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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with Your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening. Vancouver's student Elisa Lamb was last heard from on January thirty first, twenty thirteen, after she checked into downtown LA's Cecil Hotel, a six hundred room building with a nine decade history of scandal and tragedy. The next day, Elisa vanished. A search of the hotel yielded nothing. More than a week later, complaints my guests of foul smelling tap water led to a grim discovery, Elisa's nude body floating in a rooftop water tank in an area extremely
difficult to access without setting off alarms. The only clue was a disturbing surveillance video of Elisa uploaded to YouTube in hopes of public assistance. As the eerie elevator video went viral, so did the questions of its tens of millions of viewers. Was Elisa's death caused by murder, suicide or paranormal activity, was it connected to the Cecil Hotel, and in that video, what accounted for Elisa's strange behavior.
With the help of web sluthe and investigators from around the world, journalist Jake Anderson set out to cover the facts behind the death that had become a macabre Internet meme as well as a magnet for conspiracy theorists. In pouring through Elisa's revealing online journals and social media posts, Anderson realized he shared more in common with the young woman than he imagined. His search for justice and truth became a personal journey, a dangerous descent into one of
America's quiet epidemics. Along the way, he exposed a botch investigation and previously unreported disclosures from inside sources who suggest there may have been a corporate conspiracy and a police cover up. Anderson chronicles eye opening discoveries about who Elisa Lamb really was and what or whom she was running from, and presents shocking new evidence that may reopen one of the most chilling and obsessively followed true crime cases of
the century. The book they were featuring this evening is Gone at Midnight, The mysterious death of Alisa Lamb with my special guest journalists and author and filmmaker Jake Anderson. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for Greener's interview. Jake Anderson, Well.
Thank you so much. Dan. I appreciate you having the answer, and I appreciate your interest in the case and in my book.
Thank you very much. It's a very, very vast, fascinating case, and it really deals with a lot of things that are very modern. A lot of the cases now we're dealing with forty fifty year old technology, forensic techniques, and this sheds the light on a whole new world in true crime investigation. Let's talk about Elisa Lamb January thirty first. This occurs January thirty first, twenty thirteen. But tell us about a little bit about Alisa before we talk about
this incredible crime that was perpetrated upon her. Tell us about her relationship with her parents. Where was she living we mentioned in the introduction of Vancouver. Tell us a little bit about Alisa and what she's doing in Los Angeles.
Right, So, a Lisa was a Canadian Chinese Canadian young woman. She's twenty one years old and she had been going to school at the University of British Columbia and she lived in Vancouver. And the aspect of Alisa she was, you know, a blogger and a very just interesting, smart young woman, good writer. And the aspect of the case that really kind of first drew me in was Alisa struggled pretty ethically with depression and bipolar disorder, and those are illnesses that have run in my family.
You know.
It, you know, took the life of my aunt and threatened a life of several close friends of mine, and I had struggled with variations as well, So I was drawn to that psychological aspect of the case and her struggle with it, which she documented very bravely on her blogs. And I was also interested in the sociology of the case.
Elisa was, like I said, she's just an interesting young woman, and I don't think she ever imagined herself getting caught up in just such a strange zeitgeist type true crime case that would be obsessively followed by millions of people. And so it's she has a few posts that are kind of early imprescient about you know, her life. But I think that what really kind of drew me to writing about her was just her open and honest description of her own battles with mental illness, which is, you know,
an important an important thing in life in general. Right now, I would say, and she did pretty pretty bravely, and it's just it's unfortunate that she didn't get a chance to kind of get a second act in her life. And I think her battle with mental illness is pretty significant in this But as I will state, you know, as I state in the book, and we'll stay here, you know, I don't believe mental illness and style play
or mutually exclusive in this in this case. And but that's you know, to kind of similarly answer kind of the first question, that that's that's who at least said Lamb was in a nutshell, a very complicated young woman who is battling something, and that that battle is what drew me to the case in the first place. And then you know, I went down new directions at that point.
You talk about all the writing and how Canada she was, and she wanted to share her experiences, her depressive state and talk about the things that were important to her in that state, and that's how you write that. You've got to know her and a very intimate relationship in terms of the way she wrote and how much she did share what was disturbing her and concerning her in her life. Let's talk about the tour, the California tour. She's from Vancouver, she's a student, she's twenty one. What
she doing in Los Angeles? And tell us a little bit about this Cecil Hotel as you write, a six hundred room building with a nine decade history of scandal and tragedy. Tell us about this vacation, why she's at the Cecil Hotel, and a little bit about the hotel itself.
So yeah, Lisa was I think trying to turn a corner in her life where I think she wanted to. She'd spent a lot of her life online. She kind of used tungblr and other social media networks as a way to kind of kind of not only communicate with other people about her problems. That she liked that community online, and I think probably was easier for her as a person with anxiety and depression to communicate with people online.
