Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
LAPD has since used the HIG method—the true nature of which is classified—on another sixty interrogations with a 75 to 80 percent success rate.
Another case I found interesting involved both Stearns and Lieutenant Walt Teague. Teague and Stearns had been trying for nearly a decade to nab Tai Zhi Cui, the prime suspect in a grisly triple murder, who fled to China to escape extradition and prosecution. Police say that in October 2006, Cui entered a Koreatown restaurant and killed his ex-girlfriend, her new boyfriend, and the restaurant’s owner with execution-style gunshots.
China refused to extradite Cui but instead prosecuted him in their own courts, which include a three-judge panel. Cui was convicted and Stearns and Teague celebrated justice, although they would have rather tried him in the United States.
Teague, who appeared with the Lam family during the press conference, has strong connections to China. He earned a degree and met his wife there. I wondered how much of a role he played dealing with the family.
“WALLY” TENNELLE
In the book Ghettoside, a polemic on black-on-black homicide in Los Angeles, journalist Jill Leovy describes Wallace Tennelle as being atypical of LAPD officers because of a specific and tragically fated conviction that officers should live in the community that they police. For Tennelle this was South Central, where he and his wife, Yadira, high school sweethearts, raised three children who all attended private school.
After serving as a Marine, Tennelle devoted his life to the police force. He initially rejected the Robbery and Homicide Department (RHD) out of principle but the homicide surge of the early 1980s ushered him in. Tennelle would go to work for the CRASH division, which was an elite, aggressive, almost renegade force within the department that would later become a controversial liability.
In the late 1980s, Tennelle transitioned to a divisional detective job but his intense work ethic, described as pathological, persisted. In 1992, he and his partner worked twenty-eight cases, which Leovy notes, was three times more than most detectives took on.
Wallace, a veteran LAPD homicide detective, knew what it was like to lose a kid. He had bought a home for his family in the same community in which he worked, the dangerous South Los Angeles area. It was in this neighborhood, the western edge of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street precinct area, that in 2007 his eighteen-year-old son Bryant Tennelle was shot in the head and killed by a gang member. Bryant was wearing a Houston Astros baseball cap, unaware that its colors and shapes affiliated him with rival gang activity.
ANOMALIES
As Stearns and Tennelle got their investigation underway, Bernard Diaz, the eighty-nine-year-old long-time resident, told reporters that he’d heard loud strange noises coming from the 4th floor the night before Elisa’s body was found.
“They said there was some obstruction to the drain between the 3rd and 4th floor,” Diaz said, speculating as to the source of the noise.
Another claim, corroborated by photographs from the roof, stated that there was suspicious graffiti found near the water tanks. One reporter speculated that the messages, written in Latin, may have been a calling card left behind by someone ostensibly involved in Lam’s death.
Still other reports concerned several registered sex offenders living at the hotel. In fact, nearly a dozen sex offenders were known to live on Main Street within only a few blocks of the Cecil.
There was also the matter of additional young women found dead in the area and, at this point in the investigation, the detectives considered foul play a possible explanation.
But who was responsible for transporting Elisa’s body past surveillance cameras, security alarms, up several steep ladders and into the water tank?
Another question that would follow: was Elisa reported missing by the hotel staff when she failed to check out at her scheduled time? Or did they wait until notified by the police that the family had filed a missing-persons report?
Or was something else entirely going on with Elisa in the Cecil Hotel? In the coming weeks, websleuths would stumble upon new information about Elisa that further complicated their attempts to discern her behavior in the elevator. Other researchers, myself included, mined the history of the hotel itself and discovered tragic, terrifying truths about the tenants and employees who lived and worked there.
CHAPTER 4
Rise of the Websleuths
WHEN I FIRST GOT INVOLVED in the case, I didn’t have the faintest clue what a websleuth was or even what constituted a true-crime investigation. The Elisa Lam case slowly sucked me in from a variety of different angles. By the end of my investigation, the experience would take a severe psychological toll and redirect the course of my life in unexpected ways.
And I wasn’t the only one for whom the case had a special effect. What I would discover is that there are people all over the world who have become attached to, connected with, and emotionally invested in the case for an enormous variety of reasons. Websleuths and friends of Elisa’s who want to see justice served; people suffering from depression and mental illness who have forged an online community; former Cecil Hotel residents who want the truth to come out about the criminal history of the hotel; paranormal researchers who see a darker reality cutting through and want to awaken the world; conspiracy theorists who believe a larger, more sinister narrative is playing out behind the scenes.
The case became a kind of Rorschach test; everyone who looked at it saw something different, something uniquely meaningful and uniquely petrifying.
MISSING PERSONS AND UNIDENTIFIED BODIES
It is estimated that one third of murders in the United States go unsolved. That’s approximately 200,000 homicides since 1960. Since the days of Jack the Ripper and, much later, the Black Dahlia, people have always been fascinated with unsolved murders. Cold cases and true-crime sagas are a cultural obsession, an entertainment staple, but more important, they are a major conundrum for law-enforcement agencies who often simply do not have the resources to vigorously pursue the truth behind every unsolved death in which foul play is suspected.
Even the above estimates do not paint the full picture of the burden of justice, particularly in America, where one must also factor in unidentified remains and missing persons. In The Skeleton Crew, Deborah Halber breaks the situation down. A 2007 census conducted by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) suggests there may be 40,000 unidentified individuals in morgues and graves around the country. Some coroners and medical examiners think the number may be closer to 60,000. Unfortunately, many agencies in the medico-legal establishment habitually overlook unidentifieds. One study suggests only 30 percent of small-town coroners even have policies for how to handle unidentified remains.
Meanwhile, at any given time there are about 100,000 active missing-persons cases. As we discussed earlier, the majority of these people are found alive. But over the years, the number of those who remain missing—a nightmare without end for the families involved—continues to rise. Many of them do not even constitute being a “cold case” because they lack evidence or an advocate.
The ability and capacity for our nation’s police and law enforcement is outpaced by the rate of people disappearing, the staggering number of unidentified remains, and unsolved deaths. This is the troubling locus from which websleuths arose and became an indispensable and permanent tool in criminal justice.
There is no official origin to the concept of websleuths. They were forged out of the slowly evolving symbiotic relationship between humans, who seem to have an innate desire to solve puzzles, and the Internet, which is both the greatest research tool and the greatest interconnectivity tool yet devised by our species.
Since the earliest days of the Internet, civilians with an interest in cold cases have gathered information about them. The location of the body, the time it was discovered, salient physical details like scars or tattoos and other distinguishing features. They entered these details in rudimentary databases. The first newsgroups, email lists, and Yahoo! Groups like Troy More’s ColdCases united researchers and allowed them to share