Casefile Extra: Greg Fleniken

When 55-year-old Greg Fleniken was found dead inside his hotel room in Beaumont, Texas, nothing about the scene appeared suspicious. There were no signs of forced entry, no obvious wounds, and no indication of a struggle. At first, it seemed Greg had died suddenly from natural causes. But an autopsy revealed something far more troubling. Greg had suffered catastrophic internal injuries, leading investigators to treat his death as a homicide. The problem was that nothing inside Room 348 explained how those injuries had occurred. With no clear suspect, no apparent motive, and a crime scene that made little sense, the case quickly reached a dead end. What had happened inside Room 348? Casefile Extra features bonus episodes exploring compelling cases, stories and topics beyond our regular weekly releases. --- Narration – Anonymous Host https://www.instagram.com/caseys.snaps/ Research & writing – Matthew Dawe Production & music – Mike Migas http://mikemigas.com/ Audio editing – Anthony Telfer Sign up for Casefile Premium: Apple Premium https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/casefile-true-crime/id998568017?ign-itscg=30200S&ign-itsct=casefile_podcastsSpotify Premium https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/9gSwcv7USsbPatreon https://www.patreon.com/casefileFor all credits and sources, please visit https://casefilepodcast.com/casefile-extra-greg-fleniken Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  The evening of Wednesday, September 16, 2010, was an ordinary one for Susie Flanagan. Her husband, 55-year-old Greg Flanagan, was in Texas for work, leaving Susie alone at the couple's home in Louisiana. Greg worked as a landman in the oil and gas industry, a job that involved negotiating leases, meeting with clients, and spending long stretches on the road. As the vice-president of the OGM Land Company, which he co-owned with his brother, Greg spent his weekdays travelling and returned home for the weekends. Although Susie missed Greg when he was gone, after 15 years of marriage, she was used to them spending time apart.

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  The two kept in regular contact, speaking on the phone several times each day, even if it was just to briefly check in with one another.

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  That evening, Susie sat down at her computer to work on her taxes. Shortly after 7pm, she sent Greg an email to update him on how it was going. He wrote back, "You're doing good, babe." As the night wore on, Susie expected to get her nightly phone call from Greg. He didn't go out much when he travelled, preferring to keep to himself. His evenings were mostly spent in his hotel room, watching television and unwinding from the day. But Susie's phone didn't ring. At first, she assumed Greg must be tired or distracted. She waited a while, then eventually went to bed.

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  The next morning, when there was still no word from Greg, Susie tried calling. There was no answer. She tried again. Still nothing. This worried Susie. Even if Greg was in the middle of a meeting, he always answered her calls, even if it was just to say that he'd call back later.

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  When she still hadn't heard from Greg by around 10am, Susie called his office to see if anyone there had heard from him. Her anxiety spiked when she discovered that his coworkers were wondering the same thing. Greg hadn't shown up for work and no one had been able to reach him. With no word from him and no explanation for his absence, two of his coworkers decided to drive to his hotel to check on him. Greg was staying at the MCM Elegante, a large conference-style hotel just off Interstate 10 in the Texan city of Beaumont. It was a hotel he stayed at often, and he'd been there all week.

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  When his coworkers arrived, they noticed Greg's pickup truck was still sitting in the parking lot. They made their way to his room, number 348, which was located on the third floor of the Cabana Wing, a distinct section of the building that provided views of the outdoor swimming pool. They walked down the hallway and knocked on Greg's door. There was no response. After several minutes, Greg's coworkers tracked down the hotel manager and told him about the situation. The manager agreed to let them in and came upstairs with a key. The three men gathered outside the room, not knowing what to expect as the door swung open. Inside, they were met with darkness.

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  Heavy curtains were drawn across the windows, blocking out the morning light. Then, they saw Greg.

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  Room 348 of the MCM Elegante Hotel was just like any other standard hotel room. But in the space between the bed and the front door, Greg Flanagan was lying face down on the floor, cold to the touch. He was dressed in pajama shorts and a t-shirt, and in his left hand was a cigarette, burned down close to the filter. The color of his skin indicated he'd been dead for some time, but nothing else about the scene was out of the ordinary. On his bed, the pillows had been propped up in a way that suggested he'd been lying back shortly before he died. A hand towel had also been laid out on the bed, with Greg's mobile phone, an ashtray,

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  and a half-eaten chocolate bar sitting neatly on top of it. There was no blood or obvious wounds, and no visible signs of a struggle. The door to the balcony stood slightly ajar, but nothing in the room was overturned or scattered. Detectives were summoned to the scene, and almost immediately, they were struck by the temperature of the room. Outside, Beaumont's September air was heavy with humidity, and the air in Greg's room felt warm and stale. This suggested that the air conditioning wasn't running properly, or hadn't been used at all. But, other than that, nothing about the room was particularly noteworthy.

