Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
site goes on to state the following: “The difficulty with a missing persons report is that the person missing has a right to be ‘missing.’ In other words, this person may have a legitimate or personal reason that he or she wants to be left alone and the police do not have the right to violate that right. This can be frustrating for family members or loved ones who may be (perhaps justifiably) convinced that foul play is involved. Once foul play is reasonably established—or the police have a reason to suspect the person’s life is endangered (for example, if they require timely medication and are without it)—an investigation can be launched.”
Law enforcement agencies urge family members or friends to report a missing person as early as possible. However, in the case of adults, it is virtually impossible for police to rapidly determine if they are missing or if they have simply left their old life and started a new one. And in the case of children or young women, investigators simply can’t respond to every missing persons case assuming it’s a sexually motivated non-family abduction. Most of the time people go missing, they either return safely or the case was a misunderstanding of some kind.
“If you just spent two extra hours and went to the hairdresser, would you want the chief of police pulling up?” said Todd Matthews, communications director for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). “You don’t want to be controlled or watched.”
In those first crucial forty-eight hours, there is a slippery slope investigators must navigate in respecting the privacy rights of the missing while doing right by the family.
While an individual has the right to disappear, their families have the right to file a Missing Person report. They can do this at any time; there is not a requisite number of days one must wait before contacting the police. In California, a missing person is simply “someone whose whereabouts is unknown to the reporting party.” In fact, in the case of children or other dependents, each hour counts and family members should report as soon as possible.
However, prematurely reporting someone missing can lead to wasted police resources. In 2017, the mother of twenty-two-year-old Rebekah Martinez reported her daughter missing, igniting a statewide manhunt only to find out that Rebekah had absconded to Los Angeles and was an aspiring reality TV star on The Bachelor.
Other cases don’t have such warm endings. In early 2018, the parents of nineteen-year-old University of Pennsylvania student Blaze Bernstein reported their son missing. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department used Blaze’s Snapchat posts to pinpoint his last sighting to around midnight on January 2, when a friend dropped him off at a park. He hadn’t been seen since.
In the ensuing search of Borrego Park in Foothill Ranch, police deployed drone technology. But Blaze was only found when rain runoff exposed his body, which had been buried in a shallow grave. The friend, Samuel Woodward, who dropped Blaze off was charged not only with stabbing Blaze twenty times but with a hate crime, as it was later determined Woodward was associated with a white supremacist group and may have targeted Blaze because he was Jewish and gay.
Drones are increasingly utilized in missing persons cases because they allow detectives to explore large swathes of land and then judiciously narrow in on the areas that should be searched on foot by people and dogs. In another case, the search for three-year-old Sherrin Matthews, police hired the North Texas Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Response Team to scour Richardson County, Texas. Like the Bernstein case, the search for Matthews ended with a tragic discovery. Her father was later charged with capital murder, her mother with child endangerment and abandonment.
Drones are part of a growing suite of new technological tools used in the search for missing persons. This arsenal includes predictive analytics, closed-circuit television, GPS darts, blockchain, and even experimental facial recognition. In 2008, Seattle police found a missing suicidal man by tracking his cellular phone data, in a case that would portend a controversial debate over privacy rights that persists today.
Cell phones and smartphones have assisted greatly in missing-persons cases. If police actually physically have the phone, they may be able to piece together what happened based on the most recent text messages or calls. But even if they do not have the missing person’s phone, investigators can usually learn a great deal about a person’s location based on “tower dumps” from network providers, which let them track a phone’s serial number. They can use network towers pinged by the phone to “triangulate” a specific location.
Unfortunately, increasingly stalkers also use this technology for nefarious purposes.
However, if there is no evidence of a crime, investigators can find themselves legally restricted from accessing cell-phone information. Which is to say, there is another slippery slope for investigators, who must wield technology to help identify missing persons without trampling on the civil liberties of someone who simply wanted to disappear for a few days.
When he opened the conference up for questions, Teague was immediately asked by a reporter if they had checked Elisa Lam’s cell phone for information.
“I don’t want to talk about the cell phone,” Teague replied, adding, “We have . . . some of her property.”
The next reporter asked what, in retrospect, was an astonishingly prescient question.
“Is there any surveillance footage of Elisa from inside the hotel?”
THE SURVEILLANCE VIDEO
One week later, on Valentine’s Day, a friend emailed me a link. The email had no subject or text, just a hyperlinked YouTube url. Thoughtlessly opening it (could have been a virus), I found myself watching a grainy video recorded by a hotel’s elevator surveillance camera. I had no idea what the video was going to show, but I had a sneaking suspicion it would be disturbing.
One of my hobbies is curating and creating content for the website The Ghost Diaries, which I launched earlier that year to satiate my fascination with morbid mysteries. I was posting about everything from the paintings of serial killers to parallel universes, watching thousands of bizarre videos—some of them fascinating, some of them moronic, others outright emotionally scarring.
The Internet has democratized information and, in doing so, freed the pixels of a trillion nightmares to flow into our heads.
I didn’t know it at the time, but in opening the link in the email I had opted into an obsessive quest that would change the way I think about the world and myself. I spent the next five years of my life trying to solve a puzzle that is missing most of its pieces.
The footage was allegedly surveillance from inside the Cecil Hotel. It must have originally come from the hotel manager’s office, then migrated to the files of the investigating LAPD detectives and had somehow ended up posted on the YouTube account of journalist Dennis Romero of LA Weekly. Romero has since steadfastly refused to explain how he came into possession of this clip.
At this time the view count was several hundred thousand, but it has since ballooned to over 23 million for that upload alone.
The blurry, pixelated video showed a young woman with shoulder-length black hair in a red hoodie and black cargo shorts entering an elevator and leaning over to inspect the button panel. She proceeded to push several of the buttons and then stand waiting. The doors remained open. As she waited, so too did I, wondering why my friend had emailed the video to me. I half expected it to be a “screamer”—a once popular online ploy to trick someone into engaging with a video just long enough that they jump out of their skin in horror when an Exorcist-style face suddenly screams at an eardrum-shattering volume.
“What the hell is this?” I asked out loud.
The video description read: “Elisa Lam, the Vancouver woman who disappeared in Los Angeles on January 31, is seen acting strangely in new video released by police on Thursday.”
“What?” my colleague said, beside me.
“Oh, uh, nothing,” I said, discreetly covering the browser window with a work tab. “Where you getting lunch?”
Lunch—and food, in general—was always a popular subject in our company’s ranks. Creature comforts