S03E17: THE DEATH OF ELISA LAM

Katie: Coming up on this episode of Crime Family.

Stephanie: I feel like it dates back a while. I don't know how old it is, but I remember seeing something that it's haunted and that people were doing strange things.

Katie: There was something evil that was chasing her down that hallway, that she was hiding from something that she just couldn't get away from.

You know, obviously clearly something is happening to her, but the manager's saying this is skid row. This is Los Angeles. They've seen a lot of alarming, very weird things happen. This was weird, but it was definitely not something that would make them be worried.

AJ: So weird. It's weird.

Stephanie: That's really creepy.

Katie: It is strange.

AJ: In the world there's things that are just strange and you can't explain them. Their explanation is that they have no explanation. They're just weird.

Katie: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Crime Family. I'm your co-host Katie and I'm here with Stephanie and AJ, my brother and sister. So the case that I'm going to talk about today is a very well known case, but it's interesting and bizarre. I know that you guys know a little bit about it. It's probably one of the most popular, relatively recent, true crime cases out there. It's known all over the world. It's the very bizarre case of Elisa Lam. So even though it is considered solved, I know that there's a lot of people out there that aren't convinced with the conclusion that they ultimately came to. We'll talk about some of the theories and reasons why once I get further into this case, and I'm not sure that we'll ever really know what happened to Elisa.

Elisa Lam was a 21 year old college student from UBC in Vancouver, BC. She was very much still trying to figure out her life, like most 21 year olds. She was a bit shy and reserved, but she could also be very outgoing depending on the situation. She used the social media platform Tumblr as her diary or journal in a way. That's where she felt she could really express herself. If you look into this case, you'll see a lot of her Tumblr postings out there, and you can see how introspective she was and just questioning the world and where she fit into it, I guess. She posts about her depression and being diagnosed with bipolar and the anti-depressants she was on and how a lot of the time she felt really sad. How sometimes she felt okay. She used that platform to open up about her struggles. Elisa wanted to expand her life a little bit, I guess, meaning she wanted to get out of her comfort zone and travel. She decides that she wants to take a west coast trip, down to California and she wanted to go to Los Angeles in particular. She was going to take this trip on her own. She plans everything out and she actually does book her plane tickets and go on this trip by herself. She plans to head down to San Diego and then ultimately to Los Angeles. We do know that she checks into her Los Angeles hotel around January 28th, 2013. Some sources say it was the 26th, but I'm pretty sure it was January 28th. She would call her parents every night on her trip to let them know how she was doing, where she was. She had a history of losing her phone and she was actually borrowing a friend's phone for this trip that she had actually lost as well. She was still able to call her parents every day. January 31st, 2013 is the last time that her family, back in Vancouver, hears from her and they know that something is wrong right away. Like I said, she kept in constant contact with them and they report her missing on February 1st, 2013. The police get involved and their initial thoughts are of course that she's escaping from her life and she doesn't want to be found, so she tried to get a new identity or ran away. They know that she's traveling alone so maybe she got lost. Maybe she didn't have access to a phone. Of course they're thinking maybe she was a victim of foul play. Those are the three scenarios that the police jumped to right away. Now, one thing that they know for sure is that she was staying at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles called the Cecil Hotel and the Cecil Hotel could have an episode or two on its own just with its history and everything that happened there. There's a lot of death associated with the Cecil hotel. I know you guys are familiar with this case so you do know a little bit about the Cecil Hotel? Do you guys remember what stands out in your minds the most, when you hear Cecil Hotel?

AJ: I watched a Netflix documentary about the Cecil Hotel and about this case. I feel like anything I know about this case probably is from that documentary and I don't know the exact details, but I feel like there was some connection to a serial killer from back in the eighties or seventies. That was where he either lived or where he stayed for significant period of time. I remember that serial killer but I don't know other information specifically.

Stephanie: I was going to say the same thing as AJ. I remember watching the documentary about this case and about the Cecil Hotel itself and the serial killer. I also remember, I don't know if I watched something about it or if I read something about it being haunted. I know it's a fairly old hotel, so I feel like it dates back a while. I don't know how old it is, but I remember seeing something that it is haunted and that people were doing strange things.

AJ: That actually rings a bell. Something about there were sightings of people doing strange things. Almost like some supernatural or paranormal activity surrounded it. I feel like the serial killer that was associated with Cecil Hotel was Richard Ramirez? Is that right?

Katie: You're right. And yes Steph, you're completely right, some people do think that it is haunted. They think that there's some paranormal evil activity going on because of the history, which I'm going to get into, not too in depth, but yeah, there's a lot of theories surrounding the Cecil and why it is how it is.

AJ: Sorry. I'll just say that the Netflix documentary about it is riveting. If anyone wants to go listen or go watch it.

Stephanie: I've watched it five times I'm pretty sure.

Katie: A lot of what I am talking about today is from that documentary and it is really well done. The Cecil Hotel was built around 1919, and it was opened for business in 1924, so almost a hundred years in operation at this point. In its day when it first opened, it was a state of the art hotel. It was very big and grand. It had 700 rooms and it was never really meant to be a luxury hotel. It was more made for people who wanted or could only pay a little bit less and therefore they would get a little bit less out of the hotel, but they had the basics. Anything that you would need in a hotel. So during the 1930s, when the stock market crashed and the depression hit, the Cecil turned into a place for local people who didn't have anywhere else to go. It turned into a cheap place for them to live. Because of the time and because it was, you know, a rougher area, a rougher time, it became a hub for drugs and prostitution, and it was downtown LA and it's in the area known as skid row. There's lots of homelessness. There's lots of violence and crime. It's one of the most dangerous and poorest neighborhoods in the US. Skid row isn't just a few streets. It actually spans 56 blocks. There's an estimated around 10,000 homeless people that live on skid row. It's potentially very dangerous for someone like Elisa who's alone, unfamiliar with the area, and she potentially could be wandering around at night.

