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CHAPTER 1

Missing

ON A SUNNY, WARM WINTER DAY in Los Angeles, during one of the most historic and tumultuous weeks in LAPD history, detectives ushered a grieving family before a hungry press corps that had assembled at the downtown precinct. Six days earlier, a Chinese-Canadian student, Elisa Lam, vanished from the Cecil Hotel while vacationing alone. The police had since searched the building twice and canvassed the neighborhood; now they beseeched anyone who might have pertinent information to come forward.

Shortly after this press conference, though, the LAPD cut off the flow of all incoming and outgoing information regarding the case. Looking back years later, their plea for a synergistic relationship between law enforcement and the citizenry carries an ironic, disingenuous tone.

Detective Walter Teague of the Robbery and Homicides Division, looking appropriately grave, led the press conference, the ostensible purpose of which was to enlist the public’s help in finding the twenty-one-year-old Elisa. A posterized photograph erected next to the podium featured her in autumn colors flashing an ebullient smile, cascading, obsidian hair swept over one shoulder, her eyes gazing out from behind thick-rimmed glasses.

With an anxious and unsettled air, Teague outlined what the police knew so far. Elisa was last seen on January 31, 2013. She had verbally checked in with her parents every day while on her solo “West Coast Tour” of California, but on February 1 she didn’t call. And they hadn’t heard from her since. Nor had anyone. No texts. No calls. All communication—including Elisa’s prolific social media posts and blog entries—had abruptly ceased. Her parents reported her missing and flew with their eldest daughter from Vancouver, Canada, to Los Angeles to assist with the search.

Flanking Teague, the family looked ashen and devastated, their body language melting downward in the panicked countenance of loved ones who know something has gone horribly wrong.

The day before the press conference, on the sixth of February, the LAPD had posted flyers around the neighborhood.

“Lam is described as an Asian woman of Chinese descent,” the flyer stated. “She has black hair, brown eyes and stands five feet four inches tall. She weighs about 115 pounds. Lam is fluent in English and also speaks Cantonese.”

It concluded with a directive telling people to contact the LAPD with information.

Teague told reporters that Cecil Hotel management had confirmed Elisa was booked for four nights and scheduled to check out on February 1, the morning she disappeared. They also confirmed that Elisa was last seen by hotel employees in the lobby, shortly after returning from The Last Bookstore with gifts she bought for her family.

Police believed Elisa intended to travel to Santa Cruz next, but they were still piecing together the timeline of her travels.

Lead Detective Wallace Tennelle noted that particular attention was being paid to the case because it involved a foreign national.

“We’ve had some tips come in, not many, but nothing that has proven to be her,” Tennelle stated. “Some sightings, but they proved not to be her.”

When later asked about the nature of the investigation, he said, “We’re just investigating whatever personal habits she may have. And trying to follow up on where she was headed to or what she wanted to see. Like the murders that I investigate, they may grow cold but we don’t close them. I’m pretty sure that’s the same with missings, we don’t close them out.”

Tennelle, whose own son was murdered in cold blood only a few years earlier, mentioned that he was keeping Lam’s family updated with their progress. “We can’t give them everything we have but we do try to keep them in the loop as to what’s going on.”

In the preceding days, the LAPD had set up a command post in the lobby of the Cecil Hotel, where they deployed numerous search teams who were paired with a hotel employee with access to a master key. This effort produced an “extensive and exhaustive search of the entire hotel, including the roof.” The search lasted several days, but did not turn up any substantial evidentiary clues as to Elisa’s location.

A second search was conducted, this time with a K9 unit attached. Again, the entire hotel was searched, “every nook and cranny,” including the roof. Again, police obtained zero clues.

Finally, after a full week had elapsed since Elisa was last seen, the LAPD turned in desperation to the public. In an age when milk carton photos have been replaced by social media hashtags and online web-sleuth forums, word spread quickly that the notorious Cecil Hotel—known by locals as the “Suicide Hotel”—was at the heart of another potentially dark mystery.

Not even Aleister Crowley himself could have predicted how much darker it was about to become.

