[OMINOUS MUSIC]
The poignancy of a final image is the subject of this countdown of...
21 year-old Elisa Lam was last seen alive in the security camera footage from the lifts
of the Cecil Hotel, Los Angeles. After Lam fails to make her daily phone call home, she
is reported missing by her parents. Reviewing the hotel’s camera footage,
Lam is seen to be behaving bizarrely in the hotel’s lift.
When hotel guests begin to complain about discoloured, foul-smelling water,
employees are sent to examine the water cisterns on the hotel’s roof.
Lam’s naked body is found floating in the tank.
The County Coroner was unable to determine a cause of death, and the bizarre final image
of Elisa Lam and her shocking discovery remains a mystery to this day.
Reynaldo Dagsa, a Filipino politician, takes a photograph of his family outside their
home on New Year’s Day. Shots ring out, and Dagsa collapses on the ground with gunshot
wounds to his arm and chest. Rushed to a nearby hospital, he is pronounced dead on arrival.
Only when the photograph is seen by his grieving family does it become apparent that the gunman
who fired the fatal shots has been captured on camera, staring coldly down the barrel
of the gun that took Reynaldo Dasga’s life. The police recognise the man as a local criminal,
out to seek revenge on Dasga for being injured in a shootout at which Dagsa was present.
He is immediately arrested and charged with murder.
This final photograph captures Joseph Avery in 1853.
Boating on the Niagara with two friends, they are soon overcome by the power of the river,
and his friends are pulled from the boat and carried over the falls. Avery manages to grab
a log, lodged between two rocks, but is ultimately stranded, his fate sealed. Onlookers attempt
a number of rescues, all of which end in failure. After an 18 hour ordeal, he finally gives up the
fight and is pulled over the falls to his death.
Politician Budd Dwyer was convicted in 1986 of taking a bribe from a Californian accounting
company. On the day before he was due to be sentenced, Dwyer calls a press conference.
The room is full of reporters expecting a resignation statement, but after a long speech
protesting his innocence and denouncing the justice system, Dwyer hands out three envelopes
to colleagues, the first a letter to the Pennsylvania governor, the second a donor card, and the
third a suicide note to his wife. Taking a gun from the manila envelope in his briefcase,
R. Budd Dwyer shoots himself on live television. In 2010 the key witness whose testimony was
critical to Dwyer’s conviction admitted lying under oath to reduce the severity of
his own sentence.
Carl Williams was a convicted murderer and drugs trafficker, making obvious enemies along
the way. But it wasn’t until his incarceration in
Barwon, Australia’s maximum security prison, that his chickens finally came home to roost.
Prison security cameras capture fellow inmate Matthew Johnson taking the leg of a nearby exercise bike
and striking a fatal blow to Williams’ head, allegedly as punishment for Williams turning informant and striking
a deal with the Assistant Commissioner. Williams’ body lies in a nameless plot without a headstone.
Russian free-runner Pavel Kashin was in the prime of his life when this tragic moment
was captured in the summer of 2013. Mistakes happen, even amongst the fittest and most
disciplined of athletes, but when they occur on the landing of a backflip, on the very
edge of a 16-storey building, it’s likely to be the last trick you’ll ever perform.
Robert Ben Rhoades was a long-haul trucker who kept a torture dungeon in the cab of his
vehicle. Police believed Rhoades held his victims captive for about a week, before shooting
them and disposing of the body. Rhoades was arrested when an Arizona state trooper examined
the parked-up truck, and discovered Rhoades inside his cab with a shackled, naked teenager.
When his apartment was searched after his arrest, the final photograph that would be
taken of 14 year old Regina Kay Walters was unearthed. In an abandoned barn, Rhoades cut
off the girl’s hair and forced her to wear a black dress and heels. Regina Walter’s
body was discovered months later, and Robert Ben Rhoades awaits the death penalty.
Michael McQuilken and his younger brother Sean pose for a photograph on top of Moro Rock,
California, in 1975. The weather began to worsen and when their
hair began to standing on end, their sister took this photograph with her Instamatic camera.
On leaving the summit, the temperature suddenly dropped, and it began to hail. The ring on
the older brother’s right hand began to buzz. The family were engulfed in a white, searing light.
There was a sense of weightlessness, of time slowing down.
And then the lightning struck.
Sean had been struck by lightning, and lay collapsed unconscious, smoke pouring
from his back. He was carried down the mountain by his brother to receive treatment to his
3rd degree burns, passing along the way a woman desperately giving emergency first aid to her husband,
who had the smallest of burn marks near his heart. Sean McQuilken went on to recover from
his injuries, but the man at the foot of the mountain wasn’t so fortunate.
The worst nightmare of every parent is to lose a child at a shopping mall, and the parents
of 2-year old James Bulger suffered just that in February 1993. The mall’s security cameras
showed two males leading him quickly outside, and proved to be the last haunting image of
James Bulger in his tragically short life. Led down to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal,
James was systematically beaten and tortured, his body finally being dumped on the railway
line for a passing train to add to the outrage. Mercifully he had died long before the impact.
When an enhanced still from the video was released to the public,
the two abducters were recognised as Robert Thompson…
...and Jon Venables.
Ten year old classmates at the local junior school.
The pair were charged, and spent the rest of their childhood behind bars.
The interviewing police officer later said of one of the boys: ‘I didn’t look
for the three sixes on the back of his head, but at that moment, I thought he was the devil.’
Questions are being asked about the safety of wind turbines, as recent figures suggest
that the numbers that catch alight each year is ten times higher than the industry admits.
It was the fatal misfortune of two Dutch engineers to be stranded 200 feet from the ground when
a fire broke out in the generator behind them, blocking off the exit tower.
The engineers final photograph captures them in an embrace, two souls brought together
by the dreadful realisation that they were facing their final moments in life.
As the raging fire eats its way through the plastic hull on which
they stand, they each decide their own fate. One engineer leaps from the tip of the turbine
to meet his death in the wet grass two hundred feet below him. The other braves the inferno
in an impossible attempt to descend the ladders of the melting tower. His body is discovered
at the top of the ladder when the fire is finally brought under control.
A poignant final image that reminds us that though we must each face the final walk alone, the path is
shared between us all, bound together as we are, by the tragedy of the human condition.