AJ: It's very similar to the downtown east side of Vancouver. She's from Vancouver. She's probably at least familiar with that. She might not be shocked.

Katie: That's what I'm thinking too, she probably wasn't shocked when she saw what she saw, but she may not have necessarily known that was where she was going. That type of neighborhood. When you look at it online, I'll get into a little bit more how it's marketed. It's marketed as more of a upscale place when really it's in the worst neighborhood in the whole country. The downtown east side in Vancouver is a mini skid row. It's not this huge skid row they have there, but yes, very similar. The hotel itself had some floors that were dedicated to a sort of alternate living situation where people were actually living there full time. These were people that couldn't get anywhere else to live. They could never get approved for rent. People who were fresh out of prison, people who were hiding or didn't want anyone to know where they were. Those kind of people lived there full time. Like I was saying, there's lots of possibilities and speculation out there for who Elisa could have met while she was staying there. In that documentary that we were talking about on Netflix called Crime Scene; The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, the police recall that for years, there would be one to three calls every day that came just from the Cecil. Someone needing help, or there was something going on there. People would set fires in the hallway. People would be on drugs, having a bad trip. There would be stabbings, domestic violence. There were dead bodies, murder suicides all the time. Like you were saying, the serial killer actually lived there for a bit in the eighties. He was known as the night stalker Richard Ramirez. And they say that he would go out in the night, murder somebody, then he would come back to the Cecil and he would take off all his clothes in the alley. Then he would walk up the stairs in his underwear covered in blood, bare feet, and he would go into his room. People would see him night after night walking covered in blood. He was considered another fucked up person that lived in the Cecil. It didn't alarm anyone enough to try and do anything because that's just the kind of place that it was or it's because people that did notice something and thought maybe it was, you know, off, they didn't want to bring police attention to them by reporting something. They just let it go. He murdered 13 people or something. Also there was another serial killer named Jack Unterweger that lived there for a bit in 1991. There was also an unsolved murder that took place in 1964. It's also one of the last known locations of the Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, before she was brutally murdered in 1947. Eventually they split the Cecil into two separate hotels, but it was still one building. It was still zoned that they had to have some sort of residential section so even though they tried to evict some of their tenants, they were ultimately not allowed to do that. Some people had lived there for 40 years and they were really not planning on leaving. They still have two floors that are dedicated to those tenants. Then there's three floors above that, which they called Stay On Main. This is where I was saying they marketed it as a completely different hotel, that had a separate entrance, that had a separate lobby. There were separate staff that dressed differently. It was a bit more upscale and classier. If you look online, you see, Stay on Main. It looks a lot better than what the Cecil actually was, but it was the same building. Then the next nine floors above Stay On Main were the Cecil Hotel. More of a grungy, cheaper way to go. Elisa was actually staying in Stay On Main. She actually was, you know, maybe not trying to stay at a place like the Cecil. She did have that awareness that she was trying to Stay On Main instead, even though it was the same building. It's because of this history that attracts a lot of true crime sleuths. Like we were saying paranormal hunters, and for someone who's not aware of the history, It probably is a big shock to show up at that hotel, just the hotel itself and then where it is in Los Angeles. So, like I said, Elisa was staying in Stay On Main, but you have to remember it's the same building, the same elevators for everyone. The residents that were living there, people that were staying in Stay On Main, and the Cecil guests, they could all be on the same elevator and there's nothing stopping anybody from getting off on any floor. You know a sketchy tenant could come up to your floor whenever they wanted and you could go onto their floor. So there's nothing stopping that. So, I mean, it really was everyone intermingling. Potentially dangerous people. That's the Cecil Hotel and it shut down in 2017 and it was bought for 80 million by somebody else that was trying to fix it up. I think it's open again now. That's the history. The vibe of where Elisa was staying. They know that she checked into the Cecil or Stay On Main on January 28th, 2013. This is where the police focused their investigation. She was scheduled to stay about four days at the hotel, according to the manager at the time, named Amy Price. She talks in that documentary on Netflix as well. She was there when Elisa was there.

AJ: She is interviewed a lot in the documentary. She's the main person they talk to, if I'm picking up the right person. But I still have her face in my mind. I felt a lot of deflection on her part throughout the documentary. She didn't seem the most forthcoming.

Katie: She did seem kind of defensive, but I think from her perspective, she became the manager and she really tried to fix it up. She worked there for 10 years, so it was like her passion project or it was like her baby that she was trying to fix. She was probably just very defensive. It's not actually a terrible place, even though there's terrible people, terrible things happen. But you know, the people that worked there and what they were trying to do was positive. I think she's trying to not blame the hotel for everything, because it really, it really wasn't the hotel's fault.

AJ: Yeah. Which I get. If she was the manager throughout this whole time, you're not going to admit your place is falling apart or you don't want to say you're not doing a good job as the manager. Right?

Katie: I think she actually cared about the hotel. She actually really loved it.

AJ: Yeah. Even though I get why she would do that I wanted to put that out there. I felt that she was very defensive and that like her view of it was not necessarily the most accurate.