MISSING PERSONS

Teague looked worried. YouTube users commenting on an uploaded video of the press conference remarked that he sounded like he wanted to cry. Indeed, with a grief-stricken family behind him, the emotional burden must have been heavy.

I’ve always wondered what detectives say to families when a loved one is missing. What can be said? I doubt it plays out like in the movies, where a steely-eyed detective tells the parents, “I’ll find her, I promise.”

Los Angeles has had its fair share of missing persons. For a city that prides itself on visibility, hubris, and conspicuous consumption, the rate of disappearance is staggering. According to the Missing Persons Unit (MPU), approximately 3,900 adult Missing Person (M/P) reports are filed annually. “Approximately 80 percent of all reported missing persons are found or voluntarily return within 48 to 72 hours.” That still leaves hundreds of people who disappear from Los Angeles each year, never to be found again.

There are around 750,000 cases reported annually in the U.S. and in the majority of them, the person is found. However, many are not. Over the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of people have vanished from the face of the earth.

On its website, the Los Angeles Police Department lists the following most common reasons for a Missing Person report: mental illness, depression, substance abuse, credit problems, abusive relationships, or marital discord.

The site goes on to state the following: “The difficulty with a missing persons report is that the person missing has a right to be ‘missing.’ In other words, this person may have a legitimate or personal reason that he or she wants to be left alone and the police do not have the right to violate that right. This can be frustrating for family members or loved ones who may be (perhaps justifiably) convinced that foul play is involved. Once foul play is reasonably established—or the police have a reason to suspect the person’s life is endangered (for example, if they require timely medication and are without it)—an investigation can be launched.”

Law enforcement agencies urge family members or friends to report a missing person as early as possible. However, in the case of adults, it is virtually impossible for police to rapidly determine if they are missing or if they have simply left their old life and started a new one. And in the case of children or young women, investigators simply can’t respond to every missing persons case assuming it’s a sexually motivated non-family abduction. Most of the time people go missing, they either return safely or the case was a misunderstanding of some kind.

“If you just spent two extra hours and went to the hairdresser, would you want the chief of police pulling up?” said Todd Matthews, communications director for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). “You don’t want to be controlled or watched.”

In those first crucial forty-eight hours, there is a slippery slope investigators must navigate in respecting the privacy rights of the missing while doing right by the family.

While an individual has the right to disappear, their families have the right to file a Missing Person report. They can do this at any time; there is not a requisite number of days one must wait before contacting the police. In California, a missing person is simply “someone whose whereabouts is unknown to the reporting party.” In fact, in the case of children or other dependents, each hour counts and family members should report as soon as possible.

However, prematurely reporting someone missing can lead to wasted police resources. In 2017, the mother of twenty-two-year-old Rebekah Martinez reported her daughter missing, igniting a statewide manhunt only to find out that Rebekah had absconded to Los Angeles and was an aspiring reality TV star on The Bachelor.

Other cases don’t have such warm endings. In early 2018, the parents of nineteen-year-old University of Pennsylvania student Blaze Bernstein reported their son missing. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department used Blaze’s Snapchat posts to pinpoint his last sighting to around midnight on January 2, when a friend dropped him off at a park. He hadn’t been seen since.

In the ensuing search of Borrego Park in Foothill Ranch, police deployed drone technology. But Blaze was only found when rain runoff exposed his body, which had been buried in a shallow grave. The friend, Samuel Woodward, who dropped Blaze off was charged not only with stabbing Blaze twenty times but with a hate crime, as it was later determined Woodward was associated with a white supremacist group and may have targeted Blaze because he was Jewish and gay.

Drones are increasingly utilized in missing persons cases because they allow detectives to explore large swathes of land and then judiciously narrow in on the areas that should be searched on foot by people and dogs. In another case, the search for three-year-old Sherrin Matthews, police hired the North Texas Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Response Team to scour Richardson County, Texas. Like the Bernstein case, the search for Matthews ended with a tragic discovery. Her father was later charged with capital murder, her mother with child endangerment and abandonment.

