Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
negative, officials tried to assuage residents’ fears of contaminated water. But no amount of mental gymnastics could absolve the odious truth: a cadaver had been marinating in their drinking water.
In the days following the rooftop discovery, fifty-five of the hotel’s guests chose to leave the premises and were relocated. Approximately fifteen guests, many of them lower-income full-time residents signed waivers and remained. They received bottled water in replacement of the possibly contaminated hotel water. Two guests, Steven and Gloria Cott, filed a class-action lawsuit against the hotel within the next month.
The cistern in which Elisa was found was taken “offline” and additional samples were taken from different parts of the building to be retested. The hotel’s entire water system was flushed and refilled with chlorine-rich water. Until the new tests came back, the hotel restaurant was shut down and water at the Cecil was only to be used for “flushing.”
“So many things have happened in this place that nothing surprises me,” Diaz told a reporter.
CAUSE OF DEATH
The preliminary autopsy was unable to determine the cause of death. Ed Winter, L.A. County assistant chief coroner stated that it was “deferred, pending additional tests.” Winter further stated that the coroner’s office wouldn’t be releasing any partial or preliminary information until it had the results of blood, urine, and toxicology tests. That information could take anywhere from six to eight weeks to be released. At least, it was supposed to take that long.
Though he didn’t divulge much information, Winter did shed a little light on his thought process when he stated a few of the questions for which he would seek answers. “What was in [Elisa Lam’s] system? Were all the organs functioning right? . . . Any prescriptions, was she on meds within a therapeutic level or did she take too many or was there none?”
In other words, it’s reasonable to assume based on this statement that there was at least some consideration going into the theory that Elisa was under the influence of drugs during the surveillance video. Had Elisa willingly taken an illicit substance—a psychedelic or narcotic that rendered her in a dissociated, confused state? Or had she been drugged?
INITIAL QUESTIONS
With Elisa no longer missing and her body found in suspicious circumstances, police now found themselves with a potential murder investigation on their hands. As they waited for an autopsy and toxicology report to shed light on the empirical facts of her cause of death, detectives began working the case.
The primary detectives assigned to the Elisa Lam case were veterans Wallace Tennelle and Greg Stearns.
Elisa’s body was found naked; her clothes (if, in fact, they were her clothes; one item listed as Lam’s was a pair of men’s shorts) were found floating in the water coated with “a sand-like particulate.” Pending the results of the autopsy, we didn’t yet know whether she had been assaulted in any way. A rape and fingernail kit would hopefully answer the critical but disturbing questions that must invariably be asked when a missing person’s clothes have been removed.
No crime scene photos or photos of her body were released; nor did the LAPD release any information regarding DNA collected from the roof where her body was found. This is, of course, standard. In a homicide investigation, detectives are methodically careful about what information they release because there are certain details of the crime scene that only the perpetrator could know. When they question suspects, they look to glean these details from them.
The age-old tactic is surprisingly effective. During the investigation of serial killer Jack Unterweger, who had lived in the Cecil Hotel during one of his murder sprees, detectives from both Vienna and Los Angeles carefully safeguarded information pertaining to the condition of the prostitutes Unterweger had murdered. Details, such as the meticulous and particularly vicious and fatal nooses he fashioned with his victims’ bras, were known only to the detectives and the killer.
In the case of Richard Ramirez, who had also lived at the Cecil Hotel, the LAPD did not publicly disclose details of the killer’s Avia sneakers and .25 automatic ballistics during the manhunt so that Ramirez would not see it in newspapers and eliminate the evidence. Then-Mayor of San Francisco Dianne Feinstein blurted out the information at a news conference and it was subsequently plastered all over the city newspapers.
The disclosure infuriated the LAPD and could have compromised the manhunt, as Ramirez saw the article and only then learned what evidence they had on him. He subsequently discarded the .25 and the sneakers when he read Feinstein’s leak. Fortunately, he was apprehended anyway.
In the Elisa Lam case, there was not yet a shred of physical evidence to prove foul play—and the question deck was stacked. Was Elisa interacting with someone in the hallway as seen on the surveillance tape? Why was her body in the water tank? Why was she naked? Why was she on the roof at all? How had she accessed it (or been brought there) without the alarm being triggered?
One thing we know about the initial police investigation is that they searched the hotel, floor by floor, with a canine unit. Manager Amy Price stated in the civil-case depositions that this search included the roof but did not yield any information.
Detective Tennelle testified that when the LAPD set up a command post in the Cecil, they searched “every nook and cranny of that building where we thought was a room, locked or unlocked, it was to be opened. It was to be searched.”
This was a somewhat misleading statement, since they did not initially discover Elisa’s body on the roof when they supposedly searched “every nook and cranny.” If they had searched every nook and cranny, they would have found the body in one of the only structures visible on the roof of the hotel they supposedly searched twice.
How had police investigators overlooked the water tanks during their two searches of the hotel? There’s nothing else on the roof—if the lid to the tank in which Elisa was found was up, how had the police investigators not seen it? If the lid was down—and presumably set back into place after Elisa’s entry—who was responsible for this? Who closed the lid?
SEARCH DOGS
Police have confirmed that a K-9 unit was used in the building but have not been specific about where. For example, we don’t know if the dogs were used to search rooms and pick up a live scent—which one would presume police were looking for when Elisa was still missing—and we don’t know to what extent, if any, dogs were deployed on the roof. This is crucial in assessing how Elisa was not found earlier in the water tank, which is itself crucial in understanding that critical evidence may have been lost early in the case. Determining if and why evidence was lost is an issue we will return to later.
Since the LAPD, by their own admission, claims to have searched the entire building, “every nook and cranny,” let’s assume that the K-9 unit was taken to the roof. How did the dogs miss her scent during what was then a second search of the roof?
To answer this we must first know what kind of search dog was being used, an air-scent dog or a tracking dog. Tracking dogs are often used when time is of the essence in a missing-persons case. They are called onto the scene in order to follow the scent of the person missing before the area becomes contaminated by the smell of other people. To do this, canines are bred and trained to detect heavy skin particles, which living humans shed at the rate of 40,000 per minute. They are essentially following the forensic trail all humans leave in their wake.
There is ample reason to think that tracking dogs were used as detectives may have believed Elisa was still alive. But if she was still alive at the hotel, the only place they could have reasonably suspected her to be breathing is in one of the rooms. If they believed that, this may suggest the existence of other evidence, such as suspicious tenants or employees, that led them to think using a tracking dog in the hotel would have been fruitful.
However, unless Elisa was alive in one of the rooms of the hotel, the only logical K-9 choice would have been air-scent dogs, who do not follow a specific scent but rather look for the origin of a corpse scent that they pick up on through air currents. Tracking dogs and air-scent dogs overlap in their training but only air-scent dogs look for cadavers.
If