Katie: Yeah. You get the feeling that she's just sick of everyone's shit at this point. She probably heard so many rumors. People have told her, she was there when it happened, you know, she's probably just, " I don't wanna hear the bullshit anymore. This is how it was. Leave me alone." They do know that Elisa should have still been there when she was reported missing, because she was supposed to check out on February 1st and she had actually never checked out. She was staying in room 506 which wasn't a typical hotel room that you'd probably think of. It was more of a hostel style. It was an all female bunk room. It was just bunk beds. There was a separate bathroom that was shared down the hall. It was more like a dorm style than like a typical hotel room. This was just a cheaper option. When police do go check her room, it's already been cleaned by the hotel staff. Since she didn't actually check out, they bagged up all her stuff and stored it with the rest of the stuff that people leave abandoned. They keep that stuff at their hotel for 30 days. Then if nobody claims it, they throw it out. What stuck out to police was the fact that all of Elisa's stuff was left. Her laptop, her medication, her wallet, all of her clothes were all still there. It wasn't like she just didn't check out and left to go somewhere else. If you're planning on running away from your life, you'd still need your medication and money. Right? So that seemed like that wasn't an option anymore. Investigators are able to locate a bookstore that Elisa had gone to before she was reported missing. Ironically, it was called The Last Bookstore and the bookstore staff remember her and they remember talking to her. They said that she was really outgoing and friendly. There was no red flags that came up for them about this girl, Elisa that they had met. A normal, happy girl shopping at the bookstore. Police do get the security footage from the Cecil. Not every floor has security cameras. Of course Elisa's floor didn't have security camaras so they couldn't actually see her floor and her coming and going from her room. They do watch hours of video footage though, just hoping to find something. They finally do come across some video of Elisa on the last day that she was seen before she goes missing. This footage I think is probably what a lot of people think about when they think of this case. When you watch it, it's really bizarre. A lot of you have probably seen it already, but we will link it in the show notes anyway. I'm going to describe some of it just so you get the idea and to refresh your memory about why it's so strange. This is a summary of that footage. It starts with the elevator door opening and Elisa getting on the elevator. At the elevator panel with all the buttons, she pushes a whole column of the center buttons. You can see all the lights light up in the footage. There's about five or six floors or more of buttons that she pushes. Then she steps back into the corner of the elevator and stands there. Then she goes back to the open door and she sticks her head out really quickly looking both ways. Then she puts her head back in and stands in the top corner of the elevator almost as if she's hiding from someone out in the hallway that might see her. The door is still open. She goes back to the door, looks out into the hallway. She slowly steps out and she does a strange sequence of steps in a square back and forth. She goes back out into the hallway and you can't really see her. The side of her arm, she's waving it around a bit. Then she goes back on the elevator. She pushes more buttons to more floors. Gets back out into the hallway and her hand movements are interesting. She's moving them around, waving them. It looks like she's talking to somebody out in the hallway maybe, and she's using her hands to try and describe something floating through the air or something. It looks like she's counting on her fingers at one point. She's just moving really weirdly. Then she turns left and walks away. The whole video footage is about four minutes, but after two and a half minutes is when she leaves the video that was released by police. It keeps rolling for another minute and a half, and finally the door closes and then the elevator presumably goes through all those floors that she had pushed the buttons for. That's the last footage or anytime that anyone had ever seen Elisa. You could just tell she's acting weird. There's a lot of questions go through my mind when I see it. It's creepy. Some people are saying that hotel's haunted, she's seeing something out in the hallway. There's some theories that maybe someone's out in the hallway holding that elevator button so that it won't move, keeping her there. What do you guys think about this footage? I know you guys have recently watched it as well.

Stephanie: It's just strange to me. She goes in the elevator and usually when you go in the elevator, you're not going to push all those buttons at once. Maybe if you're a kid, you want to push all the buttons, but she does it immediately and then she's hiding in the corner, like she's hiding from somebody. What gets me is that the door just never closes until the end of the video. So it does seem to me like somebody's holding the elevator button because normally the door would just close after five seconds of you getting in or out. That really struck me as weird and her motions when she's getting out of the elevator are really strange. It's like she's talking to somebody or she's describing something that she saw. I don't know. The whole thing is just strange to me. This is why I don't like elevators. They're creepy.

AJ: Yeah. It's weird. Every time I watch that surveillance footage, I just get the creeps. An elevator door doesn't just stay open for minutes on end for no reason, unless somebody is pushing the button. That theory when I first heard it, it sounds plausible. You can't see from the angle of the camera, you can't see around the corner. It's possible that there is someone standing just out of view. I mean, not that I necessarily think that's what's happening, but also too, it is an old elevator. It is an old hotel. Maybe they're just having mechanical issues. Maybe the elevator is just not functioning properly. That's also a thing. To me, she looked like someone who was in the midst of a mental break. Maybe she's seeing hallucinations or maybe she's thinking somebody's stalking her or following her. It does look like she's looking both ways trying to avoid someone. She's hiding in the corner of the elevator at one point. To me, that's what it looked like. It's probably more likely that there's no one there, but she's just thinking there is. It's very creepy either way.

Katie: Yeah. So what you guys touched on are some of the main theories that are out there, or that were out there at first before people did some more digging. When this first came out, people are like, she's definitely seeing someone or there's definitely somebody out there. Some people say that if you look really closely, you can see the tip of somebody else's shoe, that's not hers, even though it's right where she is onto the left of the screen. She turns to walk away and they say that if it was her, then her foot would be twisted at a very weird angle for that shoe to be poking out. It's hard to tell. For me, I think it is her shoe, but some people are convinced that it's someone else's shoe and that they're standing right there as she turns to leave.

