The Death of Elisa Lam

Overview

The water tasted funny. That was the first complaint. Guests at the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles noticed it in early February 2013 — the water from their taps had a strange color, an odd taste, low pressure. Some described it as “sweetish.” Others just said it was dark. The hotel maintenance team couldn’t figure out the problem. The water had been like this for days, maybe weeks. People had been showering in it. Brushing their teeth. Drinking it from the tap at 3 a.m. when they woke up parched in the California heat.

On February 19, 2013, a maintenance worker climbed to the Cecil Hotel’s roof to inspect the four large water cisterns that supplied the building’s plumbing. He opened one of the tanks and found the body of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian tourist from Vancouver, floating face-up in the water. She had been dead for approximately nineteen days. For nearly three weeks, hundreds of hotel guests had been drinking, cooking with, and bathing in water that contained a decomposing human body.

This alone would have been a horror story. But what made Elisa Lam’s death an all-consuming internet phenomenon — one of the defining mysteries of the 2010s, a case that launched a thousand YouTube videos and Reddit threads and amateur detective careers — was a four-minute surveillance video from the Cecil Hotel elevator, released by the LAPD on February 13 as part of their missing person investigation. The footage, shot from a ceiling-mounted camera on January 31 (the last day Lam was seen alive), shows her behaving in a way that defies easy explanation. She presses every button on the panel. She steps in and out of the elevator repeatedly. She appears to hide in the corner, as if from someone just out of frame. She leans out of the door and makes elaborate gestures with her hands — waving, flexing, conducting some invisible conversation with someone or something the camera cannot see.

The elevator doors, which should have closed, remain open the entire time she is in view.

Then she walks away. The doors close. And Elisa Lam vanishes from the living world.

Within days of the video’s release, it had been viewed millions of times. The internet had found its new obsession — and the Cecil Hotel, a building with a body count that would be cartoonish if it weren’t real, became the most famous cursed building in America.

Who Was Elisa Lam?

Before she became a hashtag and a Wikipedia article and a cautionary tale about internet sleuthing, Elisa Lam was a person. This is easy to forget, and it’s worth not forgetting.

She was born on April 30, 1991, in Vancouver, British Columbia, the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong. She was a student at the University of British Columbia, studying there while living at home with her parents, David and Yinna Lam, who ran a restaurant in the Burnaby area. By all accounts, she was bright, creative, introspective, and funny. She maintained a Tumblr blog called “Nouvelle-Nouveau” where she posted about fashion, art, her studies, and — with sometimes raw honesty — her struggles with depression and mental illness.

Lam had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression. She was prescribed several medications, including Wellbutrin (bupropion), Lamictal (lamotrigine), Seroquel (quetiapine), and Effexor (venlafaxine). Her relationship with these medications was complicated, which is neither unusual nor shameful — medication management for bipolar disorder is notoriously difficult, and many patients cycle through periods of compliance and non-compliance. Toxicology reports after her death would reveal that some of her medications were present in trace amounts or absent entirely from her system, indicating she had not been taking them consistently in the days before she died.

In January 2013, Lam set out on a solo trip down the West Coast. She planned to visit San Diego, Los Angeles, and possibly San Francisco and Santa Cruz. She traveled by Amtrak and bus. She posted on social media. She seemed excited. Her parents spoke with her regularly by phone and expected her home by February 1.

She checked into the Cecil Hotel on January 26.

Why the Cecil?

This is one of those questions that seems sinister in retrospect but has a perfectly mundane answer. The Cecil Hotel — rebranded as “Stay on Main” for its hostel-style budget floors, though it remained the Cecil in every way that mattered — offered cheap rooms in a central downtown location. For a student traveling on a budget, it was a logical choice. Lam originally stayed in a shared hostel room but was moved to a private room after her roommates complained about “odd behavior.” (The nature of this behavior was never specified in detail, but given what we now know about her mental state, it was likely related to her bipolar disorder.)

She was not the kind of person who would have known the Cecil Hotel’s history. Most guests weren’t. But the Cecil’s history knew her.