I think her so called West Coast Tour, what she called it, I think that was an attempt by her to kind of break out of her comfort zone and try and turn a corner and just try and start like a new chapter. And so she planned this kind of trip where she was going to start in San Diego and move up through Los Angeles to Santa Cruz and it's you know, obviously it ended in Los Angeles. The question of why she settled on the Suscle Hotel is is definitely it's an unanswered one. People have theories
is to you know, everything from just economical pragmatism. It is probably one of the cheaper hotels in downtown Los Angeles. So maybe she learned about the history of the Suscle Hotel or maybe was withdrawn to that to even some people who go down the paranormal route out and something was calling to her. Probably not the angle I would choose to go down when trying to explain this, but regardless, yes, once she was there, I feel like she got caught
up in a nexus there. And you know, to be clear, like I'm not saying one hundred percent that you know, criminal homicide was committed against her, but I my perspective on that did change as I went into this, and I'll get more into that in a second. As far as the history at the Special hotel. Yeah, it's unbelievable as history, and it was already in notorious place even before the Elisa Lamb case, and I document it pretty
extensively in the book. There were aspects of it that I was having trouble operating because there's really not most of the information online is basically regurgitated from all all of this from one post. It's just there's very little independent corroboration that has gone on online as well the exact people who died and what happened to them. And so I went in and did a little bit of
background trying to corroborate for sure what happened to certain people. Unfortunately, the records on that stuff are very very limited, and it's very difficult to confirm this stuff beyond just newspaper
headlines from that time. But they started the curse, what I call the curse of this subtle kind of started in the thirties the hotel, around the time the hotel first started, and as the hotel got as the whole downtown Los Angeles area got kind of just marooned in the Great Depression, we start to see a string of just very grizzly suicides that would take place there, and it would range from people slashing their own throats to poisoning themselves, to the most frequent of people jumping out
the windows of the hotel. And in fact, this continued for so long and so consistently that locals there would start to call the hotel the suicide hotel because so many people were doing it. Dozens and dozens and dozens
of people, really grizzly stories. One woman unexpectedly gave birth while she was in the room, in her room, and without waking up her partner, she dropped the child out of the window, and just very very grizzly, horrible stuff that I'm tempted to not even talk about publicly because it's disturbing and can be traumatizing for people. But it's
just it's part of the history. And so and then of course we get into the murder of Pidgey Good Osgood pigeon lady, the pigeon lady Osgood, sorry messing up her name here, And she was strangled and murdered in her room at the Cecil Hotel, and her murderer was never found, and so, and you know, this is just a small cross sampling of just the horrible things that have gone on. And this is all before even the
eighties started. And when the eighties started, we enter a whole new phase of the subsal Hotel when two different serial killers took residence there. The first was Richard Rumirez, the Knightstalker, and then and you know, most people know about him, still very shaking stuff. The second, which I read a book about and I almost feel like it's more interesting, almost, is Jack Unterbegger from the Austrian Ghoul
they call him. And this guy is just probably the only serial killer in history that had used literature to trick people into getting letting him out of prisons that he could continue his murderous flee. It's really just a fascinating story behind Unterberger. So that's two different serial killers, and then more horrible stuff just continue up into the turn of the century, and then we get to release
his case. So it's just this incredible history. And I try not to delve too far into spooky stuff, but you know, at a certain point one has to ask whether there's just some kind of just I don't know, residual trauma that is just lingering in that place that affects people. And I went and stayed there by myself a couple times, and I definitely just didn't feel myself and had pretty profound experiences there. But the short answer, I guess to your original question was I don't know
why Alisa stayed there. She's not very clear, and once she got to La, she really stopped blogging and her social media post just kind of cut off around him. So it's very hard. There's pretty much no answer to right now as to why she decided to stay there.
Well, let's get to the crime that captivated everyone's imagination. Of course, it's the video that really did the trick in terms of this case, but also just the description of the crime itself. You write that Elisa was last seen January th first, twenty thirteen. She's been at the hotel a few days. She's scheduled to be in the hotel. I think you say three or four days. She was talking to her parents every day during her tour of California. That you write, what happens She's supposed to be out
of the hotel on February first. I believe what happens and tell us about this video and how this video happened to get onto YouTube.
Yeah, that's a good question, actually, and it's a question and not a lot of people have considered. And I really tried to find an answer as to how this video got onto the internet in the first place. But first, yeah, he so, yeah. She disappeared, by all reports of which they're little, around midnight January thirty first, And I do believe she was experiencing a mixed episode, which in bipolar
steak is basically kind of a mix between hypomania and depression. However, and that's because she she had gone off two of her mens, at least according to the corner. Of course, I'll tell you later why. I think it's hard to
trust a lot of stuff that the coroner says. But for whatever reason she uh there were reports that she was acting bizarre, and I heard it's we've heard that from beyond just the women who apparently stayed with her for a couple of nights and then asked to be moved her to be moved out of the room because she was acting bizarre.