Drones are part of a growing suite of new technological tools used in the search for missing persons. This arsenal includes predictive analytics, closed-circuit television, GPS darts, blockchain, and even experimental facial recognition. In 2008, Seattle police found a missing suicidal man by tracking his cellular phone data, in a case that would portend a controversial debate over privacy rights that persists today.

Cell phones and smartphones have assisted greatly in missing-persons cases. If police actually physically have the phone, they may be able to piece together what happened based on the most recent text messages or calls. But even if they do not have the missing person’s phone, investigators can usually learn a great deal about a person’s location based on “tower dumps” from network providers, which let them track a phone’s serial number. They can use network towers pinged by the phone to “triangulate” a specific location.

Unfortunately, increasingly stalkers also use this technology for nefarious purposes.

However, if there is no evidence of a crime, investigators can find themselves legally restricted from accessing cell-phone information. Which is to say, there is another slippery slope for investigators, who must wield technology to help identify missing persons without trampling on the civil liberties of someone who simply wanted to disappear for a few days.

When he opened the conference up for questions, Teague was immediately asked by a reporter if they had checked Elisa Lam’s cell phone for information.

“I don’t want to talk about the cell phone,” Teague replied, adding, “We have . . . some of her property.”

The next reporter asked what, in retrospect, was an astonishingly prescient question.

“Is there any surveillance footage of Elisa from inside the hotel?”

THE SURVEILLANCE VIDEO

One week later, on Valentine’s Day, a friend emailed me a link. The email had no subject or text, just a hyperlinked YouTube url. Thoughtlessly opening it (could have been a virus), I found myself watching a grainy video recorded by a hotel’s elevator surveillance camera. I had no idea what the video was going to show, but I had a sneaking suspicion it would be disturbing.

One of my hobbies is curating and creating content for the website The Ghost Diaries, which I launched earlier that year to satiate my fascination with morbid mysteries. I was posting about everything from the paintings of serial killers to parallel universes, watching thousands of bizarre videos—some of them fascinating, some of them moronic, others outright emotionally scarring.

The Internet has democratized information and, in doing so, freed the pixels of a trillion nightmares to flow into our heads.

I didn’t know it at the time, but in opening the link in the email I had opted into an obsessive quest that would change the way I think about the world and myself. I spent the next five years of my life trying to solve a puzzle that is missing most of its pieces.

The footage was allegedly surveillance from inside the Cecil Hotel. It must have originally come from the hotel manager’s office, then migrated to the files of the investigating LAPD detectives and had somehow ended up posted on the YouTube account of journalist Dennis Romero of LA Weekly. Romero has since steadfastly refused to explain how he came into possession of this clip.

At this time the view count was several hundred thousand, but it has since ballooned to over 23 million for that upload alone.

The blurry, pixelated video showed a young woman with shoulder-length black hair in a red hoodie and black cargo shorts entering an elevator and leaning over to inspect the button panel. She proceeded to push several of the buttons and then stand waiting. The doors remained open. As she waited, so too did I, wondering why my friend had emailed the video to me. I half expected it to be a “screamer”—a once popular online ploy to trick someone into engaging with a video just long enough that they jump out of their skin in horror when an Exorcist-style face suddenly screams at an eardrum-shattering volume.

“What the hell is this?” I asked out loud.

The video description read: “Elisa Lam, the Vancouver woman who disappeared in Los Angeles on January 31, is seen acting strangely in new video released by police on Thursday.”

“What?” my colleague said, beside me.

“Oh, uh, nothing,” I said, discreetly covering the browser window with a work tab. “Where you getting lunch?”

Lunch—and food, in general—was always a popular subject in our company’s ranks. Creature comforts distracted from the monotonous toil of search engine optimization (SEO) and Internet publishing.

I turned back to the video.

Presently, the young woman became interested in something outside the elevator, as though she’d heard a noise or voice in the hallway. Her body language became nervous, hesitant, like someone who suspects there is something waiting for her but is afraid to look. Then she lurched out through the doors in the pose of a runner stretching her legs, peering down the hallway to the right of the elevator. Except for the small patch of carpet and wall directly in front of the doors, the camera could not observe this hallway, but whatever Elisa saw (or heard) caused her to retreat back into the elevator and back herself into the corner.

