Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson

      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:

      have arrived in Laland . . . and there is a monstrosity of a building next to the place I’m staying when I say monstrosity mind you I’m saying as in gaudy but then again it was built in 1928 hence the art deco theme so yes it IS classy but then since it’s LA it went on crack Fairly certain this is where Baz Luhrmann needs to film the Great Gatsby.

      There was no direct text from her that was more recent, from the thirtieth or the day she disappeared.

      Going backward, I read more of her writing, attempting to reverse engineer her timeline: on January 27, she gave a “shout out” to custodians and other working-class people who get “shit on”; she says “the Speakeasy was AWESOME” but that she lost a cellphone; on January 26, she posts that she’s going out that night and hopes that no “creepers” harass her; on the 24th, she summarizes her activities prior to Los Angeles, in San Diego, mentioning that she’s staying at a hostel and “reckless [ly]” told a guy there that she liked him.

      Prior to that, she’s planning for her trip, which she called her “West Coast tour.” Her planned destinations include San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. On January 12, she mentions that she would appreciate “suggestions and meet-ups.”

      Elisa had been planning her trip for a while and was excited to see California. The information presented a solid travel itinerary from Elisa herself mixed in with more Tumblr madness: a man missing his head labeled “where’s your head at”; American Psycho; a demon sitting in someone’s head whispering, you suck; Carl Sagan; a tribute to weird people; David Bowie; more Fight Club; more Great Gatsby.

      I began collecting Elisa’s writing into a Google document so that I could read her posts without sifting through the other Tumblr posts.

      Then I remembered someone mentioning a second blog. This one, called Ether Fields, was hosted on Blogspot and took a more traditional form. My eyes swept over a post dated over six months before her death. It was titled “Worries of a twenty something” and captioned: “I spent about two days in bed hating myself.” I clicked on it to read more.

      The post continued:

      Why don’t I simply do the things that I know will make me feel better?

      It isn’t rocket science. It isn’t that difficult. Get out of bed. Eat. See people. Talk to people. Exercise. Write. Read. If you want to do something with your life, well ok just go ahead and do something.

      The post continued on for several more paragraphs in which Elisa admonished herself for various reasons.

      I was about to move on to the next post when I noticed that someone had left a comment below the blog entry. Someone named Emma wrote: “You REALLY need to speak to someone in real life about what you’re going through.”

      She continued on with a strenuous appeal for Elisa to seek help for depression and low self-esteem. It appears this was the only comment prior to her death because the very next comment began:

      Elisa,

      I don’t know you and we have never met or even knew of each other’s existence until your tragic fate. When I first heard of the news and saw your picture, I don’t know why, but I felt torn and drawn to you . . . I became obsessed in finding more about you.

      The author of the comment said reading her blog was like looking in a mirror and seeing a version of himself, a reflection of his own despair. The next comment responded to Jeff telling him that it was not silly for him to write to a dead person because Elisa’s thoughts live on in the minds of those who read her blog. These comments were left one month and two months after her death, respectively.

      There were many more comments. I was a bit startled by the reality that months after her death, complete strangers felt an emotional connection to Elisa and were flocking to her blog to leave digital epitaphs.

      I sought out Elisa’s blogs with a specific purpose in mind: to determine if her posts revealed anything about her cause of death. But I soon got caught up in reading her thoughts and comments left by others. There was something mystifying about getting so much detail on a stranger’s life