Spoiler note: This post covers both parts of our episode, including how the case was solved. If you want to experience it the way Laura did, listen to both episodes first.
In September 2010, a 55-year-old Louisiana landman was found dead on the floor of his Beaumont, Texas hotel room. There was no sign of a struggle, nothing had been stolen, and no one had heard a thing. It looked like a heart attack. Then the medical examiner ruled it a homicide, and for the next seven months nobody could explain how Greg Fleniken had died.
Who Greg Fleniken was
Greg Fleniken lived in Lafayette, Louisiana, but he spent his weeknights in Beaumont. He and his brother Michael ran an oil-land leasing company there. As a landman, Greg negotiated mineral rights between landowners and oil and gas companies. Before that, he’d been a chief engineer on oceangoing ships, spending months at sea. Long stretches on his own were nothing new to him.
For almost fifteen years, Greg made the same drive every Monday morning, two hours west on I-10, and checked into the MCM Eleganté Hotel. His nights there followed a routine. His rolling suitcase sat open on the floor as his dresser, his boots were lined up beside it, and he cranked the air conditioning because he liked a cold room. He’d lay a clean white hand towel across the bedspread so he wouldn’t soil it, then set out his ashtray, cigarettes, lighter, BlackBerry, remote, and a candy bar, and settle in to watch TV.
On weekends he was home with his wife, Susie. She’d been singing in a rock band in her twenties when they met. They married young, split up for years, and then, in middle age, Susie called him again. Greg told her he’d been waiting for her call. By 2010 they’d been married fifteen years the second time around, and together they ran a bed and breakfast out of their home.
The night of September 15, 2010
That Wednesday evening, Greg was in Room 348 with a Reese’s Crispy Crunchy bar, a root beer, and Iron Man 2. A little after seven, he traded emails with Susie, who was filing a tax extension back home. “You’re doin’ good, babe,” he wrote.
At some point he microwaved a bag of popcorn and blew the circuit. The outage knocked out his room, the room next door, and the rooms below. Greg called the front desk and sheepishly admitted it was his fault. A maintenance man reset the breaker, and according to hotel records, left Greg alive and well around 8:30 p.m.
The next morning, Greg didn’t call Susie, and he didn’t show up for work. Two co-workers went to the hotel, got no answer at his door, and had the manager let them in. Greg was face-down on the floor between the bed and the door, a burned-out cigarette between the fingers of his left hand. The room was unusually warm.
A “natural-causes thing”
Detective Scott Apple of the Beaumont Police Department found nothing to suggest a crime. There was no forced entry, no disturbance in the room, and Greg’s wallet was still full of cash. The neighbors had heard nothing. Greg was a lifelong smoker who never saw a doctor, and everyone assumed his heart had simply given out. Susie even took some comfort in it. Greg used to say that a sudden death was exactly how he wanted to go.
Then Jefferson County Medical Examiner Dr. Tommy Brown performed the autopsy.
The autopsy that didn’t make sense
On the outside, Greg had only a small scrape on his cheek and a half-inch cut on his scrotum, with bruising spreading across his groin and hip. Inside, the damage was catastrophic: torn intestines, lacerations to his stomach and liver, two broken ribs, and a hole in his heart.
Dr. Brown concluded that Greg had been beaten to death, kicked in the groin and struck in the chest with enough force to rupture his heart. He ruled the death a homicide and told Detective Apple the injuries looked like something from a car crash, or from being crushed under a heavy object.
But nothing in that room could have done it. There was no sign of a fight and no enemy with a motive. Greg’s family offered a $50,000 reward. Apple chased every theory he could, including the maintenance man and a group of union electricians from Wisconsin who had been drinking in the room next door, Room 349. He even re-interviewed the electricians wearing a hidden camera. Nothing came of any of it, and by early 2011 the case was headed for the cold files.
Enter Ken Brennan
At the urging of a lawyer friend, Susie called Ken Brennan, a former Long Island cop and DEA agent working as a private investigator in Florida. Brennan had been profiled by journalist Mark Bowden in Vanity Fair for cracking a Miami cold case.
When Brennan met Susie in April 2011, he asked whether anything about the scene had seemed off to her. She told him the room had been warm. Greg always kept it cold.
In Beaumont, Brennan reviewed the case with Detective Apple in Room 348. Then he called Susie with one more question: was Greg left- or right-handed?
Right-handed, she said, and he always smoked with his right hand.
To Brennan, the details now fit together. The A/C had gone off with the breaker, and Greg apparently never turned it back on, so he must have died not long after the repairman left. And the cigarette in his left hand suggested he’d gotten up and moved it over so he could reach for the door with his right. Greg hadn’t been beaten somewhere else and carried back. Whatever happened to him happened in that room, fast, while he was sitting on his bed.
The dent in the wall
In late May, Brennan and Apple were interviewing the electricians’ former co-workers when a crew foreman mentioned a secondhand rumor about a gun going off. They went straight back to the hotel.
After searching Room 348 on their hands and knees, Brennan noticed a patched indentation beside the door to the adjoining room. It looked like ordinary wear from a doorknob, except the knob didn’t line up with it.
In Room 349, they found a small, neat hole in the same wall, plugged with dried toothpaste. Investigators later shone a laser through both holes, and it pointed straight at Greg’s bed.
Greg Fleniken had been shot.
