The body of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was recovered from a water tank atop the Cecil Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles on February 19, 2013. She had been reported missing at the beginning of the month. Maintenance workers at the hotel discovered the body when investigating guest complaints of problems with the water supply.
Her disappearance had been widely reported; interest had increased five days prior to her body's discovery when the Los Angeles Police Department released video of the last time she was known to have been seen, on the day of her disappearance, by an elevator security camera. In the footage, Lam is seen exiting and re-entering the elevator, talking and gesturing in the hallway outside, and sometimes seeming to hide within the elevator, which itself appears to be malfunctioning. The video went viral on the Internet, with many viewers reporting that they found it unsettling. Explanations ranged from claims of paranormal involvement to the bipolar disorder Lam suffered from; it has been argued that the video itself has been tampered with.
The circumstances of Lam's death, when she was found, also raised questions, especially in light of the Cecil's history in relation to other notable deaths and murders. Her body was naked with most of her clothes and personal effects floating in the water near her. It took the Los Angeles County Coroner's office four months, after repeated delays, to release the autopsy report, which reports no evidence of physical trauma and states that the cause of death was accidental. Guests at the Cecil, now re-branded as Stay on Main, sued the hotel over the incident, and Lam's parents filed a separate suit later that year.
Some of the early Internet interest noted unusual similarities between Lam's death and plot elements from the 2005 horror film Dark Water. There have been efforts to fictionalize the case since then as well. Less than a year after her death, Hungry Ghost Ritual, aHong Kong horror film, included a scene apparently inspired by the elevator video, and mainland Chinese director Liu Haoannounced he was planning a film based on her life and death, hopefully starring Gao Yuanyuan. An episode of Castle was inspired by it, and a horror film that uses the case as a backstory, The Bringing, is currently in development under Sony Pictures.
Lam, the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong who opened a restaurant in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, was a student at the University of British Columbia;although she was not registered when she left her home in January 2013 for a trip to Southern California, which she called her "West Coast Tour" on her Tumblr blog. She said she planned to stop in San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Francisco. While she also hoped to visit San Luis Obispo, she was not sure she could.
She traveled alone, on Amtrak and intercity buses. She visited the San Diego Zoo and posted photos taken there on social media.[12] On January 26 she arrived in Los Angeles and checked into the Cecil Hotel, near downtown's Skid Row.
Built as a business hotel in the 1920s, the Cecil fell on hard times during the Great Depression of the 1930s and never recaptured its original market as downtown decayed around it in the late 20th century. Several of Los Angeles's more notable murders have happened at or have connections to the hotel: Elizabeth Short, victim of the Black Dahlia murder, the city's best-known unsolved killing, supposedly made the Cecil her last stop before her death, and in 1964 Goldie Osgood, the "Pigeon Lady of Pershing Square", was raped and murdered in her room at the Cecil, another crime that has never been solved. Serial killers Jack Unterweger and Richard Ramirez, the "Night Stalker", both resided at the Cecil while active. There have also been suicides, one of which also killed a pedestrian passing in the front of the hotel. After recent renovations it has tried to market itself as a boutique hotel, but the reputation lingers. "The Cecil will reveal to you whatever it is you're a fugitive from," says Steve Erickson.
Lam also had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression. She had been prescribed four drugs—Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Seroquel and Effexor—to deal with the condition. According to her family (who supposedly kept it a secret), she had no history of suicidal ideations or attempts, although one report claims she had, in fact, briefly gone missing at some earlier time as well.
In mid-2010, she began a blog named Ether Fields on Blogspot. Over the next two years she posted pictures of models in fashionable clothing and accounts of her life, particularly her struggle with her disorder. In a January 2012 post titled "You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life" after a quotation from novelist Chuck Palahniuk that she used as an epigraph for the blog, Lam lamented that a "relapse" at the start of the current school term had forced her to drop several classes, leaving her feeling "so utterly directionless and lost." She worried that her transcript would look suspicious with so many withdrawals, adversely affecting her ability to continue her studies and attend graduate school.
A little over two years after Lam had started blogging, she announced she would be abandoning the blog for one she had started on Tumblr in March 2011, Nouvelle/Nouveau. Its content was heavier on found photos, mostly of fashion, and quotes, with a few posts in Lam's own words. The same Palahniuk quote was used as an epigraph.
While traveling, Lam kept in touch with her parents back in British Columbia daily. On January 31, 2013, the day she was scheduled to check out of the Cecil and leave for Santa Cruz, they did not hear from her and called the Los Angeles police; the family flew to Los Angeles to help with the search.
Hotel staff who saw her that day said she was alone. Outside the hotel, Katie Orphan, manager of a nearby bookstore, was the only person who recalled seeing Lam that day. "She was outgoing, very lively, very friendly," while getting gifts to take home to her family, Orphan told CNN. "[She was] talking about what book she was getting and whether or not what she was getting would be too heavy for her to carry around as she traveled."
Police searched the hotel to the extent that they legally could. They searched Lam's room and had dogs go through the building, including the rooftop, looking unsuccessfully for her scent. "But we didn't search every room," Sgt. Rudy Lopez said later, "we could only do that if we had probable cause" to believe a crime had been committed.
On February 6, a week after Lam had last been seen, the LAPD decided more help was needed. Flyers with her image were posted in the neighborhood and online. It brought the case to the public's attention through the media.
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