"Theories only" - thread
- Thread starter summer_breeze
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it's not a special type of drowning... rapid only means the death came quickly once the event began... like somebody might shoot themselves and die quickly vs bleeding to death... When my brother died in a car crash, his death was "instantaneous", he died on scene after the event the other passenger lived for almost an hour afterward and his death was classified as delayed
Which was precisely my initial point. I never said it was a "special" type of drowning. You said it wasn't noted anywhere in the AR that it was "rapid," which was wrong. Sorry about your brother.
CircuitGuy
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Here is my plausible made-up story, my guess:
She is playing around with a hotel employee. She breaks a minor rule (e.g. wondering into a employees-only area) and runs from the employee in a teasing way when caught. She does this for three reasons:
She manages to get someone chasing her again. This time she gets to the roof, using some trick she learned from the same person who told her the elevator hold trick. This time employees keep chasing her. She imagines they’re angry. The danger, attention, and thought that she’s crossed a line excite her. Maybe subconsciously she hopes an avuncular security guard will catch her and see this as a cry for help, and he’ll shower her with kindly attention. Or maybe it will be young man who will be easily sweet-talked into breaking the rules just for her. Or it could be an angry young man who will take advantage of her. Or maybe it’s a police officer, and she’ll be jailed, and it will be like an international mini-incident. She’s scared, but she loves attention and the fact she doesn’t know what will happen. She climbs the water tower ladder, intending to hide up there and double back, just as in the elevator. But it’s hard to hide there. She sees the hatch. It's hard, but not impossible to open. She doesn’t know it’s a water tank. She imagines it’s some kind of service crawlway, storage, or something like that. She jumps in, without even knowing it’s a deep container of water with no way out. It’s half a game, and half an imagined action movie. Once she’s in the water she can’t get out of the tank. She takes off her clothes to facilitate swimming. She eventually drowns.
The guards who chased her give up the cat-and-mouse game quickly. They think nothing of it until she goes missing. They don’t want to be blamed. When she turns up dead, they feel awful. They probably should have followed up. People think of 21-y/o’s now the way people used to think of 17 y/o’s back in the 90s when I was 17. It’s unfortunately more so for females because sexism has not improved any. At best people will say they should have done more to looks after this poor lost “child”. At worst, they’ll suspect they murdered her. They and their colleagues know they’re innocent. They cover up the fact that he was chased her around the time she went missing. The police conclude it was an accident, too, and resist releasing anything that would make the tragedy any more of a public spectacle than it already is.
If I’m right in even half my guesses, I would consider that good. It’s all guessing.
She is playing around with a hotel employee. She breaks a minor rule (e.g. wondering into a employees-only area) and runs from the employee in a teasing way when caught. She does this for three reasons:
- Youthful goofiness while on vacation
- Flirting, inviting the employee to “chase” her
- A manic episode giving her an urge to run around and engage in risky attention-seeking behavior
She manages to get someone chasing her again. This time she gets to the roof, using some trick she learned from the same person who told her the elevator hold trick. This time employees keep chasing her. She imagines they’re angry. The danger, attention, and thought that she’s crossed a line excite her. Maybe subconsciously she hopes an avuncular security guard will catch her and see this as a cry for help, and he’ll shower her with kindly attention. Or maybe it will be young man who will be easily sweet-talked into breaking the rules just for her. Or it could be an angry young man who will take advantage of her. Or maybe it’s a police officer, and she’ll be jailed, and it will be like an international mini-incident. She’s scared, but she loves attention and the fact she doesn’t know what will happen. She climbs the water tower ladder, intending to hide up there and double back, just as in the elevator. But it’s hard to hide there. She sees the hatch. It's hard, but not impossible to open. She doesn’t know it’s a water tank. She imagines it’s some kind of service crawlway, storage, or something like that. She jumps in, without even knowing it’s a deep container of water with no way out. It’s half a game, and half an imagined action movie. Once she’s in the water she can’t get out of the tank. She takes off her clothes to facilitate swimming. She eventually drowns.
The guards who chased her give up the cat-and-mouse game quickly. They think nothing of it until she goes missing. They don’t want to be blamed. When she turns up dead, they feel awful. They probably should have followed up. People think of 21-y/o’s now the way people used to think of 17 y/o’s back in the 90s when I was 17. It’s unfortunately more so for females because sexism has not improved any. At best people will say they should have done more to looks after this poor lost “child”. At worst, they’ll suspect they murdered her. They and their colleagues know they’re innocent. They cover up the fact that he was chased her around the time she went missing. The police conclude it was an accident, too, and resist releasing anything that would make the tragedy any more of a public spectacle than it already is.
If I’m right in even half my guesses, I would consider that good. It’s all guessing.
^ The police would have known immediately if she was in contact with any hotel staff. The police had security camera footage -- not only inside the elevator -- but in the lobby, etc. If the police knew this from the get-go, they wouldn't have released the footage of EL in the elevator at all, weeks after she went missing, if they were simply going to cover anything up. There wasn't a cover-up; they released the video because they were desperate for info.
