Posted on Oct 13, 2017

Notes For Unsolved: The Bizarre Death Of Elisa Lam

Research notes for True Crime Season 1 Episode 3

Freeform Input

BuzzFeed Staff

**Research compiled for Ryan on February 25, 2016 by Mariana Uribe.

The Facts:

Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian tourist (from Vancouver) in Los Angeles, went missing. She was a student at the University of British Columbia.
She had checked into the hotel on January 26th, 2013. She was last seen on January 31st.
Her body was found in a 4-foot-by-8-foot water tank on the roof of the Cecil Hotel, where she had been staying, a few weeks later, on February 19th, 2013.
The last known images of her is a surveillance video of her in an elevator at the hotel, behaving in a bizarre manner. In the video, she pushes elevator buttons, steps in and out of the elevator, and then seems to hide in the corner of the elevator. The surveillance footage is from February 1st.
Her body was discovered after people staying at the hotel reported low water pressure, which in turn caused a maintenance worker to check the tanks on the roof.
Authorities said she was in Los Angeles on her way to Santa Cruz.
Elisa’s parents said they received a phone call from her every day until the day she disappeared.
The water tank was three-quarters full at the time of Elisa’s discovery. While the latch on the tank could have been opened easily by someone, the roof of the building was locked and should have set off an alarm.
The LA County Department of Public Health later got involved to determine the safety of the water.

The mysterious circumstances surrounding Elisa’s death and how she made it into the water tank left many feeling suspicious about the death.
It is still not clear how she got into the tank.
It’s possible guests at the hotel were drinking, brushing their teeth, and showering in water from the tank where Elisa’s body was for up to 19 days.
When she first went missing, a search was conducted with a police dog, but she was not located on the roof.
In the days after she went missing, Elisa’s family flew to California to try to find answers.
One couple, who had spent over a week at the hotel, reported that the water in the shower was black before turning a normal color, that the water pressure was bad, and that the water had a bad taste. They didn’t complain at the time because they thought that might just be the norm in LA.
After the body was discovered, the hotel did not shut down. Instead, new guests checking in had to sign a waiver saying the hotel was not liable if they got sick. Guests who had already paid did not get refunds.
LA’s Department of Public Health told the hotel they could stay open as long as guests were offered water bottles and told not to drink from the tap.
Tests found that there was no harmful bacteria present in the tank and the pipes, and the director of environmental health for the Department of Public Health said that this was possibly due to the chlorine in LA’s water supply at the time.

an initial autopsy did not find a cause of death, do they had to wait for toxicology test results.
Later results found that drugs did not play a role in her death.
There were no visible trauma signs on her body and toxicology test results didn’t find anything in her system that could have contributed to her death.

Elisa’s death was eventually ruled an accidental drowning.
The coroner’s report also listed “bipolar disorder” as one of Elisa’s significant conditions.

The maintenance worker, Santiago Lopez, who found her said she was face-up in the tank when he found her. She was also naked, a fact he did not mention but was in the autopsy.
He also said he did not hear the alarm to the roof go off that day.

Elisa’s parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the hotel, looking for compensation for burial costs and unspecified damages, saying the hotel’s duty was to "inspect and seek out hazards in the hotel that presented an unreasonable risk of danger to [Lam] and other hotel guests."
However, the hotel filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, saying there was no way the hotel could think someone could feasibly get into the water tanks.

A judge later dismissed the lawsuit against the hotel by Elisa’s parents, saying that the hotel could not have foreseen the situation.
To get into the tank on her own, Elisa would have had to: get on the roof, get onto the tank’s platform, climb up a 10-foot ladder on the side of the tank, open a 20-lb lid, and then get into the tank

Steven and Gloria Cott, guests at the hotel at the time, sued the hotel over the unsanitary water, seeking reimbursement for their stay as well as $100 compensation for medical costs as well as any future medical costs.

The case has since become popular on the internet, with people sleuthing and coming up with their own theories as to what may have happened to Elisa, be it criminal or paranormal.
According to Vice, this was her tumblr.
The strange surveillance video that was released of her, along with the mysterious nature of the case, have kept internet sleuths intrigued for years.
Some of the theories going around include drugs, ghosts, hallucinations, mental breakdowns, possession.
One wild theory correlates strangely to tuberculosis, which was going around at the time in LA’s Skid Row, near the hotel. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-tb-outbreak-20130222-story.html
The test to determine whether or not someone has tuberculosis is actually called the LAM-ELISA
Her autopsy didn’t show that she had tuberculosis.
Elisa had been taking 4 medications for her bipolar disorder: Wellbutrin (an anti-depressant), Lamotrigdine (an anti-convulsant), Quetiapine (an anti-epilleptic and mood stabilizer), and another that her sister did not remember when reporting this to the police. (according to her sister talking to LAPD)
A statement from the hotel manager stated that a few days prior to her disappearance, Elisa was moved from a hostel-style shared room to her own private room, after complaints of “odd behavior” from her roommates

There are many Reddit threads dedicated to discussing the Elisa Lam story, as well as an entire Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/elisalam/

There were reports that American Horror Story: Hotel would be based on this story. While it wasn’t directly lifted, Ryan Murphy discussed the case in brief during a press tour for the show, which led people to believe it was at least inspired by the case.

Sony purchased a spec script at one point based on Elisa’s story, which was later re-worked to be mainly about the hotel itself