What happened to Elisa Lam? Know all about the mysterious death of Elisa Lam in 2013

Netflix's new crime documentary Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel looks into the Elisa Lam case, which was one of the most notorious crime cases of the last decade. The show goes into depth about what happened to Elisa Lam and the circumstances surrounding her long disappearance and death. Read on to know what happened to Elisa Lam at the Cecil Hotel. 

What Happened to Elisa Lam? 

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Elisa Lam checked into the Cecil Hotel on January 28, 2013, as Amy Price tells the viewers in The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. Amy Price was the hotel manager in 2013 when the Elisa Lam incident happened. The Cecil Hotel has a very long history involving notable criminals and serial killers having resided there. The hotel although located near major tourist attractions is in a place called Skid Row, a shady part of the town. 

Skid Row is home to some 5000 people who live in poor conditions and the inhabitants include mostly tent campers, the homeless, some dilapidated old apartment buildings. The place is home to sex works and people struggling with drug addictions. Basically, it was a very shady part of Los Angeles. However, Cecil Hotel has been popular for some time and attracted a lot of customers because of the novelty. Police suspect that must have played a part in Lam's choice in picking this hotel. Also, it was comparatively cheaper because of the rough neighbourhood. 

Lam stayed in room 506, a bunk bedroom for women with a shared toilet and shower. As detective Tim Marica of the LAPD told us in the Netflix show, Lam has intended to check out on 1st February to continue on her journey through the US, which she called her 'West Coast Tour' on her Tumblr blog. Cecilia was the daughter of Canadian immigrants from Honk Kong. Lam was taking a break from her college, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to take a trip across the USA. She had been attending the university on and off for about three years with a few long breaks due to her mental health conditions. She had been suffering from severe depression and bipolar disorder for years. 

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On 31st January she'd visited the 'The Last Bookstore', a nearby bookstore where the manager Katie Orphan attended to her. "It seemed like she had plans to return home, plans to give things to her family members and reconnect with them,” Orphan told CBS in an interview. As per the documentary, the hotel employees saw her in restricted sections of the hotel on 31st January, acting strangely. It was the last day when anyone saw her alive for the last time. 

The Infamous Elevator Video 

Then there was the strange surveillance footage from the hotel elevator which went viral online. You can take a look at the video above. In the video, it appears that Lam thinks someone is after her. Wearing a red hoodie and black shorts she comes onto the elevator and hides in a corner for half a minute. Then she repeatedly looks out of the elevator as if she's afraid someone might show up to do her harm.

The footage gets stranger still, as Lam steps out of door looks around and makes weird actions with her hands then she comes back into the elevator. At around 2 minutes into the video, Lam steps out of the elevator and does some strange hand motions like she's hitting the air. It's also possible she's talking to someone who was out of the frame, we may never find out. Then she steps out of the hallway, completely disappearing from the camera frame. 

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How did they find Elisa Lam?

Elisa Lam's body was found by a maintenance worker at the Cecil Hotel on February 19th. The residents of the hotel had been complaining about the poor quality and pressure of water in their rooms. Maintenance worker Santiago Lopez went investigate the water tanks and found the body of Elisa Lam inside one of the water tanks.

"I noticed the hatch to the main water tank was open and looked inside and saw an Asian woman lying face-up in the water approximately twelve inches from the top of the tank," Lopez said in court documents, as reported by LAist. Lopez also added the door alarms were armed. Lam couldn't have entered the roof through that door, as the roof alarm didn't ring all day, on the day of her disappearance. 

Pedro Tovar, the hotel's chief engineer said in the above-mentioned documents that the roof was accessible by four different ways. Three fire escapes lead to the roof alongside the door with the alarm that Lopez mentioned. To access the tank themselves was a difficult task, said Tovar. If someone wanted to, they would have to climb to the top of the large tanks, and then would have to take off the very heavy metal lid covering it. 

Elisa Lam Autopsy Report 

In June 2013, the L.A. County coroner's office declared Lam's cause of death as accidental drowning. Her actions were attributed to her bipolar disorder, taking into account her strange behaviour on the elevator footage. "Without going into her diagnosed psychological problems, we (law enforcement and medical consultants) can conclusively say that her behaviour was consistent with her diagnosis," Detective Marcia of the LAPD wrote in a 2015 email. What remains unknown even after all these years is how Lam managed to climb on top of the large tank(you had to climb up with a ladder), take off the very heavy metal lid of the tank and then accidentally(or on purpose?) drown herself. We may never know. 

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About Cecil Hotel 

The Cecil Hotel is a famous LA landmark. Originally, the Cecil Hotel was a 14-floor budget lodging that opened in 1924 in the Skid Row section of LA. There is a lot of mystery and lore connected to this particular hotel. It's also rumoured that Richard Ramirez, the subject of the Netflix true-crime documentary Night Stalker and a notorious serial killer lived in the Cecil Hotel. It's said that he lived there for a few weeks when he was an active serial killer in LA. The Australian serial killer Jack Unterweger lived in the Cecil Hotel as well, around the time when he committed his murders.

The Hotel is so popular, in fact, that Ryan Murphy chose this hotel as the inspiration for the haunted hotel in his TV show American Horror Story: Hotel. With the mysterious death of Lisa Lam attached to it, Cecil Hotel is bound become a historic place for the tourists. In 2017, the hotel was declared as a historical landmark of LA. The hotel has been closed since 2017 and has been undergoing renovations under a new owner. 

• All the information sourced in this article is based on the Netflix series Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.