Room no 348 Mystery: Man Smashed to Death With No Major External Injuries?
Heart, stomach, and ribs broke, but the man died with a burning cigarette in his hands!
Susie Fleniken was pacing anxiously around her room. The previous day, her husband, Greg Fleniken, had checked into Room no 348 of the MCM Elegante Hotel in Beaumont, Texas. But she hasn’t heard from him this morning.
Greg, a seasoned landman, dealing with mineral rights on private property for gas and oil corporations, used to travel a lot and check into many hotels. But he never missed his routine-placing a call to his wife the following day, except that day.
Susie kept trying his cellphone, but he wasn’t picking up. She called Greg’s colleagues and learned that he hadn’t turned up for work. The co-workers then went to the MCM Elegante hotel to find out the truth and opened his room with the help of the hotel manager.
And there, Greg Fleniken was dead on the floor, bent forward and down, with his face facing the carpet. There was a little wet spot on his pajamas near the crotch area. A burned cigarette was neatly tucked between the fingers of his left hand. His skin color had turned grayish-blue.
The co-workers and hotel staff stood shocked in that warm room, gazing in disbelief at the body.
The natural death hypothesis
Officer Scott Apple studied the crime scene diligently. He could rule out theft since Greg’s wallet and a few 100 dollar notes were intact; so were his other possessions like a watch and cellphone.
The room showed no sign of a struggle or break-in. The occupants of the next room reported no unusual activity. Every circumstantial evidence was pointing towards death due to natural causes.
Susie Fleniken saw nothing suspicious about her husband’s death. Greg was a chain smoker, not known for a healthy lifestyle. He found visiting a doctor a hassle he didn’t have to meddle with.
The wife had to assume that this devil-may-care attitude towards fitness and health caused Greg’s demise.
Little did Scott and Susie know that they were in for a shock after the post mortem examinations were done.
The shocking post mortem report
Dr. Tommy Brown was a well-known examiner, highly respected for his expertise. He noticed the two external marks on the 55-year-old Greg’s body: an inch-long abrasion on his left cheek and a tiny laceration near his groin. The bruise on the cheek was where his face hit the carpet.
But inside his body, the story was different. There was extensive damage to Greg’s internal organs. The intestine was torn, two of his ribs were broken, lacerations were found on his liver and stomach, along with a hole in the right atrium of Greg’s heart.
This meant one thing for Dr. Brown: Fleniken was beaten to death, and his internal organs were crushed by severe smashing.
The other curious wound he picked up was a laceration around the groin area. Again, an indication that his crotch area had taken a hard kick or smash.
Thus, although the circumstances of the death pointed nothing unusual, Dr. Tommy Brown had no hesitation in calling this a homicide. After all, he wasn’t a detective, and all his job was to make his observations based on medical facts.
Mr. Brown figured someone had beaten Greg to death. Officer Scott Apple now had a job on his hands.
The puzzling array of questions
Scott Apple was now left with a bewildering set of questions.
How can a man be beaten to death without much to show for it in his external body? If someone had smashed Greg, so much so that his internal organs would crash so badly, a bit of that smashing should show up on his outer body as well.
But there was nothing there except the small abrasion in the face and the crotch. How is this even possible?
If someone did beat Greg to death, he would have resisted. Neighbors should have heard some noise, and the room would have been all messed up. But this room was kept in pristine condition.
How is that possible?
Above all, who would have ever wanted Greg dead? Greg hardly made any enemies and was well-loved in his circles.
Scott Apple could make no sense out of it. However, he followed the events of the last day of Greg Fleniken, since he checked into the hotel, and found an interesting detail.
The popcorn mishap
On his last day, Greg had tried to cook some pre-packed popcorn in the hotel. But somehow, the microwave he was cooking took out a fuse and killed the power, even for the adjacent room. Room numbers 348 and 349 instantly lost power and plunged into darkness.
Greg soon called the front desk to report his misadventure, and a maintenance guy turned up and fixed the issue. The problem was solved there, but in retrospect, this incident gave rise to a couple of theories:
One theory was that the maintenance guy, perhaps annoyed that he had to fix the power at the odd hour, beat Greg to death. Also, he happened to have a history of a sexual offences. So, was the murder a result of Greg’s resistance to the maintenance guy’s kinky needs?
