Elisa Lam

The case of Elisa Lam

 

Who is Elisa Lam?

 

Born April 30 1991, Elisa Lam, also known by her Cantonese name Lam Ho Yi was a Canadian student living in Vancouver at the time of her disappearance. She was a student at the University of British Columbia at the time although she was not registered there. She disappeared on January the 31st 2013. 

   Her parents first noticed that something was wrong when she did not get in touch with them as promised the day she was scheduled to leave the Cecil hotel where she was staying. Questions arise as to why she was staying there in the first place given the reputation of the hotel and the fact that there were cheaper ones she could have stayed in elsewhere.

 

Elisa was on a trip that she referred to as her 'west coast tour'. She was planning to stop in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. She arrived in Los Angeles on January 26th and within two days she checked into the Cecil hotel. Initially she was assigned a shared room on the fifth floor of the hotel but was later moved to a room of her own after her roommates complained about her, 'certain odd behaviour'. This is important and we'll go back to it later.

 

When Elisa first went missing her parents immediately rang the police and flew out to help search for her. The police searched through the hotel with dogs to the extent that they were allowed to legally even checking the roof but found no trace of her at first. It can't have been the first time that they had had to check out the hotel this way and they probably weren't  surprised by the fact that they had been called out to it again as another potential crime scene. (More on this below).

 

It wasn't until nearly three weeks after her disappearance that Elisa's body was found by an employee. The guests at the hotel had started complaining about the water, saying it had a bad taste and smell. Some even said it was coming out of the faucet black, so eventually when the employee went to investigate he checked inside the water tanks on the roof, of which there were four in total each containing 1000 gallons of water pumped from the city's water supply, and he found Elisa's body floating  naked, face up within. Police responded and had the tank drained immediately so that fire fighters could remove the body by noon that day. But what had happened to her?

 

Video Footage

Police found surveillance footage of Elisa the day she disappeared acting strangely in a lift. (See below). Many have tried to explain this and the explanations given have varied from rational to in some cases absurd. I'll go into more detail on this later as I have a theory of my own and I believe I can explain it.

 

 

 Here is a link to the footage: Elisa Lamb lift footage.

  

 

Theories: There are two possibilities initially that the police will have looked into in a case like this both of which seem credible at first glance and either way would have to be ruled out before any other theories could come into the limelight. These are murder and suicide, with murder being the most likely. It does appear as if she was murdered for some reason and then her body was dumped here to hide the evidence at least long enough for the killer or killers to make their escape. 

 

The Cecil hotel where she was staying had a very bad history. Other guests had committed suicide whilst staying there and two other guests that stayed there in the past were murdered. These murders remain unresolved to this day. Further more two serial killers had stayed in this hotel including Richard Ramirez, known as 'The night stalker', and Jack Unterweger, though not around the same time that she was there. 

 

Suicide seems less likely in the circumstances although it is worth noting that she did suffer from bi polar disorder and was on medication for this. The results of the autopsy would be important (as always) to give a clearer picture of what happened to her.    
   The pathologists found her death to be the result of accidental drowning with no signs of foul play and no obvious indications of suicide. There were no narcotics in her system apart from her own prescription medications. These were antidepressants. 

Murder Theory: Despite this, many people are adamant that she had to have been murdered by an employee or guest at the hotel. They try to back up this theory with the video footage, suspecting that she is playing hide and seek with someone outside, hiding from a potential threat or someone who had already threatened and started following her. Further indications of a staff member or long term resident being involved are backed up by the question of how she got onto the roof in the first place when the doors and stairs leading to the roof were all alarmed and the only way to bypass these security measures would be through the fire escape which someone familiar to the building would know.   

Others ask how she could have gotten into the tank in the first place when hotel staff and the fire fighters that removed her body used ladders to get on top of them. However I believe this is just basic health and safety. If you look at the position of the tanks as well as the rail to the side of them it doesn't look too difficult for someone to climb on top of them without needing a ladder. It would also have been difficult for her to climb inside the tank herself. But not impossible.