AJ: So if it's her, she's still standing there for a few minutes, just randomly, right?

Katie: Yeah. She does stand out in the hallway randomly, and then she turns and leaves. That's the last time anyone sees her.

AJ: Oh, okay. Also the shoe they think is when she was standing out the hallway, or after she leaves?

Katie: No. She's standing there right at the edge of the elevator. Then when she turns to leave, it looks like somebody else's shoe is poking out at a weird, and if it was her foot, it'd be like, her foot was twisted all the way around. She's turning to leave, but the foot is pointing the other way. So they're like, oh, someone's there standing right beside her. It's hard to tell. I mean, it's grainy, fuzzy footage and to me it just looks like her shoe and maybe she did twist her foot a weird way. That's what I think, but I mean, you have to look closely at it to even see someone else's shoe there. That's just a theory. I don't think it really held on anywhere else, except for the internet. Some people also speculate that it looks like she could have been on drugs like LSD or some kind of hallucinogenic, and maybe they were thinking that it could have been mixed with her antidepressants or if she stopped taking her antidepressants and took other drugs instead that maybe it was just really messing with her reality. Like I said before, she did have bipolar. It's not unreasonable to think that there was something going on with her medication. Also, another note is that investigators found out that when she first checked in, she was in a room with some other girls, like I said, that dorm style room and they started complaining about her weird behavior. So much so that the hotel actually moved her out of that room, into her own private room and the hotel manager, Amy says that Elisa was writing notes and leaving them on people's beds. She would write notes that would just say, "go away, go home, get out." Then when the other people that were staying in her room would try to get in, when she was in there by herself, she wouldn't let them in. She was saying that they needed a password to get in. It was very odd behavior and probably just people were seeing it as weird and annoying rather than maybe something serious was going on. You can see that maybe she was having some sort of mental break. She was maybe paranoid. In that documentary, they talk about her sister saying that she had had these kinds of things before, where she was scared. She thought someone was chasing after her. She'd be hiding under the bed. So it doesn't seem too far off that maybe she was seeing something that wasn't there. The hotel manager says that Elisa went down to the lobby of the hotel. She stood there in a weird position and yelled," I'm crazy, but so is LA." Clearly something is happening to her, but the manager's saying this is skid row. This is Los Angeles. They've seen a lot of alarming, very weird things happen. This was weird, but it was definitely not something that would make them be worried because they see so many weird things all the time. They brushed it off as a young girl on drugs or being crazy. After she gets off that elevator, there's zero footage of her again. What hits the investigators is that they're looking at all the footage of the exits and they never see her leaving the hotel. They figure that she has to still be in the hotel somewhere because every exit has a camera. She's not on any of the exits, all the main exits have a camera anyway. So of course they don't know if she's hurt somewhere in the hotel, if she's dead or maybe someone's holding her captive, or maybe she just met someone and was staying in their room for a few days. So they have no idea, but they are pretty certain that she's still in the hotel. They start searching. Like I said, there's 700 rooms and then there's a basement that has lockers. There's over 600 closets. It's a pretty intense search underway. If you're going to check every single room, every single closet, it's going to take a long time. They get sent tracking dogs to help with the search and the dogs do actually get a scent that lead the police to a big window on the fifth floor that leads to a fire escape. That's another possibility. She could have went out the fire escape, which doesn't have a security camera on it. They do say that after they get to that window her scent stops and they do go out on the roof when they search around the roof, but they don't find any evidence of her up there either. They're searching for almost two weeks and they really find no evidence at all. They have to reassign a lot of their officers elsewhere. There were about 18 on the case and reduced down to 4. They had press conferences. Elisa's parents had come to LA almost immediately. They had released that video footage on the internet to the public, but there was still nothing. It's not like they weren't getting tips. It was web sleuths and people that were watching the footage and it blew up on the internet. It really did. It got millions of hits from all over the world. Some people would call in with their theories, "oh, I think this happened. I think you should check this out." They were getting overwhelmed with people, putting their own two cents into what they think happened, which they said really was not helpful. Someone just watching video footage, being, "this is probably what happened," wasn't helpful to them, even though they were probably trying to do the right thing, but yeah, so they just were very overwhelmed. Meanwhile, there's other guests at the hotel, of course. This is in that documentary as well. This is one of the things that haunts me about this case, and you'll see why in a minute. They notice that the water pressure is getting worse in their room and the water coming out of the tap is really gross and discolored. Despite that they're still brushing their teeth and showering and even drinking the water and they complain about it and they're moved to a new room, but the water pressure never did get better. On February 19th, 2013, they send a maintenance man up to go check out the water supply. There are four big water towers on the roof of the hotel. They go to make sure there's nothing clogging the pipes. Make sure there's still water in the tank. They check the sinks to check everything out. The maintenance guy climbs up onto the roof and he climbs up onto one of the water tanks . He looks in to make sure that there's still water in the tank. He sees, floating face up in the water tank, the body of Elisa Lam. She was naked and her clothes were at the bottom of the tank. So now the investigation is turned into, "How did she get up there? Who was with her? Why is she in the water tank? What happened?" The mystery of this whole thing is how she got in that tank? Why she was in that tank? Why was she naked? It came out that the police first said that the hatch for the water tank was closed. It was a 20 pound metal top that you could just take off and get in. She would have to put that top back on, they were saying, and that was like an impossible thing to do because there's no way you could be in the tank and put the top back on. That's why people were thinking that somebody put her in there and then put the top back on because she would not have been able to do that herself. Also, why would she get in the tank herself? I mean, investigators say that there's no physical evidence of someone else being there that night. There's no fingerprints, there's no DNA on her body, or around the tank. To get into the water tank, there's a ladder and then there was that metal top. It is possible for her to have gotten in there herself, but there's so many questions about why and how. How long she was in there and what was going on? Like I said, there's lots of theories out there about what happened and people take that footage of her in the elevator and they dissect it very closely. They say if you look close enough at the video, they point a few things out. They say that the timestamp, I don't know if you noticed, but the timestamp, when you look at it is really messed up. You can't even read the numbers. So they're saying that someone made it unreadable on purpose. So you didn't actually know what time this was happening. You can tell when you're looking at it the milliseconds don't move properly. I mean time, the seconds and milliseconds are gonna go consistently, but they stop and jump around as if someone was playing with the footage. They also point out that the video had been slowed down in some places to make it look creepier than it actually was. They're saying, when she's out in the hallway, those hand movements, it's actually slowed down and in reality she would actually be moving faster. Maybe it wouldn't look as creepy. So I'm not sure if that was intentional, someone slowed it down or if there was just something that happened to the footage that did that on its own. There's not really answers about why that is the case. Some are saying there's also five seconds missing where you can see the elevator. It's closed. Then the next second it jumps like a foot and then it's closing. So what happened? Someone's cutting and clipping the footage? Police do say that when they looked at the footage, there was really nothing wrong with it. Nobody had tampered with it. So maybe it was them transferring it and then passing it along to media that just somewhere along the way it got corrupted, and so those little things were happening to make it look weird. They said that there was nothing wrong with it when they got it. There are theories out there that someone in the hotel got a hold of that footage and was editing it and clipping things out and slowing it down. I'm thinking, if somebody was involved and they were tampering with the footage, why wouldn't they just destroy it or damage it instead of editing it weird if they were trying to cover something up. Doesn't make sense. I don't think that theory really holds.

