Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
they missed all of Elisa’s forensic trail? It is almost certain that Elisa’s DNA—and possibly her killer’s DNA—festooned the staircase leading to the roof or, alternately, the fire escape on the side of the building. One would also suspect DNA to have been on the roof, on the ladder to the water tank, and on the lid to the water tank.
But if the police used cadaver dogs and the lid was indeed open, how had the dogs missed the scent? Does that suggest that her body was moved into the tank at a later date? Who would have the access and clearance to be carrying a body up the stairs? Who would have the strength to carry the body up the precarious ladder on the side of the cistern? And how would some of this activity not been picked up on hotel surveillance?
And where was the body before it was moved and why was that scent not picked up? Later, detectives admitted they didn’t search rooms at the Cecil because they couldn’t prove there was a crime, a statement that raises its own set of concerns.
But the biggest question remains: how did the K-9 unit miss the scent? Air-scent dogs’ work retinue include the categories of Cadaver, Water, Avalanche, Urban Disaster, Wilderness, and Evidence. It has been said that most cadaver dogs have about a 95 percent accuracy rate and can detect bodies buried as far as 30 feet below ground.
The use of dogs by law enforcement dates back all the way to the Middle Ages, but it was not until 1889 that the modern era saw dogs integrated into police work. Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police of London, trained two bloodhounds to help him search for Jack the Ripper.
Subsequently, K-9 units became a regular asset of police investigations. Decomposition in the human body begins when enzymes and microbiome start breaking down organs and skin. When the body’s amino acids dissolve, they release the compound chemicals cadaverine and putrescine. Cadaver dogs are trained to detect these with a unique skill set that utilizes the incredible olfactory powers of canine nostrils. Man’s best friend can smell death—human death. The hounds become scholars at identifying the odor of our expiration.
They are trained to detect hundreds of different scents dispensed by corpses, to differentiate between humans and animals, between bodies that are submerged in water and bodies buried in rubble. However, the process of decomposition is impacted by external factors like environment, weather, and insects. Each modulation slightly changes the exact “scent of death” that will be present.
Some analysts suggested that rainfall may have thrown off the cadaver dogs. Weather reports show that there was slight precipitation on February 8 and February 19 in Los Angeles during the time Elisa was missing. However, the K-9 search conducted by the LAPD occurred somewhere between February 1 and February 6. Therefore, rain was not a factor that would have affected the scene. Forensic evidence, such as DNA from skin cells, should have been available either in the staircase and doorway of the rooftop emergency exit or on the fire escapes, which are the only ways Elisa could have accessed the roof. Forensic evidence should have also been available on the ladder to the water tank and on the lid to the water tank.
If the LAPD only used tracking dogs, it is possible that they missed the decomposition scent due to water immersion. But they should have picked up on the other DNA left behind by Elisa that would have led them to the roof. If, alternatively, the LAPD used cadaver dogs, it’s especially difficult to imagine how they missed both the DNA scent leading to the roof and the decomposition scent.
On that day, did the 5 percent rear its ugly head and account for a group of trained, diligent hounds missing the scent? Or could it be that there was no scent because Elisa’s body wasn’t yet there?
WHAT HAPPENED ON THE ROOF?
One of the biggest early questions pertained to roof access: how Elisa got up there and how she accessed the tank? How did she access the roof without triggering the rooftop alarm? Pedro Tovar, the Cecil’s chief engineer, confirmed that there are four ways to get onto the roof: three fire escapes that are connected to interior doors of the hotel; and a staircase attached to the 14th floor, which according to one tenant was designed to trigger an alarm when accessed by someone without clearance.
If we assume that Elisa accessed the roof via a fire escape, we have to take into consideration that she was missing her glasses. Think back to the surveillance tape and recall that Elisa had to bend over and bring her face to within a few inches of the button panel to read the floor numbers—and she still got it badly wrong two different times. Is it realistic to think that someone with impaired vision, or who was discombobulated enough to press the wrong buttons multiple times, subsequently climbed out the side of a building—with nothing to stop her fall, the distant windy call of traffic humming fourteen floors below—and climbed a tiny ladder onto the roof?
And once she was up there, Elisa would have had to ascend a separate platform on which the water tanks sit and then slither through the narrow space between the tanks and the plumbing equipment. Then she would have had to scale the cistern itself, lift its heavy metal lid, and climb inside. But not before taking off her clothes and bringing them, as well as her watch and room keycard, into the tank with her.
If the lid was open when the police twice searched the roof, it’s hard to believe they didn’t see it and inquire. If the lid was closed, how did Elisa close it herself while descending into the tank?
Of course, the biggest question would pertain to Elisa’s motive for doing any of this. Why would a young woman—who, we would learn, liked to stay in her room and keep to herself—scale the side of a dangerous building and then scale the ladder of a ten-foot water tank, remove her clothes and climb inside?
Almost immediately, many case analysts began to conclude this was the wrong question. With the evidence at hand, a young woman displaying behavior that suggests she is frightened and being followed, her body coming to rest shortly thereafter in an enclosed metal tank with her clothes removed on a difficult-to-access roof, perhaps the better question is: who brought Elisa to the roof and/ or who arranged for Elisa’s body to be concealed in the water tank?
It was a question that would be debated on countless websites, in a million plus comment threads, in thousands of videos and podcasts.
But first: would the LAPD find evidence of criminality to support these theories?
The primary detectives assigned to the case, Greg Stearns and Wallace “Wally” Tennelle, were veterans of the LAPD police force.
STEARNS AND THE “MYSTERY OF THE HOLLYWOOD HEAD”
Greg Stearns is widely viewed as a particularly skilled interrogator who uses cutting-edge techniques. He is probably best known for cracking a cold case that ended with a fellow LAPD detective, Stephanie Lazarus, being convicted of a murder she committed twenty-three years earlier.
In 2012–13 (directly overlapping with the timeframe of the Lam investigation) the department cherry-picked Stearns and Tim Marcia, who also worked the Lam case, to participate in a top-secret non-coercive interrogation training program called HIG (High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group), headed by a consortium of FBI, CIA, and Pentagon officials.
The goal was to use new interrogation tactics to reduce the number of false confessions. Stearns and Marcia led the way and applied what they learned at HIG to the “Mystery of the Hollywood Head.”
This investigation-turned-cold-case began in early 2012 when a dog jumped into a ravine and found a head-sized object in a plastic bag.
The object was indeed a head and it belonged to a man, Hervey Medellin, who had been missing for weeks. The prime suspect was Medellin’s housemate, Gabriel Campos-Martinez, for whom police had a mountain of circumstantial evidence (for example, his Google search for how to dismember a body, which he conducted the day Medellin disappeared) but nothing substantial enough to hand over to prosecutors.
Stearns and Marcia took a run at Campos with their new HIG interrogation method. Though he didn’t confess, by the time they were done chatting, Campos had admitted he went for walks in the Hollywood hills with the victim, in close proximity to where his head was found; additionally, he discussed a plant called Datura, which could incapacitate someone.
In 2015, Campos received a sentence