Elisa Lam - What Happened?

[Nickfalzone]

<rsbm>

Do you know where in BC for possible perp 2?

Yesterday I was on EL's tumblr ... clicked through a bit and next thing I knew had a "malicious" hit that was dealt with. Checked the IP and the server backlinks .. first thing up was a dark*****productions out of NY and another site in BC.

WRT tracking the phone, if she had a gps tracker on it, it would have been possible to track it from any computer. She might have even phoned them and made arrangements to meet to get it back?

Perp 2 is from Ontario, so location may not significant.

One thing I neglected to mention earlier is that Perp 1 claimed to be in China very early this year. The Ringu/Asian Girl/Dark Water connections to China seem convenient.

Re: phone - possible scenario:

Elisa met with perp 1 & 2 in San Diego. One of them stole her phone, although they did a good enough job that she "thought" she "lost it". That to me seems a little strange... If I was in a dive bar in SD and my phone went missing, "lost" is not the first word I would use, I would probably say someone stole it. That she didn't state it that way suggests to me that she possibly had an inkling one of her new friends took it, but she knew they looked at her tumblr so she didn't feel comfortable accusing them.

Ok, so now she's at the Cecil, may have even travelled there with perp 1/2. They were staying on 14, she on 4. She went to 14 on the promise that perp 1 or 2 "found" her phone in one of their bags. This was late at night on the 31st and they may have woken her up. She went up there to retrieve it, while half-awake and without her contacts in. She goes to the room and one of them gives her the phone. The other perp is nearby, but may not be aware of the phone situation. As Elisa is leaving the room and heading to the elevator, one perp gets pissed at the other for giving Elisa her phone back. Probably because the phone is incriminating in some way, or because the intention of getting her up to the room was not the phone, but something nefarious that perp 1 and 2 did not make clear to each other. Elisa was uncomfortable with the situation and determinedly goes into the elevator to get back to her room. She hits multiple floors bec she just wants the door to close. She hears a noise, steps out, and then moments later is "frisked" by one of the perps to get the phone back. Things go downhill from there.

 

[OCSlacker]

I've always assumed that the timestamp was "blurred" for evidence purposes. This happens all the time to CCTV footage, in order to give the police/detective a leg up on the public/perp as far as evidence.

As far as the door close button, I am still of the belief that due to her poor vision, she accidentally pressed this button thinking it was door open. She hit all the different levels because she desperately wanted the elevator to go down. She looks, at the least, very frustrated when the door doesn't close soon after she hits the buttons... Now later, when she goes through the row of buttons again, I believe she is doing it with other intentions, and/or someone else's intentions.

Suspect-wise, I put out some ideas in a previous post but it was deleted due to the inclusion of links to these individuals social media accounts. In any case, I can still put out info that led me my profiling of said perps:

Poss. Perp 1, lives in LA:

1. Male heavily into occult, tattoos, metal music, etc. Lived in both San Diego and Los Angeles. Familiar with San Diego Zoo. Boyish charm masking a sociopath/sk.

(Elisa mentioned a "fun tattoo'ed guy" at the Cecil. She went to check out music in SD, along with the Zoo. This possible perp is a musician, tatted, has lived in both LA/SD, and according to FB has been to the zoo. She poss had low self-esteem and was relatively easy to pick up/manipulate by other men.)

Poss. Perp 2, lives in Canada, but family with Perp. 1:

2. Female that is either friends or family with male perp. Heavily into occult, also a sociopath/sk. Has girlish charm that can be used to gain the trust of other women.

(IMO, Elisa is talking to 2 people outside elevator. First the one on the left, that frisks her/tries to calm her down (Female Perp) and one on the right that arrives later and makes some threats to her (male perp) that she tries to wiggle out of conversationally).

Is it possible that Elisa lost her phone in SD, then somehow tracked it to somewhere else in the building? Or even heard it going off? She attempted to retrieve it, did so, then things went downhill. This is re: the frisking.

Another though regarding the elevator buttons. Lets say that she needed to use the bathroom late the night of the 31st, but d/t the flooding conditions in the bathroom on 4, she decided to go use a br on another floor. She started up high, 14, saw it was busy, got into the elevator planning to check every floor on the way down. Maybe br availability at the Cecil is tough and she had done something similar before?