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  While the cause of Greg's death wasn't immediately clear, they found nothing in Room 348 to suggest there was a crime scene. There was no sign of forced entry or damage to the door. To get inside the room, hotel staff had to lift the swing bar latch from the outside, indicating the room had been secured from within. Although the balcony door was open, the windows were sealed shut and intact. Greg's wallet, with a stack of $100 bills inside, was still in the room, as was his laptop, ruling out a robbery gone wrong.

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  Detectives spoke to guests in the surrounding rooms, but no one reported hearing shouting, fighting, or anything else unusual coming from Room 348. A search of Greg's luggage didn't reveal any prescription medication or anything else that could explain his death, and his colleagues said he wasn't a particularly healthy man. When the other guests asked what happened, detectives described it as what it appeared to be: a natural causes thing.

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  Given that Greg Flanagan was a middle-aged, long-term smoker with no known illnesses or external injuries, the expectation was that his death had likely been caused by a major medical event, such as a cardiac arrest, stroke, or aneurysm. When Susie Flanagan was notified, the only consolation to her grief was that Greg would have likely wanted it this way. She later told Vanity Fair that Greg was a stubborn man who didn't exercise, had no interest in fitness, and never went to the doctor. When hearing about people who died suddenly, he would make remarks such as “Lucky bastard, that's how I want to go”.

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  Greg's autopsy was carried out the following day by Dr Tommy Brown, a respected Jefferson County medical examiner with a strong reputation among local law enforcement and the courts for being meticulous, consistent, and conservative in the way he reached conclusions. Dr Brown began his standard external examination and noted there was a small abrasion on Greg's cheek, which was consistent with him having collapsed and struck the carpet. He then moved on to Greg's groin area and noticed there was a small vertical laceration on his scrotum, about half an inch long. At first glance, it was so small that it could have been mistaken for a superficial injury, but the tissue around it was markedly bruised and swollen, indicating it had been

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  hit by something hard. Dr Brown proceeded to the internal examination. To his surprise, he found that Greg's abdominal cavity contained a significant amount of blood. His liver was also lacerated and torn, his intestines were perforated in multiple places, his stomach showed bruising, and two of his ribs were fractured. There was also a hole in the right atrium of Greg's heart. Dr Brown was taken aback. It looked to him like Greg had suffered some kind of extremely hard blow to the chest, but this type of extensive internal trauma was more commonly associated with high-impact

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  incidents, such as a car crash or something heavy falling on a person, not a lone man relaxing in a hotel room. Although it went against the physical evidence at the scene, Dr Brown concluded that Greg Flanagan's injuries were consistent with severe blunt force trauma and that he had likely been beaten to death or crushed. In the official documentation, under manner of death, he wrote homicide.

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  When the autopsy findings arrived at the Beaumont Police Department, Detective Scott Apple was shocked. Having attended the relatively unremarkable scene at the MCM Elegante Hotel, the realisation dawned on him that he now had a murder investigation on his hands. But if Greg Flanagan hadn't simply collapsed from a medical event, that left just two broad possibilities. Either something had happened inside Room 348 that left little to no outward trace, or Greg had been injured elsewhere and somehow ended up back in his room.

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  Neither option sat comfortably with what Detective Apple had witnessed. He went back over the initial response, looking for anything that might have been missed or dismissed too quickly. He couldn't figure out how someone could have possibly sustained that level of internal trauma without clearer signs on the surface.

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  A check of the hotel's security footage showed that Greg arrived at the hotel alone at around 6:30pm, but there was no footage of the hallways.

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  Apple considered the possibility that something heavy could have fallen onto Greg, but nothing in the hotel room supported this theory. He also wondered whether Greg could have been assaulted in the hallway or another part of the hotel and then left for dead in his room. But there were no visible marks on the carpet that suggested Greg's body had been dragged, and it seemed highly unlikely that someone could have moved an adult male through a public hotel without being seen or heard. And if Greg had indeed been the victim of a homicide, then there was a bigger question of who could have killed him and why.

