Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
since the inception of major urban police forces in the mid to late nineteenth century.
This is not necessarily always due to some conspiratorial hush-hush campaign. The reality is, as Halber notes in her book, criminal investigations, especially homicides, can easily become mired in communication breakdowns between jurisdictions, agencies, police departments, coroner’s offices, and municipalities and divisions within municipalities.
In other words, the public-service officials have enough trouble with internal communication. Fissures within the law-enforcement community can be just as divisive as public relations problems. The fallout from this has been seen in cases such as the Black Dahlia and the Hillside Strangler, in which squabbling among agencies and failure to share information across jurisdictions arguably allowed killers to get away with murder.
When it comes to websleuths, there’s a reason law-enforcement professionals took to using the moniker “Doe Nuts” when referring to them. They view websleuths as mentally unstable amateurs who do not have the training or the temperament to solve a case. More importantly, they are seen as dangerous lynch mobs who make false accusations based on petty evidence.
Unfortunately, there is some truth to this view. I would witness irresponsible websleuths firsthand in the Elisa Lam case. Unfounded accusations run rampant across the Internet and legitimate pieces of evidence often compete with debate threads over the most putrescent conspiracy theories imaginable.
However, diligent websleuths counterbalance this disturbance and an equilibrium develops.
Would websleuths live up to the challenge in the Elisa Lam case?
The “crime scene,” the Cecil Hotel, has historically been a dangerous hotel—so dangerous in fact that there are rumors that in decades past police officers dreaded taking calls there and avoided entering its hallways at all costs.
What I would discover is that Cecil Hotel tenants, certain that they would be ignored, have traditionally avoided calling the police; further, even if the tenants could attract a caring, responsible officer, by filing a police report, they risked losing their home. So Cecil Hotel tenants didn’t want anything to do with the police; the police didn’t want anything to do with the Cecil Hotel; and the Cecil Hotel seemed to operate for decades with a kind of impunity.
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