In late-January of 2013, 21-year-old Elisa Lam of British Columbia took a solo trip to California. Her plan was to start in San Diego and work her way up to San Francisco. On Jan. 26, Lam arrived in Los Angeles, lodging at a youth hostel, Stay at Main, in its downtown section. While there, she visited The Last Bookstore and attended a live television taping in Burbank. She called her family back in Canada every day of her trip. When she didn’t call on Feb. 1, her parents contacted the police. The robbery-homicide division found that she never checked out of the hostel and left behind all of her belongings, including her clothing, her laptop, and her psychiatric medications.
There was an immediate cause for concern. Lam’s stay was concentrated in the middle of Los Angeles’s Skid Row district, a kind of open-air Bedlam where much of the city’s massive homeless population has been forcibly shuffled over time. It’s an area marked by overwhelming poverty and violent crime, with free-flowing drug use and prostitution to boot. Lam’s youth hostel, moreover, was actually a repurposed portion of the Cecil Hotel, advertised separately but sharing a common elevator and facilities. Like the area surrounding it, the Cecil Hotel had an unseemly reputation. Suicides, murder, rapes, robberies, and domestic violence were common. Serial killers Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger were former guests.
But the more that police investigated Lam’s disappearance, what began as a straightforward missing persons case became anything but that. There was no evidence to suggest that Lam physically left the hotel. And the centerpiece of the case, a four-minute surveillance video of Lam in an elevator, gained millions of views internationally after it was made public. On Feb. 19, her body was discovered in one of the water tanks on the roof of the hotel.
This series of events makes up the center of the four-episode true-crime documentary series, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, now streaming on Netflix.
Netflix is one of the most prolific producers of prestige true-crime content. By “prestige,” I mean that these series swap the arch style and sensationalist substance of shows such as Dateline and Unsolved Mysteries for a moodier, more sober presentation and an essayistic tendency to explore themes beyond the crime in question, however tangentially related. Netflix’s breakout hit, Making a Murderer, is really about the implicit biases and blind spots of small-town justice systems. Showtime’s Murder in the Bayou is about the harsh effects of economic segregation. HBO’s Murder at Middle Beach is about the hidden fractures of one family coming to light.
Crime Scene hardly breaks the mold. It has everything repeat viewers have come to expect from prestige true crime: dreamy reenactment footage, deep archival research, tempered and earnest talking heads, grand themes, and a commitment to truth with many entryways for theoretical rabbit holes. Yet the uniquely strange case of Lam works a kind of magic on the series, placing scrutiny back on the traits of the genre.
Lam’s disappearance was subject to two investigations that ran parallel to and often against one another — a reality investigation and a perception investigation, one could say. The reality-based investigation was carried out by the Los Angeles Police Department, with the immediate facts at hand and dealing directly with a family who wanted resolution. The perception-based investigation emerged when the police made the surveillance footage public. In it, Lam is seen behaving erratically, pressing multiple buttons, and moving in and out of an elevator that seems to be stuck. She appears to be evading or talking to someone out of view and makes bizarre hand gestures before disappearing. It is unnerving to watch and was poured over by “web sleuths” on YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook for visual clues. And as the speculations of these online amateurs became more feverish, Lam’s disappearance took on a more sinister aspect.
There would not be a true-crime genre without amateur sleuths. At their best, they can keep a long-unsolved case from going cold, as they did with the Golden State Killer. But amateur sleuthing is more alchemy than science. The web sleuths in Crime Scene went to every possible, counterproductive extreme in their pursuit of the truth. Some of their excesses were the result of overanalyzing things. They hypothesized that the surveillance video was manipulated, the result of an obvious cover-up on the part of the LAPD and hotel management. Some speculation was the product of pure coincidence. They found the disappearance was eerily similar to the 2005 horror film Dark Water. Lam might have been a secret agent sent to spread a new strain of tuberculosis among Skid Row’s homeless population because a treatment for tuberculosis happens to be named LAM-ELISA. The coroner’s report, which ruled Lam’s death an accident, was challenged and picked apart. Most egregiously, the amateur sleuths abetted the harassment of a Mexican black metal musician who stayed at the hotel a full year before Lam and whom they falsely identified as a suspect.
Skepticism is an indispensable ingredient of true crime. Yet Crime Scene shows the dark side of doubt, how it can come back full circle into becoming its own kind of certainty. The amateur sleuths in the Lam case start to believe that everything released through official channels is a deception that needs to be dismantled. Some of them actually visit the hotel, where they come off as intrusive, entitled, and self-assured. It takes them a lot of time to accept that the most plausible explanation of Lam’s death is the simplest. Lam had bipolar disorder, for which she was prescribed a regimen of four medications. The coroner’s toxicology report showed evidence that she’d been neglecting that regimen. Witness reports, such as her bunkmates at the hotel, suggested a mental state that was quickly deteriorating. The elevator footage very likely shows Lam in the midst of a severe psychotic episode.
Lam lamented her poor mental health on her prolifically updated Tumblr account. “I’m not a profession [sic] depressed person,” she wrote. “I am so much more than that.” Throughout the series, a voice actor speaks excerpts from her Tumblr, which she filled with candid, cathartic confessions alongside affirmations of her self-worth and expressions of her hope for normalcy and independence, a hope that seems to have motivated her to travel to California. Another post said: “Life is long and difficult and people will always be stupid and complain but it is worth it so long as you have special moments. … Thank you friends, family and tumblr. The world is just awesome.”
In this respect, Crime Scene also presents the divergent ways in which we rely on the internet. For Lam, it was a positive outlet for her struggles and a way to feel less alone, even if it seems she was writing for no one but herself. The sleuths who professed to help her, on the other hand, created a community by which she was transformed into an abstract victim of some malevolent conspiracy.
It is admirable that Crime Scene should offer a corrective to the genre’s worst impulses. Still, the visceral response I felt watching how casually YouTubers and Redditors involved themselves in the case exposes a weakness that may never be improved. Prestige true crime’s pretensions to nuance and gravitas can make strong emotional demands on viewers that Dateline, as unabashed infotainment, would never permit. But there’s a dark side to making people feel as if they, personally, have to get involved — it’s easy, especially when possessed by a sense of righteousness, to do more harm than good.
Chris R. Morgan is a writer from New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter: @CR_Morgan.
