palahniuk. She used that quote as an epigraph for her blog. Lam
worried that her transcript would look suspicious with so many
withdrawals and that it would result in her being unable to continue
her studies and attend graduate school.
A little over two years after Lam had
started blogging, she announced she would be abandoning her blog for
another she had started on Tumblr, "Nouvelle-Nouveau".
Its content mostly consisted of fashion photos, quotes and a few
posts in Lam's own words. The same Palahniuk quote was used as an
epigraph.
Disappearance
Lam contacted her parents in British
Columbia every day while traveling. On January 31, 2013, the day she
was scheduled to check out of the Cecil and leave for Santa Cruz, her
parents did not hear from her and called the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD); her family flew to Los Angeles to help with the
search.
Hotel staff who saw Lam that day said
she was alone. Outside the hotel, Katie Orphan, manager of a nearby
bookstore, was the only person who recalled seeing her that day. "She
was outgoing, very lively, very friendly," while getting
gifts to take home to her family, Orphan told CNN. "[She was]
talking about what book she was getting and whether or not what she
was getting would be too heavy for her to carry around as she
traveled," Orphan added.
Police searched the hotel to the extent
that they legally could. They searched Lam's room and had dogs go
through the building, including the rooftop, but the canines were
unsuccessful in detecting her scent. "But we didn't search
every room," Sgt. Rudy Lopez said later, "we could
only do that if we had probable cause" to believe a crime
had been committed. On February 6, a week after Lam had last been
seen, the LAPD decided more help was needed. Flyers with her image
were posted in the neighborhood and online. It brought the case to
the public's attention through the media.
Elevator video
On February 15, after another week with
no sign of Lam, the LAPD released a video of the last known sighting
of her taken in one of the Cecil's elevators by a video surveillance
camera on February 1. The video drew worldwide interest in the case
due to Lam's strange behavior, and has been extensively analyzed and
discussed.
In the clip, the camera at one of the
elevator cab's rear corners looks down from the ceiling, offering a
view not just of its interior but the hallway outside as well. It is
somewhat grainy, and the timestamp at the bottom is obscured. At some
points Lam's mouth is pixelized.
At the start, Lam enters, clad in a red
zippered hooded sweatshirt over a gray T-shirt, with black shorts and
sandals. She enters from the left and goes to the control panel,
appears to select several floors and then steps back to the corner.
After a few seconds during which the door fails to close, she steps
up to it, leans forward so her head is through the door, looks in
both directions, and then quickly steps back in, backing up to the
wall and then into the corner near the control panel. The door
remains open. She walks to it again and stands in the doorway,
leaning on the side. Suddenly she steps out into the hall, then to
her side, back in, looking to the side, then back out. She then steps
sideways again, and for a few seconds she is mostly invisible behind
the wall she has her back to just outside. The door remains open.
Her right arm can be seen going up to
her head, and then she turns to re-enter the cab, putting both hands
on the side of the door. She then goes to the control panel, presses
many more buttons, some more than once, and then returns to the wall
she had come into the elevator from, putting both hands over her ears
again briefly as she walks back to the section of wall she had been
standing against before. The door remains open.
She turns to her right and begins
rubbing her forearms together, then waves her hands out to her sides
with palms flat and fingers outstretched, while bowing forward
slightly and rocking gently. This can all be seen through the door,
which remains open. After she backs to the wall again and walks away
to the left, it finally closes.
The video was reposted widely,
including on the Chinese video-sharing site Youku, where it got 3
million views and 40,000 comments in its first 10 days. Many of the
commentators found it unsettling to watch.
Several theories evolved to explain her
actions. One was that Lam was trying to get the elevator car to move
in order to escape from someone who was pursuing her. Others
suggested that she might be under the influence of ecstasy or some
other party drug, but none was detected in her body. When her
bipolar disorder became known, the theory that she was having a
psychotic episode also emerged.
Other viewers argued that the video had
been tampered with before being made public. Besides the obscuring of
the timestamp, they claimed, parts had been slowed down, and nearly a
minute of footage had been discreetly removed. This could have been
done simply to protect the identity of someone who otherwise would be
in the video but had little or nothing to do with the case, or to
conceal evidence if Lam's disappearance and death had been the result
of a criminal act.