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  For Susie Flanagan, the possibility that someone might have wanted to harm her husband seemed preposterous. Greg was the love of her life. The two had married young before going their separate ways and then reconnecting later in life. When Susie contacted Greg after years apart, he told her that he'd been waiting for her call. They'd remarried and stayed together for the next fifteen years. In all that time, Susie knew Greg to be a kind, dependable, and quiet-natured man with no enemies. The couple ran a bed and breakfast from their home in Lafayette, and Greg warmly welcomed guests from all over, often serving them fish or meat that he'd caught or hunted himself.

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  As a world traveller, he loved nature more than anything, and never took a good sunset or star-studded sky for granted. Greg also adored animals and relished the quiet moments sitting in his courtyard, surrounded by his cats and visiting birds.

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  Greg touched many lives, and others who knew him gave a similar account to Susie's, describing him as well-liked, generous, and easy to get along with. He was also a creature of habit, especially when he travelled for work. Susie told detectives that at the end of the day, Greg typically returned to his hotel room and kept to his routine, watching television and unwinding before going to bed. He wasn't a big drinker, making it unlikely that he would have gone down to the hotel bar. This was confirmed by staff and guests at the MCM Alagante, none of whom had seen Greg outside of his room on the night he died.

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  Police found nothing to suggest Greg had sought out anyone's company or done anything out of the ordinary during his time in Beaumont, and by all accounts, he was a devoted and loyal husband to Susie. However, there was one workplace incident that caught their attention. Five days before Greg died, his company had fired one of their employees. The woman's husband, a man named Joseph, was furious, believing the decision to be unjust, and he called the office demanding to speak with Greg. Detectives looked into Joseph's background and learnt he had martial arts experience, which was a possible explanation for the injuries.

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  But Joseph provided an alibi and it checked out, confirming he was nowhere near Beaumont on the night Greg died. Detectives also reviewed Greg's financial records, but found nothing to suggest pressure, conflict, or any obvious cause for concern. With no clear motive or suspect emerging, the detectives were dealing with three immediate problems: a victim who was by all accounts much loved, a hotel room that didn't appear like a crime scene, and fatal injuries that made no sense. "It's a big mystery", reporter Zach Lajway told the Investigation Discovery Channel. "We all just go to bed thinking we're going to wake up in the morning.

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  Nobody's going to do us any harm while we're sleeping." But in Greg's case, there was evil in his room that night.

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  As investigators worked to narrow down Greg Flanagan's final movements, one detail from the night of Wednesday, September 15, stood out. At around 8:30pm, Greg had called the front desk of the hotel to report that he'd tripped a circuit breaker while using the microwave to make popcorn.

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  The outage had affected not only his room, but also the room next door and several rooms on the floors below. Hotel records showed that the employee who responded was a maintenance worker named Nicholas Garcia, and it wasn't the first time he'd had contact with Greg. Earlier that evening, at around 7:30pm, Greg had rented the film Iron Man 2. Hotel records showed that Garcia handled that transaction as well. But when detectives first spoke to Garcia, he denied having seen Greg or having entered room 348. Curious as to why he would lie, detectives looked into Nicholas Garcia's background

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  and discovered that he was a registered sex offender. That information, paired with the unusual injury to Greg's groin, created an avenue detectives couldn't ignore. They considered whether Garcia could have injured Greg during some kind of sexually motivated assault, or perhaps the two men knew one another personally and Garcia had some kind of vendetta. They summoned Garcia to the station for a formal interview, where they told him they had evidence placing him in room 348 on the night that Greg Flanagan died. Faced with that information, as well as a photo of Greg, Garcia changed his account. He admitted that he went to Greg's room to reset the breaker,

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  but insisted that Greg was still alive when he left.

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  If Garcia was telling the truth, it meant that Greg was alive after the power had been restored and the fatal injuries were inflicted sometime after Garcia left room 348, around 8:30pm. Exactly when and how remained unknown.

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  The outage also drew attention to the room directly next door to Greg's, room 349. At the time of Greg's death, a group of Union electricians were staying at the hotel while working on a refinery expansion in Beaumont. It was a major project, and many of the electricians had come from interstate to see it through. After work, in the evenings, they often gathered in one another's rooms to drink and socialise. Two of the electricians had been staying in room 349, and witnesses said that on the night of September 15, they and some others had been drinking in their room and getting a bit rowdy. Detectives considered whether one of them could have gone to Greg's door to complain about the power outage.

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  Perhaps a drunken argument had broken out in the doorway or hallway and quickly escalated, with Greg then crawling back to his room where he died from his injuries. This could explain why his room appeared undisturbed and why guests in nearby rooms hadn't heard anything unusual coming from inside. But, nothing had been found to indicate that an assault had taken place in the hallway, or anywhere else in the hotel for that matter. Detectives had also interviewed some of the electricians on the day Greg's body was found, but none of them reported having any contact with Greg or hearing anything out of the ordinary next door.