Several moments passed. Hands tucked in the pockets of her hoodie, Elisa ventured from her corner and stood at the threshold, peeking out the still-open doors as though checking to see if whoever had been there was still there. She hopped back out into the hallway and took a few playful steps to the left, back, and then to the front, where she waited, barely visible on the left side of the screen.

She returned to the inside of the elevator and leaned over the button panel again, proceeding to press nearly all the buttons again in rapid succession. The elevator doors remained open.

Elisa wandered back out into the hotel hallway. She lingered there for a moment and then began gesticulating, as if conversing with an unseen figure. She waved her hands around in strange, dreamy movements, fingers splayed.

Is she sleep walking? Possessed? Her behavior actually reminded me of how I’ve seen others (and presumably myself) behave on psychedelic drugs.

Finally, Elisa shoved off out of frame of the surveillance camera. After four or five long seconds, the elevator doors slowly closed. And that was the end.

Using some of our search engine tools, I checked the Alexa ranking, SEOmoz score and other metrics. The case was extremely popular. Viral, in fact. Elisa Lam’s disappearance was already being debated on several forums, including Reddit and Websleuths.

I perused the comment thread underneath the video and found a veritable hornet’s nest of frenzied civilian analysts proposing their explanations. There were quite a few people speculating that Elisa was on drugs. LSD, mushrooms, PCP, bath salts, and virtually every other illicit substance was invoked to explain her behavior. Someone even mentioned certain kinds of vitamins as being capable of making you dizzy and nauseated, and hence susceptible to confusion or paranoia.

Others developed detailed narratives as to what was happening in the hallway. Elisa had been drugged by someone who was stalking her through the hotel. Some sadistic psychopath was toying with her and triggering a different button panel down the hallway so that Elisa’s elevator couldn’t depart to another floor. This person followed her and probably killed her, according to one YouTube account.

“She is hiding from someone,” a commenter wrote, describing the inverse of the previous scenario, “and is trying to prevent them from using the elevator. If you look up a map of the layout of the hotel, there is a staircase to the left and I’m wondering if she tried going that way and they caught her.”

I wondered if that person had actually studied a schematic of the hotel.

Another user wrote: “She was obviously trying to get the doors to close . . . The murderer was probably trying to get her to go to the stairwell, so he could grab her.”

One commenter wrote that she was having a psychotic episode and that her murderer knew this. “I think her killer came across her during this episode, in the halls just outside the elevator. Possibly an employee and probably offered to help her but then felt bc of her mental state, he could take advantage of her and ended up killing her . . .”

The views and comments kept pouring in. I watched the video again, hoping to catch a detail, a nuance, an eerie face in the corner, a glitch in the matrix, a barely perceptible timeslip from one dimension to another—to give me something I can work with. Why were people instantly obsessed with this video?

The footage was blurry, almost smoky looking, and the timecode in the lower-left corner of the screen was inexplicably scrambled into what looked like alien Sanskrit. But other than that, and Elisa’s admittedly peculiar behavior, the video was pretty uneventful. A woman enters an elevator, a woman exits an elevator. Yet somehow the video had accumulated almost a million views in less than a week.

I looked it up. Exactly one week earlier the LAPD had held its press conference. Elisa was still missing without a trace.

I recalled a piece of advice sometimes given to people, particularly young women, who are trying to evade someone in a building. They are told to press multiple buttons of an elevator so that the pursuer doesn’t know what floor they will end up on. Is that what was happening here? I got chills imagining a stalker leaping into the stairwell and trying to intercept Elisa on the ground floor.

Other commenters delved into more fringe explanations. She was playing the Elevator Game, one user suggested; she had pressed a specific sequence of buttons in order to travel to different dimensions inside the elevator.

Another YouTuber discussed the creepy history of the Cecil Hotel. Dozens of people have committed suicide there, she claimed. Hotel guests have been murdered in cold blood. Sex offenders and serial killers rented rooms there. And the place is obviously haunted, she concluded.

