Don’t Overlook ‘Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel’s’ Harrowing Case Against Conspiracy Theories

If you were aggressively online in early 2013, then you remember the first time you saw the Elisa Lam elevator video. It was that big of a moment, and that’s why Netflix’s Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is a must-watch docuseries. Tt dives into a mystery that we all remember, illuminating what happened before and after that viral video. But unlike a lot of other true crime docs, like Unsolved Mysteries, there is ultimately no mystery here. There’s a pretty cut and dry conclusion to Elisa Lam’s disappearance and subsequent discovery in a water tank on the roof of the Cecil. The real mystery at the heart of this series, one that remains unsolved, is why the internet cared so much—so much that “web sleuths” actively wrecked at least one person’s life?

SPOILER ALERT for Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel—but if you haven’t watched it yet, you need to watch Episode 4, “The Hard Truth.” After three episodes of buildup, “The Hard Truth” reveals the actual hows and whys of the Elisa Lam case. It’s all so straightforward: Elisa Lam lived with bipolar disorder and, as she had a few times in the past, she began to undertake her meds. The autopsy supported this, as do accounts from the hotel staff. She was acting erratic, getting kicked out of a TV taping and leaving rude notes on her Cecil roommates’ pillows telling them to leave. Her family said that when she went off her meds in the past, she often feared that she was being chased. Elisa Lam going off her meds (proven), believing someone to be after her (proven by the elevator video), and hiding in a water tank on the roof? It makes sense. Even her being naked is explained by the very real phenomenon known as “paradoxical undressing.” Case closed.

The case that’s still open, though, involves online conspiracies that work people into a tizzy. Due to the viral nature of the elevator video in 2013 and the singularly millennial nature of this whole case (Elisa Lam was a prolific Tumblr user), social media became thoroughly obsessed with this vanishing. And then when the rest of the internet moved onto Doge or hot dog legs or whatever else we were sharing in 2013, a group stayed behind at the Cecil Hotel—and I mean that literally in a few cases.

The web sleuths devoted a lot of time and dollars to finding justice for Elisa Lam, and they found justice in bizarre places. Elisa was murdered by a maniac recreating the 2005 Jennifer Connolly horror movie Dark Water. Elisa was a government agent or terrorist tied to a tuberculosis outbreak. Elisa was a biological weapon used to spread tuberculosis. Also toss in ghosts, zip codes, the Illuminati, and a death metal musician just for funsies. The coincidences were admittedly bizarre at times (the tuberculosis test is called a LAM-ELISA, which… wow), and those bizarre coincidences just emboldened this online community to do something dark.

Because of a need to use up their supply of red string, the web sleuths tied the death of a real person to a real death metal musician named Pablo Vergara, a.k.a. Morbid. Why? Because he stayed at the Cecil a year before Elisa. Yeah… a year before, but, y’know, he sure does look scary!

This community became convinced that Morbid murdered Elisa Lam and began harassing him daily. He was called a suspect in international news, he had his social media profiles flagged and taken down, and he dealt with daily death threats. No amount of proof, not records at the hotel or a flight itinerary proving he was in Mexico in February 2013, could stop the harassment. He admits he tried to take his own life because of this nonsense, nonsense brought on because he stayed at the Cecil one time. “Being truthful doesn’t matter to them,” Morbid says in the doc. “They want to destroy you. They hate you.”

And how did the community react when the autopsy came out? It was—no surprise—met with endless skepticism. YouTubers that have “seen a lot of autopsy reports” cried foul. Everyone was suddenly an expert on hypothermia. They convinced themselves that the report was doctored, because they couldn’t tell a “5” from an “8.” The sleuths put so much time into the case, and they wanted the outcome to retroactively justify their passion. When it was proven that Elisa died during a manic episode, that wasn’t big enough to justify all the hours of analysis. There had to be a massive coverup between the LAPD and the hotel and who knows who else, because the results didn’t go the way they wanted.

Does this sound familiar? No doubt Crime Scene plays differently than the filmmakers intended, being released in February 2021 after the January we just had. The ecosystem of misinformation that the web sleuths inhabited in 2013 feels like an upsetting precursor to the #StopTheSteal hell of today. I’d imagine that if the Crime Scene team were to start production on Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel today, they might wisely reframe the entire series to be about the online phenomenon that took over so many minds and definitely, permanently, ruined one life. Online conspiracies and their dangerous proliferation? That’s the real mystery here, not what happened to Elisa Lam. Lam’s case has been solved, but online radicalization’s only gotten worse. This mystery needs to be solved before we’re a world of Morbids.

Stream Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel on Netflix