CircuitGuy
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"Cover up" was a poor choice of words on my part. It's hard to imagine her staying there without having at least some innocent contact with the hotel staff. In my scenario, the hotel staff and police knew that Lam had innocent contact with hotel staff that could look suspicious. But police determined it was innocent. In my scenario, a staff member was chasing her shortly before she went missing. You're probably right that the police would have released that key fact if they knew it. In my scenario, someone from the staff chased her for a legitimate reason: she was in an employee-only area, and he needed to see her room key to make sure she was supposed to be there. But it was an innocent contact not directly related to her death. Her pursuer viewed this her behavior as something between annoying misbehavior and flirting, nothing to do with real crime. She was in a hyped-up "manic" state, viewing it as excitement for excitement's sake. Her death was an accident. The hotel staff and police saw no need to report that staff made contact with her shortly before the time she is thought, by best reckoning, to have died.
It's all a made-up narrative.
I think this whole thing is blown out of proportion. She was mentally ill and on four different meds according to her sister. The only thing that strikes me as weird is the fact that ended up in the water tank. That's the only thing that puzzles me. If she fell off the roof or something like that, it wouldn't be that odd to me. But to end up in the water tank...
Tuffgong
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No foul play. She was mentally unstable. She climbed up the ladder and fell into the water tank. Would be impossible for anybody to place her in that. She was exploring all over that hotel. I can't believe this has been made into some kind of mystery.
I have for a while now thought that the weird hand gestures were her doing a bit of Geisha dance hand movements. If you notice right at the end of the video she stands up on her calves a couple of time at at the end spreads her left foot out to her side. She was just being playful. I have no idea what would posses her to go into the water tank.
MelissaG
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Hi! New to WS. I have always been interested in unsolved cases but now that I am at home every day due to COVID-19 shelter in place, I thought I would finally join a forum. With that, I would like to suggest a possibility that I have not seen proposed yet. There has been much discussion about how she got into the tank and why she was naked with her close in the tank. What if she went on the roof with someone (a bad someone in this scenario, maybe someone who lived there or a worker, what if they told her they like to go skinny dipping in a tank and asked her if she wanted to go with him. They went to the roof together, they took their clothes off and left them on top of tank, and get in together. Maybe he was planning on killing her the whole time or maybe it was a crime of passion or something accidental happened once in the tank together but he drowned her. He then got out and threw her clothes in to hide evidence. If the top was closed, obviously he closed it but if it was left open maybe he thought he heard someone and got out there before he closed it. It would explain how and why she got in the tank naked and why her clothes were in there too. If he was already playing fun cat and mouse games with her prior, it would explain the elevator video too. I could have been a 14th floor resident because her scent was picked up at a window on the 14th floor that leads to the roof, only a long-term resident or employee would know that..
Hi welcome. I'm probably the wrong person to respond because my mind has been made up about this case for a very long time now, in that I don't believe there was anyone following her or involved in her death. That said, for what it's worth -- when the maintenance man found the body, he said the lid was still off the tank. I know it's been reported from some outlets that the lid was on, but this is utterly false; the actual police report clearly states the lid was off. Also, there were only two ways to get on the roof: one was from the "alarmed" door, and the only other way was from that 14th floor window (with a fire escape that led to the roof) that you speak of. To me, it wouldn't have been hard for EL to find the window on her own.
glamourkitty1922
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Every room in the hotel should have fire escape maps on the door. All she has to do is look at the map and see that there is a fire escape entrance out the window in the corridor.
LittleOneEm
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I tend to follow a more skeptical note, she was bipolar and was taking medication daily for her condition. She may have gone off on her meds or was needing an adjustment, thus she had a psychotic break and was either taken advantage of or unwittingly died of an accidental drowning. Videos have surfaced of people getting onto the roof without the knowledge of hotel staff.
Killerhunter89
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It's hard for me to believe some people call themselves detectives, or if there is truly a lack of care in some cases that fall through the cracks. <modsnip: Naming random people who are not officially a POI is not allowed> How impossible it would have been for her to throw herself in there, or get past all the alarms to even make it too the roof . He needs looked into . He says the only thing off was the latch? How many times had he been up there before she was reported? I'll look into it because we can't count on the law enforcement. There probably put off by the Cecil hotel and I don't blame them. Place is a hotspot for evil.. . Somebody with access put her in there in what was probably a thrill kill. She was off her antipsychotic medicine and could have been easily manipulated and pushed in. There might even be photos of her in the tank because it would have been impossible for her to get out giving the killer all the time in the world to bask in her demise. Im officially reopening this case. I'm not going to believe the supernatural route, because that's all the police have at the moment... Please feel free to put your input in, this is a community.
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Marg from Oz
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Wish you luck. John Lordon from Brainscratchers has also put a lot of time into this case.