The Cecil Hotel: A Building That Eats People

The Cecil Hotel opened in 1927, a grand 700-room establishment at 640 South Main Street, built during Los Angeles’s boom era as a luxury destination for businessmen and tourists. The Great Depression hit two years later, and the Cecil’s neighborhood began its long slide into what would become Skid Row — one of the largest concentrations of homelessness in the United States. The hotel slid with it.

By the mid-twentieth century, the Cecil had become a residential hotel catering to transients, the down-on-their-luck, and people who had nowhere else to go. It also became, with a consistency that strains coincidence, a place where people died violently.

The confirmed body count at or connected to the Cecil Hotel is genuinely staggering:

• 1931: Manhattan resident W.K. Norton checked in and took poison. He survived. He came back in 1932 and succeeded.
• 1934: Former Army Medical Corps sergeant Louis D. Borden was found dead in his room with his throat slashed. Ruled a suicide.
• 1937: Grace E. Magro fell from a ninth-floor window, landing on a telephone wire that may have broken her fall. She died at the hospital.
• 1938: Marine fireman Roy Thompson jumped from the top floor.
• 1939: Navy officer Erwin C. Neblett was found dead of poison in his room.
• 1944: Dorothy Jean Purcell gave birth in her room, believed the baby was dead (it wasn’t), and threw the newborn out the window.
• 1947: Robert Smith jumped from the seventh floor.
• 1954: Helen Gurnee leaped from the seventh floor. The same year, “Pigeon Goldie” Osgood — a retired telephone operator beloved in the neighborhood for feeding pigeons in Pershing Square — was found raped, beaten, and stabbed to death in her room. Her killer, Jacques B. Ehlinger, was convicted in 1964.
• 1962: Pauline Otton jumped (or was pushed, per a brief investigation) from the ninth floor and landed on George Gianinni, a pedestrian walking on the sidewalk below. Both died.

And then there were the two serial killers.

Richard Ramirez

Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, lived at the Cecil Hotel during his 1985 murder spree across Los Angeles. He paid $14 a night for a top-floor room. He would come home from his nocturnal attacks — which included murder, rape, and mutilation — and dispose of his bloodied clothing in the dumpster outside the hotel. Other residents later recalled his odd hours and the fact that he walked around the hallways in his underwear. Nobody reported anything. It was the Cecil.

Ramirez was eventually identified, chased down by an angry mob in East Los Angeles, and convicted of 13 murders. He died of lymphoma on death row in 2013 — the same year Elisa Lam was found.

Jack Unterweger

Less well known in America but equally chilling: Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer and literary celebrity, stayed at the Cecil Hotel in 1991 while on assignment as a journalist covering crime in Los Angeles. During his stay, he murdered three sex workers, strangling them with their own bras — his signature method. Unterweger had previously served 15 years in Austria for murdering an 18-year-old sex worker in 1974 and had been released as a model of rehabilitation, celebrated as a writer and intellectual. He was eventually extradited to Austria, convicted of nine additional murders, and hanged himself in his cell with a drawstring from his pants.

He, too, had chosen the Cecil.

The building’s reputation was so grim that when the hotel tried to rebrand its budget floors as “Stay on Main” in the 2010s, nobody who knew its history was fooled. The Cecil was the Cecil. It attracted darkness the way a porch light attracts moths, except the moths were serial killers and the light was whatever nameless energy pulses through a building that has absorbed that much human misery.

It was this hotel that Elisa Lam checked into on January 26, 2013.

The Disappearance

Lam’s parents grew worried when she failed to check in by phone on January 31. They contacted the LAPD, who opened a missing persons case. Officers searched the Cecil Hotel, including the roof, but did not check inside the water tanks. This would later become a significant point of controversy — the tanks were on the roof, the roof was searched, but the tanks themselves were apparently not opened.

For two weeks, Lam was simply gone. The LAPD distributed flyers. They canvassed the Skid Row area. They got nothing.

On February 13, in an attempt to generate leads, the LAPD released the elevator surveillance footage to the public.

They got leads. They also got an avalanche.

The Elevator Video

It is difficult to overstate the impact of this footage. In the taxonomy of viral video, the Elisa Lam elevator tape occupies a category almost entirely its own — it’s not graphic, not violent, not even particularly dramatic in any conventional sense. It is simply wrong. Something about it hits the limbic system before the rational brain can catch up. You watch it and you feel dread, the particular kind of dread that comes from watching someone behave in a way that doesn’t map onto any behavior you’ve seen before.

