Crime Scene The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel | The New Yorker

This four-part, tabloidish documentary quickly shot to the top of Netflix’s most-watched list when it débuted, last month. The fervor makes sense in an age of zealous true-crime rubbernecking; the show investigates a hotly debated unsolved mystery—the death, at the downtown Los Angeles hotel the Cecil, of a guest named Elisa Lam, who, in 2013, was found inside one of the hotel’s rooftop water tanks—and the Cecil’s haunted past. The story is a tragic tale of a woman struggling with her mental health, and of a neighborhood (Los Angeles’s Skid Row) that has been systematically neglected with policies that have confined the city’s homeless population to a small area. But the documentary withholds this information until the last minute, instead indulging a series of “Web sleuths,” who became obsessed with the Lam case and are given bizarrely free rein to unspool their wild theories. Many of the sleuths ultimately apologize for turning one woman’s devastating death into viral content, but their mea culpas show how retelling the story in this sensational format might be repeating the harmful cycle once again.