Couple of questions just to play devils advocate:

What leads you to believe she met anyone in San Diego? I read her tumblr and saw nothing to indicate she met a person , let alone 2 people of specific gender. Saw no mention of a "fun tattooed guy" being met either in San Diego or at the Cecil.

As for the occult involvement, what has led you to believe this has anything to do with a ritual or the occult in anyway? I've seen nothing to indicate any ritualistic behavior, no materials at the scene to lead us to believe that the occult is any way involved. Imagination is a wonderful thing as long as it isn't implied to be fact .

As for being duped into making a film . I'm pretty sure someone would get suspicious when they see no cameras . Just sayin, it is not likely .

Being frisked in the hall , don't see that either. She rarely looks to her left and directs most of her attention to her right throughout the video. Also, pretty sure that being in a hall , less than 20 feet from the nearest room, if someone were going to frisk her they would have led her back to the room she came from. Aside from the fact she probably would have yelled her head off before they even had the chance to get that close, why would they then allow her back into the elevator? why would she have left so calmly at the end of the video after having just been robbed? If we question the people who say she appears to be in a psychotic state or on drugs , how can we not question this. It involves an entire scenario for which there is no proof and all pure speculation. See the holes now?

If you have links to any proof of what you say may have happened ( meeting people at the Cecil/San Diego etc) I would be interested in viewing them.

The video being doctored in anyway I have no idea about. I have no background with that and won't even bother to try. I will say one thing in regard to it though, did ya ever think that it would be pretty dumb to alter a video then hand it over to LE? I'm pretty sure they would notice and pay a lot more attention to anyone who might have had access . I'm thinking it was not a cut and paste job or altered in anyway by anyone other then LE if at all.

Not Trying to be rude.. Just thought I would add my 2 cents.

 

[MissedItByThatMuch]

I've always assumed that the timestamp was "blurred" for evidence purposes. This happens all the time to CCTV footage, in order to give the police/detective a leg up on the public/perp as far as evidence.

Let's agree to assume that the police tried to hide the original timestamp from the public. Can we assume that the police wouldn't decieve the public by changing the original numbers? Do you think the police simply had a video-modifying program that "saw" the normal "English" numbers, and then automatically converted them to pixel format? Is that how it went down?

Or did the police take the liberty to snip the video and/or make other alterations in the name of having one up on the public? Did the police deceive us all in the name of keeping special information to themselves? Because if they did not, the hotel people are guilty.

Rather than just guessing at what the police might have done, because we can guess one way or the other and make either view sound plausible, can we instead take all the facets of the tampering, put them on the table, and then use them to eliminate or drastically minimize one possibility after another? This is where those two frames at the end of the 14th second can be important for drastically minimizing the possibility that the police tampered in that area of the video. There's mo use guessing as to whether those frames are in there. Do you know of any way to check it out?

 

[MissedItByThatMuch]

As for being duped into making a film . I'm pretty sure someone would get suspicious when they see no cameras . Just sayin, it is not likely...

The video being doctored in anyway I have no idea about. I have no background with that and won't even bother to try. I will say one thing in regard to it though, did ya ever think that it would be pretty dumb to alter a video then hand it over to LE? I'm pretty sure they would notice and pay a lot more attention to anyone who might have had access . I'm thinking it was not a cut and paste job or altered in anyway by anyone other then LE if at all.

Not Trying to be rude.. Just thought I would add my 2 cents.

No, you're not being rude at all. Thanks for the thoughts. I've already thought of those things, over and over again. The evidence is weighing heavily on the amateur-actress theory. Nickalzone agrees that she stood there waiting for the door to close. She's not a great acrtess, but she did a good enough job to fool me at first, and to fool Nickalzone to this very day. In her second bout with the buttons, her task was to make us believe that she wants to go down very badly. I believed it at first, and Nickalzone (I'm not trying to be rude) believes it to this day. But the evidence is heavily in favor of her placing the elevator on hold mode. Therefore, Nickalzone, see if you can't just entertain that idea to see where it might lead because you can't prove that she couldn't see the buttons, so you can't take that position as fact. You need to be open to the what the button-evidence tells on its face value.