The video, shot from a fixed camera in the upper corner of the elevator, runs approximately four minutes (though the original, unedited version may have been longer — the LAPD has acknowledged the released version was slowed down and had a timestamp removed, fueling further speculation). Here is what it shows:

Lam enters the elevator and presses multiple buttons on the panel — not just one or two, but what appears to be nearly every button. She then steps to the side and waits. The doors do not close. She steps forward and peers out of the elevator to the left, then retreats back inside. She does this several times, moving with a mix of caution and purpose, as if checking whether someone is in the hallway.

She steps entirely out of the elevator, walks out of frame to the left, then walks back and reenters. She again presses buttons. She again waits. The doors still do not close.

She steps out again, this time standing just outside the door in a posture that can only be described as “hiding” — pressed against the wall, as if trying to avoid being seen by someone approaching from the left. She holds this position, then slides back in.

She begins making hand gestures. This is the part that haunts people. Standing in the doorway, she extends her arms and moves her hands in fluid, deliberate motions — fingers flexing, wrists rotating, arms sweeping. The gestures don’t look like sign language. They don’t look like someone directing someone else. They look like… nothing you can categorize. Some viewers have described them as “ritualistic.” Others see a person working through a thought process with her hands, the way some people gesture while talking to themselves. Others see the disinhibited motor activity of a manic episode.

She walks away. After the hand gestures, Lam steps out of the elevator and walks out of frame to the left. She does not return. The elevator doors, which had remained stubbornly open for the duration of her presence, now close. The elevator begins moving to other floors.

That’s it. That’s the video. And it broke the internet’s brain.

What People Saw — and What Was Actually There

The video’s virality hinged on the gap between what the footage showed and what viewers perceived. The human brain is an aggressive pattern-matching machine, and when it encounters behavior it can’t categorize, it fills in the gaps with narrative. Here are the narratives that emerged:

“She’s hiding from someone.” The way Lam presses herself against the wall and peers around corners led many viewers to conclude she was being pursued by someone just out of frame — a stalker, an attacker, someone who followed her into the elevator and then waited in the hallway. The fact that the elevator doors remained open seemed to suggest tampering, as if someone was holding the door from the hallway.

“She’s communicating with something invisible.” The hand gestures launched a cottage industry of paranormal interpretation. The Cecil Hotel’s history of death made it easy to frame Lam as someone in contact with a supernatural entity — a ghost, a demon, the accumulated psychic residue of a century of violent death. This theory was particularly popular on Tumblr and in paranormal forums.

“She’s being controlled.” A smaller but vocal contingent saw the video as evidence of mind control — government experimentation, a drug-induced state, some external force directing Lam’s movements. This theory intersected with long-standing conspiracy narratives about CIA behavioral modification programs and led to elaborate (and entirely evidence-free) speculation about government testing on vulnerable targets.

“The elevator was tampered with.” The doors staying open for so long struck many viewers as mechanically impossible without outside interference. In reality, when multiple buttons are pressed simultaneously (as Lam clearly does), many elevator models enter a kind of hold state. The doors remain open until the button sequence resolves. Additionally, some Cecil Hotel elevators had a “door hold” button that, when pressed, would keep the doors open for an extended period. This is the boring explanation. It is also almost certainly the correct one.

The video was, in essence, a Rorschach test. People saw in it whatever they were primed to see. If you came to the video believing in ghosts, you saw a ghost. If you came believing in government conspiracies, you saw mind control. If you came with a working knowledge of bipolar disorder, you saw a young woman in the grip of a psychotic or manic episode doing what people in psychotic or manic episodes sometimes do — behaving in ways that seem purposeful but are disconnected from observable reality.

The Discovery

On February 19, 2013 — nineteen days after Lam was last seen, six days after the video’s release — a maintenance worker named Santiago Lopez climbed to the Cecil Hotel’s roof to investigate ongoing water complaints. The hotel’s water was supplied by four cylindrical tanks, each roughly eight feet tall and four feet in diameter, accessible by a short ladder on the roof. Lopez opened the hatch on one of the tanks and found Elisa Lam’s body floating in the water.

