Police Thought Man in Room 348 Died of Natural Causes. The Truth Was Buried Inside His Body By Christina Coulter

Greg Fleniken liked his routines. The 55-year-old landman from Lafayette, La., worked hard, traveled often, and ended his nights the same way each time he checked into the MCM Elegante Hotel in Beaumont, Texas: with a candy bar, some microwave popcorn, a cigarette and the quiet of cable television.

On the night of September 15, 2010, Greg called his wife Susie, as he always did. Then he got into bed and turned on the TV.

By morning, he was dead.

Coworkers found him on the floor near the bed, face-down, still in his pajamas, a cigarette still gripped between his fingers. The hotel door had been locked from the inside, per reporting by Vanity Fair.

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

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

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

Yet there were no signs of bruising anywhere else. No defensive wounds. No abrasions on the chest. No evidence of blunt force trauma to the torso.

Dr. Brown initially assumed the damage had been caused by CPR. But Greg had been dead for hours before anyone found him, and no one had attempted resuscitation. That ruled CPR out — and made the injuries all the more confounding.

The injuries were more typical of what he’d expect to see in someone who’d been in a serious car crash or crushed under a heavy object — not a man found lying face-down on the floor of a hotel room with no external wounds. There were no bruises or abrasions to explain the broken bones and internal lacerations. It didn’t make sense. Something violent had happened to Greg — but it had left almost no trace on the surface of his body.

What the coroner didn’t realize at the time was that the scrotal wound was actually a bullet entry point — but the skin had sealed itself after death.

In rare cases, loose or pliable skin — like that of the scrotum — can settle or “knit” back together post-mortem, especially if the opening is small and no autopsy incision disturbs it. The result? A deep internal pathway of destruction, but with no obvious external bullet hole to flag it.

Dr. Brown ruled the death a homicide — cause unknown. It would be nearly two years before anyone figured out what really happened.

Susie Fleniken, unconvinced by the shifting explanations and desperate for answers, hired private investigator Ken Brennan. Brennan, a former DEA agent with a knack for reading between the lines, teamed up with local Detective Scott Apple.

Together, they reconstructed Greg’s final hours — and found a clue everyone else had missed: the electricians next door.

Three union workers from Wisconsin had been staying in Room 349, just across the wall from Greg. On the night of his death, they’d been drinking and watching sports. When police interviewed them, they claimed they hadn’t heard or seen anything unusual.

But Brennan wasn’t so sure. He had Apple re-interview them. And when the two men returned to Room 348 to walk the scene, Brennan noticed something: a tiny hole in the wall, just big enough to be missed 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 plugged a matching hole with dried toothpaste.

From there, detectives began to piece the story together — slowly connecting the internal injuries to a possible gunshot, and narrowing their focus to the men who had been drinking next door that night.

Detectives brought the electricians in for questioning. Using a mix of subtle pressure and direct threat — warning them they could be charged for 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 had been poured, one of their coworkers, Lance Mueller, pulled out a 9mm Ruger handgun to show off. Mueller, clearly drunk, was playing around — trying to “quick draw” like in an old western movie. He pointed the gun at Steinmetz, then at another man in the room.

The weapon discharged.

No one screamed. No one next door called out. They saw the hole in the wall, panicked, and patched it with toothpaste. No one reported the shot. No one checked next door. They assumed no one was hurt.

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But in Room 348, the bullet had entered Greg’s scrotum, tearing upward into his body, lacerating his organs and breaking bones before lodging deep in his chest. It was a slow, silent death. He may have remained conscious for minutes.

Tim Steinmetz cooperated. Another coworker, Trent Pasano, backed up the story. Detectives arrested Lance Mueller, who later pleaded no contest to manslaughter. He was sentenced in October 2012 to 10 years in prison.

“You would never have come forward with the truth. . . . You murdered him,” Fleniken’s widow said to Mueller in court. “No, you didn’t intentionally seek him out to murder him, but you murdered him, with every lie you told, with every intentional selfish deception, with every cover-up, 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 have met your match,” she said, per Vanity Fair. “I would have spent the rest of my life tracking you down. And I found you. Greg’s murderer. I brought you to justice.”