The video is dim probably for a reason, so that we can't see the buttons very well. I say that we were not to discover that this elevator had a hold-door button. Most people, I think, do not know such a button exists. We were not supposed to discover that the elevator was on hold. In her second bout with the buttons, the apparent purpose was to make us believe elevator malfunction. She was acting exactly that part, wasn't she? She looked frustrated, exactly what could be expected from an act, and yet, in contradiction to what she appeared to be doing, she was hitting the hold-door button again and again. It's a conflict. Either she was virtually blind and elevator-ignorant, or she was acting. Surely she knew where the door-close button was. Surely, if she wanted to go down, she would have pressed all buttons, not just the center door-hold button. I've read online that the door-close button over-rides the hold-door button, and it makes sense.

I do not believe that there necessarily had to be a camera crew up there on the 14th floor to create this amateur production. The camera was already there. All that was needed was a few rehearsals elsewhere. In this theory, they had only one chance to "film" this because doing it over and over again in an elevator would have tipped off the police.

About your good point on how unlikely it would have been for the hotel to give the police a timestamp in that condition, I fully agreed as I thought through it. Put it this way, that if the hotel did tamper with the video to the point of obvious, they might more likely have filled the 4-minute slot with a closed elevator door, hoping the police would just pass by that segment unnoticed. However, the added frames are another matter having not to do with the timestamp, and the hotel could be in collusion with the killer in that regard. Or, the hotel and the killer(s) could be one.

I havn't yet informed anyone here that Arkadiy claims to have found three more frame segments, one each at every one of the three snips. This strange complication needs to go into a post of its own if I/we ever get there. Thank you for taking this to task.

 

[noodled1]

Have we ruled out circus clowns yet? She may have been holding the elevator to see how many clowns you can load into a 50 year old Otis elevator.

 

[allison78ca]

L e e bsb


Just trying to make this world a safer place for our children.

Ummm this was from my 29 month old daughter :-/ She trying to make me look like a crazy person lol

 

[allison78ca]

Have we ruled out circus clowns yet? She may have been holding the elevator to see how many clowns you can load into a 50 year old Otis elevator.

Bahaha... That's funny

 

[Montjoy]

Ummm this was from my 29 month old daughter :-/ She trying to make me look like a crazy person lol

Mission accomplished! (Just kidding -- what she wrote makes at least as much sense as some other things I've read.)

 

[Newton]

I made no explicit or implicit connection between the dog and EL's behavior in the elevator, so I have no idea what you are referring to. Your referral to other discussions on SAR dogs is irrelevant in this context. It might be helpful for experts know about this discussion, so they might see it has relevance to for any conclusions they draw.

My question was actually intended for our newest expert Rougelatete. It was not intended to challenge anyone's authority. I asked days ago but she (?) disappeared. Feel free to answer it is an open to all question. How can EL die as a result of following command hallucinations when there is no trace of her being on the roof per the K-9 dog search that found no trail of her on the roof?

I appreciate the K-9 stats but am more inclined to believe our newest K-9 expert Oriah. Have you read his thoughts?

I am inclined to believe what the LAPD sergeant said when fielding a question regarding the search dog. He didn't seem bothered by the dog not hitting on her scent and says it could be due to the lapsed time. I am paraphrasing so please reference the linked video. I believe it is about 2:40 or so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctBF_PnRXis&sns=em

 

[ATasteOfHoney]

Just thinking out loud here......there are common recreational drugs like Ecstasy that make you crave water. A person using it will have their body burn up without water, literally.

So does that mean there's any connection with EL's strange behaviour and the fact that her body was found in a water tank? I don't know.....

Hmmm?????

 

[noodled1]

Ummm this was from my 29 month old daughter :-/ She trying to make me look like a crazy person lol

That's cute... and yes 3 daughters later I can attest they can make you crazy

 

[noodled1]

Just thinking out loud here......there are common recreational drugs like Ecstasy that make you crave water. A person using it will have their body burn up without water, literally.

So does that mean there's any connection with EL's strange behaviour and the fact that her body was found in a water tank? I don't know.....

Hmmm?????