AJ: Wasn't the theory that the choppy bits were made that way to remove the image of someone who was either in the elevator or walked in front of the elevator. They walked out and then as soon as they were out of view, the footage starts again, which is when the door is already closing.

Katie: Yeah. They think that because that door was closed and maybe somebody came into view and then they cut that out. The next second, the door's almost halfway closed. They are thinking they cut somebody out, but the police are saying when they got it and they looked at it there was nothing wrong with it. It might have just got corrupted when it was getting transferred and uploaded. There's also theories out there, conspiracy theories that it was somebody in the hotel that did something and they're covering it up. There's maybe more than one employee that is trying to cover something up. There's theories out there that the LAPD, the Los Angeles Police Department were in on it. They're trying to cover something up. There's theories that the hotel staff and the LAPD are all in on it together trying to hide something I mean, there really is no evidence on that, but people will spiral into these conspiracy theories.

AJ: I think it's more plausible that it's just a shitty old security system that the footage is just not great. I mean, although you said the police said that it was perfectly fine when they first watched it. It's probably shitty equipment to begin with.

Katie: Yeah. You can tell that it's not perfect quality and some people think maybe it was slowed down so you could see Elisa"s face a bit better so they could identify her. Be sure that it was her. That could be a possibility as well. It was not a state of the art camera. Something could have happened to it. That's not too far off. In the Netflix documentary, they do talk to some YouTubers that have really gotten into this. When we were talking about before, how the door wasn't closing and they say when she's pushing all those buttons, because some of these people actually went to the Cecil Hotel, they were in the same elevator, they're taking videos and pictures. They can show us exactly what Elisa would've been seeing. All those buttons that she pushed, the very last one was the door hold button. When you push that button, they timed it and it actually makes the door stay open for two whole minutes. That maybe explains why the door didn't close. She probably didn't mean to push that button. Maybe she did, but she did push it. That's why the door stayed open. Maybe there wasn't somebody out in the hallway holding that button. She actually pushed that button herself. The top floor of the hotel was the 14th floor and they find out that when she's in that elevator, she actually is on the 14th floor. They know that because when you push the button and you push the button for the floor that you're already on, it lights up and then unlights right away. When she's doing that, she pushes 14, but it stops because that's the top middle button. That's how they know that she's on the 14th floor, which is, you know, one level below the roof. She gets off that elevator on the 14th floor and she's already almost at the roof. If you go out the fire escape at the end of that hallway, all you have to do is climb up this ladder on the side of the building and then you get on the roof. There's nothing stopping you from getting out those windows onto the fire escape onto the roof.

AJ: Is the window to the fire escape in that same direction that she walked off in?

Katie: Mm-hmm.

AJ: Does anyone confirm that it is?