Right.
I found a man who had spoken with her, who hadn't been interviewed yet, and he said she was acting bizarre too.
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But like I say, just because someone has mental illness, that does not mean that her death was necessarily an accident. And in fact, studies routinely show that, you know, particularly women with mental illness, are far more susceptible to sexual predators. So what happened that night, of course, is still kind of a mystery. I did turn up some information. It makes me think that this was not just an accident, which has now become kind of a sort of commonly
held of these now. But let's see what you want me to answer. What happened? What she was that night?
Yeah?
Well, no, the thing is where where we're at is that she disappears. So the parents of course from Rancouger to Los Angeles for the search, and then what does the police do, what's the response to this six hundred room hotel. What does the police do and what do they bring into the system.
Okay, thank you, thanks for getting me back on track there. Okay, so yeah, they ran some searches there. They ran two searches of both including the roofs, and one of them involved a canine unit. Canine units are pretty reliable. The canine units did not pick up are sent on the roof. The police then kind of conscripted the public a little
bit in the help for the in the search. And then about a week later, they released this very cryptic surveillance tape, probably one of the most cryptic surveillance videos that's ever been on the internet, and it, you know, went viral. And my confusion with this tape has always been why it was released and why the nature in
which was released. I don't understand that the surveillance tape doesn't really show who it is, Like it's so pixelated and blurry that it's not good for identification purposes, and since there's no one else in it, it's not good for identifying any suspects either, So I'm not sure why it was released. All it did was stigmatize her and make everyone say that she looked crazy. And furthermore, the
police didn't even release it publicly for some reason. They gave it to this journalist named Dennis Ramiro, who released it on his YouTube channel, and Ramiro has steadfastly refused to discuss how he came into possession of it. I mean, I was pretty much begging him to talk to me. I mean, he's a journalist. I thought journalists were supposed to be about transparency, right, He just, for whatever reason,
did not want to get into that. And I think that tape is very problematic for a number of reasons. I think it really kind of poisoned the people's minds and stigmatized her, and so that's one of the reasons I wanted to write the books to try and give a portrait of her that counteracts that that narrative about
a week later. I'm kind of compressing times here, But eventually they did finally find her body, and he made that worker they found her, okay, so they said they were there were people reporting uh dark water basically sorry, people who were staying at the hotel tenants there a long term residence. They were starting to find you know, dark water and their showers and their uh water they used to drink and brush their teeth with red sediment,
strange black sediment. And so finally the management dispatched the maintenance worker, Santiago Lopez, who went to the roof and finally checked the water cistern and there he found body floating face up, and that face up aspect is important, and so that's when they found her floating in the water tank, naked with her clothes in the tank with her UH. Santiago claims that the lid was open, which
I think is very significant. Obviously, if the lead was out, If the lid is open, it's much more easy to imagine that she climbed in herself. It was closed, definitely points a little bit more towards foul play. Santiago testified in a civil deposition regarding that, and what I believe
is that he may have perjured himself. And the reason I think that is because I hired someone to help me try and find this guy because he had kind of gone off the radar, and I didn't find him, but we did find his half brother who basically said that Santiago had been paid money to leave the country with his family and then it had happened pretty abruptly. Yeah, he's and he said that he didn't even know Santiago
had left of a sudden, he just found out. And so obviously this is limited information and this needs to be corroborated. But you know, part of this is because all three sources of information about the case, the family, the hotel, and the police have all been talking about it. It's it's harder to get information out of this. But I do think that we have to figure out whether
that sid was closed or open. And another point on that, real quick is that I did manage to speak to one of the first responders who is now chief of police in Wisconsin. This is definitely a worthwhile or a reliable source. He was one of the first people on the scenes. He says the lid was closed. Now, is it possible that Santiago found the body with the lid open and then closed it while he waited for the
police to come. It's possible. But if you're me and if I'm working and I discover a dead body in a water tank, I'm not touching anything I'm leaving it how everything is, and I'm immediately and going Italian of
the management the pipeline is. Who he reported to first is also an interesting thing I and we'll get into this in a minute, but I do have reason to think that the hotel itself had definitely had an incentive to delay the discovery of this body, because if this body is in the water tank and the lid is open, especially, I don't know how a canine unit is not going to pick up on that set. So there's just all
kinds of anomalies there. But regardless, it's a grizzly, horrific tragedy and there's just a lot a lot of anomalies associated there, not the least of which is the fact that our body is floating the face up. Most corners agree that in generally still water, it's far far more likely that a body, a person that has died from drowning, they're going to be face down. And that's one that's just one little detail of the autopsy that we can get into.
