“The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” Illustrates the Dangerous Power of Conspiracy Theories
A new docu-series on Netflix provides further evidence that ill-informed Internet investigators and self-appointed Web Sleuths harm more than they help
Published in
5 min readFeb 13, 2021
The latest trending Netflix series, “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” tells the story of the 2013 disappearance and death of Elisa Lam, a 21 year old Canadian student who went missing while travelling in Los Angeles. Lam was staying at the notorious Hotel Cecil in the insalubrious Skid Row area of L.A.
The hotel, opened in 1924, has been the site of numerous murders, suicides, drug-overdoses, rapes and serious physical assaults. It was, for a time, the “home” of infamous serial killer Richard Ramirez, more famously known at the Night Stalker, who terrorized Los Angeles through the summer of 1985. (That case was the focus of another of Netflix’s recent popular docu-series, “Night Stalker: Hunt for a Serial Killer”.)