She was naked. Her clothes — the same outfit visible in the elevator video, plus her underwear — were floating in the water beside her. Her cell phone and room key were not found in the tank. (Her phone was never recovered; some theorists point to this as evidence of foul play, though a phone could have been lost anywhere in the hotel or on Skid Row.) Her watch, which was found in the tank, had stopped.

The Los Angeles Fire Department had to cut a hole in the side of the tank to remove her body. The tank’s opening was too narrow for a body to be easily extracted the way it had entered.

The discovery prompted immediate questions that would fuel conspiracy theories for years:

How did she get to the roof? The Cecil Hotel’s rooftop was ostensibly off-limits to guests. Access required either going through a locked door with an alarm, climbing a fire escape, or taking a specific route through maintenance areas. However — and this is the detail conspiracy theorists consistently ignore or downplay — hotel employees told investigators that the alarm on the rooftop door was frequently broken and had been non-functional for extended periods. The fire escape was accessible. The roof was not the impregnable fortress that viral Reddit posts made it out to be.

How did she get into the tank? The tanks were accessed by a ladder on the roof. They had lids, but the lids were not locked — they were heavy but could be lifted by one person. At least one tank lid was found open when maintenance workers arrived. A person could climb the ladder, lift the lid, and lower themselves into the water. Getting out would be considerably harder, especially if the water level was high and the sides were slick — which is, tragically, likely what happened.

Why was she naked? Paradoxical undressing is a well-documented phenomenon associated with both hypothermia and certain psychiatric states, including severe mania. People experiencing extreme confusion or psychotic episodes sometimes remove their clothing. It is disturbing but not mysterious.

The Official Ruling

The Los Angeles County Coroner’s office completed their investigation and issued their findings in June 2013. The manner of death: accidental drowning. The cause of death: drowning, with bipolar disorder listed as a significant contributing factor.

The toxicology report found trace amounts of some of her prescribed medications (including Lamictal, Wellbutrin, and Seroquel at sub-therapeutic levels) and noted the absence of others, indicating inconsistent medication use. No recreational drugs were found. No alcohol. No date-rape drugs. No evidence of trauma. No evidence of sexual assault.

The coroner’s report was not ambiguous. It did not hedge. It concluded that Elisa Lam, in the grip of a bipolar episode exacerbated by medication non-compliance, accessed the hotel’s roof through inadequately secured access points, climbed into a water tank (possibly believing she was swimming, hiding, or acting on psychotic ideation), and drowned when she was unable to climb out.

This is the answer. It is not a satisfying answer. But medicine and reality are under no obligation to provide satisfying answers.

The Conspiracy Theories

The official ruling did not stop the theorizing. If anything, it accelerated it. The Elisa Lam case became a case study in how the internet processes ambiguity — which is to say, badly.

The Murder Theory

The most common alternative theory is that Lam was murdered and her body placed in the water tank by a killer or killers. Proponents point to the difficulty of rooftop access (overstated, as discussed), the tank’s heavy lid (liftable by one person), the missing cell phone (explainable by any number of mundane scenarios), and the lack of clear motive for a mentally ill person to climb into a water tank (which reveals a misunderstanding of how psychotic episodes work, not a gap in the evidence).

No murder suspect has ever been identified. No evidence of a second person on the roof has ever been found. No DNA evidence, no forensic evidence, nothing. The murder theory requires a killer who left absolutely zero physical trace while committing one of the most logistically unusual murders imaginable — carrying or coercing a victim to a rooftop, into a water tank, with no witnesses in a building full of residents, while also somehow gaining access to the same “impossible to reach” rooftop that they argue Lam couldn’t have reached alone.

The Hotel Cover-Up

A related theory suggests the Cecil Hotel (or its owners, or its management) covered up the circumstances of Lam’s death to avoid liability. Why were the alarms broken? Why wasn’t the roof better secured? Why didn’t the initial search check the tanks? These are legitimate questions about negligence, and the Lam family did file a wrongful death lawsuit against the hotel (which was eventually dismissed). But negligence and cover-up are different things. The hotel being poorly maintained and irresponsible is not the same as the hotel being complicit in murder.

