Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
that the killer had acquired Elisa’s lost phone and was using her Tumblr account to tease and mock investigators.
The most logical explanation for the posts is that Elisa had set up the auto-updater feature on her Tumblr account. This would have allowed her feed to automatically aggregate posts from her favorite accounts. But given that her phone was missing, it was hard not to wonder whether maybe the new Tumblr posts were messages from her killer.
The effect was chilling, as illustrated by a message written posthumously to Elisa by a former classmate:
What haunts me is that your Tumblr reblogged my posts at the end of February and beginning of March 2013, which distressed me to no ends at the time.
There was suspicious graffiti found on the roof.
In one of John Lordan’s early “BrainScratch” videos, he reported on photographs displaying graffiti on the roof of the Cecil. The photos were taken when the Fire Department removed Elisa from the tank. The vulgar tags included the Latin phrase Fecto cunt her suma, which is inscribed on a surface close to the water tank where Elisa’s body was found. According to some online accounts, Fecto cunt her suma translates either to “in fact she was a cunt” or “it’s the best pussy” in Latin.
There are a couple of reasons why the graffiti should be considered important. For one, in later statements the hotel management insisted that the rooftop wasn’t accessible, a determination that became legally critical when the Lam family eventually filed a civil lawsuit against the Cecil Hotel. The fact that someone or multiple persons had tagged the roof meant that at least one or more people had breached the security there.
Furthermore, tagging usually implies that there will be an audience, meaning there may have been the expectation that others would see it. All of which leads to the conclusion that hotel residents or others may have habitually occupied the roof. One former Cecil tenant told me that she used to drink beer on the roof on a regular basis. It can only be assumed that she wasn’t the only one. Could one of these occupiers have had something to do with Elisa’s death or known the killer?
Another point to consider is an oddly synchronistic post from Elisa’s blog. On 31 January, the day she went missing, Elisa posted the following statement on her Tumblr account:
Cunt again? It was odd how men . . . used that word to demean women when it was the only part of a woman they valued.
This was several days into her stay at the Cecil. Had Elisa already been on the roof and taken offense at the message? Perhaps she objected to the graffiti and offended the artist. Or (a more extreme possibility) had someone Elisa knew or someone who had followed her blog—on which she had published her traveling itinerary—tracked her to the Cecil, and left the graffiti tag as a kind of calling card?
WEBSLEUTH TRAVELS FROM HONG KONG
One websleuth, Kay Theng, journeyed all the way from Hong Kong with the intention of infiltrating the Cecil Hotel with a camera and documenting the layout.
Kay arrived at the 14th-floor elevators—ground zero of the entire case—and proceeded to ask and answer five questions:
1. Do the doors of the elevator remain open? Yes, the doors remain open when you push the buttons to other floors; they only close when you press the “door close” button, or if someone on another floor has pressed the elevator button outside the elevator to signal the elevator to go to their floor.
2. How many buttons and panels are there outside the elevator? There are just two buttons on the outside panel—up and down.
3. Does the hold button work? The hold button does work and John Lordan later tested it to learn that the doors remain open for approximately two minutes when it’s pressed.
4. What can you see from the inside? On the wall opposite the elevator is a round mirror which allows you to see if anyone is outside the elevator. The placement of this mirror also means Elisa would have been able to see a reflection of herself when she was standing in the hallway.
5. What can you see if you look outside the elevator? There are two blind spots that are impossible to see from the hallway in front of the elevator. When Elisa peeked out of the elevator and into the hallway, she was not able to see the entire corridor in either direction.
Kay’s next moves are to attempt to access the roof and as he does so he asks and answers three new questions:
1. How many paths are there to access the roof?
2. How accessible are those paths?
3. How close can you get to the water tank?
Kay first approaches the 14th-floor fire escape and finds it can be accessed easily and used to reach the 15th floor (top floor). He avoids the main roof access, the stairs used by the hotel employees to reach the alarmed, locked door, and instead climbs the fire escape to reach the roof. It doesn’t seem particularly difficult to reach the water tanks.
He concludes his video, “This is not a supernatural event, it is very likely to be a murder. We don’t want to see people exaggerate the truth. May the killer be captured soon, and the dead rest in peace.”
The paranormal interpretation is far more popular in Kay’s home country of Hong Kong but he wasn’t buying it. Like John Lordan, Kay didn’t want the idea of ghosts and demons to distract people from what was really going on. And he certainly was not the only websleuth who suspected foul play.
MURDER THEORIES
Without the Internet and its attendant websleuth community, the Elisa Lam case would have likely disappeared from the public radar soon after its initial reports had made the rounds. Depending on your point of view, it can be argued that this was either a blessing or a curse. The voracious consumption of the case is nothing short of amazing, a sociological phenomenon that would be haunting in its own right even if it were not predicated on the discovery of a corpse in a rooftop water tank.
The Elisa Lam case was a uniquely Internet-based phenomenon. While the initial investigation and subsequent discovery made both local and international headlines on cable TV stations, the case never became a featured darling on Nancy Grace or other cable exploits. Maybe it lacked a certain scandalous sexiness when compared to the cases of Scott Peterson, Jodi Arias, Casey Anthony, or Amanda Knox. Or, one could easily argue, Elisa Lam did not fit the criteria of a ready-for-TV celebrity victim.
She wasn’t white. TV true-crime producers often gravitate toward white victims. This phenomenon has an actual psychological designation, the “missing white woman syndrome” (MWWS).
Elisa’s case also brings up un-TV-friendly issues. How often do shows on ID (Investigation Discovery) delve into mental illness? Even when the station did eventually run a three-part series, Horror at the Cecil, which devoted an episode to the Lam case, her struggle with depression and bipolar disorder were hardly touched upon at all.
Or perhaps it was because the case didn’t have a clear antagonist. There was no cinematic murder suspect lurking in the shadows.
Enter the Internet.
A variety of homicide theories would soon follow: They included Elisa being drugged and either dying from accidental overdose or malicious poisoning (perhaps by a romantic interest who had an expectation that prolonged exposure to water would eliminate the trail); another theory posited that Elisa was killed elsewhere in the hotel, possibly in a bathtub where she was already naked, and then transported to the roof and deposited into the water tank; a frequently articulated theory held that Elisa had been killed by a hotel employee, or a friend of a hotel employee, who subsequently edited the surveillance tape so as not to appear.
As people waited for the LAPD detectives to make an announcement or release the results of the autopsy and toxicology reports, speculation was rampant, and more and more websleuths deputized themselves to investigate the mystery. There was something about the case that called to people.
Two body language analysts