Katie: Yeah, there are people that have gone in there and they go the same route. If you go down that hallway, that's where the fire escape window was. It's almost like she left that elevator and walked right down the hallway to the fire escape, which is really creepy. I mean, you're watching her minutes or hours, right before she died. It's what makes that video even more creepy. Of course there's other ways to get to the roof. There's a full on staircase that leads right up to the roof. At the end there's a locked alarmed door. You have to have a key to even open it. When it does open the alarm goes off at the front desk. All of the employees confirmed that that door had not been open at all during the time Elisa was there. She didn't open that door to get out. Someone didn't unlock the door and open it. It would've alarmed. For her to get on that roof, she had to go the fire escape. YouTubers in this documentary go up there. Some security guards let them up on the roof and it's not like no one ever goes up there because they said there was like cigarettes and beer bottles and there was graffiti everywhere. People had been up there and maybe hang out there on their breaks or something, I don't know. There's a lot of stuff up there to make it seem like people hang out up there. It wasn't impossible to get up there. There's other theories about why was she naked? People are thinking maybe there was some sort of sexual assault and then somebody threw her in the water tank and then threw her clothes in after her. When they did an autopsy, they found there was no sexual assault evidence at all. They also didn't find any abrasions or bruises that would point to her being dead and then someone having to drag her body up the ladder, up the stairs and then throw her into that tank. There was nothing like that. It wasn't like she was dead and being banged around as she was getting dragged up there. That was ruled out as well. Some weird things though. People were digging deep into this and there's some crazy theories out there that I just find I don't believe them. There's just weird coincidences and I mean they're interesting. I'm just going to touch on them but I'm not saying that I believe any of them. There was one. There's a tuberculosis outbreak that happened on skid row and to some of the residents of the hotel. This happened just a few days after they had found Elisa in the water tank. They had to go through tuberculosis tests and the name of the tuberculosis test that they were getting was called a LAM-ELISA test. What are the odds that the test is the exact same name as her?

AJ: That's so weird.

Katie: It's such a coincidence. I don't think it really means anything. Then people go further and they say that it was some kind of government conspiracy where Elisa was being used as a biological weapon to infect the people to get rid of some of them. Then they're saying, because they had to get rid of her as well, because she knew too much. She could tell somebody and who was involved. To go even further, she went to UBC, like I said, the University of British Columbia, and there was actually a tuberculosis research center at that school, so people were like, "Oh, everything's connected." Of course it didn't go anywhere, but what are the odds that Elisa Lam, and then the test is LAM-ELISA? Weird. Spelled the exact same way.

AJ: It's so weird.

Katie: What coincidence?

AJ: That was in the documentary. Of course you can't not look into that or think about it. I mean, obviously it's probably not even remotely close to the truth, but in the world there's things that are just strange and you can't explain them. Their explanation is that they have no explanation. They're just weird. So I think that's what it is, but it's just strange.

Katie: It is strange. Another strange coincidence, was that bookstore that she went to, like I said called The Last Bookstore. That bookstore was in LA. If you look up the registrar information for that bookstore, there's a postal code that comes up. If you search that postal code, it's actually for Burnaby BC, which is part of Vancouver. That pin drop on the map, if you zoom into where the center of that pin is, it actually lands in the cemetery where Elisa is buried. It's far stretched to think it means anything, but it's just weird.

Stephanie: That's really creepy.

Katie: Yeah. That bookstore she went to, the pin drops in the cemetery where she's buried. Weird! There's a few other theories out there that I'm not going to go into. Like I was saying, people think the hotel could be haunted. They think maybe something was possessing her that night. There was something evil that was chasing her down that hallway. She was hiding from something that she just couldn't get away from. The elevator didn't work on purpose. There was some spirit holding it there. On June 21st, 2013, they ruled her death an accidental drowning. They said that her bipolar disorder was a contributing factor. When they looked at her toxicology, there was no evidence that she was on any kind of drug at all, except for her bipolar medication. One thing that they did note was that her medication was in a lot smaller doses than it should have been. Maybe she was trying to wean herself off, or she just didn't take as much of her medication as she should have. That's what makes people think that she was having this episode. Bipolar is really scary, right? When you go into these manic episodes and you're not medicated properly, you can have hallucinations and you can have scary thoughts and see things, hear things that aren't really there. These voices can tell you to do things. They can tell you to kill yourself and people listen to those voices all the time. She could have been running from something and why she made the decision to go out that fire escape, go up that ladder and then get into that tank is still weird. Why those choices? Why not run down the stairs of the hotel to maybe find other people. Why that decision? That's what they say happened. She got in that tank and just couldn't get out and drowned.

AJ: My question would be, if that is the case, if she was weaning herself off her medication, I would just wonder, did she have a history of doing that in the past? Or was there something that precipitated that? I feel like if you're on this medication and you know, you're really good with it and you are always making sure that you take it, for her to just randomly decide to go off it while she's out of the country in a different city you know what I mean? That's weird. I would wonder what would precipitate her deciding to do that? Unless she had a history of doing that in the past.

Katie: Yeah. I'm not sure if she had a history of it, but I do know that it did mention something about some of her Tumblr posts, where she was saying that she hated that she had to be on four different pills every day. She just hated that that was her life. Maybe she was just thinking that she was fine. Didn't need it. Maybe she just missed a dose. She was busy out exploring, doing whatever, and didn't take it at the right time, so, she wasn't on it when she should have been. That's when she went into that episode. Like I said before, her sister did say that she had a history of these manic episodes where she thinks something was after her, when there was actually nothing there. It seems like that's what's happening. It's scary that it was on video and you can actually see what was going through her head. You can see how she's reacting to something she thinks is out in that hallway, which is scary to think of. She actually thinks there's something out there is what basically the conclusion is. She's running from it.

AJ: Yeah, it is really creepy. My question would be how did the hatch get closed if she did go in there willingly?

Stephanie: You said it was too heavy for her to open or close and you can't close it from the inside. How did she get in and close the lid?

Katie: It was 20 pounds. I never said it was too heavy, but it was a pretty heavy lid. She could have lifted that herself. It did come out later that the employee that found her did say in his report to the police, that the hatch was open when he found her. It was already open and then somebody just misquoted somebody and said that it was closed. The police did say that the hatch was closed, but it actually wasn't apparently, according to this maintenance worker. It was open, so it makes more sense that she opened, it, got in and then it was just open. She was in there for almost two weeks.

