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The Fetishism of True Crime: What Web Sleuths and Medieval Witch Hunters Have in Common
Several years ago, I watched a short video that had gone viral. The footage was taken from the camera of a hotel elevator and in it, a young woman seemed to be running or hiding from someone. Several times, she peered slowly outside of the elevator, as if checking to see if she was being followed, before darting back into the corner so she wouldn’t be seen. She pressed all of the buttons rapidly. She moved erratically. I remember thinking she must have been in some sort of danger. I didn’t learn anything else about the woman in the video until years later.
Last month, Netflix released a four-part documentary series called Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. The series told the story of Elisa Lam, a 21 year old college student who went missing in Los Angeles in 2013. Months after she was first reported missing, her body was found in one of the Cecil Hotel rooftop water tanks. Her death was ultimately ruled an accidental drowning, which would usually mean the case itself was closed; after all, just because we don’t know how exactly she ended up in the tank, doesn’t mean it wasn’t her own doing. When someone drowns in the ocean during a midnight swim, there is very rarely video evidence of the drowning itself. But due almost entirely to a lack of understanding — and, honestly, even an interest in understanding — of Elisa’s bipolar disorder, her name has remained in the mouths of true crime enthusiasts for years after her death.
Plenty of people have discussed The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel and how it failed to truly focus on Elisa Lam rather than the superstitious conspiracy theories that sprouted up around her. Personally, I’m less bothered by that than many others; after all, the documentary isn’t called The Vanishing of Elisa Lam. For better or worse, the Cecil Hotel itself is the true protagonist of the series, not Elisa. My outrage — and I was outraged throughout most of the series — lies not with the lack of focus on Elisa Lam’s personhood, but with the amount of spotlight and sympathy given to the group of armchair detectives who, led by an obsession with a person they knew nothing about, expanded what was an explainable tragedy into an explosion of conspiracy and superstition comparable to witch-hunters in medieval Europe.
