Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
of the oxygen of the LAPD. It was watershed enough for a former officer to blow the whistle on the entire department and accuse them of systemic corruption. That this officer had actually taken up weapons and manufactured a one-man war against the third-largest municipal police department in the United States was sufficient cause to worry about the tenacity of the Elisa Lam investigation.
THE ASSASSIN
The Elisa Lam case made local news, but it was a second Los Angeles–based missing-person case that at this time dominated the national headlines. On February 3, three days before detectives launched an official investigation into Elisa’s disappearance, former police officer Christopher Dorner released a manifesto declaring “unconventional and asymmetric war” on the LAPD. In the coming days, he would initiate targeted killings of police officers and their families before leading his former colleagues on a week-long manhunt that ended as violently as it began.
A widely circulated photo of Dorner showed him in his Navy uniform with a beaming smile across his face. A former police officer, Dorner had also been a naval reservist who was deployed to the Persian Gulf for six months to provide security on an offshore oil platform in Bahrain. In over a decade of service to the United States Naval Reserve, Dorner received multiple honors, including the Iraq Campaign Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, a Rifle Marksman Ribbon, and a Pistol Expert Medal.
A laudatory 2002 story profiling Dorner recounted how while on duty at the Vance Air Force Base he found a bag containing $8,000 that belonged to the Enid Korean Church of Grace. Chris reported the money to local police and made sure it was returned. He called it a matter of “integrity.”
Dorner’s troubles started in 2008 when he accused a fellow officer, Teresa Evans, of kicking a handcuffed detainee in the face. An internal review board concluded that Dorner fabricated the claim; he was dismissed shortly thereafter. Dorner filed a lawsuit challenging his firing, but the California Court of Appeal dismissed it.
This challenge to his integrity seems to have triggered something inside him, flipped a switch in his mind that left him consumed with vengeance and wrath.
Two years later, Anderson Cooper’s office at CNN received a package from Dorner addressed to La Palma Police Chief Eric Nunez. The package contained a Post-it note to the former police chief that had dismissed Dorner, a video supposedly corroborating Dorner’s claim against Evans, of excessive force and a gold “challenge coin” riddled with bullet holes.
Then the killings started. Monica Quan, the daughter of the LAPD’s first Asian-American captain (who Dorner believed was involved in his firing), and her fiancé Keith Lawrence were murdered in Irvine. Only four days earlier Monica had joyously surprised her basketball team at Cal State Fullerton, holding up her hand to brandish the engagement ring. Keith, who had proposed to Monica next to a heart-shaped pattern of rose petals he’d carefully designed, was himself a prospective law-enforcement officer with a bright future. They were shot to death while sitting together in their car. Monica was shot three times in the back of the head; Keith took five bullets to the head and face, and two in the neck.
In an 11,000 word Facebook manifesto released soon after, Dorner outlined at least forty other officers and targets he planned to assassinate in retaliation for conniving against him. The manifesto excoriated the Los Angeles law-enforcement agencies, accusing them of rampant corruption, racism, and brutality. Dorner, an African-American, said the department had actually grown worse since the Rodney King beatings and that excessive force was an everyday occurrence. Dorner wasn’t just crossing the “thin blue line” that supposedly unites all police officers together in a brotherly fraternity—he was destroying the very concept of allegiance to Los Angeles law enforcement.
“The blue line will forever be severed and a cultural change will be implanted,” Dorner wrote. “You have awoken a sleeping giant . . . I am here to change and make policy. The culture of LAPD versus the community and honest/good officers needs to and will change.
“From 2/05 to 1/09,” Dorner continued, “I saw some of the most vile things humans can inflict on others as a police officer in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in the streets of LA. It was in the confounds [sic] of LAPD police stations and shops [cruisers].”
Dorner’s claims included officers falsely incriminating people they knew to be innocent. He claimed officers let shooting victims bleed out just to accrue overtime hours from the resulting court subpoenas. They shared and joked about cell phone images of the grisly deaths encountered while on the job. They regularly brutalized civilians and lied about it.
The rambling document oscillated between eloquent pleas for social justice and descriptions of his favorite TV shows and actors. He professed his admiration for President Obama and Senator John McCain and his continued respect for the nation’s military veterans and the federal rule of law. Dorner advocated for gun-control measures while threatening wholesale death with a military-grade arsenal of assault weapons. Using the language of terrorist insurgents, he promised to engage in “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” and warned his former colleagues, his brothers in blue, that they would “live the life of the prey.” He knew all of their contingency plans and protocols, he said, and would systematically dismantle and thwart all attempts at containment.
By the end of the ensuing manhunt and standoff, an effort that conscripted thousands of LAPD officers, five people were dead and six people sustained non-fatal injuries.
The week Elisa Lam disappeared, the Dorner manhunt went into full swing. This same police department—charged with the unprecedented task of neutralizing a former officer turned rogue assassin and executioner—was now carving out time to investigate another missing-person case.
As one case fizzled out in dramatic violence and the other became mired in mystery, I would find other disturbing parallels.
For now, I could only consider that Elisa had vanished only blocks from Skid Row, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Were the detectives interrogating hotel employees and residents? Were they canvassing neighbors? Maybe Elisa had simply made a new friend, with whom she was staying; she had lost her phone and didn’t have Internet access. It was unlike Elisa, according to her family. But missing persons have been found alive under much stranger circumstances.
One thing was for certain: Elisa would not be part of the 65 percent of missing persons who return or are found alive within the first forty-eight hours. After seventy-two hours, your survival rate plummets. Elisa had been missing for a full seven days.
But the surprises and anomalies in this investigation were just getting started. Five days later, an unlikely discovery cemented the case as one of the most bizarre death investigations of all time.
CHAPTER 2
Found
THE TAP WATER OOZED out of the faucet as a thick brownish red sludge and almost looked like it was saturated with red blood cells. However, you can’t waterlog blood cells enough to expand them to be visible to the naked eye. Whatever these grotesque globules are, Natalie Davis thought, standing over the faucet in her new, temporary bathroom, I’m better off not knowing.
Steven and Gloria Cott saw the same thing. They had not checked into the Cecil Hotel expecting their room to be adorned with silk curtains and crystal cutlery. Nor had they more faith in the purity of the hotel’s tap than any other municipal source of water. However, they had most certainly not planned on brushing their teeth with water that looked like it had been dredged from a corpse-infested swamp and pumped through the crotchety pipelines of an eighty-year old, 600-room building in the decrepit heart of downtown Los Angeles.
And for this reason, Steven Cott lodged a formal complaint with the hotel management. Upon his approach to the concierge’s desk and his subsequent verbal grievance, the hotel manager, Amy Price, managed to suppress a groan. It was the third complaint over the hotel’s tap water that night, and the tenth that week. Some residents complained about the water pressure, reporting that the water only dribbled out of the faucets; others said it smelled, and that it had a “funny, sweet, disgusting taste.”
Amy Price knew the