Recently, a viral TikTok video showing Elisa Lam in the Cecil Hotel’s elevator once again revitalized the mystery of Lam’s death, suggesting the impression she left on strangers still goes deeper than any answers could ever remedy. “A death that still doesn’t sit right with me,” the caption reads.
To that end, The Vanishing feels written for a sleuth. The series answers every question raised point for point, no matter how far-fetched, clearly in the hopes of guiding viewers to some kind of closure. It also takes great pains to depict Elisa Lam as a thoughtful, curious young woman, and her troubles with sensitivity and humanity.
The Cecil Hotel itself comes out worse for the wear. By the time Lam arrived in Los Angeles, drawn to the hotel’s budget prices and proximity to downtown’s allegedly thriving hotspots, it had been rebranded, likely to hide the hotel’s horrid history and the rough area surrounding it, rechristening it “Stay on Main.” But Stay on Main’s entrance, though it led to its own lobby within the Cecil, was merely three renovated floors of the Cecil Hotel, with tenants below it, and residential units and other guests above, according to Price in The Vanishing. Its bank of elevators was shared by all of them. Price says they never got any questions about that fact, but according to LAPD’s Detective Sergeant Jim McSorley, that connection meant guests were frequently interacting with the stable of downtrodden guests who gave the hotel a bad reputation to begin with.
“So if you were staying at the Stay on Main, you would sometimes have to interact with someone that’s completely bugging out, or someone that’s just come out of jail, or the insane asylum, or prison,” McSorley says. “It could be disgusting there. We used to call it the vertical toilet.” If nothing else, one thing is clear: Lam had no business staying at a place like the Cecil Hotel.
Texas drifter Richard Ramirez, however, fit right in. A historian in the Elisa Lam doc notes that this is a place where serial killers would let their hair down—Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger, who strangled women with their own bras, stayed there in 1991. In 1985, Ramirez returned to his 14th-floor room covered in blood after peeling off his bloody clothes in the alley—“and no one’s got a problem with that,” the historian said.
But in Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, we meet the many people who did have a problem with Ramirez. The series features survivors and descendants of his victims as well as the two detectives who tirelessly worked his case: rookie Gil Carrillo and veteran Frank Salerno, who by then had already made his name by identifying the Hillside Strangler.
Night Stalker follows a murderer who was unpredictable yet meticulous, at least by the ’80’s standards, which made him especially difficult to catch. For a long time, a flowerbed footprint—he wore black Avia shoes in a size 11.5—was the only identifying mark Ramirez left at his crime scenes. Extensive news footage from the era reveals that during his series of break-ins, assaults, burglaries, and murders, Los Angeles was so terrified that sales of guns, burglar alarms, locks, baseball bats, and attack dogs rose. It didn’t help that Ramirez continually changed his murder weapon and method. Months of killings took place before police even connected them to a single actor; he was caught weeks later, after committing at least 13 murders and numerous sexual assaults.
Though Ramirez mostly targeted the east side of the city, he covered extensive ground, creating the fear that he could appear from anywhere at any time. His targets were wide-ranging—anyone and everyone from children to elderly couples. Women reportedly rushed to move in with boyfriends for some sense of protection. Burglars laid low for fear they would be mistaken for the killer. Despite temperatures hovering around 100 degrees that summer and air conditioning still a rarity, windows were now bolted shut. As one cop told a reporter in 1985, “Better to wake up in a pool of sweat than a pool of blood.”
Unlike many true crime documentaries, Night Stalker doesn’t make the obvious blunder of glorifying Ramirez—though like many killers, he had his share of groupies, and even married a woman who visited him in prison. Mostly, we hear about him through eyewitnesses. He’s described as a menacing guy with rotting teeth; a librarian who interacted with him that summer still remembers that he smelled like a goat.
Yet while The Vanishing’s meticulous details humanize Lam and make sense of her story, in Night Stalker, details are clearly ordered for their lurid appeal. Interviews with the parents and loved ones of victims are unfortunately intercut with horrific crime-scene photos, often repeated and accompanied with dramatic reenactments. At one point, a PAC-MAN video game scene is interspersed with the real chase to capture Ramirez. The effect is cheap, at cross-purposes with the very point of including those perspectives. Even the decision to focus more on the victims than on Ramirez himself backfires. Without a deep analysis of his backstory, details of his goofy Satanic affiliations seem less sinister than profoundly juvenile.