The second theory was about the occupants of room number 349- Lance Mueller and Tim Steinmetz. Both of them were electricians. Is it possible that they, with their expertise in electric circuits, figured Greg was responsible for the sudden power outage? What if they were booze-partying and the loss of power drove them crazy?
Outraged, they could have beaten Greg to death.
In both theories, the smashing had to happen in the hall, leaving Greg with just enough life to crawl his way back into his room. And then he might have collapsed on the floor, and that should explain why the room was intact.
However, these were just theories. Scott Apple interviewed the occupants of Room number 349 and the maintenance guy, and nothing screamed odd about their responses.
Scott also considered the possibility of Greg’s wife or brother plotting the murder. Still, beyond a few such hypotheses, he could produce nothing.
Greg Fleniken’s murder was thus doomed to go into cold storage.
Detective Ken Brennan
Susie Fleniken was growing impatient. She could have consoled herself if she believed that her husband had succumbed to poor health, but this? Someone murdered Greg, and months have elapsed without capturing his killer. Susie was determined to find an answer. She decided to employ the services of a private detective- Mr. Ken Brennan.
Mr. Brennan was formerly a cop and had made a good name for himself as a private detective. He started his work by posing a series of tough questions to Susie, including everything from Greg’s work life to his fidelity. Brennan’s most crucial question, though, was this:
“Was there something about the crime scene that didn’t seem right to you”?
Susie’s reply was quite interesting. She said Greg always liked to crank up the air conditioning, and when the colleagues and the hotel staff found him dead, the room was hot. The AC was not switched on.
It was even more interesting because it was scorching in Beaumont, Texas when the crime happened. There was no way Brennan would have sat in that room, bearing the excruciating heat, keeping the AC off.
The Brennan instincts
Officer Scott Apple had extended his whole-hearted support to Mr. Brennan’s investigation. Both of them went to the crime scene, and after studying the room for long, Brennan could make a rough reconstruction of the crime.
But there was one detail he had to be sure about. He immediately rang up Susie and asked, “When your husband smoked, did he hold the cigarette in the left or right hand”?
Susie replied that her husband was right-handed, and he always held the cigarette in the right hand. That was the final piece of the puzzle Brennan needed to present his theory. He knew that the cigarette was placed in his left hand when Greg’s body was found.
Brennan soon started explaining his inferences.
Brennan’s reconstruction of the events
Here is how Brennan reconstructed the events before Greg’s death:
The records at the hotel show the repairman had fixed the blown circuit at 8:30 PM. Susie said Greg always kept the AC on, so he was definitely running the AC on that hot day before the fuse was blown.
When the circuit was damaged, and the maintenance man fixed it, Greg might have forgotten to turn the AC back on. Because the AC was running for an extended period, it would take some time before the room was warm enough for Greg to notice the AC was off.
Before Greg figured the AC was turned off, he was dead.
The more puzzling question to address for Brennan was the cigarette in the left hand.
All the theories about Greg’s death until that point figured Greg was killed in the hall. Because the room showed no indication of a brawl, and therefore the smashing should have happened elsewhere.
But Brennan was more interested in the cigarette on Greg’s left hand. It was extremely unlikely that the attackers smashed Greg in the hall, left him in his room to die, and placed a burning cigarette in Greg’s left hand.
Besides, Greg’s heart’s right atrium was ruptured, and when that happens, the person doesn’t last long. He could not have lit up a cigar in that condition.
So, according to Brennan, the fatal blow to Greg happened so quickly, and in all probability, it happened while Greg was still smoking.
But why is the cigarette in the left hand then? Susie said Greg always held them in his right hand. Brennan concluded that Greg was going towards the door, and to grab the door handle with the right hand, he shifted the cigarette to his left hand.
Yes, Brennan was making a lot of sense. His inferences were quite interesting, but they still didn’t answer the pivotal question. If Greg was smashed in his room, why did the room look so neat? Why didn’t anyone hear anything?
Kim Brennan didn’t know the answer yet.
Kim Brennan’s suspects
Piecing together every information and conjecture he had, Brennan figured the electricians in the adjacent room were the most likely culprits. They might have been partying and could have run into an argument with Greg regarding the blowing of the fuse.
In the drunk and inebriated state, did the electricians smash and kick Greg? Maybe the blow was so powerful that Greg perished with not so much resistance? A killer blow to take out a man in a few seconds?
The idea that the neighbors smashed Greg to death while he did not let go of the cigarette in his left hand was quite silly. But Mr. Brennan, in his mind, had confirmed that the death had occurred while Greg was quietly doing his business- smoking and watching TV.
