Netflix makes rare missteps in real crime with dirty show on Los Angeles’ Cecil Hotel

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 – via the mysterious death in 2013 of 21-year-old Canadian university student Elisa Lam. His body was found trapped in one of the water tanks at the top of the 19-story hotel that winter, and although the LA coroner ruled his death accidental, the bizarre circumstances surrounding his disappearance continue. to capture the imaginations of true crime enthusiasts and Angelenos.

Directed by Joe Berlinger (“Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes”), “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” claims to deconstruct the circumstances around Lam’s death, shedding light on an old mystery. Cecil’s sordid and violent past serves as a chilling backdrop to this particularly unsettling 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 latest offering since establishing itself as a destination for real crime. But it’s not really the best of the bunch. Because while there are essentially two stories here, neither is told in a terribly convincing way.

Initially, “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” is a fascinating journey through the city’s past, from its aspirations as a respectable business and leisure center to its garish displays of wealth and glaring class disparities.

Chronicle here is the century-old hotel’s decline from a leading tourist spot to a seedy crash pad for the belly of Los Angeles, including the chilling fact that “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez resided in the Cecil during his gruesome murder. in the summer of 1985. Built in 1924, the Cecil was once a trendy place for visitors, but 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 sits on the edge of a row of skids. It is also the last place where Lam was seen alive.

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The series, however, fails to convincingly interweave the hotel’s past with Lam’s disappearance, instead relying on the salacious aspects of both storylines to drive the narrative.

At the time of her death, Lam, the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a student at the University of British Columbia, was on vacation in Los Angeles, where she had found a hotel that suited her meager budget. Then the story gets blurry, before it gets downright macabre.

“The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” falls in love with the crime story aspects of the affair and feels more exploitative than revealing, like a production from the far reaches of basic cable – but with a bigger budget, more archive footage and an extended narrative spanning multiple episodes. And unlike other hit Netflix series that have taken nefarious cases from new angles (“Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer”; “Jeffery Epstein: Filthy Rich”), “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” fails to shed much light on the circumstances surrounding Lam’s death, although the story itself may not be familiar to many outside of Southern California. Netflix docu-series chronicling lesser-known tragedies, such as “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez” or “The Keepers”, should have been used as the guiding lights. They imbued the polarized aspects of their central cases with relentless research, nuanced subplots, and emotional attachment to the victims.

The story of Lam and the Cecil Hotel rarely goes this far, although it does include interviews with a former hotel manager, former residents, retired LAPD homicide detectives, historians and social media hobbyist detectives who are still obsessed with the case.

Lam’s disappearance and death became a concern among true crime podcasters and amateur Reddit sleuths after the video went viral of her bizarre behavior in an elevator at the Cecil Hotel on the day she went missing. The LAPD had released the footage, which was captured by an elevator surveillance camera, in hopes it might boost leads in the case. This has generated countless theories of armchair detectives seeking to explain Lam’s actions on tape and connect them to his death.

A maintenance worker investigating customer complaints about low pressure and discolored water coming out of their faucets led to the gruesome discovery of Lam’s body in a water tank on the roof of the aging building. The series makes a point of interviewing at least two guests from this era who remember the funny taste of water when brushing their teeth, repeating much of what they had previously said in clips from contemporary news included in the series.

Crazy details like these are the stock of fiction films and TV series, and in fact several – including “Castle”, “How to Get Away With Murder” and “American Horror Story: Hotel” – have had intrigue which recall 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.