The Skeleton Key Chronicles

13 hours ago

This week Elisa Lam would've celebrated her 35th birthday. It was in early 2013, when 21-year-old Elisa was traveling through California and staying at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. Elisa’s family became concerned when she suddenly stopped checking in with her family. For weeks, there were no answers. Then, in mid-February, Elisa was found inside one of the hotel’s rooftop water tanks, bringing a search that had garnered endless amounts of attention online to a sudden and sad ending.

Not long before that discovery, elevator footage from inside the hotel had been released. In it, Elisa plays around running in and out of the elevator, pressing buttons and reacting in ways that people still go back and rewatch, trying to understand if there was another individual that's outside of the video frame interacting with her.

Even with all the questions surrounding the case, investigators ruled Elisa’s passing as accidental. She was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Burnaby, Canada with a quote from om Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet on her grave marker. … See MoreSee Less

The Skeleton Key Chronicles

21 hours ago

There’s a case out of Buffalo where, for years, the answer has seemed obvious to the family, but the official case file still says something very different. In December 2008, 20-year-old Amanda Lynn Wienckowski, a Kenmore native, was last seen with a man named Antoine Garner. By early January she was found inside a plastic storage tote outside a church in Buffalo across from Garner's home.

The Erie County medical examiner ruled her death as accidental, but almost immediately, Amanda’s family questioned that conclusion and pointed to details they believed didn’t match that explanation. Over time, additional reviews told a different story. A second autopsy commissioned by the family suggested her passing was related to something much more sinister, reinforcing what they had been saying from the beginning.

For more than a decade, her mother, Leslie Brill-Meserole, has continued to push for answers, asking for the death certificate to be amended and for the case to be looked at again. She has said publicly that she has reached out to local officials year after year, trying to get movement, but nothing has changed.

At the same time, the man Amanda was last seen with is currently in jail in connection with separate cases involving violent acts against other women, something the family has pointed to as further reason to take another look at what really happened.

Amanda’s passing was ultimately classified as accidental, a conclusion her family has never accepted, even as separate findings have pointed in a different direction. In the years since, legislation known as “Amanda Lynn’s Law” has been brought forward in her name, and her family is still hoping to get justice and have the case file reflect what they believe happened to her.

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The Skeleton Key Chronicles

2 days ago

Today marks exactly three months since Nancy Guthrie went missing, and it feels like the case is still in the same place it was weeks ago. At this point, it seems like the only real glimmer of hope is evidence from her home that was recently sent to the FBI for cutting-edge DNA analysis. There are a lot more cases like Nancy's than most people realize. If you’ve never scrolled through NAMUS or your state’s missing persons page, it’s worth spending some time going through them. Unfortunately most of them don’t get much attention.

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