Like most people here, I have watched the elevator video over and over again looking for any clues.
There are many things in the video that remain unclear to me regardless of how many times I watch it. However, there are several things that I am 100% certainty about. These are:
1. The item being noticed by people at the 2:28 part of the video is absolutely Elisa Lam's own left foot. I understand why people questioned whether it is another person's hand or another person's foot because to be her foot, she would have to have her feet positioned in a manner that most of us would find awkward.
However, I would like you to please pause the video at 1:30 or 1:31, you will see her do this same thing with her feet reversed. Therefore, what is not contestable is that she does this with her feet when she is turning.
What can be disputed of course is why she does this. It is odd if you use the average person as your gauge for normal. My personal opinion is that she is very loose jointed. Commonly, people call this double jointed. All it means is that her joints are held together more loosely than the average person. I am more loose jointed than average myself, although not as much as Elisa Lam I believe.
There are other indications that she is loose jointed besides the video. There are at least two pictures that indicate this as well. I assume everybody here is familiar with the picture in which she is wearing a black hooded coat (with hood up); under the coat is the same flannel jacket as in the released police photo of her; she is holding a baby blue camera in front of her face. In this photo, you can see that her thumb is positioned strangely on the camera. As soon as I saw this photo, I knew she was "double jointed."
Another photo where she appears to be possibly double jointed is one in which she is flashing the peace sign in a black and white photo where she has piggy tails. Her fingers that are flashing the V curve backwards at more than a straight angle. Most people's fingers do not do this.
I have no doubt that she (like me) could easily all her life bend over and touch the palms of her hands to the floor with her legs straight at any time without stretching, practicing, warming up, gymnastics training etc. If the police asked any school p.e. coach of hers this or anyone else who would have had cause to ask her to touch her toes, I know they will find this to be the case.
2. The second thing that is clear is that it is her. I have a hard time understanding people who claim that it does not look like her. All of the particular details of her face match including the slope of her eyebrows, proportions of the face, shape of the nose and chin, etcetera.
The fact that it is her is further confirmed by the fact that none of her family has come forward to state that it is not her. They would know best.
3. The next clear fact, that I think most people have concluded by now but just in case...the door to the elevator stayed open for so long because she pushed the DOOR HOLD button. You can clearly see her do this in the video. Numerous close up photos of the elevator button panel are available on the internet so it is rather easy to match up what she was pushing to what the actual buttons were.
Many people have said that a DOOR HOLD button shouldn't keep a door open that long. I think they are wrong. First evidence is the Chinese boys who traveled to the Cecil to investigate. They confirmed that the door stays open for exactly two minutes.
The second piece of evidence is weaker, however, I found a webcache on the internet entitled, "Hydraulic Elevator Data Forms," I don't know if I can post the url because I don't understand the details of the user rules for this forum. But on that webpage, which is a form that a professional elevator company has its clients fill out with their information and elevator setting preferences, there is a specific reference to the DOOR HOLD button.
The DOOR HOLD option gives two choices, switch or button. With the choice of button, it states, "max hold=120 seconds." Of course, this does not directly tell us anything about the elevator that Elisa rode in. However, it does add further evidence that two minutes is either industry standard or common or at least a possible amount of time for the DOOR HOLD button to keep an elevator door open. This sheet also indicates that the customer can choose how long they would like this button to keep the door open with two minutes being the maximum and no minimum being noted.
Elisa pressed this button once at 0:12 and then again (repeatedly) between 1:35 to 1:49.
This easily explains why the door wouldn't close. The Youtube video timer then shows the door beginning to close at about the 2:58 mark. Assuming the elevator was operating independently, this could mean one of two things. First, the hotel had the DOOR HOLD button set for about a minute. Or second, the elevator camera is motion activated.
If you watch the elevator door as it begins to open at 2:58, you will see that it seems to go from completely closed to several inches open. This probably indicates that the camera is motion detector activated and did not engage until it saw motion, so it missed the intial opening of the door for long enough that the first inch or two of the door opening were not recorded.
So the camera could have been inactive for a period of about a minute. The police will know this for sure if they are doing their jobs.
It is not necessary to postulate that somebody was nefariously controlling the elevator for their own amusement or to commit a crime against Elisa Lam.
4. I do not know if Elisa Lam was under the influence of alchohol or drugs. However, I think if you watch the video clearly, you can see that she was not drunk or drugged to a high degree.
I say this because of the movement she does at 0:57. She has her back to the elevator door. She steps quickly to position herself perfectly at the center of the open elevator door. She begins the motion of stepping backwards into the elevator and then (after she begins to step back) she quickly glances over her left shoulder to confirm where her body is relative to the open door, then she surely completes her motion.
Most people who are severely compromised by drugs or alcohol do not even have a clear grasp of area/depth of their surroundings in front of them which they can see, not to mention if they could have that much understanding of where they are relative to objects behind them which they are not looking at.
