Among her possessions left at the hotel were several prescription medications, seemingly untouched. Lam’s sister had revealed to detectives that Lam had a history of not taking her medication. Tim Marcia, a LAPD homicide detective assigned to the case, says in another interview that investigators had information not shared with the public, including knowledge of the severity of Lam’s mental health history.

“For the people on the internet, you really don’t have the full story in front of you. Jason Tovar explains in an interview for the series. “All the background information that’s used to rule as an accident is not necessarily made available to the public,” forensic pathologist Dr. In short: Lam was not murdered, and it was speculative to have believed so from the start. In the last episode, in a fusillade of evidence revelation, we are told of many details, which, if revealed earlier in the series and the case, would have led us likely to different conclusions. The sleuths, however, are proven wrong, and the final episode of Crime Scene imitates the kind of jarring awakening many experienced when the case wrapped. Through the documentary, we become the sleuths. The structure is particularly effective in the Elisa Lam case, during which internet sleuths obsessed over details of the death. While frustrating and baiting, the structure is designed give viewers knowledge only available to the public, allowing them to participate in solving the crime. So while the central question of the series may seem conspiratorial, the answer is actually clear, and it reveals more about those investigating (and obsessing over) Elisa Lam than it does about Lam herself.Ĭrime Scene partakes in a common true crime story structure: withholding key details from the audience until the final episode. Though explicitly chronicling the Elisa Lam investigation, the documentary acts more as a trojan horse for exploring many other features of the case: confirmation bias, fallacies of coincidence found in conspiracy theories (apophenia), urban planning in LA, and mental health. She was found dead on the hotel roof days later.Īs journalist Josh Dean puts it in an interview for the Netflix series, “You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to say, ‘what the fuck?’”Īs the documentary and Dean later make clear, however, there are ways of explaining Lam’s death, even if these explanations prove unsatisfying.

Her last known sighting was on security footage from one of the hotel’s elevators, in which she was seen acting erratically, moving around inside the elevator as if hiding, speaking and motioning as if there is someone else out of sight near the elevator bank. There were no signs of forced entry into her room, nor any drug-related paraphernalia. Lam had left her belongings behind at the hotel, including her laptop and clothing.

Netflix’s new docuseries, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, looks into the case, which became one of the most well-known true crime “mysteries” of the last decade.

She changed from a shared room to a single. During this time, Lam’s known activity was limited. On January 28, 2013, Canadian college student Elisa Lam checked into the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

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