EVERYDAY STRANGE - Elisa Lam, Part II

BEFORE YOU START, BE SURE TO READ PART I

CONCLUSIONS
There are few, if any solid conclusions in this case, mostly pie-in-the-sky speculation. But let's put on our thinking caps and try for a slice of that pie anyway.

This case haunts me. Elisa Lam is like the little sister of a close friend. She's from my town and she's from a culture that I recognize and am closely familiar with. My parents used to eat at her parent's restaurant. And as I mentioned, she's buried in the same cemetery as my young uncle, the same uncle who, with his brother, introduced me to Metallica and AC/DC and Slayer at a time when I was too young to realize that music got any worse than that. I never knew her and would never have in life, but this death hits close to home. I want to know what happened. I want to solve it. And if anybody is responsible I want them found, exposed and punished.

But that's the thing, we don't know if anybody else was involved.

The elevator video haunts many who watch it. There are so many "freaky" behaviors in it that it becomes unforgettable. I believe that she is playing some kind of cat-and-mouse game with an unidentified person, most likely a man that she is attracted to. I also believe that she is wearing his shorts in the video. I originally thought she was wearing a skirt, but she is in fact wearing a man's black shorts, they are large enough on her to fall past her knees at the bottom. She was also not wearing a bra, or anyway, a bra was not found in the water tank along with her body and her other clothes. She was wearing a shirt, a zip-up hoodie, black lace underwear and a man's shorts. This sounds like post-coital attire to me, but that is pure speculation. It does seem odd to me though, that someone as interested in fashion as Elisa would go around in a man's shorts and seemingly hastily thrown on wardrobe without there being some kind of a reason for it. Remember in part one when the autopsy stated there was subcutaneous pooling of blood in her anus, but no trauma. It's possible that this was due to consensual sex. Not saying it was, just saying it's possible.

Watch the video again, her face shows no signs of distress, nothing to indicate she feared imminent harm. Watch the part of the video when she steps outside the elevator. For starters, if she was hiding and truly feared being found, she wouldn't have stepped out of the elevator in the first place. She's acting like someone who is hiding that wants to be found or at the very least, doesn't fear being found. She peeks her head out the door and looks both ways in a noticeable fashion. She hides again, then takes cute, shuffling little steps toward the exit and watches the hallway, then hops out hoping to surprise someone. Then she playfully crab-walks in and back out of the elevator again.

We know that there are two elevators, side-by-side at the old Cecil Hotel (now re-branded as the Stay-on-Main), on the opposite wall between the two elevators is a mirror. When she steps outside the elevator it appears she is facing the mirror and fixing her hair.

The next moment on the video is the one that is truly bizarre. She goes back into the elevator and pushes all the buttons again, I suppose hoping to jam it up. Some speculate that she does this to prevent someone chasing her from using the elevator to catch up to her by sending it on a random journey. But again, she shows no signs of serious distress at being found.

The next part of the video is the one that disturbs most who see it. She makes hand gestures with her fingers spread out. Some people compare the gestures to the way they imagine a grey alien might move, fluidly but in an unrecognizable pattern. Watching the video at 135% speed, removes some of the freakiness of the hand gestures. After watching the video countless times it seems to me that she is calling out to somebody that she can't see. If you look at the selfie picture she took which I posted at the top of Part I, it seems that it was not entirely uncommon for her to make these kind of fingers spread apart hand gestures. It's impossible to know what she was saying when calling out, but it seems like she was getting bored of the hide and seek game and hoping to end it, warning that however was playing with her that the game was about to end.

Immediately after she makes the seemingly bizarre hand gestures, she counts to three. This is the most obvious part of the video but it took quite a few plays before I caught it. She is calling out and counting to three on the fingers of her left hand. She even bends her knees when she touches her fingers, the way one would when playfully doing so.

But after she counts to three and no one appears, she looks both ways down the hall, then plays with her again before walking off, never to be seen alive again.