The LAM-ELISA Tuberculosis Connection

This one is genuinely wild, and it illustrates how the conspiracy-minded brain works. Around the time of Lam’s death, there was a tuberculosis outbreak in the Skid Row area near the Cecil Hotel. A common diagnostic test for tuberculosis is called the LAM-ELISA test — an acronym for Lipoarabinomannan Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay. LAM-ELISA. Elisa Lam.

Conspiracy theorists seized on this coincidence with the fervor of medieval monks discovering a weeping statue. Was Lam killed as part of a biological weapons test? Was her body placed in the water supply to spread tuberculosis? Was the TB outbreak caused by her death? Was the name coincidence a coded message from… someone… to… someone else?

The LAM-ELISA test is named after lipoarabinomannan, a molecule found in mycobacterial cell walls, and ELISA, a standard immunological assay methodology developed in 1971 and used in thousands of diagnostic tests across medicine. The name has nothing to do with any person named Elisa. The tuberculosis outbreak was caused by the same conditions that always cause tuberculosis outbreaks in Skid Row — overcrowding, poor sanitation, and a vulnerable homeless population. The coincidence is exactly that.

But coincidences are boring. Conspiracy is not.

The Paranormal Theory

The Cecil Hotel’s history made supernatural explanations almost inevitable. The building had seen so much death that even skeptics could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the sheer statistical improbability of it all. Was the hotel haunted? Was Elisa Lam communicating with spirits in that elevator? Was she possessed, lured, or consumed by whatever dark energy had accumulated in the building’s walls over nearly a century of violence?

These theories are, of course, unfalsifiable and unverifiable by definition. They belong to the realm of belief rather than evidence. What can be said is that the behavior in the elevator video, while eerie, is consistent with documented presentations of bipolar psychosis and does not require a supernatural explanation.

The Amateur Detectives and Their Damage

The Elisa Lam case arrived at a specific moment in internet culture — the early 2010s, when Reddit, Tumblr, and YouTube had created massive communities of amateur investigators who believed that crowdsourced analysis could solve cases that stumped professionals. This was the era of “we did it, Reddit” optimism, before the disastrous Boston Marathon bombing misidentification taught the internet (briefly, incompletely) that armchair detective work could ruin innocent lives.

The Elisa Lam case produced its own victim of crowdsourced justice: Pablo “Morbid” Vergara, a Mexican death metal musician who had stayed at the Cecil Hotel in 2012 — a year before Lam’s death. Morbid, whose music contained violent imagery (as death metal does, by genre definition), was identified by amateur investigators as a possible suspect based on nothing more than his having stayed at the same hotel at a different time and his having an aesthetic that internet detectives found alarming.

Morbid was harassed relentlessly. He received death threats. His social media was flooded with accusations. He was doxxed. He was, by every account, a deeply sensitive person despite his musical persona, and the harassment campaign devastated him. He had been in Mexico at the time of Lam’s death. He had no connection to her whatsoever. He had committed no crime. The internet had simply decided he looked like someone who could have done it, and that was enough.

The harassment contributed to Morbid’s mental health decline. He died by suicide in 2015. He was 35 years old.

The Elisa Lam case destroyed two lives, not one.

What Actually Happened

Reconstructing the most likely sequence of events is not difficult if you’re willing to accept an explanation that is sad rather than sinister.

Elisa Lam was a young woman with bipolar disorder traveling alone, far from her support system, in an unfamiliar city, while not consistently taking her prescribed medications. These are known risk factors for a bipolar crisis. The fact that her roommates at the Cecil had complained about unusual behavior suggests that her mental state was already deteriorating in the days before January 31.

On the night of January 31, she experienced what mental health professionals who have reviewed the case describe as a psychotic or severe manic episode. The elevator footage — the button-pressing, the hiding, the gesturing — is consistent with the disordered thinking, paranoia, and agitated behavior that characterize such episodes. She may have believed someone was following her. She may have been responding to hallucinations. She may have been in a state of mind so far from baseline that her actions, while appearing purposeful, were driven by internal logic that had no correspondence to external reality.

At some point after leaving the elevator, she made her way to the roof — through a broken alarm door, up a fire escape, through some combination of access points that were supposed to be secured but weren’t. On the roof, she encountered the water tanks. What happened next is unknowable in its specifics — did she think she was getting into a pool? Was she trying to hide? Did she simply climb in, driven by psychotic ideation? — but the result is documented. She entered the tank. The water was deep. The sides were slick. The opening was above her. She could not get out.

