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CHAPTER 4

Rise of the Websleuths

WHEN I FIRST GOT INVOLVED in the case, I didn’t have the faintest clue what a websleuth was or even what constituted a true-crime investigation. The Elisa Lam case slowly sucked me in from a variety of different angles. By the end of my investigation, the experience would take a severe psychological toll and redirect the course of my life in unexpected ways.

And I wasn’t the only one for whom the case had a special effect. What I would discover is that there are people all over the world who have become attached to, connected with, and emotionally invested in the case for an enormous variety of reasons. Websleuths and friends of Elisa’s who want to see justice served; people suffering from depression and mental illness who have forged an online community; former Cecil Hotel residents who want the truth to come out about the criminal history of the hotel; paranormal researchers who see a darker reality cutting through and want to awaken the world; conspiracy theorists who believe a larger, more sinister narrative is playing out behind the scenes.

The case became a kind of Rorschach test; everyone who looked at it saw something different, something uniquely meaningful and uniquely petrifying.

MISSING PERSONS AND UNIDENTIFIED BODIES

It is estimated that one third of murders in the United States go unsolved. That’s approximately 200,000 homicides since 1960. Since the days of Jack the Ripper and, much later, the Black Dahlia, people have always been fascinated with unsolved murders. Cold cases and true-crime sagas are a cultural obsession, an entertainment staple, but more important, they are a major conundrum for law-enforcement agencies who often simply do not have the resources to vigorously pursue the truth behind every unsolved death in which foul play is suspected.

Even the above estimates do not paint the full picture of the burden of justice, particularly in America, where one must also factor in unidentified remains and missing persons. In The Skeleton Crew, Deborah Halber breaks the situation down. A 2007 census conducted by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) suggests there may be 40,000 unidentified individuals in morgues and graves around the country. Some coroners and medical examiners think the number may be closer to 60,000. Unfortunately, many agencies in the medico-legal establishment habitually overlook unidentifieds. One study suggests only 30 percent of small-town coroners even have policies for how to handle unidentified remains.

Meanwhile, at any given time there are about 100,000 active missing-persons cases. As we discussed earlier, the majority of these people are found alive. But over the years, the number of those who remain missing—a nightmare without end for the families involved—continues to rise. Many of them do not even constitute being a “cold case” because they lack evidence or an advocate.

The ability and capacity for our nation’s police and law enforcement is outpaced by the rate of people disappearing, the staggering number of unidentified remains, and unsolved deaths. This is the troubling locus from which websleuths arose and became an indispensable and permanent tool in criminal justice.

There is no official origin to the concept of websleuths. They were forged out of the slowly evolving symbiotic relationship between humans, who seem to have an innate desire to solve puzzles, and the Internet, which is both the greatest research tool and the greatest interconnectivity tool yet devised by our species.

Since the earliest days of the Internet, civilians with an interest in cold cases have gathered information about them. The location of the body, the time it was discovered, salient physical details like scars or tattoos and other distinguishing features. They entered these details in rudimentary databases. The first newsgroups, email lists, and Yahoo! Groups like Troy More’s ColdCases united researchers and allowed them to share facts. These embryonic forums grew quickly in the early days of Google and Wikipedia. Social media was just getting started but hadn’t yet produced communities like Reddit, and improved Internet access and functionality had not yet allowed for a site like Websleuths.

Like raw cosmic matter being slowly shaped and consolidated by the force of gravity, the Internet and its ability to facilitate crowdsourcing coalesced into a sphere accessible to all. These earliest websleuths turned their sights onto classic decades-old cold cases like the Green River Killer, Tent Girl, the Lady of the Dunes, the Boy in the Box (which dates all the way back to 1957), etc. More recent and contemporary cases like those of Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G, Jodie Arias, OJ Simpson, and Natalee Holloway fanned the flames of true crime as a moneymaker on cable TV shows like Nancy Grace.