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  Nine days after Greg's death, the Union electricians were still in Beaumont, so a detective returned to speak with them again. Room 349 was registered to a Wisconsin man named Lance Mueller, who was sharing the room with his colleague, Tim Steinmetz. Both men were polite and willing to talk, but they had little to add to their original accounts. They said they'd been drinking in their room on September 15 with a couple of friends and hadn't heard anything unusual from Greg's room or in the hallway outside. Although, they acknowledged that they were being pretty loud that night and probably wouldn't have heard anything coming from outside. They said they went down to the hotel bar at some point after the power outage

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  and returned to the room around midnight. Upon their return, they thought they might have heard a cough coming from next door, but they couldn't be sure exactly what time. Like others at the hotel, Mueller and Steinmetz were curious to know what had happened to Greg Flanagan. The detective simply told them that Greg's injuries were unusual and that investigators were considering whether some kind of heavy force might have come down on him. Mueller scanned the room and frowned. It was a standard hotel room. Nothing looked heavy enough to cause that kind of damage. The detective also spoke to an electrician named Trent Passano,

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  who had been hanging out with Mueller and Steinmetz in room 349 on the night that Greg died. Like the others, Passano said he hadn't heard or seen anything of interest.

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  The electricians were scheduled to be in Beaumont for months. They gave detectives their contact details and said they would be happy to help if anything else came up.

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  For the detectives, the fact that Greg's death had taken place in a busy hotel added an extra layer of difficulty to the already confusing investigation. The elegante was a large and popular venue, and guests from all over the country stayed there for all kinds of reasons, be it business or personal. If another guest was responsible for Greg's death or knew anything about it, they could have checked out before his body was even discovered, and they would have been long gone before detectives started investigating the case as a homicide. As the months passed with no breakthroughs, the lack of progress became harder and harder for Greg Flanagan's family to accept.

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  In November, after the Beaumont Police publicly announced that Greg's death was being treated as a murder, his family offered a $50,000 reward for information. Susie told the Beaumont Enterprise that Greg lived an honest and sincere life and had an impact on anybody who got to know him.

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  "It's such a difficult situation to have a life of an incredible person shortened in a dishonorable way," Susie said.

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  "I don't know much about the investigation, but I do know who Greg was. He was such an incredible person, and he had an impact on anybody who got to know him. We're just hoping and praying for information. Somebody knows something."

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  With no leads coming from the reward, Greg's brother hired a private investigator, but that didn't generate any meaningful results either. By February 2011, five months had passed since Greg's death, and the case remained at a standstill. Desperate for answers, Susie Flanagan began reaching out to private investigators outside of Beaumont. Among them was a Florida-based investigator named Ken Brennan. A former police officer and a drug enforcement special agent, Ken now worked on cold cases, with the aim to uncover the truth for his clients, even if the truth was uncomfortable. He was selective about the cases he took on, looking for two specific things when reviewing

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  a file: whether the facts remained unresolved, and whether further work could still produce results. Ken was fascinated by Greg's case, and believing there were further avenues that needed to be explored, he agreed to look into it further. In April 2011, Ken travelled to Lafayette to meet Susie. He asked about Greg's life, his work, his finances, and the state of their marriage. He then asked whether there was anything about the scene of Greg's death that had stayed with her. Susie said there was. When Greg's coworkers had entered Room 348 on the morning his body was found, the room had been warm.

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  This detail had always struck Susie as odd, as Greg typically slept with the air conditioner running at night. Ken Brennan travelled onwards to Beaumont and met with Detective Scott Apple, who brought him up to speed on the investigation. The men agreed to work together, and from that point on, the investigation continued as a joint effort.

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  The following day Detective Apple took Ken to the MCM Alegante, where he walked him through room 348 and showed him the photographs of the crime scene. Ken listened carefully, mulling over the details, before calling Susie with a question: Was Greg left or right-handed? Susie told him that Greg was right-handed.

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  Ken then asked which hand Greg used to smoke cigarettes with.

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  Susie’s answer was assuredly the same: his right hand.

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  For Ken, this was a significant detail. When viewing the crime scene photos, he was struck by the fact that Greg had been holding a burnt-down cigarette when his body was found. With the ashtray sitting on the bed nearby, it suggested that he had been smoking shortly before he collapsed. But if that was the case, it complicated the police theory that Greg could have been attacked in the hallway or elsewhere before being brought back to room 348. If he had indeed been carried back into the room after sustaining catastrophic injuries, the cigarette in his hand became difficult to explain. It seemed highly unlikely that an attacker would have taken the time to gingerly place

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  the lit cigarette in his hands, or that Greg would have been in a state to light it himself.

