Skip to main content
The unethical mess of 'The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,' Netflix's most popular true crime show
FacebookTwitterEmail
A view of the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles in 2017.MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images
When Netflix’s latest true crime show, “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,” dropped Wednesday, it immediately shot to the number one spot on its most-watched list.
It’s understandable. Even if you don't think you know the case, you probably do. You’ve likely seen the grainy clip of 21-year-old Elisa Lam ducking in and out of an elevator, looking frantic and upset. Or you remember the 2013 headlines about the missing guest found dead in a Los Angeles hotel’s rooftop water tank a few weeks after she was last spotted in that surveillance video. It’s perhaps the most viral missing-person case of the internet age, with a plethora of details that made Lam’s death almost cinematic in its strangeness.