The attacks of 9/11 had an impact on websleuths in forensic science, Halber believes. The number of victims that had to be ID’d sometimes with nothing more than microscopic shreds of DNA pushed the envelope of forensic technology and encouraged crowdsourced work.

The biggest online community used by websleuths at this time was the Doe Network, sometimes called the “Facebook of the dead,” which is a crowdsourced database of missing persons and unidentified bodies. It was launched in 1999 and in time thousands of volunteers would become members and contribute information gathered from public records, media archives, and medical examiner and coroner websites like Las Vegas Unidentified and the Florida Unidentified Decedent Database. The volunteers were so tenacious and pesky that law-enforcement officials and cops called them “Doe Nuts.” This set the stage for a prolonged tension over efforts to peek behind the “blue curtain” that has traditionally been drawn over police investigations.

A series of events in the middle half of the last decade acted as major accelerators for the websleuth movement. The first was in 2004 when Tricia Griffith purchased and revamped the Websleuths website, transforming the crime forum from a hostile vipers’ nest into one of the most trafficked and respected platforms for crowdsleuthing. The next year, in 2005, Reddit came online and quickly grew into a massive online community with several “subreddits” dedicated to websleuthing and cold cases.

In 2007, partly inspired by the success of the Doe Network, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), created a massive new database, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), dedicated to helping families and investigators identify remains and locate missing persons. Within only five years of its inception, NamUs users were mounting impressive numbers.

Crowdsleuthing was having a real effect, helping families find some degree of closure in cases of unimaginable loss and tragedy, delivering justice to hundreds of victims who had almost been completely snuffed out of existence.

A specific case spurred Tricia Griffith to join Websleuths and test her might at cold cases. The day after Christmas in 1996, six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her home, triggering one of the most scrutinized police investigations in modern times. Replete with a potentially staged abduction, unidentified DNA, inconclusive handwriting samples, a badly compromised crime scene, fake press leaks, false confessions, and hundreds of opposing theories, the case generated a small library of books, movies, and TV specials. The JonBenet case essentially created a new niche obsession with true crime.

In 2004, Tricia took the helm of Websleuths and made immediate changes. The forums had become unbearable, Tricia told me, “a sea of jerks” threatening each other, calling each other names, and trolling the hell out of anyone and everyone. Her initial goal, she said, was not to create a popular web forum but to give a platform to disenfranchised advocates. She also wanted to help the families of missing persons or homicide victims who weren’t getting media attention.

Tricia tightened the moderation on the site and made strict rules for communication etiquette and rumor regulation. She also banned a huge group of insufferable trolls. Eventually these measures had the unintended but welcome effect of attracting real websleuths . . . and lots of them. In only a couple years, Websleuths’ membership grew from only 250 to thousands.

Then the Casey Anthony case hit and Websleuths truly exploded.

WEBSLEUTHS

In The Skeleton Crew, Halber paints a portrait of websleuths as decentralized, spread out all over the country and world, usually anonymous, and ranging from a software sales rep like Dan Brady to college students and stay-at-home moms. They are true-crime fanatics, cold-case junkies, people for whom the prospect of cracking an unsolved murder ranks higher than almost any other human accomplishment. They are cold-case lifers.

Some websleuths hunt for forensic information or file FOIA requests; others work on behalf of families who are missing a loved one or who believe their loved one was the victim of foul play. They crowdsource granules of detail based on dental records and DNA, facial reconstruction models, post-mortem photos, computer-generated color portraits, clay dummies, Google or aerial maps. They may comb through online archives collecting census, voter, and military records, marriage and death certificates, property titles, business permits, and bankruptcy and criminal files.

Halber’s book chronicles the stories of several successful websleuths.

Bobby Lingoes, a Doe Network member who works as a civilian database manager for the police in Quincy, Massachusetts, helped solve a 2002 case of an unidentified body found in the Sudbury River. He crowdsleuthed the letters “PK,” which were tattooed on the body’s right shoulder, and found another Doe volunteer from Texas who remembered a missing man with that exact tattoo. Lingoes handed off this information to Framingham police; they subsequently identified the deceased man as forty-year-old Peter Kokinakis. He had disappeared that year from Houston.