Discovery of body
During the search for Lam, guests at
the hotel began complaining about low water pressure. Some later
claimed their water was colored black, and had an unusual taste. On
the morning of February 19, Lam's body was found in one of four
1,000-gallon (3,785 L) tanks providing water to guest rooms, a
kitchen, and a coffee shop. The tank was drained and cut open since
its maintenance hatch was too small to accommodate equipment needed
to remove Lam's body.
On February 21, the Los Angeles
coroner's office issued a finding of accidental drowning, with
bipolar disorder as a significant factor. The full coroner's report,
released in June, stated that Lam's body had been found naked;
clothing similar to that she was wearing in the elevator video was
floating in the water, coated with a "sand-like particulate".
Her watch and room key were also found with her.
Lam's body was moderately decomposed
and bloated. It was mostly greenish, with some marbling evident on
the abdomen and skin separation evident. There was no evidence of
physical trauma, sexual assault, or suicide. Toxicology tests –
incomplete because not enough of her blood was preserved – showed
traces consistent with prescription medication found among her
belongings, plus nonprescription drugs such as Sinutab and ibuprofen.
A very small quantity of alcohol (about 0.02 g%) was present, but no
other recreational drugs.
Unresolved issues
The investigation had determined how
Lam died, but did not offer an explanation as to how she got into the
tank in the first place. Doors and stairs that access the hotel's
roof are locked, with only staff having the passcodes and keys, and
any attempt to force them would supposedly have triggered an alarm.
However, the hotel's fire escape could have allowed her to bypass
those security measures, if she (or someone who might have
accompanied her there) had known. A video made by a Chinese user
after Lam's death and posted to the Internet showed that the hotel's
roof was easily accessible via the fire escape and that two of the
lids of the water tanks were open.
Apart from the question of how she got
on the roof, others asked if she could have gotten into the tank by
herself. All four tanks are 4-by-8-foot (1.2 by 2.4 m) cylinders
propped up on concrete blocks; there is no fixed access to them and
hotel workers had to use a ladder to look at the water. They are
protected by heavy lids that would be difficult to replace from
within. Police dogs that searched through the hotel for Lam, even on
the roof, shortly after her disappearance was noted, did not find any
trace of her (although they had not searched the area near the water
tanks).
Theories about Lam's behavior in the
elevator video did not stop with her death. Some argued that she was
attempting to hide from a pursuer, perhaps someone ultimately
responsible for her death, while others said she was merely
frustrated with the elevator's apparent malfunction. Some proponents
of the theory that she was under the influence of illicit drugs are
not dissuaded by their absence from the toxicology screen, suggesting
that they might have broken down during the period of time her body
decomposed in the tank, or that she might have taken rare cocktails
of such drugs that a normal screen would not detect.
The autopsy report and its conclusions
have also been questioned. For instance, it does not say what the
results of the rape kit and fingernail kit were, or even if they were
processed. It also records subcutaneous pooling of blood in Lam's
anal area, which some observers suggested was a sign of sexual abuse;
however one pathologist has noted it could also have resulted from
bloating in the course of the body's decomposition, and her rectum
was also prolapsed. Even the coroner's pathologists appeared to be
ambivalent about their conclusion that Lam's death was accidental.
Since her death, her Tumblr blog was
updated, presumably through Tumblr's Queue option which allows posts
to automatically publish themselves when the user is away. Her phone
was not found either with her body or in her hotel room; it has been
assumed to have been stolen at some time around her death. Whether
the continued updates to her blog were facilitated by the theft of
her phone, the work of a hacker, or through the Queue, is not known;
nor is it known whether the updates are related to her death.
Litigation
In September, Lam's parents filed a
wrongful death suit, claiming the hotel failed to "inspect
and seek out hazards in the hotel that presented an unreasonable risk
of danger to (Lam) and other hotel guests" and seeking
unspecified damages and burial costs. The hotel argued it could not
have reasonably foreseen that Lam might have entered the water tanks,
and that since it remained unknown how Lam got to the water tank no
liability could be assigned for failing to prevent that. In 2015,
the suit was dismissed.