AJ: They didn't notice that when they did the search of the the roof before? You said that there was 18 police officers on the case, they were looking through the hotel ,probably on the roof. No one noticed that the hatch was open? Although I guess you wouldn't, unless you go up there, up the ladder to it, which you probably wouldn't, but wouldn't that be part of your thorough search?

Katie: Yeah. You would think, and one of the investigators is in that documentary and he's saying obviously they regret not looking in those tanks, but you're not thinking about that at the time. They had sniffer dogs with them and they never hit on the tank. I'm wondering would they hit if there's water? Also, sitting on the roof, there was this mini building. It had a stairway and then you go up a ladder and then you're on this extra roof. Then you could jump down onto the tanks from there, which is what they think she did. If not, she'd have to shimmy through the tanks and up onto the pipes. The dogs just didn't get her scent for some reason.

AJ: The dogs got her scent throughout the rest of the hotel leading up to that window so the scent was still there that long after. Why wouldn't it also be on the roof if she was on there? You know what I mean?

Katie: Yeah. That's a weird thing. Whether she was up there on her own or whether there was somebody with her, they didn't track her scent regardless. Right? Even if they did track her scent it doesn't help us figure out if there's somebody else with her. Right? Her scent would've been there either way.

AJ: Yeah.

Stephanie: Somebody else's scent would be up there. They probably wouldn't know who it was, but they could pick up somebody else's scent if there were two people.

Katie: Yeah. Like I said before, there was evidence that people had gone up there a lot to smoke and drink and stuff. There probably was just a lot of mixed sense going around. Maybe they just couldn't differentiate between them. I don't know. Their explanation is really, they just didn't think she was up there. They didn't look in the tanks. That's basically all I have to say about it.

AJ: Wasn't there a theory, the reason the dogs didn't find her scent there on the roof was because her body was moved there later. She wasn't there initially when the dogs searched and then her body was moved into those tanks later. Then that's when the worker found her.

Katie: Yeah. One of the conspiracy theories where the police were involved, they were thinking that there was a delay between when they checked the roof and when somebody actually found her because the dogs went up there, her body wasn't in the tanks at that time. There was no hit. Then after they had searched it, somebody knew that and then put her body up there because they knew it wasn't going to get searched again. That's one of the theories that was out there. They're thinking the police were involved in that just cause of the timing of everything. There's no evidence that, that is the case at all.

AJ: Yeah. Just a theory.

Katie: Yeah.

AJ: If a person was trying to hide it, it would be smart, you'd think to put the body there after the police search it. They're not going to search it again. They've already searched it. There's nothing. Then you would think, "If I'm oing to hide this body, I'm going to put it somewhere the police already searched." That would be the smart thing to do.

Katie: Yeah. Exactly. It is a smart thing to do. Like I said before, there would be a lot of work for someone to carry her up those ladders. There's no evidence that after she was dead she was thrown down or she hit anything like ladders or stairs on the way up. It's like someone perfectly carried her up there without banging her head off something. You know what I mean? So that doesn't seem like that was possible. People were thinking that if it was suicide, why wouldn't she just jump off the side of the building? Right? They are saying that she didn't go into that water tank to kill herself, there was something going on. She got in there and then just couldn't get out and she died accidentally. That's why it wasn't ruled suicide.

AJ: Wasn't there something in the documentary about the plot of this movie, where there was something very similar that happened?

Katie: Oh yeah. There's this movie, I think it was called Dark Waters. The whole plot of the movie is they're in this creepy, dilapidated hotel, this little girl and her mother, scenes with them in this creepy elevator. The little girl has on a red jacket, very similar to the one Elisa had on. The girl ends up climbing onto the roof, climbing up a ladder and getting into a water tank and drowning. The water in the hotel gets gross and brown. That's what leads them to the water tank to find the girl in there. That's similar. People were were thinking that someone was elaborate in trying to recreate that movie. That seems like a stretch. Another coincidence that was related.

AJ: Yeah. It's not even that it's similar, it's identical. That's exactly what happened in this case. I mean, if we believe that's what happened.

Katie: Even the color of her little jacket was the same, which is weird. The little girl in the movie had black hair too. She looked like a miniature version of her. There was another thing in the documentary, the singer, the guy named Morbid.

AJ: Oh yeah.

Katie: He has some creepy videos and people blamed him and they were saying that they were gonna kill him if they ever found him. They were, "You killed Elisa" because he had been at the hotel one year before Elisa was ever there. Then he was making murder music videos. He said one thing about China, one time. They're like, "Oh, Elisa is, you know, Chinese Canadian" so he must have killed her. Ruined his life, ruined his career. He was in the documentary too. He was saying, "It's crazy. I didn't have anything to do with it." I think that's an example of people trying to get involved. They really ruined this guy's life by pointing the finger at him for no reason at all.

AJ: Yeah. It's like in the process, they turn away from the most obvious explanation and they look into every little detail and try to come up with these conspiracies that are very far fetched. They're more willing to believe that, than facts that actually make sense, that are more plausible. It's just weird.

Katie: They were saying, it's like people don't want to think that it was a mental illness and that she did it to herself. That's almost harder to understand than if someone had done it to her. You know what I mean?

AJ: Mm-hmm. It is sad, but I feel like it's fairly obvious just from watching that footage of her in the elevator that she probably just stopped taking her medication. She was having some sort of episode and you know, just ended up in the water tank and we can't really rationalize it because it's not like she would've done that had she been on her medication. It was just something that she felt she had to do in the throes of this episode. I can't really explain it, but I feel like that makes just the most sense to me.