Legendary websleuth Todd Matthews, who solved the infamous decades-old Tent Girl mystery, also solved a case using only a tattoo, a kangaroo tattoo that identified a missing woman found dead in Maryland.

Ellen Leach did what police in Missouri and Iowa had been unable to do for four years. Using a forensic reconstruction, she connected a skull found cemented into a bucket behind a dumpster in Missouri with a photograph of missing Iowa resident Greg May. It was Leach’s first solve in six years of websleuthing, and she still remembers the glow.

In 2008, Tonya Finsterwald, an amateur Doe sleuth from Texas, helped solve the 1980 case of a young man, Joseph Formica Jr., who suffered from mental illness and had disappeared from near his family’s home in Pennsylvania.

In another case, a websleuth’s tool of choice was Ancestry.com. While searching the Doe Network, Sheree Greenwood saw the picture of a victim’s bones and the garments worn prior to death, which included white tennis shoes, jeans, and a red T-shirt with a Native American graphic and the words “Wynn family reunion” with the date of the event and a list of names. Greenwood methodically hunted down the family members and the shirt designer and ultimately identified the deceased as Brenda Wright.

Halber says the websleuths and their crowdsleuthing techniques have not only solved a number of cases but are “transforming law enforcement’s relationship with the public.”

Indeed, it is important to remember that at the very beginning of the Elisa Lam case, LAPD law enforcement called upon the public to get involved with providing clues as to her whereabouts. They were not only open to but soliciting a co-relationship between the citizenry and the police, knowing full well that this meant deputizing websleuths to look into the case. Once they showed the surveillance footage, though, they couldn’t close Pandora’s Box.

Tricia Griffith says she knows for a fact that law-enforcement officials use the Websleuths site to gather information and keep an eye on the threads. She has tracked the IP addresses logged into the site and determined that multiple precincts have accounts they use to monitor activity on certain cases. Griffith is convinced that despite any outward posturing or criticism, a growing number of detectives consider the work of websleuths valuable.

But the relationship is not an altogether cozy one and, in fact, in the majority of cases, investigators are outright dismissive of websleuths and consider them impediments. Historically, law enforcement officials—be they police officers, detectives, or any number of deputies from local, regional, and federal task forces—do not want to talk to the public. And not just about the details of an unsolved murder. Transparency at all levels has been opaque since the inception of major urban police forces in the mid to late nineteenth century.

This is not necessarily always due to some conspiratorial hush-hush campaign. The reality is, as Halber notes in her book, criminal investigations, especially homicides, can easily become mired in communication breakdowns between jurisdictions, agencies, police departments, coroner’s offices, and municipalities and divisions within municipalities.

In other words, the public-service officials have enough trouble with internal communication. Fissures within the law-enforcement community can be just as divisive as public relations problems. The fallout from this has been seen in cases such as the Black Dahlia and the Hillside Strangler, in which squabbling among agencies and failure to share information across jurisdictions arguably allowed killers to get away with murder.

When it comes to websleuths, there’s a reason law-enforcement professionals took to using the moniker “Doe Nuts” when referring to them. They view websleuths as mentally unstable amateurs who do not have the training or the temperament to solve a case. More importantly, they are seen as dangerous lynch mobs who make false accusations based on petty evidence.

Unfortunately, there is some truth to this view. I would witness irresponsible websleuths firsthand in the Elisa Lam case. Unfounded accusations run rampant across the Internet and legitimate pieces of evidence often compete with debate threads over the most putrescent conspiracy theories imaginable.

However, diligent websleuths counterbalance this disturbance and an equilibrium develops.

Would websleuths live up to the challenge in the Elisa Lam case?

The “crime scene,” the Cecil Hotel, has historically been a dangerous hotel—so dangerous in fact that there are rumors that in decades past police officers dreaded taking calls there and avoided entering its hallways at all costs.

What I would discover is that Cecil Hotel tenants, certain that they would be ignored, have traditionally avoided calling the police; further, even if the tenants could attract a caring, responsible officer, by filing a police report, they risked losing their home. So Cecil Hotel tenants didn’t want anything to do with the police; the police didn’t want anything to do with the Cecil Hotel; and the Cecil Hotel seemed to operate for decades with a kind of impunity.

Perhaps this is exactly why websleuths are needed. If disenfranchised victims or witnesses won’t talk to the police out of fear, perhaps they will talk to websleuths, who are not ordained by the state to wield coercive force. The thought of this makes police detectives cringe but, as Tricia Griffith emphatically claims, it’s a reality departments are going to have to face.

One reality I was going to have to face was that to learn more about the Elisa Lam case, I would have to get out of the academic definitions and studies of websleuthing and further into dark realms of the web itself. It was time to become a websleuth.

“BRAINSCRATCH”

Like many people who search for careers in Los Angeles, John Lordan tried multiple niches of the entertainment industry. But his heart was always in investigating true crime, unsolved cases, and conspiracies. It was a natural calling.

John launched a YouTube show devoted to tackling cold cases and murder investigations. His idea was to present a mysterious case and compile all the research he could, present that research and then use the comment threads to deputize his viewers as a decentralized crowdsourced investigation. By leaving behind all the breadcrumbs of his investigation, anyone could follow in John’s footsteps—including police detectives who might not ever admit to culling evidence from a websleuth—and anyone could participate and annotate an ongoing project.

With a small but rapidly growing circle of passionate followers spurring him on, John urged subscribers to introduce new evidence and ideas. He didn’t mind if his investigations forked into previously unforeseen directions. In that way, his new channel was like a multimedia Wikipedia, a transparent work in progress whereby you can actually witness, step-by-step, the formation of a theory and the research conducted to confirm or debunk it.

He called the show “BrainScratch” and one of his very first videos was about the mysterious case of Elisa Lam, the popularity of which launched his channel into motion with thousands of devoted subscribers. What he didn’t know at the time was that the Elisa Lam case would be a subject he returned to many times over the years. No one could have predicted the near-cult devotee status it would attain in popular culture.

One of John’s early goals with the Elisa Lam case was to eschew the paranormal angle, which he found distracting and stigmatizing. He vowed instead to focus only on demonstrable, empirical evidence. Of course, with a case like this one, such a goal became virtually impossible. And despite John wanting to avoid conspiracy theories, he couldn’t deny that there was something off about this case.

He started calling out the anomalies.

There should be more surveillance footage.

While it is common for police to release video of a missing person—especially if that person is a foreign national—the only practical purpose for that surveillance video was to help identify Elisa. But the footage is of such low quality that it does not really identify her. Ultimately, the surveillance video only served to stigmatize the victim and spawn conspiracy theories.

And it raised more questions than it answered. What about other footage from the hallways of the hotel? Footage from the lobby? From outside the hotel? Why have we not seen any of that footage that could actually help to retrace Elisa’s steps and identify anyone she might have been with? Why was the elevator video the only available footage?

The answer: it wasn’t, it’s just the only footage the police allowed us to see. In time, we learned there was additional footage of Elisa. And the content of that supplemental footage will give you goosebumps—but that disclosure wasn’t made until fairly late in the investigation.

Elisa’s cell phone(s) was never recovered.

The police were reluctant to talk about Elisa’s missing phone from the beginning. As I mentioned previously, the fact that at least one of her phones was missing prevented police from looking at who Elisa communicated with prior to her death. However, it is technically possible to track lost phones, and it seems that this could have been of assistance to the investigation.

More important, you do not need access in the phone to track the phone and to extract information—metadata, for example—from the carrier, provider, and cellular towers.

It is also not certain that the phone wasn’t recovered. An early statement by the LAPD suggested that Elisa’s possessions from her room had been stored in the hotel’s basement. Could her phone have been among these possessions?

Since the investigation was still active, the police would say nothing about the location of Elisa’s phone, adding the first of countless enigmatic wrinkles to the mystery.