Is it possible that the elevator footage showed part of a game of hide-and-seek? What if, since Elisa was never found by whoever she was playing with in the elevator, she took the game one step further and attempted to hide in the water tank? Is that a smart, rational decision to make? No, but there is some evidence that she wasn't taking as much of her medication as she might have, potentially throwing her cognitive skills off-balance, as touched on in Part I.

The question then becomes, if she was playing hide-and-seek in the video with an unseen party, why did that person not come forward before or after her body was found? Is it possible that she wasn't actually playing hide-and-seek with anybody, that her play friend was a hallucination? That's a stretch but it's possible.

I wonder about why 54 seconds were edited out of the elevator footage. I've got a couple ideas of why that might be. Either it shows nothing interesting, just an empty hallway and so was chopped out as unimportant, or it shows somebody else, somebody unconnected to the disappearance who just happened to be walking by. If the latter is the case, then that could help explain why Elisa walked away form the elevator at the end of the video as seemingly disappointed or dare I say somewhat embarrassed as she appeared to be. She was calling out, counting to three, her friend didn't re-appear, but somebody else did. In the final analysis though, these ideas are all just speculation. Still, the case haunts me.

I saw a recent news report that police were looking into two hotel employees as possible suspects in Lam's murder, but the source is dubious and I haven't seen a follow-up.

Carmen Yarira Esparza Noriega

One of the strangest elements of all in this case, is the recent discovery of the body of Mexican actress Carmen Yarira Esparza Noriega in a water tank. There are a couple of coincidences between Carmen and Elisa's cases that may lead you to think they are connected. Both women disappeared in February, Elisa in 2013, Carmen in 2014, both were found in water tanks after locals complained of funny or foul tasting water and California and Mexico are relatively close in proximity. It's not without precedent for a killer to move from state to state or even country to country to avoid detection or it may be possible that Carmen's murderer was inspired by the seamier details of Elisa's case. I'll provide a bunch of links to Carmen's story at the end of the "sources" section.

I've barely scratched the surface here. I haven't talked about the Cecil Hotel's checkered history, which includes multiple suicides and stays by serial killers including Richard Ramirez. There are many low income long-term residents of the hotel at least one of which is a well-known sex offender who was a resident at the hotel at the time of Elisa's disappearance. He was on many videos about the case including one on CNN, and the news either failed to mention or didn't realize just who they were talking to. Apparently he was one of the most vocal residents to complain about the water. At the time, the hotel was facing possible re-zoning and he had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. There is speculation that he and another long-term resident acting as his accomplice staged the murder, but I don't buy it.

I didn't talk about the other bizarre coincidences surrounding the circumstances of this case, like how it resembles the story of Japanese horror film Dark Water, right down to the actress playing the mother in the film wearing a similar looking wardrobe to Elisa in the elevator video. I didn't talk about the Tuberculosis detection kit, called LAM-ELISA that was being used during the time of her disappearance in the area to help stifle a possible outbreak among the homeless. I didn't talk about the last known witness to see her alive being a store clerk at a bookstore called ... The Last Bookstore. And there are more little things, little echoes that jab away at you until you are unsettled enough to believe that Elisa Lam was killed by fate itself.

Elisa was a real person, a beautiful girl with self-image problems who battled depression and felt isolated in her own active mind. Many if not all young people feel depressed or self-conscious, I wish I could have been there to tell her that it's perfectly normal to feel that way, at any age. But I can't.

Sources:
It's impossible to list all the sources, but here were some of the major ones.
Elisa Lam's tumblr blog
Elisa Lam's blogspot
The autopsy report
Yelp listing for Cecil Hotel
Current Yelp listing for renamed Stay on Main hotel
Crisis Forums (a terrific active chat about the Lam case)
Websleuths translation of Chinese forum about Lam

The case of Carmen Yarira Esparza Noriega:

The Mirror UK
New York Daily News
Fox News Latino

The Daily Mail
Milenio