The Girl Whose Rotting Body Was Discovered In A Hotel Water Tank

The Girl Whose Rotting Body Was Discovered In A Hotel Water Tank

Stay tuned for the tragic story of Elisa Lam and her family, who, nine years later, still can’t find justice for their daughter! Subscribe to Anna Solves for more true crime.

Elisa Lam was a Chinese-Canadian student who was visiting Los Angeles, when something really odd happened to her inside the Cecil Hotel. To this day, the police reports remain ambivalent, and it’s still unclear how Elisa died, and who k****d her. It’s a tragic story which deserves to be further explored. That being said, let’s dive in!

Elisa Lam was an only child and a quiet girl who was interested in fashion and literature. Her parents had come from Hong Kong, but she was born in Vancouver, Canada. Her parents opened up an Asian restaurant in Vancouver, then helped keep up the popular Chinese restaurant Paul’s.

As a teenager, Elisa was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression. Bipolar disorder manifests itself as depression alternating with moments of abnormally elevated mood, called mania. She had a long list of prescription meds she had to take, but she lived a peaceful life with her family, and she was never violent, nor did she attempt to take her own life.

In 2010, 19-year-old Elisa started recording her struggles with mental illness alongside pictures of models. She had a blog named “Ether Fields” on Blogspot, and she kept it running for two years. One of her entries just said: “I spent about two days in bed hating myself.”

Many of Elisa’s entries revolved around her depression. She was critical of herself for not running, for overeating, and for making excuses to do so.

In a January 2012 blog post, Elisa wrote that a "relapse" at the start of the current school term forced her to drop several classes, leaving her feeling "so utterly directionless and lost." She titled her post, "You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life" after a quotation from novelist Chuck Palahniuk.

Elisa also used that disturbing quote as an epigraph for her blog. She worried that her transcript would look suspicious with so many withdrawals and that it would result in her being unable to continue her studies and attend graduate school.

A little over two years after Elisa had started blogging, she announced she would be abandoning her blog for another she had started - this time on Tumblr, called "Nouvelle-Nouveau". Its content mostly consisted of fashion photos, quotes and a few posts in Elisa’s own words. She used the same quote as an epigraph. Keep watching to find out how this criminal case ends.

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