He died alone in room 348. The truth took years to show up

Greg Fleniken liked its routines. The 55-year-old landman from Lafayette, LA., Worked hard, often traveled and ended his nights in the same way every time he checked into MCM Elegante Hotel in Beaumont, Texas: with a candy bar, a little microwave popcorn, a cigarette and the silence in cable TV.

On the night of September 15, 2010, Greg called his wife Susie, as he always did. Then he went to bed and hit the TV.

In the morning he was dead.

Co -workers found him on the floor near the bed, with his face down, still in pajamas, a cigarette still seized between the fingers. The hotel door had been locked from the inside, per reporting of Vanity Equitable.

Nothing seemed disturbed. His wallet was untouched. The police saw no blood, no immediate signs of injury. They chalked it up to a sudden heart attack.

The local coron, Dr. Tommy Brown, did a routine autopsy – but what he found was anything but routine.

Greg’s ribs were broken. His sternum was cracking. His heart and liver were laced. Most puzzling of all was a dark purple wound on his scrotum, swollen and worn as from a crushing blow.

Still, there were no signs of bruises anywhere else. No defensive wounds. No damage to the chest. No evidence of blunt power trauma for the upper body.

Dr. Brown originally assumed that the damage had been caused by CPR. But Greg had been dead for hours before anyone found him, and no one had tried resuscitation. It excluded CPR – and made the damage all the more confusing.

The injuries were more typical of what he expects to see in someone who had been in a serious car accident or crushed under a heavy object-not a man who found lying down with his face down on the floor of a hotel room without external wounds. There were no bruises or injuries to explain the broken legs and inner laces. It wasn’t meaningful. Somewhat violent had happened Greg – but there had almost no traces on the surface of his body.

What the coron did not realize at that time was that the scrap wound was actually a bullet -in -site – but the skin had sealed after death.

In rare cases, loose or flexible skin-as a scrotum-sink or “knit” back together after mortem, especially if the opening is small and no autopsy interference disturbs it. The result? A deep inner way of destruction, but without obvious outer ball holes to flag it.

Dr. Brown ruled death a murder – cause unknown. It would be almost two years before anyone found out what really happened.

Susie Flenic, convinced by the varying explanations and desperate after response, hired private investigator Ken Brennan. Brennan, a former dea agent with an ability to read between the lines, collaborated with the local detective Scott Apple.

Together, they reconstructed Greg’s last hours – and found a clue that everyone else had missed: electrician next to it.

Three trade union workers from Wisconsin had stayed in room 349, across the wall from Greg. At night of his death, they had been drinking and watching sports. When the police interviewed them, they claimed that they had not heard or seen anything unusual.

But Brennan was not so sure. He had Apple to interview them. And when the two men returned to room 348 to go on stage, Brennan noticed slightly: a small hole in the wall, just big enough to miss in a first sweep – and just big enough for a bullet.

They returned to room 349. On the opposite side of the same wall, someone had connected a matching hole with dried toothpaste.

From there, detectives began to share the story – to slowly connect the internal injuries to a possible shot and limit their focus to the men who had been drinking next to that evening.

Detective took in electricians for interrogation. With the help of a mixture of subtle pressure and direct threat – they warn that they could be accused of making false statements – Brennan and Apple got one of them, Tim Steinmetz, to talk.

According to Steinmetz, after the electrical work was done and the drinks were poured, one of their colleagues, Lance Mueller, pulled out a 9mm Ruger gun to show off. Mueller, clearly drunk, played around – tried to “quickly pull” as in an old Western movie. He pointed the gun at Steinmetz and then to another man in the room.

The weapon was released.

No one screamed. No one next to it shouted. They saw the hole in the wall, panicked and patched it with toothpaste. No one reported the shot. No one checked next to it. They assumed no one was injured.

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But in room 348, the bullet had entered Greg’s scrotum, torn upwards in the body, laced his organs and broke legs before he lay deep in his chest. It was a slow, silent death. He may have remained conscious in minutes.

Tim Steinmetz collaborated. Another colleague, Trent Pasano, backed up the story. Detectives arrested Lance Mueller, who later did not invoke any competition for murder. He was sentenced in October 2012 to ten years in prison.

“You would never have come up with the truth … You murdered him,” the Flenic widow told Mueller in court. “No, you did not intentionally seek him to murder him, but you murdered him, with every lie you told, with every deliberate selfish fraud, with every coverage, over and over again …. You saw his body taken out of the room in a body bag the next day. You knew you killed him.”

“You’ve met your match,” she said, Per Vanity. “I would have spent the rest of my life tracking you. And I found you. Greg’s murderer. I brought you to the right.”