Let's talk about that autopsy, because police make a determination from what the coroner determines. You say they did some tests, but then they did further test, But what does the coroner find in terms of cause of death, in terms of toxology reports, in terms of what drugs may or may not You mentioned antidepressant drugs, but what drugs did they test for to be in her system?
Right? So it's pretty limited, and I ended up getting to speak to the corny Corny, the deputy corner, and he basically set flat out they only test for a few drugs, and anything past that the family has to pay for. What they did test for is the antidepressants and the mede she takes for her psychiatric illness. She was missing her bipolar medage, she was missing her mood stabilizer. She did have one of her antidepressants in there, so the conditions were right for her to be having maybe
mixed episode. But as far as the autopsy itself, they did not find any evidence of foul play in terms of like bruises or lacerations on her that would be
immediately indicative of foul play. They did find some some strange like injury to her amus that they tried to explain as like the decomposition process of forcing forcing things to happen in a way that's grizzly independent corner I talked to you said that that definitely should have been looked further into, and that, in fact, he does not even think that, you know, there's really no reason why they concluded that it was a dwelling, according to an
independent corner I talked to, And uh, you know, this is all kind of not gonna pretend that this isn't controversial, Like we don't we don't know for sure, you know, people are people have different as of opinion, basically is what I'm saying. But the independent corner I talked to you said that it does not look like she d Basically there was very little evidence, a very little water in her lungs at all, and no water in her stomach, and they didn't do other tests that they should have
done to find out if she had drowned. And obviously the question of whether she drowned is very important because if she didn't drown, she must die before she was put in the water tank. But the I mean, the autopsy is just problematic for a few different reasons. But what they did basically say is they believed by they believe bipolar disorder was a contributing factor to her death. The LAPD psychologists I spoke to said that the detectives didn't once consult him or his team about bipolar at all.
So it kind of seems like to me that using surveillance tape and the medical reality that she had that illness, I feel like they just kind of use that it's just an easy way to explain to death because they were overwhelmed that week because of Chris dorn or manhunt, and I just think in general, they just you know, didn't have the resources at the time to look more into it, and they just did not gather the kind of evidence it needed to be gathered to prove anything.
They also didn't process the rape kit. Apparently they gathered if the necessary forensic evidence for a rape kit, but they did not process it, so we therefore cannot explain this injury to her to her region. So yeah, the autopsy is just yet another reason why there's just some problems with this with this case in terms of what the officials are saying.
Now, we'll have to say for the audience that the police really don't have any well, they don't have any eyewitnesses. They have these people that you've never able to contact. There was never an official interview. But there was two women, as you mentioned, that came forward and said we shared a room whether if she was acting strangely, we requested another room from her. So that was people that had
seen her. Now, the really the most contentious thing is, and we put this in the introduction as well, is that how could somebody get up on the roof if there's an alarm? But you said, there's four ways to get up on that roof, and of course you investigate that. And this is important too because when we talked about Santiego Lopez and the strange behavior coincidences, he's the person that could open that lid. He's the person who would
have access to that roof. Tell us a little bit more about the issue itself of access to that roof and your investigation on how likely it was for the police theory that she committed suicide and got into that water cistern. Tell us about that, right.
So, yeah, the access in the roof, well there basically there's an alarm that should have gone off, so she had used the main entrance door. There's also a fire escape she could have used. Some recent evidence that came out suggests that her DNA evidence trails off at the fire escape, which would further lend credence to the idea that she took the main entrance. How she got up there is still a mystery, and the police have never
answered that. There seems to be no DNA evidence forensic from the canine units and the other investigation showing that they haven't answered basically how she got up there. Now I think that I personally think that an employee probably let her up there. I've spoken with other tenants there who say that people regularly drank beer up on the roof.
It was not difficult to get up there, contrary to popularity, and that the deputy corner I spoke to said that when he actually at one point he just kind of point blank asked the detective one of them, you know,
what do you think happened? And basically the detective said that they think, you know, either a security guard or selling there gave her access to the roof, which would explain why the alarm didn't go off, It would explain why there was no DNA evidence of her touching a door, and it would also explain you know, I mean, yeah, I would just explain how she got out there. But we don't have any hard evidence of that, and because they've been able to it seems to kind of lock
down every possible witness that you would talk to. It's very difficult to say exactly what happened, But if I were to stake a guest right now, I would say that someone led her up there, perhaps a security guard who maybe said he wanted to show her the roof or something like that. I have found a number of eyewitnesses who directly testified to predatory employees that have worked
at the Cecil Hotel for decades. In one case, this young woman who did not want to go on the record because she heared being addicted, basically said that an employee there would use the master key to break into her room and assault her. And this is not the first story I've heard like that, and more recent comments by people saying, you know, yeah, that security guard was, you know, really creeping on my girlfriend and stuff like that. So it would explain why she was able to get
up there. Maybe she then ended up hiding. You know, it's you know, it's still a big mystery what happened up there, and I hope we're able to get to
the heart of that. At some point it's going to take I mean, basically, what I hoped to do is just kind of kick the door open a little bit more and hopefully, you know, we're going to be able to get to the bottom of this, because you know, if this young woman was just preyed upon at this hotel, it's pretty doubly tragic that then they're blaming her mental illness on her own death. So I would say, at this point, my belief is that someone let her up
on that roof. I don't see any other way she would get up there.