“That’s a bullet hole, Doc”
Dr. Brown resisted, and with Greg cremated, there was no body to re-examine. So Brennan and Apple went through the autopsy photos with him, one by one. When they reached the photo of Greg’s heart, Brown finally agreed: it was a bullet hole.
The bullet had entered through the scrotum, where the loose skin folded over the wound and disguised it, and traveled upward through his body. Every injury Brown had documented traced its path.
What happened in Room 349
On June 1, 2011, Brennan and Apple interviewed electrician Tim Steinmetz in Wisconsin. After signing a statement that left out the gun, Steinmetz was told he’d just made a false report, and he told them everything.
That night, Lance Mueller had asked co-worker Trent Pasano to bring up a bottle of whiskey from his car, along with his 9mm Ruger. Drunk, Mueller played with the gun and pointed it at the other men, and it fired into the wall. Mueller patched the hole with toothpaste and took the gun back to his car, and then he and Steinmetz went downstairs to the hotel bar. No one checked on the man next door.
In a call recorded by investigators, Steinmetz told Mueller the man had died from the gunshot. Mueller refused to believe it.
Charges, a plea, and ten years
Mueller was arrested in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, in June 2011 and charged with manslaughter. After the shooting, he had hidden the gun, first in his car, then with a friend, and finally in his attorney’s safe. The district attorney’s office considered a plea deal, but Brennan and Susie pushed back hard.
On September 24, 2012, Mueller pleaded no contest to reckless manslaughter and criminally negligent manslaughter. On October 29, 2012, Judge Layne Walker sentenced him to ten years in prison. His own attorney said the judge had punished Mueller more for what he did after the shooting than for the shooting itself.
The questions that remain
Some things were never resolved. Estimates of how long Greg survived after he was shot range from seconds to hours. The electricians claimed they heard him coughing when they returned from the bar after midnight, which investigators doubted. And according to the arrest affidavit, someone had tried to repair the hole on Greg’s side of the wall with a wooden dowel. Who did that has never been reported.
Susie Fleniken later filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the hotel, its security company, and all three electricians. It was dismissed with prejudice in April 2015, before trial, and the terms were never disclosed.
“You have met your match”
At Mueller’s sentencing, Susie spoke to him directly. She told him he would never have come forward with the truth, and that he had seen Greg’s body carried out of that room the next day and said nothing.
Then she told him: “You have met your match. I would have spent the rest of my life tracking you down. And I found you.”
Listen to our full coverage of this case! Start with Part 1 today on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Resources:
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Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Agosto, Aziz & Stogner. (2015, March). Trial set in lawsuit against MCM Elegante Hotel in Beaumont. https://abrahamwatkins.com/blog/2015/03/trial-set-in-lawsuit-against-mcm-elegante-hotel-in-beaumont/
Bowden, M. (2013, May). The body in Room 348. Vanity Fair. True Crime: How a Mysterious Beaumont, Texas, Murder Was Solved | Vanity Fair
CF man to stand trial in Texas. (2012, January 1). Leader-Telegram, C1, C3. https://www.newspapers.com/image/302903186/
Cohen, P., & Liou, J. (2010, November 24). Hotel death ruled homicide: Family offers reward for information. The Beaumont Enterprise, 3. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1308828900/
Coulter, C. (2025, July 19). He died alone in Room 348. The truth took years to surface. People. Police Thought Man in Room 348 Died of Natural Causes. The Truth Was Buried Inside His Body
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Leads sought in oilman’s death. (2011, February 24). The Daily Advertiser, 4. https://www.newspapers.com/image/321988193/
Lipscomb, J. (2011a, June 24). Drunken gunplay led to hotel slaying: Police released information about Wisconsin man arrested on manslaughter charges. The Beaumont Enterprise, 1A, 5A. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1308742354/
Lipscomb, J. (2011b, July 15). October trial set for man charged in hotel death: Lance R. Mueller of Wisconsin returned to surrender to authorities. The Beaumont Enterprise, 3. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1308800621/
Man’s trial in fatal Texas shooting delayed. (2011, October 19). Leader-Telegram, B3. https://www.newspapers.com/image/303281897/
Moore, A. (2012a, September 25). Sentences due Oct. 29: Two manslaughter charges in a single 2010 death draws plea of no contest. The Beaumont Enterprise, 3. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1295682690/
Moore, A. (2012b, October 30). 10 years for hotel shooting: Man who fired a bullet through a wall is sentenced for manslaughter. The Beaumont Enterprise, 3. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1295695294/
Moore, S. (2013, August 11). Evidence brings to question, “What if?”: Wife of man found dead at MCM Elegante proceeding with lawsuit after finding night’s actions irresponsible. The Beaumont Enterprise, 1A, 3A. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1295686432/
Mueller gets 10 years for Beaumont shooting death. (2012, October 30). KJAS. Mueller gets 10 years for Beaumont shooting death | Local News | kjas.com
Police: Alcohol fueled accidental hotel killing. (2011, June 24). Leader-Telegram. https://www.leadertelegram.com/news/front-page/police-alcohol-fueled-accidental-hotel-killing/article_6e0c6f99-89ec-5d74-a1c6-10507578393d.html
Trial nixed in civil suit over notorious death at MCM Elegante Hotel. (2015, April 14). Southeast Texas Record. Trial nixed in civil suit over notorious death at MCM Elegante Hotel | Southeast Texas Record | legalnewsline.com