I didn’t know about the sex offenders, but it was most certainly true that at least two serial killers had taken up residence inside the Cecil Hotel walls. Both Richard Ramirez, aka “The Night Stalker,” and Jack Unterweger, “the Austrian Ghoul,” called the place home during their respective killing sprees in the 1980s and 1990s. And there certainly had been decades of grisly deaths. Did that mean there was some nefarious disembodied consciousness possessing the hotel tenants?

I had been a bit unclear on why the video was pushing buttons inside so many people’s heads. But it was starting to make sense to me. I was beginning to feel the terror frozen in those pixels. It’s pretty simple.

She was hiding from someone. And now she’s missing . . .

Who was after her? I wondered, lost in thought. A stalker? A serial killer? An abusive boyfriend? A deranged hotel resident or employee?

“What about you?”

“Huh?” I looked up, startled.

My coworker was staring at me. “What are you getting for lunch, McFly?”

GOING VIRAL

My toolbar widget didn’t lie. Although it was only two weeks old, merely an embryo in the life cycle of a popular true-crime enigma, the Elisa Lam case was already red-hot. In time these numbers swelled to astronomical proportions. At one point, Google Analytics clocked 70,000 organic monthly searches for “Elisa Lam,” a stunning metric dwarfed only by the feverish social media activity surrounding articles, videos, and podcasts about the case, which Internet users shared by the millions on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and other networks.

I left work that day in a haze of unorganized thoughts.

I recalled a recent story in which police officers had deputized a psychic to help them find a missing woman. A couple years later, the CIA declassified hundreds of thousands of files about government experiments on ESP, which, among other things, showed that police agencies regularly use psychics to help with cold cases.

“All of the police officers said they had used a psychic in a case as described in the newspaper articles,” one report noted. “Eight of the officers said that the psychic had provided them with otherwise unknown information which was helpful to the case. In three of these cases, missing bodies were discovered in areas described by the psychic.”

I wondered if the LAPD detectives had hired a psychic to find Elisa. Did they have a medium squared away in some windowless precinct room conducting remote viewing sessions, wading through the quantum ether in search of Elisa’s red hoodie?

Even though I didn’t know Elisa, I found myself anxious about her case.

The Christopher Dorner case—the intensive manhunt for a disgruntled former officer turned rogue assassin—was surely using up most of the oxygen of the LAPD. It was watershed enough for a former officer to blow the whistle on the entire department and accuse them of systemic corruption. That this officer had actually taken up weapons and manufactured a one-man war against the third-largest municipal police department in the United States was sufficient cause to worry about the tenacity of the Elisa Lam investigation.

THE ASSASSIN

The Elisa Lam case made local news, but it was a second Los Angeles–based missing-person case that at this time dominated the national headlines. On February 3, three days before detectives launched an official investigation into Elisa’s disappearance, former police officer Christopher Dorner released a manifesto declaring “unconventional and asymmetric war” on the LAPD. In the coming days, he would initiate targeted killings of police officers and their families before leading his former colleagues on a week-long manhunt that ended as violently as it began.

A widely circulated photo of Dorner showed him in his Navy uniform with a beaming smile across his face. A former police officer, Dorner had also been a naval reservist who was deployed to the Persian Gulf for six months to provide security on an offshore oil platform in Bahrain. In over a decade of service to the United States Naval Reserve, Dorner received multiple honors, including the Iraq Campaign Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, a Rifle Marksman Ribbon, and a Pistol Expert Medal.

A laudatory 2002 story profiling Dorner recounted how while on duty at the Vance Air Force Base he found a bag containing $8,000 that belonged to the Enid Korean Church of Grace. Chris reported the money to local police and made sure it was returned. He called it a matter of “integrity.”

Dorner’s troubles started in 2008 when he accused a fellow officer, Teresa Evans, of kicking a handcuffed detainee in the face. An internal review board concluded that Dorner fabricated the claim; he was dismissed shortly thereafter. Dorner filed a lawsuit challenging his firing, but the California Court of Appeal dismissed it.