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slash true Murder or fifteen percent off today. Now you have you mentioned in the book the the web Tricia Griffith reorganizes purchases the website and you talk about the amateur sleuths in the world that were fascinated with this case, and you talk about the numbers a million views in a month. You tell us a little bit about the response of this case, the kind of numbers that some of these sites experienced. Tell us a little bit more about this phenomena.
Sure, yeah, I mean it's it's definitely one of the aspects of it. Like I said earlier, that drew me to be interested in the case because you know, it's kind of an overused metaphor, but it kind of became like a glor Shack test, Like everyone you would look at this case would find some special meaning in it that matched up with their worldview, and so you would have people that believe there was some spiritual paranormal narrative
going on. You would have people that were gung ho on the homicide narratives, and then you would have people that say, you know, this was just an accident and a tragedy involving mental illness. And it goes even beyond that. There's some of the most bizarre conspiracy theories I've ever heard came from this case. And so I definitely think that this case kind of tapped into a little bit of a widespread social pathology that we're seeing come out
with the advent of the Internet. But yes, the web slue aspect of it is very interesting because there's really responsible web flutes a lot of the people like Ifitt Tricia Grivith works with and I was lucky enough to get to interview her for this, and she's been very kind and supporter. John Lorden from brain Scratch, I think there's a really responsible job analyzing cases and destigmatizing certain aspects.
But any I would talk with people, I mean, I don't even really want to call sometimes people web Flues because I really just some of the conspiracy theories I was hearing were just sell unhinged that I almost feel like it's kind of if he's the purpose of a kind of more decentralized criminal justice pursuit, which is what
we're trying to establish as a whole. We're trying to, you know, earn enough respect from the police that they're at least willing to kind of hand out age old cold cases and just kind of let web Flues see what they can do with it. There's web Flues that is straight up solved cases, and the more responsible ones, I would say deserve that chance, especially when you have police departments that simply don't have the money, your resources
to look at all these cases. So that aspect of it I think is very important, and I you know, spend a considerable considerable amount of time in the book discussing kind of the ramifications of this because I would, you know, just speak to so many people who you know, just believe things about the case that are just really just not worthy of putting a lot of attention into, and it ended up just kind of stigmatizing the case so much that you couldn't even really discuss any theory
on it because people would just say, out of hand, oh, you're just exploiting this young woman or something like that. And that was an aspect of the case I was very sensitive about from the beginning. He's wanting to, you know, do her justice and paint a portrait of her that is more realistic and humanizing instead of just like a horror meme.
You know.
But the legacy of this case will live on for a while, I think in terms of just the kind psychology that captured snapshot of this century where people are really just wand diving into these Internet conspiracy communities and not doing a lot of their own independent research and cooperation, and that's counterbalanced by people that are just really devoting their life to the opposite of that, which is just really fact checking things and trying to do real investigative
journalism through the Internet, and so we kind of see that battle playing out in the book, but also just in real life right now.
What are some of the other avenues that you explored. You tried to talk to hotel personnel as we talked about there was a pattern of having sex offenders in the six hundred room building. You said there was sex offenders outside the hotel within blocks, and sex offenders that were in the hotel itself. In this aspect of the unknown because of the rape kit not being pro you mentioned that one of the drugs that was not tested for that you thought might be a good idea to
be tested for. Was what tell us what that drug was and why you thought it should be have been tested for.
Well, I definitely think they should have tested for date rate drugs like Rufie's. That I mean, I think that should go without saying. When a young woman is found naked and dead in a dark tank on a roof, I can't understand why you wouldn't not only process a rate kit, but treated as a suspicious death and run and test for the kind of measitor used to incapacitate women.
I personally would have liked to see a test for drugs like ambient and you know, a drug that can make you sleepwalk, to see if maybe she was just kind of in a lucid state when she when she entered the tank. But you know, at the very least I think they should have tested for for date rate drugs,
and they don't. Really. Another thing is like because she was in the water so long, And this is why it's so critical that if someone did let her on the roof, it's doubly suspicious that no one spoke up about that, because if they had gotten to the body earlier, they'd found it in the tank earlier, it would have been easier for the test for certain drugs. Some drugs don't stay in the system very long, and when you're in the water, that stuff can just kind of disappear.