In popular culture
The circumstances of Lam's death have
been compared to plot elements in the 2005 horror film Dark Water. In
that film, an American remake of an earlier Japanese film of the same
name based on a 1996 short story by Koji Suzuki, a mother and
daughter move into a rundown apartment building. A dysfunctional
elevator and discolored water gushing from the building's faucets
eventually lead them to the building's rooftop water tank, where they
discover the body of a girl who had been reported missing from the
building a year earlier.
As life had imitated art with Dark
Water, the creators of films and television shows used the Lam case
as inspiration for their own works. In May 2013, the episode
"Watershed" aired as that year's season finale of
the ABC series Castle, in which a New York police detective and the
title character, a mystery novelist, investigate crimes. In
"Watershed", the duo pursue leads in the death of a
young woman found dead in the rooftop water tank of the "Cedric
Hotel" in Manhattan; among the evidence is a surveillance
video of the woman taken in an elevator. Ultimately she is found to
have been posing as a prostitute in order to investigate another
guest at the hotel.
Another ABC series, How to Get Away
with Murder, had a similar story line. Over a series of flashbacks
spread out across the first season, which began airing in 2014, it is
revealed that a sorority girl missing at the start of the season was
murdered and that her body has been hidden in the water tank on the
roof of the sorority house. Similarly, her body is only discovered
when a maintenance worker is called to the house to address a water
pressure issue.
In Hong Kong, from which Lam's family
had emigrated to Vancouver, filmmakers were also inspired by the
case. Nick Cheung, an accomplished actor in Hong Kong films, made his
directorial debut in 2014 with Hungry Ghost Ritual, a horror thriller
that includes a scene in which a ghost terrorizes a young woman in an
elevator, shot to look like security-camera footage and believed to
have been inspired by the Cecil's Lam footage. In mainland China,
director Liu Hao announced a year after Lam's death that he would be
making a film based on it; he went to Los Angeles himself and stayed
for a few days at the Cecil doing research. Chinese media have
reported that actress Gao Yuanyuan may be interested in playing Lam.
In March 2014, a little over a year
after Lam's death, brothers Brandon and Philip Murphy sold a horror
script, The Bringing, that uses the investigation into it as a
backstory for a fictional investigating detective's slowly unraveling
sanity. They were widely criticized for doing this so soon after the
death. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn was originally slated to
direct the film, but in August it was announced that Jeremy Lovering
would direct the film for Sony Pictures whenever production began.
The 2014 video for Vancouver pop duo
The Zolas' "Ancient Mars" is meant to be an
idealized representation of Lam's last day, showing a young woman
exploring Los Angeles and taking in simple pleasures. "It
bugged me how tidily people explained away her disappearance with
drugs or mental illness," said singer Zach Gray, who
attended UBC around the same time and had a friend who knew Lam.
"Though it's mostly fiction we wanted people to see it and
feel like she was a real girl and a familiar girl and not just a
police report." Later that year, the American post-hardcore
band Hail the Sun wrote "Disappearing Syndrome",
also inspired by Lam's story. "It's such a chilling and eerie
case," said the band's guitarist, Aric Garcia, in a Reddit
Ask Me Anything.
In 2015, the media speculated that the
fifth season of American Horror Story was inspired by Lam's death.
In late spring creator Ryan Murphy said the next season would be set
in a hotel in present-day Los Angeles. He was inspired, he added, by
a surveillance video of a young woman who "got into an
elevator at a downtown hotel ... [and] was never seen again."
He did not use her name but it was believed he was talking about Lam.
In 2017, Sun Kil Moon released the songs "Window Sash
Weights" and "Stranger Than Paradise" as
part of their album Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood
(2017); the songs specifically reference the event and promote the
idea that it was a hoax. Band member Mark Kozelek said in an
interview "I've come to the conclusion that nobody died in
the water tank. There’s no way to identify the girl on the
elevator, as her face is pixelated."
In 2019, the studio ACKK, creators of
the video game YIIK: A Postmodern RPG, mentioned Lam's death as an
inspiration during a Reddit AMA, saying that "Her suffering
was influential in the development in the game". The game
featured an animated recreation of the elevator surveillance video,
with a main character from the game taking the part of Lam. The
developers faced criticism for making use of elements of Lam's death
in a way that was perceived as exploitative.