This challenge to his integrity seems to have triggered something inside him, flipped a switch in his mind that left him consumed with vengeance and wrath.

Two years later, Anderson Cooper’s office at CNN received a package from Dorner addressed to La Palma Police Chief Eric Nunez. The package contained a Post-it note to the former police chief that had dismissed Dorner, a video supposedly corroborating Dorner’s claim against Evans, of excessive force and a gold “challenge coin” riddled with bullet holes.

Then the killings started. Monica Quan, the daughter of the LAPD’s first Asian-American captain (who Dorner believed was involved in his firing), and her fiancé Keith Lawrence were murdered in Irvine. Only four days earlier Monica had joyously surprised her basketball team at Cal State Fullerton, holding up her hand to brandish the engagement ring. Keith, who had proposed to Monica next to a heart-shaped pattern of rose petals he’d carefully designed, was himself a prospective law-enforcement officer with a bright future. They were shot to death while sitting together in their car. Monica was shot three times in the back of the head; Keith took five bullets to the head and face, and two in the neck.

In an 11,000 word Facebook manifesto released soon after, Dorner outlined at least forty other officers and targets he planned to assassinate in retaliation for conniving against him. The manifesto excoriated the Los Angeles law-enforcement agencies, accusing them of rampant corruption, racism, and brutality. Dorner, an African-American, said the department had actually grown worse since the Rodney King beatings and that excessive force was an everyday occurrence. Dorner wasn’t just crossing the “thin blue line” that supposedly unites all police officers together in a brotherly fraternity—he was destroying the very concept of allegiance to Los Angeles law enforcement.

“The blue line will forever be severed and a cultural change will be implanted,” Dorner wrote. “You have awoken a sleeping giant . . . I am here to change and make policy. The culture of LAPD versus the community and honest/good officers needs to and will change.

“From 2/05 to 1/09,” Dorner continued, “I saw some of the most vile things humans can inflict on others as a police officer in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in the streets of LA. It was in the confounds [sic] of LAPD police stations and shops [cruisers].”

Dorner’s claims included officers falsely incriminating people they knew to be innocent. He claimed officers let shooting victims bleed out just to accrue overtime hours from the resulting court subpoenas. They shared and joked about cell phone images of the grisly deaths encountered while on the job. They regularly brutalized civilians and lied about it.

The rambling document oscillated between eloquent pleas for social justice and descriptions of his favorite TV shows and actors. He professed his admiration for President Obama and Senator John McCain and his continued respect for the nation’s military veterans and the federal rule of law. Dorner advocated for gun-control measures while threatening wholesale death with a military-grade arsenal of assault weapons. Using the language of terrorist insurgents, he promised to engage in “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” and warned his former colleagues, his brothers in blue, that they would “live the life of the prey.” He knew all of their contingency plans and protocols, he said, and would systematically dismantle and thwart all attempts at containment.

By the end of the ensuing manhunt and standoff, an effort that conscripted thousands of LAPD officers, five people were dead and six people sustained non-fatal injuries.

The week Elisa Lam disappeared, the Dorner manhunt went into full swing. This same police department—charged with the unprecedented task of neutralizing a former officer turned rogue assassin and executioner—was now carving out time to investigate another missing-person case.

As one case fizzled out in dramatic violence and the other became mired in mystery, I would find other disturbing parallels.

For now, I could only consider that Elisa had vanished only blocks from Skid Row, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Were the detectives interrogating hotel employees and residents? Were they canvassing neighbors? Maybe Elisa had simply made a new friend, with whom she was staying; she had lost her phone and didn’t have Internet access. It was unlike Elisa, according to her family. But missing persons have been found alive under much stranger circumstances.

One thing was for certain: Elisa would not be part of the 65 percent of missing persons who return or are found alive within the first forty-eight hours. After seventy-two hours, your survival rate plummets. Elisa had been missing for a full seven days.

But the surprises and anomalies in this investigation were just getting started. Five days later, an unlikely discovery cemented the case as one of the most bizarre death investigations of all time.