And so it's unfortunately, it was just very limited. The corner said that blood quantitation is very limited. They were just limited in what they could do, at least according to their reports. Now, as I stay in the book, one of the main corners it was at the time
being sued for falsifying an autopsy in another case. So I'm not sure, you know, I'm not sure how much of the autopsy you can trust, really, but yeah, I would have like to see a more Given that it took them about six months to release the full toxicology or autopsy, which is pretty unprecedented cases they usually released that stuff much quicker, you would think that they would have done a little bit more due diligence on testing
some of these things. And I think that, well, you know, there's I go a little bit more into depth on why I think that autopsy is so flawed in it in the book. It gets a little wonky in parts, So I'm not sure it would be great for radio right now. But I basically think that this case should
be reopened by the California Attorney General. And remember I went into this case thinking I was about sixty forty, that it had been an accident, and I was going in it to write about the psychology, the mental illness, and the sociology. I was not expecting to end up finding evidence that made me think that this really had been the cover up. Wasn't expecting to talk to a bouncer on the same street who told me he had spoken with an off duty cop that said they found
some of her belongings in a dumpster. I wasn't expecting to find a whistleblower, an LAPD insider who had retired and who had spoken first hand with private investigators who said, yeah, this case was completely screwed from the game, and that the LAPD and the Cescil Hotel corporate executives were meeting
together in very strange circumstances. I wasn't expecting to find out that the Cecil Hotel finalized AE hundred million dollar real estate deal with the biggest real estate firm in the world, CEDDRE only days after they finally discovered the body, getting them a pretty clear incentive for delaying the discovery of the body. There's just all kinds of very strange anomalies associated with this, and I'm very clear when it's circumstantial and when things need to be corroborated. And I'm
not saying that I've cracked the case. I'm just saying, from a very rational standpoint, even if you want to adhere very strongly the Aukham's razor, I personally prefer hi On's dictum, which is the theory that truth usually has a number of different sources and symptoms that are all converging into ones. There's not necessarily one cause to something to a truth that there's converging truths. And I think
here that this is not an open and shutcase. I really strongly believe there is something very, very Even if her death was an accident, I still feel like they concealed it and they I don't know who else would have been pained, the guy who found the body and maybe perjured himself to move his family out of the country besides that hotel. There's just there's major smoke here, and it really, you know, without the family being involved,
it's next to impossible that it's going to happen. But you know, maybe we can get some people talking about this case again in its full context.
It's interesting too, when you talk about this business deal that obviously does not want to have a murder involved at a hotel and the ensuing publicity, given that this hotel already has a notorious reputation. And it's interesting too a normal open investigation, where you would have things not concluded and people would be swarted from investigating by saying, look that this is an open investigation, we can't tell
you anything. This is much much better in terms of suppression and saying this is a suicide case is closed. Coroners concluded we have no other evidence. You also talk about a civil case launched by Elisa's parents, and at first you thought you hoped that this would reveal it would be forced to reveal valuable information that you weren't getting from anywhere else. Happened with the civil case, right, Yeah, this.
Is a lot of us really believe that this is probably the best chance we were going to have to see new police notes, new files from the investigation presented in a civil deposition against the Cecil Hotel for wrongful death. And I was actually like, I you know, took a train to La to attend it, and yeah, you know, we were all very disappointed when the judge kind of just just throughout the case, like it's not like we got twelve jurors and they concluded that the hotel was
not at fault. Even if that had happened, we would have got to see a trial, We've gotten to see new evidence, and new questions would have been answered. The judge just threw the case out from the beginning, and no one really knows why. I mean, whether whether the case would have succeeded or not. I can't imagine that there was wasn't enough there to at least here the case.
So I'm frankly a little a little suspicious of that, and a little suspicious of the judge for reasons I don't want to go into because it's I don't want to get into a rumor mill situation. But I do think that civil case, that civil case was heartbreaking and the unfortunately the family, you know, did not get any compensation there. And one interesting moment in the civil trial was when the lawyer said this, you know, this was not a case of haunting. This was not a case
of murder. This was just an accident, And a lot of people took that to mean, oh, well, that's the family saying that this was this was an accident. But I think it's very clear when you have a case where they're trying to prove wrongful death in the hotel, they pretty much have to say it was an accident. They can't say it was a murder because in the in the hotel is not at fault. So it was very clear that they were going to be arguing that
this was an accident from the beginning. I do not blame the family at all and not pursuing it further. They've been traumatized. I can't even imagine trauma they've gone through with not only obviously the horrific death, but then also just this thing being publicly litigated for years online. It's just the worst nightmare I can imagine. So I don't blame them at all for not wanting to be
involved in this at all anymore. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the LAPD has to just literally shut off every flow of information and just refuse to answer questions. I mean, I had detectives blocking me on Twitter for just asking the basic question. I had another detective block my email. I'm not a content I'm not a combative dude.