Of course, I think she would have had either direct or peripheral reference because of the mirror to her left front. However, even using that as a reference, her movements are too sure to be that of a severely compromised individual.
So I think that in fairness to her, I would like to see discounted the suggestions that this video shows that she crawled into the water tank because she was high or drunk.
5. The roof was accessible at all times to anyone who can climb a fire escape. Elisa Lam weighed 115 pounds. Most American men are strong enough to carry her up a fire escape if they want to.
I think that it is possible as well that the alarm was off for the roof. A long term resident could certainly have acquired a master key over time. I was in a museum last year and found a key on the floor. I turned it in to the front counter. They said it was a master key to for the museum and could open every door to the museum. I knew it was a museum key because it was very heavy duty and not like a regular house key.
Let's put it this way, if Elisa Lam could figure out how to get to the roof and into the tank (which is some people's hypothesis) then another resident or person could easily do the same thing with her dead body.
6. This ends the things I am sure about so far. In sum, there is no evidence from this video that there is anybody INTERACTING with Elisa Lam or visible to her.
What I still have questions about are:
a. Why did she push all of the buttons on that row? It is not fair to her to make assumptions about that. There could be any number of reasons. Maybe she has OCD. Maybe she is stupid (plenty of people are) about practical functioning of technical things like elevators. Maybe she read or heard somewhere that very day you should push a lot of buttons when you are a woman traveling alone so she decided to implement it. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I am not going to conclude any of these is the case without evidence, including the conclusion that she is crazy or high/drunk.
b. Why did she turn toward the elevator and make the strange hand gestures? I will say on this that when I am alone and something inanimate is not functioning like I would like it to, I often start yelling at it and gesture as well. It is just a way to release tension and frustration. I also open my hands, fingers splayed and move them around while saying things like, "Why won't you work. What the hell is wrong with you?" That doesn't make me crazy. I know the computer, remote control, riding lawn mower, dead car battery, etcetera can't actually hear me. It just makes me feel better to say it. My boyfriend often actually hits items that aren't working and breaks them. He broke his computer because he punched it because it wasn't cooperating with him. I don't hit stuff I am mad at because that just makes the situation worse. But regardless, neither of us would crawl into a 10 foot water tank. I think it is unfair to assume that she is crazy when it is an obvious option that she could have just been blowing off a little steam complaining to the elevator about why it wasn't working for her. This isn't the only option to explain her hand gestures and talking, however, it is the simplest. And she was directly looking at the elevator door or control panel while she did it.
You've never yelled or even cussed at a bolt that was stuck/fused on your brake pad or something like that? I never dated a guy who didn't cuss and yell at a vehicle at least once while he was working on it. Does that make you a crazy person who would kill yourself in some bizarre manner?
c. Why was she hiding in the corner of the elevator? I don't know. Maybe she heard something?
Something I would like to know is if the DOOR HOLD causes the elevator to make a chiming sound. She has her hands up to her head at 1:22 and I can't tell why. Was she covering her ears? Was she holding her head in consternation? Was she admiring herself in the mirror?
My greatest wish for Elisa Lam is that the police do not conclude that she put herself in the tank. I think somebody else put her there. I do not believe that she was (at least at the time of the video) drunk or high enough to put herself there. I don't think she was likely depressed enough (when she first walks in the elevator, she seems to be in a pretty good mood). And I don't think her history indicate that she is a crazy person.
It is also not common sense for the average woman to kill herself this way.
When you find a woman's body dead in a sealed space, the chances are 99.999999% that somebody else put her there to conceal their crime. It would be very unfair to her to assume otherwise out of convenience or ineptitude.
This leads me to another thing which bothers me, and that is the competence of medical examiners and coroners. Did anybody else watch the Frontline expose about the necessary certifications to be hired to be an m.e. or coroner? Please watch it. It is frightening that a completely incompetent idiot could be the person who has the legal right to make important official pronouncements about a person's death.
There is this similar report from NPR...
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/02/133403760/coroners-dont-need-degrees-to-determine-death
In my opinion, it would be a disgusting insult to every human being who has to rely on the authorities for justice not to investigate her death as a homicide unless somebody comes up with extremely firm evidence that it was a result of her own misadventure or suicide. If it were me, I would hope that if I was found dead in a sealed container, that people wouldn't just blow it off as my own doing.
We are not permitted to take the law into our own hands. This means that we are required to rely on law enforcement and courts to protect us and administer justice. This system regularly puts convicted criminals back on the streets to prey on all of us again. We are all at the mercy of this system. This girl was staying in a hotel with convicted predators. Released predators walk every street in every city in our country. Given this, the least they can do is give this girl the benefit of the doubt that she didn't crawl into a water tank and close the lid over herself considering the more likely scenario that somebody else put her there. That just adds insult to injury, doesn't it?