She drowned.

Her body remained in the tank for nineteen days, during which the hotel’s water supply delivered her decomposing remains to every tap, shower, and drinking glass in the building. The hotel’s negligence — broken alarms, unsecured roof access, unlocked water tanks, a maintenance staff that didn’t think to check the tanks during a missing persons search — created the conditions for both her death and its gruesome aftermath.

The Netflix Effect

In February 2021, Netflix released “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,” a four-part docuseries directed by Joe Berlinger. The series examined Lam’s case in the context of the Cecil Hotel’s broader history and, to its credit, spent significant time exploring the harm caused by internet amateur investigators. Berlinger interviewed web sleuths who had participated in the online investigation and confronted them with the consequences of their actions, including the harassment of Morbid.

The documentary was widely watched and reignited public interest in the case. It also, somewhat inevitably, reignited the conspiracy theories, despite the series’ clear conclusion that the official ruling of accidental drowning was correct.

The Cecil Hotel itself was purchased by a developer in 2014 with plans to convert it into a mixed-use property with affordable housing and a boutique hotel component. Renovations were complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, historical preservation requirements, and the building’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity to resist rehabilitation. As of this writing, the building’s future remains in flux — much like the public’s ability to accept what happened to Elisa Lam.

The Real Tragedy

The conspiracy theories surrounding Elisa Lam’s death are, at their core, a refusal to accept that mental illness can be fatal. They are a refusal to accept that a young woman’s brain could betray her so completely that she would climb into a water tank on a hotel roof and drown. They are a refusal to accept that the explanation is not a murder mystery or a government plot or a paranormal event but something much worse: a healthcare system that failed to protect a vulnerable person, a hotel that failed to maintain basic safety measures, and a disease that killed a 21-year-old who should have had decades of life ahead of her.

Elisa Lam’s Tumblr blog, still accessible in archived form, offers a window into a mind that was creative, self-aware, and in pain. She wrote about her depression with clarity and honesty. She knew she was struggling. She was trying.

“I spent about two days in bed hating myself,” she wrote in one post. She wrote about wanting to travel, about wanting to be brave, about the gap between the person she was and the person she wanted to be.

She was brave enough to take a solo trip down the West Coast. She checked into a hotel that had hosted serial killers and suicides for ninety years, a hotel where the alarms didn’t work and the water tanks didn’t lock and nobody checked the roof when a guest went missing. She was failed by systems — medical, institutional, infrastructural — that were supposed to keep people like her safe.

The mystery of the Cecil Hotel elevator video is not a mystery. It’s a tragedy wearing a mystery’s clothes. The internet put on its detective hat and went looking for a killer, and in doing so, it missed the actual villain: the banal, systemic, deeply American negligence that lets a sick person wander onto a roof and drown in a building’s water supply while hundreds of people sleep below.

Elisa Lam deserved better than the Cecil Hotel. She deserved better than the internet’s obsession with her death. She deserved better than conspiracy theories that strip her of her personhood and turn her into a puzzle to be solved.

She was not a puzzle. She was a person. And she is dead because the systems that should have caught her did not.

Sources & Further Reading

• Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, Case Report: Elisa Lam, Case No. 2013-01004 (June 2013)
• Kim, Victoria. “Elisa Lam death ruled accidental drowning.” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2013.
• Smith, Dakota. “Body found in water tank at Cecil Hotel.” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2013.
• “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.” Directed by Joe Berlinger, Netflix, 2021.
• Ryzik, Melena. “At the Cecil Hotel, a Troubled History Gets the Netflix Treatment.” The New York Times, February 10, 2021.
• Harmon, Amy. “Elisa Lam and the Cecil Hotel: The Web Sleuths and Their Theories.” The New York Times, March 2021.
• Mikkelson, David. “Elisa Lam / Cecil Hotel.” Snopes, February 2013 (updated 2021).
• “Bipolar Disorder and Psychosis.” National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), nami.org.
• Levin, Sam. “Cecil Hotel: Inside the dark history of Los Angeles’ most notorious building.” The Guardian, February 2021.