I'm not a disrespectful guy. I don't throw people like I just asked respectful question and just try and get a little bit of info, even on peripheral parts of the case. They will not talk about anything period, right.
Yeah, And it's interesting too. It seemed to have some hope too, because the lead detective in this was Wally Tanell. His son had been murdered. He decided to live in South LA. Figured I'm not going to move out of this area, and this kid was shot in the head, so you think he would at least be a guy that would be open to the possibility it was a murder and be more vigilant than say an officer that didn't have this happen. And yet the official position from
the police is that this was a drowning. You know what was very interesting too, is that go ahead.
Oh, I was just going to make a couple of points there. One yea Wally Tonille has an interesting backstory. He was part of the Crash Division in LAPD, which was one of the most notoriously corrupt and barbaric police units in LAPD history that got tied up in the rampart scandal. I was interested in his backstory and I really wanted to interview. But yeah, I think a point to consider is that they may have found some evidence, but you have to bring a case to a prosecutor
for foul play. You have to have a preponderance of evidence, and if you don't have it, you don't bring the case. There's many, many times when a case isn't even brought to a prosecutor to even consider charges because they just might have fifty percent evidence or even more, but they just don't have enough to charge anything. So I think it could be simply a case where they didn't have the evidence. They were very distracted by the Chris Dorner manhunt.
And this is also a final point I'll make about the laped and you can take what you want from it, but it was revealed that at that time they were systematically under reporting violent crimes for a clean year, they were fudging the numbers, make less murders, less violent crimes in the city.
Wow.
So maybe they just did not want to work on a murder case because they didn't want that to be in their numbers.
You talk about a police officer that was oh well, again, we talked about Chris Dorner. You talk about the police being preoccupied with that. He was threatening to kill forty police officers, so he could see that natural distraction and
priority for the cops that week for sure. Certainly, what was interesting is that when this video was first released, and you did get another video that you write about that had slightly different version of the elevator video for our audience and people that may watch this, the video in that that was not the entire video. It seemed there was people talked about it being edited for some reason. And also you say there was never any other footage.
Certainly there must have been some other surveillance footage from some mother camera, and yet nothing else was released, was there now?
Now the only thing they released is the one that makes her look mentally ill. That's the only one they released. Yeah, the time time code issue is a big one and it's definitely been the birth of a lot of conspiracy theories. I'll just make two points. I'll make a point and I'll make a counterpoint. So the time code definitely cuts, there's no doubt about it. There's a point in the video.
I believe it's two forty three or three forty three, but I may be wrong on that, But there's a point at which she leaves the screen, and so the time code is pretty muddled. You can't see exactly what it says, but you can clearly tell where the microseconds are, the second star and the minute hand is. You can tell that based on just how things are moving. And there's a point in the video where the minute hand changes. She leaves the screen and nothing is moving, and then
seven seconds later in a hand changes again. So there was definitely a time code cut. Now. The counterpoint now is that is at the point where someone entered the screen and they wanted to slice that out of there. Positively. The counterpoint is that there are surveillance systems that are based on motion generation, so it may simply be that it cuts because there was no movement in the screen.
That's yet one of the many questions it would be lovely to have answered and would be very easy for them to do, be very easy for them to spell that conspiracy. The is she literally a two sentence statement on that and it could have done it four years ago and that would have been the end of it, But because they haven't spoken about it. Yeah, it's the
perfect place to cut because there's no movement. And I used to do video editing, and that's the perfect place because if you cut between two different frames in which nothing's moving, it doesn't look like anything changes. And it's right when she left the elevator, so if someone was coming by at that moment, it would have been the perfect time to do it. Now, does that mean that's
what happened now? Not necessarily, but it's it's definitely one of those aspects of the case that is very eerie and boy, I mean, if I had the resources for it, I would I would have brought it to a professional digital analyst and really drill down into that, and I still hope to do that someday.
Wow.
Incredible, What again, what is your idea or your how you dispel the notion that this woman in this state? It clearly shows from the video that she was in some kind of manic state of some sort, whatever you term it. That she got through again, maybe the alarm wasn't on on the roof, maybe somebody gave her access, but physically able to do go through the fire escape,
get up to the cistern, lift up this lid. Is there any way that you determined that this was even really feasible for her to do this under any circumstances?
