Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is one of the most hotly anticipated documentaries of the year, and with good reason: The series delves into the haunting tale of the disappearance and death of Elisa Lamin 2013 from a hotel with a dark history. Much of the fascination with the Lam case surrounds conspiracy theories, coincidences and even suspicions of the supernatural. However, director Joe Berlinger examines not just the web sleuthing and eerie synchronicities surrounding Lam’s death, but also the social, societal and socioeconomic conditions that may have contributed to the loss of the young college student, as well as to the overall feelings of fear, danger and lack of control in the Cecil Hotel’s Los Angeles neighborhood through generations. True crime, especially the realm of wrongful convictions, is a subject close to Berlinger. The prolific producer and director has documented other high-profile cases in his work, including the West Memphis Three in Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robinhood Hills, Whitey Bulger in Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger, the Kitty Genoveseslaying in The Witness, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, Killing Richard Glossip and more. We spoke with Berlinger about the tragedy of Lam’s loss, as well as what her death exposed on a larger scale: The horrors not of ghosts and hauntings, but of the specters of Skid Row, cyber sleuthing, cyberbullying, mental health stigma and simply not letting a lost soul rest in peace—and how that led to even more victimization of others. Note: The following may contain spoilers for Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.
Did you follow the Elisa Lam case closely when she died in 2013? Did you do any deep dives into the conspiracy theories surrounding her death and disappearance?
I hadn’t done a deep dive into the case, I but remember and was aware of the elevator video and was fascinated by it when it came out. And I was fascinated by the conspiracy theories. I didn’t do a really deep dive into them until Netflix offered the opportunity to dig in and understand what happened. I kind of tuned [the case] out because it fell into this world of paranormal and supernatural and stuff I don’t believe in. But Josh Dean, one of our producers and a journalist we feature on the show, wrote about iton Medium and brought it to us to see if we wanted to make a show about it.
What made you want to tell Elisa Lam’s story now?
I remembered the elevator footage and figured instead of a straightforward show about this particular case, why not use it to create an ongoing series to look at a particular location to look at the forces, the socioeconomic forces that led to what happened? I wanted to dig in and push back on the paranormal stuff because to me, the tragedy of Elisa Lam is not a ghost story. It’s disrespectful to the victim and her family and to people concerned with mental health. I also wanted to lean into the whole phenomenon of web sleuths.
A big theme of Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is synchronicity. Did you buy into any of the conspiracies surrounding Elisa Lam’s death?
The level of synchronicities is very mind-boggling and to me, that’s the cautionary tale. I’ve seen a lot of wrongful conviction cases because that’s an area I’ve spent a lot of time in. There is an epidemic of wrongful conviction in this country, and it fascinates me that this case had these kinds of synchronicities. If it was a murder case, these are things that prosecutors and family members would latch onto and say, “He’s guilty!” That there was a tuberculosis outbreak shortly after her disappearance and the test for that is called the LAM ELISA test, the fact that the Dark Water movie made in Japan in 2002 and in the U.S. in 2005—literally, the plot of Dark Water is what happened to Elisa Lam. Even the Morbid stuff is fascinating, the fact that he stayed there exactly a year before, wrote a song whose lyrics could be applied to what web sleuths thought happened to Elisa Lam. The registration for the bookstore’s website is the same town where Elisa Lam is buried; the Google pin of that town is in the cemetery where she’s buried. It can make your head spin, and the knee-jerk reaction is that something spooky or supernatural is going on here and that there’s a coverup of a grander conspiracy. But these are all just coincidences, which is why you need corroborating forensic evidence in any kind of legal procedure.
One of the web sleuths’ biggest questions about the Elisa Lam case is what happened to the missing minute or so of the elevator video. What do you think happened to that footage?
I don’t have a clear answer. The police don’t want to release the footage, which isn’t unusual. The family isn’t interested in continuing to fan the flames, the family believes the police story, I believe the police story. These are old cameras, some of the cameras weren’t functioning. The time code issue being blurred, I haven’t got a definitive answer, but the police story is that they blocked out time code footage because they don’t want to give things away like time of day because it’s still an open case. The footage was slowed down, and that makes sense because the cameras themselves were slowed down, or they slowed it down to make it easier to recognize the person in the footage.
Do you have any thoughts as to why people are so doubtful or desperate to uncover more about this case?
Having lived through this last year, I never imagined the idea of truth would be under assault, but those issues are percolating throughout. The issue is real. People are still clinging to the idea that something more nefarious went on. We live in a post-truth era where whoever has the best narrative appears to be telling the truth. There are real issues, like mental illness, bad policies in Los Angeles that led to the homeless problem, and the emergence of Skid Row and trying to contain the homeless—then cyberbullying. The show tried to take it out of just the cheesy, ghost story, paranormal kind of realm and treat the case with much more dignity and bring Elisa Lam as a victim to life. A lot of true crime doesn’t treat the victim as a human, and that’s what we set out to do.
Pablo Vergara tried to take his own life because of web sleuths who somehow believed he had something to do with Elisa Lam’s death. Similarly, in Don’t F*ck With Cats, another falsely accused subject of an online mob died by suicide. Did you set out to make this a sort of cautionary tale against that sort of mob mentality?
There are pros and cons of the web sleuthing community, and there have been examples of web sleuths helping law enforcement by producing additional evidence. But a lot of that falls into cyberbullying. I went into it knowing that because of my background in true crime and having covered a lot of real cases. I’m highly aware that every crime has all sorts of circumstantial bits of evidence that you can [combine to] create the narrative of guilt on virtually any case. I’ve spent a lot of time on wrongful conviction space, and that and the case of Richard Glossip, and every criminal case has circumstantial evidence where if it was circumstantial evidence alone—you need much more than circumstantial evidence to bring a case. There are a lot of fascinating twists and circumstantial things, but without actual, physical, forensic evidence, you don’t have a case. I went into this knowing it became an urban legend ghost story and wanted to peel back the layers and tell the true story while also taking viewers on the ride of how all those circumstantial pieces of evidence unfolded.
Can people stay at the Cecil Hotel? Would you?
Well, it’s currently not available for staying there, but sure, why not? My taste in hotels runs a little higher than that, but I’m a little spoiled now. I think it’s disrespectful to assume the place is haunted. If I were in the area and needed an affordable place to stay? Sure. Next, My Favorite Murder podcasters Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark tell all about their friendship and love of true crime.