Much later, an unlikely witness disclosed to me a shocking revelation regarding the location of Elisa’s belongings.

Elisa’s Tumblr account continued updating for several months after her disappearance.

A month after her death, Elisa’s Tumblr account posted something new, a Virginia Woolf quote that read:

Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night?

As bloggers and websleuths became more and more obsessed with the case over the next year, the account would periodically update with random images and messages from Elisa. A girl repeatedly saying “I like being alone . . . I like being alone.” A Scream-like abstract drawing of a person in a car with the title “Human Identity in the Urban Environment.” A Tarot card of the Hermit.

Throughout the course of the parallel investigations that would ensue, the blog would spit forth a new post on behalf of the deceased. Paranormal buffs said they were messages from the grave. Murder conspiracists said they were evidence that the killer had acquired Elisa’s lost phone and was using her Tumblr account to tease and mock investigators.

The most logical explanation for the posts is that Elisa had set up the auto-updater feature on her Tumblr account. This would have allowed her feed to automatically aggregate posts from her favorite accounts. But given that her phone was missing, it was hard not to wonder whether maybe the new Tumblr posts were messages from her killer.

The effect was chilling, as illustrated by a message written posthumously to Elisa by a former classmate:

What haunts me is that your Tumblr reblogged my posts at the end of February and beginning of March 2013, which distressed me to no ends at the time.

There was suspicious graffiti found on the roof.

In one of John Lordan’s early “BrainScratch” videos, he reported on photographs displaying graffiti on the roof of the Cecil. The photos were taken when the Fire Department removed Elisa from the tank. The vulgar tags included the Latin phrase Fecto cunt her suma, which is inscribed on a surface close to the water tank where Elisa’s body was found. According to some online accounts, Fecto cunt her suma translates either to “in fact she was a cunt” or “it’s the best pussy” in Latin.

There are a couple of reasons why the graffiti should be considered important. For one, in later statements the hotel management insisted that the rooftop wasn’t accessible, a determination that became legally critical when the Lam family eventually filed a civil lawsuit against the Cecil Hotel. The fact that someone or multiple persons had tagged the roof meant that at least one or more people had breached the security there.

Furthermore, tagging usually implies that there will be an audience, meaning there may have been the expectation that others would see it. All of which leads to the conclusion that hotel residents or others may have habitually occupied the roof. One former Cecil tenant told me that she used to drink beer on the roof on a regular basis. It can only be assumed that she wasn’t the only one. Could one of these occupiers have had something to do with Elisa’s death or known the killer?

Another point to consider is an oddly synchronistic post from Elisa’s blog. On 31 January, the day she went missing, Elisa posted the following statement on her Tumblr account:

Cunt again? It was odd how men . . . used that word to demean women when it was the only part of a woman they valued.

This was several days into her stay at the Cecil. Had Elisa already been on the roof and taken offense at the message? Perhaps she objected to the graffiti and offended the artist. Or (a more extreme possibility) had someone Elisa knew or someone who had followed her blog—on which she had published her traveling itinerary—tracked her to the Cecil, and left the graffiti tag as a kind of calling card?

WEBSLEUTH TRAVELS FROM HONG KONG

One websleuth, Kay Theng, journeyed all the way from Hong Kong with the intention of infiltrating the Cecil Hotel with a camera and documenting the layout.

Kay arrived at the 14th-floor elevators—ground zero of the entire case—and proceeded to ask and answer five questions:

1. Do the doors of the elevator remain open? Yes, the doors remain open when you push the buttons to other floors; they only close when you press the “door close” button, or if someone on another floor has pressed the elevator button outside the elevator to signal the elevator to go to their floor.

2. How many buttons and panels are there outside the elevator? There are just two buttons on the outside panel—up and down.

3. Does the hold button work? The hold button does work and John Lordan later tested it to learn that the doors remain open for approximately two minutes when it’s pressed.