Katie: Yeah. I was on the fence until you go into the deeper facts where she wasn't on hallucinogenics. She wasn't taking the proper dose of her medication. I think a lot of people say this too, that the fact that that hatch was open when she was found solidifies it for people because she got in, didn't close the hatch. If the hatch was closed, then that'd be another story, but it was open. Everything fits why she made those decisions, you know, we'll never know, but that's what happened.

AJ: They did say it was closed, but then they said it was open.

Katie: Yeah. Once they get into it, the police report finally did come out and the employee said that it was open. The police were saying when they found it, it was closed. Whether the employee closed it, after he found her or if the police just misquoted or said the wrong thing. We don't know. The conclusion is it was open when she was found.

AJ: It is weird that her clothes were off. She had to take her clothes off to get into the tank, which is also weird.

Katie: There were two things that came out of that. There was one, maybe she took them off to try and stay afloat to try and make herself lighter. They were holding her down and she was drowning. Another one was hypothermia could have set in and you know, when that sets in, you feel hot. People that die of hypothermia, they're always without their clothes. They think that maybe that was happening as well. So, I mean, when you put everything together, all the little pieces, it does make sense. But when you think about all those little details, you're like, "What the fuck." It is really scary. A lot of people still look into it as if the hotel's haunted and something made her do it because of the hotel.

AJ: It's just frustrating too, that there's no surveillance footage of her other than that elevator. After she leaves the elevator, there's no other footage of her. There's no footage of anyone on the fire escape or on the roof or anything like that. It's perfect. She just happened to be in the areas where there was no footage to capture. You'll never actually know for sure.

Katie: I know it just makes it this huge mystery. You really don't know. I mean, if there was footage, obviously it'd be open and shut, but that's not the case. I think another point that somebody made in the documentary about skid row, it was a lot of people on skid row have mental illness like that. They were like, "How many other Elisa Lam situations have gone on unnoticed?" That population, nobody cares about. They could disappear. They have mental illness. They could kill themself and nobody really notices. The fact that this one girl, you know, didn't live on skid row, people actually are paying attention. That was a sad point that was made as well.

AJ: Yeah. It's sad. If she had been just someone who lived on skid row or was just in the hotel, maybe living in the hotel and she was poor and addicted to drugs and then that happened, you probably, would've never heard of this case, which is a sad thing.

Katie: I feel like you wouldn't know. That's like I was saying before, that kind of stuff just happens at the hotel and that's just how it is. No other case has been as big as this one just because of, you know, who she was. It's sad that those kind of people just go unnoticed and their deaths go unnoticed as well.

AJ: Yeah.

Katie: Not to take away from Elisa's case, but, just sad.

AJ: That documentary, like I said before, it's riveting. If anyone wants to watch it definitely do. I knew about this case before I feel like it was pretty well known, but I, I think I knew it from the surveillance footage. I think, you know, there's always those compilations on YouTube people make of creepiest surveillance footage ever. This is always in those compilation videos. I feel like I had seen that footage long before I even knew the details of the case. Then when I watched the episode, I remembered the footage from seeing those YouTube videos before.

Katie: Yeah. I remember knowing about this case too, before I saw that Netflix documentary, but I wasn't convinced, I didn't know the conclusion for some reason. I feel like when people tell the story, maybe other sources, they leave out the part where it's closed and this is why. To keep that mystery going. She was seeing something, something was going on. She was found dead in the tank and they leave it at that when actually we do know what happened and I think that's why I was so intrigued. Then you actually watch the Netflix documentary and it pieces everything together. If you don't know the conclusion, then you're fine with what could have happened. That's why everyone's minds go everywhere.

Stephanie: I did figure she was murdered and somebody put her in there, before I even watched the Netflix thing. Once you realize what the actual information about it is, it's sad the way that she died.

AJ: Yeah. Also I remember the documentary blew up and it was a popular documentary on Netflix when it first came out. Everyone was watching it and everyone was saying, "Oh, you have to watch this. It's so bizarre. It's so bizarre." I went into it thinking that it was going to end unsolved, but then when you watch it, it's like, "Oh, it's not unsolved. That's what happened." It's pretty conclusive in the documentary, even though it does have those really weird coincidences and all those strange little details. It is bizarre, but not a mystery necessarily.

Katie: Yeah. It still is as sad as if she had gotten murdered because it's like her own mind, you know, basically killed her. Really scary and sad to think about.

AJ: Yeah. It's so preventable, which is sad. I think you're right too about people leaving out that information. People will play that surveillance footage and be like, "Oh, this is surveillance footage from a haunted hotel. What happened?" Maybe read a little bit more and get the details of it.

Katie: Yeah, exactly. I think it's just the whole vibe of the Cecil. This plays into that. Something was happening with her and then she ends up dead and leaving out what actually happened makes the mystery, you know, weirder and the history of the Cecil plays into that for sure.

AJ: Yeah. It has that Canadian connection too. She's from BC. Did she live in Canada or she just came to Canada for school? .

Katie: They lived in Vancouver. Yeah. She was from Vancouver.

AJ: It's just really sad and definitely an interesting case to talk about for sure.

Katie: Yeah, it definitely is.

 That was the case of Elisa Lam. Thanks for joining us on this episode. We'll see you next time. You can follow us on all the social medias on Facebook @ Crime Family Podcast, Instagram @crimefamilypodcast, on Twitter@ crimefamilypod1, and you could check out our website crimefamilypodcast.ca, or you could send us an email crimefamilypodcast@gmail.com.

 Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Bye.

AJ: Bye

Stephanie: Bye..