Right at first, that was one of the questions that I think really spoke to people, is was this even physically possible? So, first of all, she is definitely acting a little peculiar in the elevator tapes. However, I will admit that if you took a random sample of me when I don't think I'm being watched, and I'm preoccupy something and maybe nervous about something, I wouldn't necessarily look, I mean, I might be doing some strange things too,
I don't necessarily think her behavior is that strange. She is certainly exhibiting symptoms of psychomotor agitation, which is a symptom of bipolar disorder. I interviewed two different body language analysts for the book, and they both conclude that her cognitive busonans is changing, that she's her mood is changing, and that she's thinking about something someone, whether that's someone with, someone who's currently in the hotel, or just when she
had a crush on was thinking about. Uh. The body language analysis is interesting as far as weather. She could have gotten to the roof, She could have climbed the fire escape. I think that's less likely simply because she didn't have her glasses on, and that just seems very I mean, I just can't imagine her climbing that. More importantly, the roof's let's assume that she went up there alone. The roof is dark, very dark, and it's unlikely someone
told her there was a water tank up there. Why would why would someone tell her that unless they planned, unless they wanted her to unless they wanted her to go there and planned to meet her there. They're not going to say, hey, yeah, check out the water tank on the roof layer. That's interesting. Now, if she went up there, she had no idea what she was looking for.
I find it strange that she was just stumbled upon these weird tanks, decided to climb it, the arduous task getting up there, and then she decided to want go skinny, dip in and take her clothes into the tank with her, and then close the tank over her head. Look, I mean, these are just I'm really trying to give credence to both sides. And I stayed very clearly in the book this could have been an accident, and people who are in manic states do do very strange things that seem impossible.
That and it's one of the aspects of the illness that that many people have talked about, and it's worth considering. But each new detail I would find would just complicate it a little bit more, making me think, my god, I just I just don't understand. I don't you know, sometimes people in manic states will have kind of like hyper sexual episodes, so maybe that would explain her taking her clothes off. I don't know why she would have
taken them in the tank with her. Sure, but yeah, it's it's it's The mystery remains on that, And I'll just say again that I think that there are two different truths that have possible here. I do think she was experiencing a mixed episode of some kind. I also think it put her in a position where she would have a very vulnerable and opportunity target for a sexual predator in the hotel. So I think it's possible that both of those things can be true at the same time.
Just before I let you go as well, I know you have to go. The one fascinating aspect of this, to add to this incredible mystery, is that there was reports you sent a video of Latin or very strange bizarre graffiti up on that roof, which is.
Yeah, someone fact checked out. I just reported what someone else had reported, which if there was a phrase in Latin on the roof on the tank that said it turns out she was a feword And it turns out that on that same day, Elisa reblogged a quote about that word about why men use that work. So it's kind of little mysterious, you know, the synchronicities, and that the whole other kind of part of the book, or
the synchronosities that go in this case. For example, the fact that she's reblogged a photo of a body falling from a building the day she died was actually one of her last posts. And meanwhile, you have this hotel where there's so many people that have jumped out the buildings. And I talked to a woman who stayed there who said that she turned out she stayed there the same week Elisa did and didn't know about that until after.
And she said that she had an experience where as soon as she entered her room, she felt this compulsion to go to the window and she's just start thinking about what it would be like to jump out of it. So there's just these strange things that seem to go
on inside this building. But as far as back to the main point here, I keep going on topic, But as far as this quote on the roof, yeah, I mean, I definitely think it's synchronistic at least that she's talking about this kind of weird posts on the roof doesn't mean that she was up there and saw it and then decided to rewog something about the word it's possible.
Yeah, it really is very interesting. The Santiago Lopez and the open lid, and he is the person that goes because the manager tells him to go up there. And then the canine unit and the police had been on that roof twice and didn't see a lid open on the cistern, So right, got a wonder And then if he's moved, him and his family has moved. Yeah, it's it's a very very interesting thing to consider.
They didn't. They didn't get a cent uh. And perhaps it's because the body wasn't yet in the tank that it was put there later they were concealing it try and keep the news of another dead body in the hotel from coming out until after they had signed this real estate deal. This is just a theory. It's based on publicly available reports. But I'm telling you there's not one interview about this case with any of the major employees besides what they have testified to in the civil deposition.
None of the sectors have talked about it. None of the women who are in the hotel have been interviewed about it. There's something very very strange about the coverage of this case, and I cannot conclude based on what I found. I cannot conclude anything else but that something is being covered up.
I want to thank you very much, Jake Anderson for talking about Gone at Midnight, the mysterious death of Alisa Lamb. It's been an absolute pleasure. Is there a Facebook page or a website that they might go to for further information.
You could get and it's just you know, google Gone at Midnight. You can check me out on Twitter if you want. Over the Moon SF, I have a website that I'm kind of revamping into a crime side. It's called The Ghost Diaries and started as kind of like a looking into strange, weird theories. I'm turning it more into true crime. But yeah, for now, I mean, if people are interested in the book, you can just google Gone at Midnight. And Dan, I really appreciate you having me on. It means a lot to me.
Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.
Good night, Good answer,