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CHAPTER 3

The Investigation Begins

AUTHORITIES RECEIVED A CALL from Cecil Hotel management shortly after 10 A.M. on February 19. The Los Angeles Police Department, according to Officer Diana Figueroa, dispatched officers to 640 South Main Street shortly thereafter. Captain Jaime Moore of the L.A. Fire Department said his department received a separate call from the hotel management reporting that their maintenance staff had discovered a body.

Upon arriving at and inspecting the scene, Moore stated: “There are three of these tanks, inside a portal, with sealed water cisterns on the roof. The body is inside one of these tanks.”

He had mistaken the number of tanks (there were four) and it isn’t known which tank he was referring to when he called it “sealed.” Virtually every later report would state that the water tank lids were not sealed. Were these reports wrong? Had Elisa been sealed in?

Moore said that the size of the hatch granting entrance was too narrow to accommodate the equipment necessary for removing the body. Subsequently, the tank was drained and cut open from the side with lasers.

At approximately 1:45 P.M., LAPD Officer Bruce Borihanh confirmed that a body had been found inside one of four rooftop water tanks of the Cecil Hotel.

“Our urban search and rescue team is working on the best method to recover the body and maintain as much . . . evidence as they possibly can to support the investigation that’s being done by the LAPD and robbery/homicide investigators,” said LAPD spokesman Sgt. Rudy Lopez.

That the tank had to be cut open from the side with lasers underscores the exceedingly awkward physical dimensions of the rooftop platform where the tanks stood. It was partially an effort on behalf of law enforcement to preserve the state of the body from any nicks and cuts that may arise from dredging it upward through an 18” by 18” opening. Pictures from the scene show a phalanx of firefighters and law enforcement officials spilling off the sides of the water cistern platform and huddled on the control room roof above the tanks.

The grim tableau served as a reminder as to why it was so strange that a body was discovered there. That Elisa, or indeed anyone, had somehow accessed the cistern struck many as borderline incomprehensible, a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. The coming debate over whether the task was even physically possible for Elisa, who in the videotape was manifestly disconcerted and missing her glasses, was just getting started online, as well as the equally important adjoining question of why she would have sought access in the first place.

Later that day, Elisa’s parents confirmed the body was hers.

At 4:36 P.M. Coroner Supervising Investigator Fred Corral notified Senior Criminalist Mark Schuchardt that a criminalist would be needed once the decedent’s body arrived at the Forensic Science Center.

Under an hour later, Mr. Schuchardt was staring at Elisa’s body, which lay supine on a service table in an advanced state of decomposition, with bloating, marbling and discoloration to the face, abdomen, and upper legs. The hands and feet were waterlogged, which did not surprise him once he learned the body had been submerged in a water tank for days or weeks. The woman’s soaking wet clothes lay next to her along with a wristwatch and a hotel key card, which had also been submerged.

Mark collected forensic evidence until 6:50 P.M., at which point the clothing and other personal effects were bagged and placed into evidence.

This information, as well as the additional fibers and debris found on the clothes, would not be publicly disclosed for another six months, when the full autopsy and toxicology reports were released. Other details, some of them critically important, would not be revealed until the next year. Some of them were not ever revealed.

CONTAMINATED WATER

Of the many simultaneous investigations that began that day, the one most devoured by local news concerned the LA County Department of Public Health, which sought to determine if the Cecil Hotel drinking water was safe for consumption. While they awaited the results of this investigation, public health officials with LA County’s Environmental Health department temporarily condemned the Cecil Hotel’s water supply and issued a “Do Not Drink” order.

Suddenly there were news reports about infected water. Eighty-nine-year-old Cecil Hotel resident Bernard Diaz, who had lived in the hotel for thirty-two years, said management did not tell him about the water situation. He and others only found out that the health department was quarantining the water supply while watching the news. An hour later, Diaz said, a news anchor on KTLA announced that a body had been found in one of the water cisterns on the roof of the building where he lived. Imagine finding out on the 6 o’clock news that your drinking water has been contaminated by a dead body.

Tenants and short-term residents who had stayed at the hotel recalled instances of water coming out of the faucets and showerheads dark, discolored and, in some cases, containing sediment; they realized in horror that for nearly two weeks they had drunk, brushed their teeth with, and bathed in corpse water.

“The moment we found out, we felt a bit sick to the stomach, quite literally, especially having drank the water, we’re not well mentally,” said Mr. Baugh, a British tourist.

Another tenant described the taste of the water to news reporters as almost “sweet.”