I think much will be revealed when the autopsy results come back. Much of the guessing we see as to the cause of her death will be put back on track at that time.

Until then I'm not ruling out Clowns, if they find grease paint I'm golden...lol

 

[Sillybilly]

Don't laugh at noodled1 ... they could really be onto something there:

 

[gitana1]

Do we know if there was water in her lungs?

No official info either way. What concerns me, however, is that I heard a report that the cause of death was not apparent at the autopsy so they sent for toxicology to find out more. That indicates to me that no water was found in the lungs. So perhaps - I don;t know because I don't understand much about decomp - her body was too decomposed to tell, or maybe she just didn't drown. If they rule out drowning that would tend to tip me more to a soft kill like asphyxiation.

If you have never seen the evidence before, of the video tampering, and if you come to believe that the tampering is true due to the inconsistencies in the timestamp, then before assuming too much, consider that the timestamp may be completely foreign to the video, and wholly pasted in. It might even be misleading if it doesn't reflect the true time or even day of the video. I have a lot of difficult questions due to this timestamp, which is why I'm here, to get your help if possible.

Who was the likely persons(s) to provide this butchered timestamp situation: the hotel, the killer(s), and/or the police? I would expect that the police provided the timestamp in the pixel form that it's in, but if so, did they perfectly convert the pixel numbers from the normal "English" timestamp of the original video? Can we trust the times in the timestamp, or are we to disregard it completely? Would the Los Angeles police answer someone's question if that question were put to them? What does this timestamp mean? Everything for solving the case, or nothing?

I;m really curious why none of the media are asking questions at all. Is it that no one cares anymore about this sweet girl or is it that they know they will receive no answers? Because it would be easy enough to ask such a question.

However, LE investigators absolutely know whether the video was altered or not and if so, why. I trust they are working this case like mad.

<modsnip>

<modsnip>

Newton below added some clarity and I agree with Newton's post.

I am inclined to believe what the LAPD sergeant said when fielding a question regarding the search dog. He didn't seem bothered by the dog not hitting on her scent and says it could be due to the lapsed time. I am paraphrasing so please reference the linked video. I believe it is about 2:40 or so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctBF_PnRXis&sns=em

Here's the same video, cued, (hopefully): http://youtu.be/ctBF_PnRXis?t=2m34s

Note that the officer says they believe Elisa was in the tank from the beginning, or words to that effect.

Just thinking out loud here......there are common recreational drugs like Ecstasy that make you crave water. A person using it will have their body burn up without water, literally.

So does that mean there's any connection with EL's strange behaviour and the fact that her body was found in a water tank? I don't know.....

Hmmm?????

It could be. There are so many possibilities. I tend to discount drugs though because, while there has been no evidence that Elisa was a partier type or did non-prescribed drugs, there is a ton of evidence that she suffered from serious mental issues for which she was prescribed some serious medication. Insomnia was one of her issues and she seemed to suffer frequently from that as well. A combination of bi-polar depression, or hypomania untreated morphing to mania, or a bad reaction to her meds, or abruptly stopping her medications, or the inability to sleep for days, all of those things either in various combinations, or alone, can cause psychosis. It just seems much more likely to me that something like that happened to her based on her history, than sleepwalking or drug usage.

And sometimes I think there is a definite urge to avoid a mental health explanation for a few reasons:

1. Because anyone can suffer from mental health issues at any time. That's scary because it is not necessarily controllable. It could happen to one of us or tone of our kids. So people fear it and want to avoid thinking about it or talking about it. (It does freak me out, frankly).

2. If Elisa died due to drug usage or her actions in meeting up with or socializing with strangers, then we can assure ourselves such a thing would never happen to us because we can avoid such behaviors.

3. There is a definite stigma, even greater among some cultures, surrounding mental illness. I get that sense that some feel if Elisa is deemed mentally ill and if her death is attributed at least in part to that, then she is being maligned in death, and demeaned. That's uncomfortable and feels unfair.

Hopefully we will find out soon. I hope the coroner and the investigators can give us some concrete answers and answer any unresolved questions. We'll see.

But no matter what, whether Elisa died due to mental issues in whole or in part, or as a result of something totally unrelated, she seems like a bright, shining, beautiful spirit. An interesting, complex soul with so much to offer the world.

