The first installment of the Netflix anthology series “Crime Scene” explores the dark history of the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles – home to notorious serial killers, multiple murders, suicides and overdoses – through the mysterious 2013 death of a student 21-year-old Canadian university student Elisa Lam. Her body was found trapped in one of the water tanks atop a 19-story hotel that winter, and although the Los Angeles coroner declared his death accidental, the bizarre circumstances surrounding his death continue to capture the imagination of true criminals and angelenos.
Directed by Joe Berlinger (“Conversations with an assassin: Ted Bundy’s tapes”), “Crime scene: The disappearance at the Hotel Cecil” aims to deconstruct the circumstances surrounding Lam’s death, shedding new light on an old mystery. Cecil’s sordid and violent past serves as a frightening backdrop for this particularly disturbing slice of LA history.
The four-part series about a hotel that isn’t exactly haunted and a girl who may or may not have been murdered is Netflix’s newest offering since it established itself as a destination for real crimes. But he is hardly the best of the group. Because although there are essentially two stories here, none are told in a terribly appealing way.
Initially, “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” is a fascinating journey into the city’s past, from its aspirations as a respectable business and leisure center to its extravagant displays of wealth and glaring class disparities.
It narrates here the decline of the centenary hotel from a prominent tourist spot to a run-down location for the underbelly of Los Angeles, including the frightening fact that “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez resided in Cecil during his terrible killing in the summer of 1985. Built in 1924, Cecil was once a fashionable place for visitors, but it began to decline in the 1930s and 1940s, as did the area around the grand hotel. Now Stay on Main – it was renamed in 2011 – the hotel is on the edge of a skid row. It is also the last place where Lam was seen alive.
The series, however, fails to persuasively intertwine the hotel’s past with Lam’s death, relying on lustful aspects of both stories to drive the narrative.
At the time of his death, Lam, a daughter of Chinese immigrants and a student at the University of British Columbia, was on vacation in Los Angeles, where he had found a hotel that fit his meager budget. So, the story gets confused before it becomes totally macabre.
“The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” falls in love with aspects of the crime story of the case and seems more exploratory than revealing, like a production from the confines of basic cable TV – but with a bigger budget, more archival material and a narrative stretched across multiple episodes. And unlike other successful Netflix series that have tackled infamous cases from new angles (“Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer”; “Jeffery Epstein: Filthy Rich”), “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” fails to clarify a lot about the circumstances surrounding Lam’s death, even though the story itself may be unknown to many outside Southern California. Netflix documentaries narrating lesser-known tragedies, such as “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez” or “The Guardians”, should have been used as guides. They infused the police aspects of their central cases with obstinate research, nuanced subplots and emotional attachment to the victims.
The story about Lam and the Cecil Hotel rarely goes as deep, though it does contain interviews with a former hotel manager, former residents, retired Los Angeles police homicide detectives, historians and amateur social media detectives who are still obsessed with the case.
Lam’s disappearance and death became a concern among real crime podcasters and amateur Reddit detectives after the video went viral of his strange behavior inside a Cecil Hotel elevator on the day of his disappearance. The LAPD released the footage, which was captured by an elevator surveillance camera, in the hope that it could generate clues in the case. This spawned numerous theories of armchair detectives who sought to explain Lam’s actions on tape and connect them with his death.
A maintenance worker investigating guest complaints about low pressure and discolored water coming from his taps led to the horrible discovery of Lam’s body in a water tank on the roof of an old building. The series is keen to interview at least two guests from that era who remember the funny taste of water when brushing their teeth, repeating much of what they had already said in contemporary news included in the series.
Flashy details like these are the stock of fictional films and TV series, and in fact several – including “Castle”, “How to Get Away With Murder” and “American Horror Story: Hotel” – had storylines reminiscent of The Case. After all, there is a lot of material to work with. Or get lost in the case of “Crime scene”.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.