“The water did have a funny taste,” said Sabrina Baugh, who had been drinking the water for eight days. “We never thought anything of it. We thought it was just the way it was here.”

Terrance Powell, a director at LA’s Department of Public Health, said the size of the water cistern and the presence of chlorine in most Los Angeles public water made the likelihood of contamination pretty small, but he could not rule it out.

“Our biggest concern is going to be fecal contamination because of the body in the water,” Powell told reporters.

When an initial test for coliform bacteria—indicative of human waste—came back negative, officials tried to assuage residents’ fears of contaminated water. But no amount of mental gymnastics could absolve the odious truth: a cadaver had been marinating in their drinking water.

In the days following the rooftop discovery, fifty-five of the hotel’s guests chose to leave the premises and were relocated. Approximately fifteen guests, many of them lower-income full-time residents signed waivers and remained. They received bottled water in replacement of the possibly contaminated hotel water. Two guests, Steven and Gloria Cott, filed a class-action lawsuit against the hotel within the next month.

The cistern in which Elisa was found was taken “offline” and additional samples were taken from different parts of the building to be retested. The hotel’s entire water system was flushed and refilled with chlorine-rich water. Until the new tests came back, the hotel restaurant was shut down and water at the Cecil was only to be used for “flushing.”

“So many things have happened in this place that nothing surprises me,” Diaz told a reporter.

CAUSE OF DEATH

The preliminary autopsy was unable to determine the cause of death. Ed Winter, L.A. County assistant chief coroner stated that it was “deferred, pending additional tests.” Winter further stated that the coroner’s office wouldn’t be releasing any partial or preliminary information until it had the results of blood, urine, and toxicology tests. That information could take anywhere from six to eight weeks to be released. At least, it was supposed to take that long.

Though he didn’t divulge much information, Winter did shed a little light on his thought process when he stated a few of the questions for which he would seek answers. “What was in [Elisa Lam’s] system? Were all the organs functioning right? . . . Any prescriptions, was she on meds within a therapeutic level or did she take too many or was there none?”

In other words, it’s reasonable to assume based on this statement that there was at least some consideration going into the theory that Elisa was under the influence of drugs during the surveillance video. Had Elisa willingly taken an illicit substance—a psychedelic or narcotic that rendered her in a dissociated, confused state? Or had she been drugged?

INITIAL QUESTIONS

With Elisa no longer missing and her body found in suspicious circumstances, police now found themselves with a potential murder investigation on their hands. As they waited for an autopsy and toxicology report to shed light on the empirical facts of her cause of death, detectives began working the case.

The primary detectives assigned to the Elisa Lam case were veterans Wallace Tennelle and Greg Stearns.

Elisa’s body was found naked; her clothes (if, in fact, they were her clothes; one item listed as Lam’s was a pair of men’s shorts) were found floating in the water coated with “a sand-like particulate.” Pending the results of the autopsy, we didn’t yet know whether she had been assaulted in any way. A rape and fingernail kit would hopefully answer the critical but disturbing questions that must invariably be asked when a missing person’s clothes have been removed.

No crime scene photos or photos of her body were released; nor did the LAPD release any information regarding DNA collected from the roof where her body was found. This is, of course, standard. In a homicide investigation, detectives are methodically careful about what information they release because there are certain details of the crime scene that only the perpetrator could know. When they question suspects, they look to glean these details from them.

The age-old tactic is surprisingly effective. During the investigation of serial killer Jack Unterweger, who had lived in the Cecil Hotel during one of his murder sprees, detectives from both Vienna and Los Angeles carefully safeguarded information pertaining to the condition of the prostitutes Unterweger had murdered. Details, such as the meticulous and particularly vicious and fatal nooses he fashioned with his victims’ bras, were known only to the detectives and the killer.

In the case of Richard Ramirez, who had also lived at the Cecil Hotel, the LAPD did not publicly disclose details of the killer’s Avia sneakers and .25 automatic ballistics during the manhunt so that Ramirez would not see it in newspapers and eliminate the evidence. Then-Mayor of San Francisco Dianne Feinstein blurted out the information at a news conference and it was subsequently plastered all over the city newspapers.

The disclosure infuriated the LAPD and could have compromised the manhunt, as Ramirez saw the article and only then learned what evidence they had on him. He subsequently discarded the .25 and the sneakers when he read Feinstein’s leak. Fortunately, he was apprehended anyway.

In the Elisa Lam case, there was not yet a shred of physical evidence to prove foul play—and the question deck was stacked. Was Elisa interacting with someone in the hallway as seen on the surveillance tape? Why was her body in the water tank? Why was she naked? Why was she on the roof at all? How had she accessed it (or been brought there) without the alarm being triggered?