Every other detail had to match up now.
If the electricians had something to do with Greg’s death, the word would have spread among other electricians. So, Brennan and Apple met several other co-workers of the occupants of Room number 349. Several months had elapsed by now, and the co-workers struggled to piece together information from their memory.
One among them, Aaron Bourque, said he had heard something about a gun going off in the hotel. Apple tried to correct him that this wasn’t a case involving a gunshot; this was a smash and death case. But Mr. Bourque had no idea about that. Ken Brennan found this statement about a bullet interesting.
The 60-year-old private detective soon drove back to Room number 348, except this time he was looking for a specific something:
A bullet.
The doorknob marks
Brennan searched every nook and corner of Room number 348. Sure many months had passed, but was it possible that a bullet was lodged somewhere? Maybe under the furniture or the wall?
The officers’ search bore no fruit.
When they were about to give up, Brennan noticed an indentation on the wall behind the door. This looked like a dent caused by the doorknob hitting the wall when the door was kept in a fully opened position. But when Brennan opened the door, he realized that the doorknob hit the walls on the right side of the indentation.
So the dent was not caused by the doorknob.
Brennan and Apple proceeded to the adjoining room, Room number 349, and it was clear: a hole in the wall, patched by some dried toothpaste! It was a bullet hole.
The entry hole in 349 was smaller than the exit hole in 348. The larger hole filled with toothpaste looked like an indentation.
Brennan measured the angle and possible trajectory of the bullet. He understood that it could have hit Greg, watching TV in room number 348. Investigators confirmed this by shining a laser through the hole. The modus operandi was obvious now; Poor Greg Fleniken was shot!
Convincing the doc
Had it not been for the insights of doctor Thomas Brown, Greg Fleniken’s case could have been brushed aside as a death due to natural causes. But now, the doctor was faced with his observations being challenged. His agreement to the new inferences was vital because no amount of circumstantial evidence could override the doctor’s report.
To confirm Brennan’s theory, Greg’s body had to be exhumed and undergo a re-postmortem. But unfortunately, this was impossible since the body was cremated, and the hot ovens had possibly destroyed fragments of metals.
However, Brennan managed to convince the doctor to reconsider the case by looking at the photos taken during the autopsy. The doctor would eventually agree that a bullet wound could have caused the internal damage Greg suffered.
The bullet entered through Greg’s scrotum and went up to cause other injuries to the organs. Since the scrotum’s skin was soft and easily bent, it didn’t stand out as a bullet entry hole, leaving the doctor to believe that Greg was smashed to death and kicked in the crotch.
The case is solved
Lance Mueller and Tim Steinmetz, the residents of Room number 349 when Greg was killed, were called for interrogation. With a bit of Brennan’s questioning tactics, a few moments later, the real story emerged:
On that fateful day, Mueller was drinking beer and playing with his 9mm pistol. He accidentally pressed the trigger, and the bullet went right through room 349 to 348. They were shocked by the accidental firing. But neither of them bothered to knock on the next door and check if something terrible had happened. Instead, they kept their ear close to the hole to see if they could pick up any sound.
According to them, they heard nothing, which made them believe that the occupant of the adjacent room was out of his room when the shot was fired.
Mueller was still scared, and he soon returned to his car and hid the pistol. The duo then went to the bar. When they returned, late in the night, they said they heard a man coughing from the next room. This assured them that whoever was in room number 348 was safe and sound.
The following day when the officers were swarming over the place, both Mueller and Steinmetz were shocked. But they picked up some chatter from the officers that this was, in all likelihood, death due to a heart attack or something. Nobody made a mention of a bullet wound.
So, Mueller and Steinmetz felt this was a grand coincidence, that on the night when they feared they might have accidentally killed a man with a gun, the same man perished for other reasons. But in the back of their mind, they always wondered if they had something to do with Greg’s death. Hence the toothpaste and the deliberate withholding of information.
The confession of the electricians matched Brennan’s theory, except the ‘coughing’ they heard when they returned from the bar. But at best, this could only mean that the coroner’s report made a slight error in determining the time of death. Or the culprits were conjuring a lie in their defense.
Either way, Brennan had solved the crime.
Lance Mueller, the electrician who fired the gun, was charged with manslaughter and sentenced to prison for ten years.
Interested in more stories like this? Check out the following links:
