The Bullet in Room 348: How a Private Eye Cracked a Hotel Murder
Ross Aaron
5
10-17David: We're diving into a true crime mystery today that starts with a scene that’s almost deceptively calm. An oil-and-gas man named Greg Fleniken is found dead in his hotel room in Beaumont, Texas. The room is tidy, his wallet is full of cash, and there are no signs of a break-in or a struggle. A seasoned detective on the scene, Scott Apple, initially thinks it's probably just a natural-causes thing.
Sarah: Right. And that initial assumption makes perfect sense. Fleniken was a 55-year-old lifelong chain-smoker who didn't exercise. So, when he’s found, it looks like his lifestyle just caught up with him. But that’s where the calm ends. The case is completely upended when the medical examiner, a local character named Dr. Tommy Brown, performs the autopsy. He finds that Fleniken’s insides are destroyed. He has broken ribs, torn organs, a hole in his heart. Dr. Brown rules it a homicide by blunt force trauma.
David: And that’s the first major twist. Suddenly, you have this impossible paradox. How does a man get beaten or crushed to death so violently, yet his body has almost no external marks, and the hotel room looks completely undisturbed? A violent death with a perfectly neat crime scene.
Sarah: Exactly. It left Detective Apple completely stymied. He had forensic evidence of a brutal homicide, but the circumstantial evidence from the room screamed the opposite. It forced him down these rabbit holes of desperate theories. He looked into a maintenance man who was a registered sex offender, wondering if the specific groin injury was from some bizarre assault. He considered a confrontation with a group of union electricians staying in the room next door. But nothing stuck. There was no evidence, no motive, no witnesses.
David: That must have been incredibly frustrating. And what about the family? Greg's wife, Susie, initially thought it was natural causes, which she could almost accept. How did she handle this shift to a brutal, unsolved murder?
Sarah: It was devastating. The initial idea of a sudden, peaceful end offered some strange solace—that he'd gone out on his own terms. But the homicide ruling, followed by months of the police having no answers, turned her grief into this fierce determination. She was furious and heartbroken, and she absolutely refused to believe that the case should just go cold. Her refusal to let it go is really what sets the entire next chapter in motion.
David: So the police are at a dead end, the medical examiner's report has only created more questions, and the family is desperate. This is the point where they decide to bring in outside help.
Sarah: Yes, this is where private investigator Ken Brennan enters the story. Susie's lawyer friend had read about him in a magazine article and recommended him. Brennan is a former cop and DEA agent with this larger-than-life personality—a gravelly New York accent, stylish, no-nonsense. But his real gift is his ability to see what everyone else has missed.
David: How does he even start? Does he just re-interview everyone?
Sarah: He starts by absorbing the entire case file. But more importantly, he listens. He asks Susie if anything at all about the crime scene seemed off to her. And she mentions something that sounds totally minor: the room was found warm, but Greg always cranked up the air conditioning. He liked it freezing cold at night.
David: Interesting. So, a warm room. What else?
Sarah: The other detail is the cigarette. The police photos show a spent cigarette cupped between two fingers of Greg's left hand. Brennan calls Susie and asks a simple question: Was your husband left- or right-handed? She says he was right-handed and always smoked with his right hand.
David: Wow. So, a right-handed man holding a cigarette in his left hand. And a warm room. These seem like such tiny details. How does Brennan connect them to a murder?
Sarah: This is his genius. He puts these small inconsistencies together. The warm room tells him the A.C. must have shut off at some point. He connects this to an earlier incident where Greg had blown a circuit making popcorn, which also knocked out power to the adjacent room. The maintenance man fixed it around 8:30 PM, confirming Greg was alive then. The A.C. being off narrows the time of death. The cigarette in the left hand suggests Greg wasn't calmly smoking; he had likely shifted it to his left hand to free up his dominant right hand... probably to grab the doorknob.
David: Okay, I think I'm following. So he was getting up to leave the room or answer the door when something happened. But how does that lead to the conclusion that he was shot, especially when the medical examiner was so certain it was a beating?
Sarah: It's a huge leap, but it's based on eliminating the impossible. A beating severe enough to cause that internal trauma would have left marks, or at least signs of a struggle. It didn't. But a single gunshot, especially to a soft tissue area, could cause catastrophic internal damage without much external evidence, and it would be instantly incapacitating. He was basically reverse-engineering the crime. It's like being an art restorer who sees one tiny brushstroke that doesn't fit the landscape everyone else sees, and realizes it's not a landscape at all, but a hidden portrait underneath. Brennan saw the brushstrokes that didn't fit the beating theory and dared to imagine a completely different picture.
David: So Brennan walks in with this wild, counter-intuitive theory. Now he has to prove it. He has to find a bullet that no one else found, and he has to convince a very confident medical examiner that he was completely wrong.
Sarah: Exactly. And that's his next, almost impossible, challenge. He and Apple go back to the hotel. They get on their hands and knees, searching everything. Brennan is convinced a gun was involved, but they find nothing. Just as they're about to give up, he notices a small, repaired indentation on the wall in Greg's room, Room 348.
David: A patch on the wall. Could be anything, right?
Sarah: It could be. But then they go next door, to Room 349, where the electricians were staying. And on the other side of that same wall, they find a small, neat hole that had been crudely patched with what turned out to be dried, pinkish toothpaste. They shine a laser through the holes, and the trajectory points directly to where Greg Fleniken was sitting on his bed, watching a movie.
David: The toothpaste. That is just... so specific and so telling. It’s not just a repair; it’s a sloppy, panicked cover-up. So now they have the proof. But they still have to face Dr. Brown, the medical examiner.
Sarah: And this is an incredibly tense confrontation. Dr. Brown is a respected expert, and he's completely invested in his initial finding. He flatly refuses to even consider that he missed a bullet wound, saying, I'm telling you he wasn't shot. The body had been cremated, so there was no way to re-examine it.
David: So how did Brennan get through to him? You can't just tell an expert of that stature, You're wrong.
Sarah: He doesn't. He does something much smarter. He says, Listen, Doc, let’s just take out the photos from the autopsy and go through them. Patiently, photo by photo, he has Brown identify the damaged organs. He asks, Could a bullet cause the same damage? Brown admits it's possible but insists that's not what happened. Brennan is gently guiding him, forcing him to re-examine his own evidence through a new lens.
David: And what was the tipping point? The moment of truth?
Sarah: They get to the photo of the heart. Brennan points to the hole in the right atrium and says, Doc! That's a bullet hole, Doc. Brown argues that blunt force trauma can cause that kind of rupture. Brennan just repeats, more forcefully, Doc, that's a fucking bullet hole. There's this long pause, and Brown looks at the photo again. And finally, he just says, Yeah, that's a bullet hole. His first thought afterward was, The media is going to kill me on this.
David: Wow. What a moment. So with the cause of death officially changed, the investigation could finally focus on who was in Room 349. They knew who they were looking for.
Sarah: Yes, the electricians. Specifically, Lance Mueller, the man registered to the room, and his roommate, Tim Steinmetz. They track Steinmetz down in Wisconsin months later. The interrogation is a masterclass. They let him tell his rehearsed, false story. He signs a written statement. And just as he thinks he's free to go, Brennan’s tone completely changes. He looks at him and says, Hang on a second. It was [fine], until you signed that statement. Now you've got a problem.
David: Oof. The trap is sprung.
Sarah: Precisely. Brennan tells him he's just committed a felony by filing a false police report and asks if he wants to go to jail with his friend Lance. That legal pressure, combined with Detective Apple appealing to him to protect his own family, is enough. Steinmetz breaks and tells them everything. They'd been drinking, Mueller was drunk and recklessly playing with his 9mm pistol, it accidentally went off, and the bullet went through the wall.
David: And they knew they might have hit someone?
Sarah: They freaked out. Pasano, another electrician in the room, was so disgusted he just left. Mueller immediately took the gun out to his car. They went down to the bar to get more drunk. They never knocked on the door to check. The next morning, when they saw a body being taken out of Room 348 on a gurney, Steinmetz said he thought to himself, I thought he had killed that guy. But they still said nothing.
David: That's the part that's so chilling. The silence. But the district attorney's office was hesitant to prosecute it as a felony, right? They saw it as a sort of legal gray area.
Sarah: Yes, they were considering a much lesser charge. They saw it as a tragic accident, and in Texas, apparently accidental discharges aren't that uncommon. This is where Brennan became absolutely indignant. He flew back to Beaumont and, with Susie Fleniken by his side, confronted the D.A.'s office. He gave this incredible, fiery speech, basically saying this wasn't an accident, it was a chain of criminally irresponsible decisions, followed by a deliberate cover-up, and that they would not let it be swept under the rug. His anger, he said, filled the room.
David: And it worked. Mueller was sentenced to ten years for manslaughter. And Susie, after two years of fighting, finally got to confront him in court.
Sarah: She did. Her victim impact statement was just devastatingly powerful. She looked right at him and said, You murdered him. 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... He meant nothing to you. She told him, I would have spent the rest of my life tracking you down. And I found you.
David: What an incredible story. When you look back on it, there are a few things that are just so striking. First, how a combination of an unusual wound and some confirmation bias led an entire police and medical investigation completely down the wrong path.
Sarah: Absolutely. It really shows how even the most experienced professionals can be fallible, especially when faced with something that doesn't fit the standard patterns. It underscores how critical it is to be willing to re-evaluate your own conclusions.
David: And then there's the power of Ken Brennan's method. The impact of a fresh pair of eyes focusing on tiny, overlooked details—the warm room, the cigarette. It proves that sometimes the biggest truths are hidden in the smallest inconsistencies.
Sarah: It really does. His work is a testament to the idea that no detail is too small, and that you have to be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, no matter how absurd the conclusion might seem at first.
David: But I think the most powerful part of the story is what it says about responsibility. This started as a tragic, drunken accident. But it was the cover-up, the lies, the silence—that’s what turned it into something so much more sinister.
Sarah: It's a stark moral parable. Mueller's decision to patch the wall with toothpaste, hide the gun, and stay silent for months transformed a moment of recklessness into a prolonged act of profound cruelty to Greg's family. It shows how the choices we make after a mistake are often more defining than the mistake itself.
David: The Fleniken case ultimately serves as a stark reminder that truth, however obscured or inconvenient, often lies hidden in plain sight, waiting for the persistence and insight of those willing to challenge assumptions. It underscores the human cost of negligence and deceit, and the enduring quest for accountability, even when faced with institutional inertia and elaborate cover-ups. What seems like a simple natural-causes thing or a clear-cut blunt force trauma can, with enough dedication, reveal a far more complex and morally charged reality, forcing us to confront not just the facts of death, but the profound weight of human responsibility.