One thing we know about the initial police investigation is that they searched the hotel, floor by floor, with a canine unit. Manager Amy Price stated in the civil-case depositions that this search included the roof but did not yield any information.

Detective Tennelle testified that when the LAPD set up a command post in the Cecil, they searched “every nook and cranny of that building where we thought was a room, locked or unlocked, it was to be opened. It was to be searched.”

This was a somewhat misleading statement, since they did not initially discover Elisa’s body on the roof when they supposedly searched “every nook and cranny.” If they had searched every nook and cranny, they would have found the body in one of the only structures visible on the roof of the hotel they supposedly searched twice.

How had police investigators overlooked the water tanks during their two searches of the hotel? There’s nothing else on the roof—if the lid to the tank in which Elisa was found was up, how had the police investigators not seen it? If the lid was down—and presumably set back into place after Elisa’s entry—who was responsible for this? Who closed the lid?

SEARCH DOGS

Police have confirmed that a K-9 unit was used in the building but have not been specific about where. For example, we don’t know if the dogs were used to search rooms and pick up a live scent—which one would presume police were looking for when Elisa was still missing—and we don’t know to what extent, if any, dogs were deployed on the roof. This is crucial in assessing how Elisa was not found earlier in the water tank, which is itself crucial in understanding that critical evidence may have been lost early in the case. Determining if and why evidence was lost is an issue we will return to later.

Since the LAPD, by their own admission, claims to have searched the entire building, “every nook and cranny,” let’s assume that the K-9 unit was taken to the roof. How did the dogs miss her scent during what was then a second search of the roof?

To answer this we must first know what kind of search dog was being used, an air-scent dog or a tracking dog. Tracking dogs are often used when time is of the essence in a missing-persons case. They are called onto the scene in order to follow the scent of the person missing before the area becomes contaminated by the smell of other people. To do this, canines are bred and trained to detect heavy skin particles, which living humans shed at the rate of 40,000 per minute. They are essentially following the forensic trail all humans leave in their wake.

There is ample reason to think that tracking dogs were used as detectives may have believed Elisa was still alive. But if she was still alive at the hotel, the only place they could have reasonably suspected her to be breathing is in one of the rooms. If they believed that, this may suggest the existence of other evidence, such as suspicious tenants or employees, that led them to think using a tracking dog in the hotel would have been fruitful.

However, unless Elisa was alive in one of the rooms of the hotel, the only logical K-9 choice would have been air-scent dogs, who do not follow a specific scent but rather look for the origin of a corpse scent that they pick up on through air currents. Tracking dogs and air-scent dogs overlap in their training but only air-scent dogs look for cadavers.

If the LAPD used tracking dogs, how had they missed all of Elisa’s forensic trail? It is almost certain that Elisa’s DNA—and possibly her killer’s DNA—festooned the staircase leading to the roof or, alternately, the fire escape on the side of the building. One would also suspect DNA to have been on the roof, on the ladder to the water tank, and on the lid to the water tank.

But if the police used cadaver dogs and the lid was indeed open, how had the dogs missed the scent? Does that suggest that her body was moved into the tank at a later date? Who would have the access and clearance to be carrying a body up the stairs? Who would have the strength to carry the body up the precarious ladder on the side of the cistern? And how would some of this activity not been picked up on hotel surveillance?

And where was the body before it was moved and why was that scent not picked up? Later, detectives admitted they didn’t search rooms at the Cecil because they couldn’t prove there was a crime, a statement that raises its own set of concerns.

But the biggest question remains: how did the K-9 unit miss the scent? Air-scent dogs’ work retinue include the categories of Cadaver, Water, Avalanche, Urban Disaster, Wilderness, and Evidence. It has been said that most cadaver dogs have about a 95 percent accuracy rate and can detect bodies buried as far as 30 feet below ground.

The use of dogs by law enforcement dates back all the way to the Middle Ages, but it was not until 1889 that the modern era saw dogs integrated into police work. Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police of London, trained two bloodhounds to help him search for Jack the Ripper.

Subsequently, K-9 units became a regular asset of police investigations. Decomposition in the human body begins when enzymes and microbiome start breaking down organs and skin. When the body’s amino acids dissolve, they release the compound chemicals cadaverine and putrescine. Cadaver dogs are trained to detect these with a unique skill set that utilizes the incredible olfactory powers of canine nostrils. Man’s best friend can smell death—human death. The hounds become scholars at identifying the odor of our expiration.

They are trained to detect hundreds of different scents dispensed by corpses, to differentiate between humans and animals, between bodies that are submerged in water and bodies buried in rubble. However, the process of decomposition is impacted by external factors like environment, weather, and insects. Each modulation slightly changes the exact “scent of death” that will be present.

Some analysts suggested that rainfall may have thrown off the cadaver dogs. Weather reports show that there was slight precipitation on February 8 and February 19 in Los Angeles during the time Elisa was missing. However, the K-9 search conducted by the LAPD occurred somewhere between February 1 and February 6. Therefore, rain was not a factor that would have affected the scene. Forensic evidence, such as DNA from skin cells, should have been available either in the staircase and doorway of the rooftop emergency exit or on the fire escapes, which are the only ways Elisa could have accessed the roof. Forensic evidence should have also been available on the ladder to the water tank and on the lid to the water tank.

If the LAPD only used tracking dogs, it is possible that they missed the decomposition scent due to water immersion. But they should have picked up on the other DNA left behind by Elisa that would have led them to the roof. If, alternatively, the LAPD used cadaver dogs, it’s especially difficult to imagine how they missed both the DNA scent leading to the roof and the decomposition scent.

On that day, did the 5 percent rear its ugly head and account for a group of trained, diligent hounds missing the scent? Or could it be that there was no scent because Elisa’s body wasn’t yet there?

WHAT HAPPENED ON THE ROOF?

One of the biggest early questions pertained to roof access: how Elisa got up there and how she accessed the tank? How did she access the roof without triggering the rooftop alarm? Pedro Tovar, the Cecil’s chief engineer, confirmed that there are four ways to get onto the roof: three fire escapes that are connected to interior doors of the hotel; and a staircase attached to the 14th floor, which according to one tenant was designed to trigger an alarm when accessed by someone without clearance.

If we assume that Elisa accessed the roof via a fire escape, we have to take into consideration that she was missing her glasses. Think back to the surveillance tape and recall that Elisa had to bend over and bring her face to within a few inches of the button panel to read the floor numbers—and she still got it badly wrong two different times. Is it realistic to think that someone with impaired vision, or who was discombobulated enough to press the wrong buttons multiple times, subsequently climbed out the side of a building—with nothing to stop her fall, the distant windy call of traffic humming fourteen floors below—and climbed a tiny ladder onto the roof?

And once she was up there, Elisa would have had to ascend a separate platform on which the water tanks sit and then slither through the narrow space between the tanks and the plumbing equipment. Then she would have had to scale the cistern itself, lift its heavy metal lid, and climb inside. But not before taking off her clothes and bringing them, as well as her watch and room keycard, into the tank with her.

If the lid was open when the police twice searched the roof, it’s hard to believe they didn’t see it and inquire. If the lid was closed, how did Elisa close it herself while descending into the tank?

Of course, the biggest question would pertain to Elisa’s motive for doing any of this. Why would a young woman—who, we would learn, liked to stay in her room and keep to herself—scale the side of a dangerous building and then scale the ladder of a ten-foot water tank, remove her clothes and climb inside?

Almost immediately, many case analysts began to conclude this was the wrong question. With the evidence at hand, a young woman displaying behavior that suggests she is frightened and being followed, her body coming to rest shortly thereafter in an enclosed metal tank with her clothes removed on a difficult-to-access roof, perhaps the better question is: who brought Elisa to the roof and/ or who arranged for Elisa’s body to be concealed in the water tank?

It was a question that would be debated on countless websites, in a million plus comment threads, in thousands of videos and podcasts.

But first: would the LAPD find evidence of criminality to support these theories?

The primary detectives assigned to the case, Greg Stearns and Wallace “Wally” Tennelle, were veterans of the LAPD police force.

STEARNS AND THE “MYSTERY OF THE HOLLYWOOD HEAD”

Greg Stearns is widely viewed as a particularly skilled interrogator who uses cutting-edge techniques. He is probably best known for cracking a cold case that ended with a fellow LAPD detective, Stephanie Lazarus, being convicted of a murder she committed twenty-three years earlier.

In 2012–13 (directly overlapping with the timeframe of the Lam investigation) the department cherry-picked Stearns and Tim Marcia, who also worked the Lam case, to participate in a top-secret non-coercive interrogation training program called HIG (High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group), headed by a consortium of FBI, CIA, and Pentagon officials.

The goal was to use new interrogation tactics to reduce the number of false confessions. Stearns and Marcia led the way and applied what they learned at HIG to the “Mystery of the Hollywood Head.”

This investigation-turned-cold-case began in early 2012 when a dog jumped into a ravine and found a head-sized object in a plastic bag.

The object was indeed a head and it belonged to a man, Hervey Medellin, who had been missing for weeks. The prime suspect was Medellin’s housemate, Gabriel Campos-Martinez, for whom police had a mountain of circumstantial evidence (for example, his Google search for how to dismember a body, which he conducted the day Medellin disappeared) but nothing substantial enough to hand over to prosecutors.

Stearns and Marcia took a run at Campos with their new HIG interrogation method. Though he didn’t confess, by the time they were done chatting, Campos had admitted he went for walks in the Hollywood hills with the victim, in close proximity to where his head was found; additionally, he discussed a plant called Datura, which could incapacitate someone.

In 2015, Campos received a sentence of twenty-five years to life.

The LAPD has since used the HIG method—the true nature of which is classified—on another sixty interrogations with a 75 to 80 percent success rate.

Another case I found interesting involved both Stearns and Lieutenant Walt Teague. Teague and Stearns had been trying for nearly a decade to nab Tai Zhi Cui, the prime suspect in a grisly triple murder, who fled to China to escape extradition and prosecution. Police say that in October 2006, Cui entered a Koreatown restaurant and killed his ex-girlfriend, her new boyfriend, and the restaurant’s owner with execution-style gunshots.

China refused to extradite Cui but instead prosecuted him in their own courts, which include a three-judge panel. Cui was convicted and Stearns and Teague celebrated justice, although they would have rather tried him in the United States.

Teague, who appeared with the Lam family during the press conference, has strong connections to China. He earned a degree and met his wife there. I wondered how much of a role he played dealing with the family.

“WALLY” TENNELLE

In the book Ghettoside, a polemic on black-on-black homicide in Los Angeles, journalist Jill Leovy describes Wallace Tennelle as being atypical of LAPD officers because of a specific and tragically fated conviction that officers should live in the community that they police. For Tennelle this was South Central, where he and his wife, Yadira, high school sweethearts, raised three children who all attended private school.

After serving as a Marine, Tennelle devoted his life to the police force. He initially rejected the Robbery and Homicide Department (RHD) out of principle but the homicide surge of the early 1980s ushered him in. Tennelle would go to work for the CRASH division, which was an elite, aggressive, almost renegade force within the department that would later become a controversial liability.

In the late 1980s, Tennelle transitioned to a divisional detective job but his intense work ethic, described as pathological, persisted. In 1992, he and his partner worked twenty-eight cases, which Leovy notes, was three times more than most detectives took on.

Wallace, a veteran LAPD homicide detective, knew what it was like to lose a kid. He had bought a home for his family in the same community in which he worked, the dangerous South Los Angeles area. It was in this neighborhood, the western edge of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street precinct area, that in 2007 his eighteen-year-old son Bryant Tennelle was shot in the head and killed by a gang member. Bryant was wearing a Houston Astros baseball cap, unaware that its colors and shapes affiliated him with rival gang activity.

ANOMALIES

As Stearns and Tennelle got their investigation underway, Bernard Diaz, the eighty-nine-year-old long-time resident, told reporters that he’d heard loud strange noises coming from the 4th floor the night before Elisa’s body was found.

“They said there was some obstruction to the drain between the 3rd and 4th floor,” Diaz said, speculating as to the source of the noise.

Another claim, corroborated by photographs from the roof, stated that there was suspicious graffiti found near the water tanks. One reporter speculated that the messages, written in Latin, may have been a calling card left behind by someone ostensibly involved in Lam’s death.

Still other reports concerned several registered sex offenders living at the hotel. In fact, nearly a dozen sex offenders were known to live on Main Street within only a few blocks of the Cecil.

There was also the matter of additional young women found dead in the area and, at this point in the investigation, the detectives considered foul play a possible explanation.

But who was responsible for transporting Elisa’s body past surveillance cameras, security alarms, up several steep ladders and into the water tank?

Another question that would follow: was Elisa reported missing by the hotel staff when she failed to check out at her scheduled time? Or did they wait until notified by the police that the family had filed a missing-persons report?

Or was something else entirely going on with Elisa in the Cecil Hotel? In the coming weeks, websleuths would stumble upon new information about Elisa that further complicated their attempts to discern her behavior in the elevator. Other researchers, myself included, mined the history of the hotel itself and discovered tragic, terrifying truths about the tenants and employees who lived and worked there.