Her death was a theft of an incredible life.

 

[Montjoy]

[snip]

It could be. There are so many possibilities. I tend to discount drugs though because, while there has been no evidence that Elisa was a partier type or did non-prescribed drugs, there is a ton of evidence that she suffered from serious mental issues for which she was prescribed some serious medication.

[snip]

3. There is a definite stigma, even greater among some cultures, surrounding mental illness. I get that sense that some feel if Elisa is deemed mentally ill and if her death is attributed at least in part to that, then she is being maligned in death, and demeaned. That's uncomfortable and feels unfair.

Regarding the first paragraph -- I somehow doubt she was using any illicit narcotics. She was from Vancouver, where the vogue drugs are high-quality (and cheap) marijuana and heroin. Nothing about her behavior suggested that she used either of those. And while there has been some good speculation about her using ecstasy, there is much in her behavior to suggest she was not using that. She was not looking for gratuitous physical stimulation, such as stroking the elevator doorway as she entered and left. And I think it should be clear to anyone that she was not a meth user.

Regarding the second paragraph I clipped -- I think that suicide is pretty much a universal taboo, even among cultures in which it is overrepresented. There are exceptions of course, but there is nothing in EL's situation to suggest that she was about to kill herself, say, to protect her family from dishonor, or to keep them from some burden. From my time reading posts here, and from my general experience, I think that most people are reluctant to suspect or expect a suicide (or misadventure as a result of one's own decisions) judgment as a manner of death. I really don't care to dredge up examples of this, but if you read enough morbid stories, I guarantee that you will find a staggering number of cases in which people are reluctant to accept suicide as an MOD. And my heart goes out to them.

 

[Conductor71]

I;m really curious why none of the media are asking questions at all. Is it that no one cares anymore about this sweet girl or is it that they know they will receive no answers? Because it would be easy enough to ask such a question.

A Vancouver news station reported that they had an interview scheduled with the LAPD (this was around time of the autopsy) that they subsequently canceled explaining they were just told by administrators to not talk about the case at all. Seems to be a media blackout.

<modsnip>

<modsnip>

<modsnip>
Believe me, I am more than ready to move on.

 

[Conductor71]

Has anyone heard of this case? The parallels are weird. Also note the interesting stats on drowning. Not saying EL is exact same thing but this could very well be the same conclusions drawn here.

Young man disappears from his own yard the night of Jan 29th.
He is a good kid, no drugs, does well in school.
Search ensues and there is a dedicated FB group.
His corpse found, badly decomposed, floating in Presque Isle Bay (Erie, PA)
on March 18th.

Link to article will not work but not sure what rule I am breaking? Hope it is kosher to do this? Google: Jacob Samuenski Eponymous Rox "No Foul Play"

Some good info on forensics of drowning right here. http://killingkillers.blogspot.com/p/drowning-forensics.html

Autopsy results: Inconclusive

"There was absolutely no marks on the body indicating any kind of trauma or foul play," Erie County coroner Lyell Cook announced yesterday. "Based on what we know there was no evidence to suspect that it was a suicide either."

Thus, death must be ruled as "accidental" though he disappeared while taking out the garbage!

Note what the writer says about cadavers in water:

Waterlogged corpses, a forensic analyst's nightmare

If you're going to kill somebody and want to make it look like an accident...the longer it soaks the better, and don't use a gun, knife, or sledgehammer.

What makes freshwater so ideal? Because the average cop and coroner haven't the vaguest idea how to process cadavers which have been retrieved from watery graves.

 

[BlueShoe]

So much of this depends on whether we think that someone is there outside the elevator or not. Those who think psychosis, think that no one is there. Those who think someone is out there in the hallway, don't see it that way. Either one is a definite possibility. And that is something we will not know for sure without more information.

I still have a problem with the suicide theory, in large part because it seems such an elaborate and difficult way to commit suicide. If she were a long-term resident, familiar with the roof, I'd have a much easier time.

As far as the ecstasy/water connection, wouldn't she just go hop into a cold shower or something--especially since there was one right near the elevator? It doesn't add up to me. MOO

 

[bessie]

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[gitana1]

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