Illuminate Assassination: Typically there are those who say that the illuminate are involved. You can't have an unusual case like this which may or may not involve murder, without someone mentioning the all seeing eye of the illuminate. So how could they be involved?
  Not long before her death on January 13th, Elisa tweeted information about an article about a company that had gained funding to work on cloaking devises for the military. Some say that she was then assassinated because she knew too much and had to be silenced. Could there be truth in this?


People do sometimes look too far into things. But there's often no smoke without fire. So further food for thought here is the fact that if you use Google maps to look at the Cecil hotel you can see that there is a company registered with the building called the invisible light agency. This company does in fact specialize in lighting effects, and linked to the company are specialists in weapon development. If there really is such a thing as stealth camouflage then anyone wanting to keep this secret could in fact use this ability to get to whoever they wanted!
   A Facebook account appeared not long after her death using her name which was later deleted without a trace. There was only one friend listed and it was that of an American male who worked for the North Korean army. 

Flaws with this theory come from questions like why would the government kill someone, go to the lengths of hiding the body and yet hide it in a water tank where it was bound to get found later? Surely they would actually take her body away, dispose of it properly and leave her permanently on the missing persons list. Unless she was meant to be found, as a warning to those that would look into it deep enough. But here we are delving into what I would call very far fetched territory. Honestly I think this is more like the premise for a film then something that would happen on real life. After all people make up fake Facebook accounts all the time; I know people who this has happened to; and there is always a chance that someone she knew would have been in the army if she was studying it.
   Another thing I would point out is that the supposed website that this company was based on now seems to have vanished and even looked fake. Some say that this vanished when it came to the publics attention following this discovery which is very suspicious. Very suspicious indeed if you ask me, I think someone made this up and put it there deliberately then realized it could have gone too far. 

Possession: There are those who say that Elisa was possessed by some kind of spirit or demon. This is supposedly backed up by the idea that when she is in the lift she pushes certain buttons in a certain order that correspond with pages and versus from the bible to try and counter act the curse. I struggle with this on so many levels so I'll get straight to the point. I have looked at this footage many times and you cannot see which buttons she is pressing. She is in the way of most of the buttons she is allegedly pressing and the numbers can't be read.

 Suicide: Again people are undecided about whether she did this to herself. This is because she was suffering from depression and was on medication for this. The medication she was taking has been known to cause hallucinations and even psychosis. If she had a sudden mental breakdown or relapse from not taking her meds, maybe even taking a few too many which people suffering from such conditions are known to do then this might go a long way towards plausibly explaining her behaviour. However, she was seen not long before she disappeared that day by a staff member working at the hotel who said she seemed to be in a happy and talkative mood. True she could have been putting on a brave face but lets look into this deeper if we can.


No suicide note was found and the only items left with her body were her clothes which she had taken off and left floating beside her, her room key and the watch she was wearing. So if suicide and murder were to be ruled out then what else could have happened to her?   


A far fetched theory:  This one came to me after looking into the Dyatlov Pass incident. In the interest of full disclosure I decided to share it with you. 

When you look at the footage of Elisa in the lift, I think I know what she is doing or trying to do. Firstly, her behaviour is quite odd, and other people who knew or met her around this time said she was acting strangely. This is not hard to explain because of the medication she was taking. I know for a fact that it can make people act strangely and even at times seem confused. They will try to rationalize a situation in an irrational way. Say if a TV set isn't working they'll try to fix it by trying to mend their laptop, unaware that the two things are not related or linked.

In my opinion she is behaving like she is in front of an automatic shop door. Like the lift doors are controlled the same way by some kind of sensor. The lift is clearly broken and she acts like there is a sensor there that should pick up on her movements, waving her arms at the door, then hiding from them to see if there is a sensor that won't let them close because she is in the way, she even walks towards and away from them again.
   She presses all the buttons to try and make the lift move but still nothing. Eventually she steps outside to see if it will do any good, waves her hands at it one more time then gives up and leaves. She is just trying to get the doors to close in a faulty lift and she is a bit confused already whilst this is happening. It is worth noting I think that you would not wave your hands out of a door of you were hiding from someone.

In her dazed and confused state she wanders around trying to find the stairs but doesn't really know where she is going as she normally gets in the lift and she isn't used to the hotel layout. She maybe ended up by asking someone for directions, either a useless employee or someone staying there who also didn't know their way around very well who sends her on a path from the wrong stairwell leading to the roof. When she gets there she isn't sure where she is, how she got there or how she will get back.


I checked the weather patterns for Los Angeles, California and it is more likely to be cold, wet and windy from December to February. These are the winter seasons and this is around the only time when it rains according to people who live there. 
   I also did a bit of research into hyperthermia and it turns out that people suffering from mental conditions especially if taking medications such as certain types of antidepressants are more vulnerable to it. If it rained that night then Elisa may not have reacted to the situation the way a rational person would and tried to get indoors and dry off. Especially if she was delirious and didn't know where she was anymore. It's also true that people with certain medical conditions are more likely to get ill from hypothermia as their bodies can't regulate heat properly. 

Admittedly it was my previous research into hyperthermia through the Dyatlov Pass incident that brought me to this conclusion but from here it starts to explain a lot about what she did next. People suffering from hyperthermia often go through an act called paradoxical undressing where they take off their clothes because they believe themselves to be incredibly hot. This is caused by confusion as well as the coldness causing their blood vessels to tighten up.
If she was already in a confused state she would be more susceptible to these actions.
  
But there is more to it. Why was she in the tank? This can be explained by terminal burrowing. Another side effect of hyperthermia. A number of times when people have been found dead from hypothermia people initially thought they had been murdered because of the positions the bodies were found in. It turns out that for as yet undetermined reasons the last thing someone will do after succumbing to paradoxical undressing from hyperthermia, if they are still alive and able, is they will try to fit themselves into a small or just enclosed space. Like the water tanks.       
 

Apart from just being far fetched, the other problem with this theory is the fact that 2013 was actually Los Angeles driest year on record. It barely rained at all that year and there was a drought.  

 

Schizophrenia: A more realistic theory is that Elisa was suffering from schizophrenia. People suffering from schizophrenia can in some cases believe that they are receiving messages from radio waves or through the television specifically for them. This is interesting for one reason. There is a film called Dark Water starring Jennifer Connolly which is actually a remake of a Japanese movie. The remake was made in 2005 and the premise is that a mother and daughter move into a dilapidated apartment where dark water keeps leaking everywhere. The daughter then starts talking to an imaginary friend who turns out to be the ghost of a young girl who died in a water tank on the roof of the building. 
   If Elisa watched or heard of this film a short while before she died she may have mimicked what took place in the film believing that the characters were making her do it (hearing voices in her head telling her to). So as bizarre as it seems, suicide is still a possibility. Depression is an early warning sign of schizophrenia after all and given her strange behaviour in the lift which contradicts the way she was behaving earlier that day according to the hotel staff, it could be that she was days away from diagnosis of this illness. If only she had been around more people she knew at the time, that were closer to her and knew this was not like her normal behaviour then maybe they could have gotten her some help.

Conclusion

Sadly, around 40% of people suffering with schizophrenia attempt suicide and I believe that in this case Elisa was one of the few who succeeded. When you rule out the supernatural, as well as murder and bare in mind that the conditions of her death were inconsistent with suicide in ordinary circumstances, as well as the fact that there were no narcotics found in her system, I personally think that mental illness is the most likely explanation for this unfortunate tale. But you may know something I don't or think of something I've missed. As always if this is the case...  

Prove me wrong


 

    

 

Riddle Me This - ANSWER: The police officer realized he was late when he got to the TRAIN STATION rather then the police station as he was still on his way to work. Realizing he had missed his train he went home.

 

NEXT RIDDLE: A man sees death beckoning on him in a market from across the street. He goes home, packs his bags and leaves town immediately. The next day after he has found a temporary place to settle down for a while, miles away from where he was living, he hears a knock at the door. Anxiously he answers the door and sees death staring him in the face. 'Before I die', the man said, ' please tell me, why were you waiting for me in the market yesterday and why didn't you kill me then?'

 

What was the reason?