4. What can you see from the inside? On the wall opposite the elevator is a round mirror which allows you to see if anyone is outside the elevator. The placement of this mirror also means Elisa would have been able to see a reflection of herself when she was standing in the hallway.

5. What can you see if you look outside the elevator? There are two blind spots that are impossible to see from the hallway in front of the elevator. When Elisa peeked out of the elevator and into the hallway, she was not able to see the entire corridor in either direction.

Kay’s next moves are to attempt to access the roof and as he does so he asks and answers three new questions:

1. How many paths are there to access the roof?

2. How accessible are those paths?

3. How close can you get to the water tank?

Kay first approaches the 14th-floor fire escape and finds it can be accessed easily and used to reach the 15th floor (top floor). He avoids the main roof access, the stairs used by the hotel employees to reach the alarmed, locked door, and instead climbs the fire escape to reach the roof. It doesn’t seem particularly difficult to reach the water tanks.

He concludes his video, “This is not a supernatural event, it is very likely to be a murder. We don’t want to see people exaggerate the truth. May the killer be captured soon, and the dead rest in peace.”

The paranormal interpretation is far more popular in Kay’s home country of Hong Kong but he wasn’t buying it. Like John Lordan, Kay didn’t want the idea of ghosts and demons to distract people from what was really going on. And he certainly was not the only websleuth who suspected foul play.

MURDER THEORIES

Without the Internet and its attendant websleuth community, the Elisa Lam case would have likely disappeared from the public radar soon after its initial reports had made the rounds. Depending on your point of view, it can be argued that this was either a blessing or a curse. The voracious consumption of the case is nothing short of amazing, a sociological phenomenon that would be haunting in its own right even if it were not predicated on the discovery of a corpse in a rooftop water tank.

The Elisa Lam case was a uniquely Internet-based phenomenon. While the initial investigation and subsequent discovery made both local and international headlines on cable TV stations, the case never became a featured darling on Nancy Grace or other cable exploits. Maybe it lacked a certain scandalous sexiness when compared to the cases of Scott Peterson, Jodi Arias, Casey Anthony, or Amanda Knox. Or, one could easily argue, Elisa Lam did not fit the criteria of a ready-for-TV celebrity victim.

She wasn’t white. TV true-crime producers often gravitate toward white victims. This phenomenon has an actual psychological designation, the “missing white woman syndrome” (MWWS).

Elisa’s case also brings up un-TV-friendly issues. How often do shows on ID (Investigation Discovery) delve into mental illness? Even when the station did eventually run a three-part series, Horror at the Cecil, which devoted an episode to the Lam case, her struggle with depression and bipolar disorder were hardly touched upon at all.

Or perhaps it was because the case didn’t have a clear antagonist. There was no cinematic murder suspect lurking in the shadows.

Enter the Internet.

A variety of homicide theories would soon follow: They included Elisa being drugged and either dying from accidental overdose or malicious poisoning (perhaps by a romantic interest who had an expectation that prolonged exposure to water would eliminate the trail); another theory posited that Elisa was killed elsewhere in the hotel, possibly in a bathtub where she was already naked, and then transported to the roof and deposited into the water tank; a frequently articulated theory held that Elisa had been killed by a hotel employee, or a friend of a hotel employee, who subsequently edited the surveillance tape so as not to appear.

As people waited for the LAPD detectives to make an announcement or release the results of the autopsy and toxicology reports, speculation was rampant, and more and more websleuths deputized themselves to investigate the mystery. There was something about the case that called to people.

Two body language analysts pored over the surveillance video, studying Elisa’s movements and micro-expressions. A YouTuber analyzed the timecode of the surveillance footage and discovered some anomalies. One rogue websleuth actually believed she had found the killer and organized a trolling campaign to make the suspect know he was being hunted.

Perhaps the most important discovery came about without much fanfare. It turned out Elisa had scrupulously documented her life online through blogs and social media. This made it possible to reverse engineer Elisa’s final weeks and days in her own words.

Shortly before she went missing, it turned out, Elisa had posted a message saying she had been harassed by “creepers.”