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  Furthermore, Greg was holding the cigarette in his left hand. If he was right-handed and normally smoked with his right, then why, Ken wanted to know, was the cigarette in his opposite hand when he died?

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  If Greg had been sitting on his bed smoking in the moments before he died, Ken considered whether he could have shifted the cigarette to his left hand in order to free up his dominant hand to do something else. Maybe he’d been reaching for something with his right hand, or had stood up to open the door. While it didn’t help explain Greg’s injuries, it did suggest that Greg was conscious and acting normally right up until that final mysterious moment.

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  Then, there was the fact that Greg's hotel room had been warm when his body was found, despite Susie's insistence that he typically slept with the aircon on. Investigators already knew that Greg had blown an electrical circuit at 8:30pm while using the microwave, so Ken reasoned that the loss of power had likely stopped the air conditioning too.

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  It had been a hot night, and without the aircon running and with Greg's balcony door slightly opened, it would have only taken about 20 minutes for the room to heat up. The fact that the aircon hadn't been turned back on suggested to Ken that Greg had likely died sometime between 9 and 10pm.

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  But if that was the case, then why had the electricians said that they'd heard coughing coming from Greg's room shortly after midnight?

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  Ken went to visit Dr Tommy Brown, the medical examiner who had conducted Greg's autopsy, and asked whether Greg's injuries could have been caused by an assault. Dr Brown said they could. In fact, the laceration to his scrotum could be consistent with a forceful kick, particularly from someone wearing a heavy boot, including a steel-toed boot, just like the electricians wore.

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  Knowing that the electricians had already been spoken to and denied hearing anything out of the ordinary on the night Greg died, Ken suggested that detectives start speaking to people who had worked with them during that period and may have heard something second-hand. He then reviewed the hotel surveillance footage. The cameras showed Greg returning to the hotel that evening, as well as members of the electrical crew moving between their rooms and the parking lot. But, there was no confrontation on camera, and nothing to explain what had happened inside Room 348.

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  By late May 2011, more than eight months had passed since Greg's death, and the electricians had long since left the hotel. Ken Brennan and Detective Apple made inquiries with various people who'd worked alongside the occupants of room 349. Most had heard that a man had died at the hotel, but they didn't know anything else about it. A foreman mentioned that he'd heard something about a gun going off in a boarding house. When the detectives told him this was regarding a death at the MCM Allegante, the foreman said he hadn't heard anything about that.

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  After hearing this, Ken told Detective Apple he wanted to go back to the hotel. Apple was dubious. Greg's room had already been examined multiple times, and he didn't know what they could gain by returning again. Ken didn't argue the point.

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  "We're going to look for a bullet," he said.

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  Case file will be back shortly. Thank you for supporting us by listening to this episode's sponsors.

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• 36:25Speaker 00

  By this point, room 348 had been cleaned numerous times, and many other guests had stayed there. If a bullet or fragment had been left loose on the floor, there was every chance it was long gone. Yet, Ken Brennan wanted another look.

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  He and Detective Apple worked slowly through the room with flashlights, checking beneath the bed, behind the furniture, and along the skirting boards, looking for anything that might have escaped a notice the first time. Near the connecting door to the adjoining room, Ken stopped.

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  On the wall beside the door was a shallow patched indentation. In most hotel rooms, this wouldn't have stood out. Walls get marked and damage gets filled and painted over all the time. But something about this bothered Ken.

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  Wondering if the mark could be caused by the door handle hitting the wall, he opened the connecting door and checked where the handle struck the wall.

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  It didn't line up. The doorknob landed slightly to the right of the repaired mark.

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  Hotel staff then gave Ken access to room 349. He went straight to the opposite wall beside the connecting door and saw a small, neat hole. It was an unusual round mark that didn't look like a doorknob strike or ordinary wear and tear. Someone had filled the hole with a pale or dried substance. Up close, it appeared to be dried toothpaste. There was no doubt to Ken Brennan or Detective Apple that someone had made a hole in the wall and tried to hide it. They compared its height and position to the patched indentation in room 348. The points lined up perfectly.

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  Crime scene investigators were called in and material was carefully removed from both damaged areas, exposing the impact points beneath. A laser was then used to trace the path through the shared wall. The beam ran from room 349 into room 348 and dangled upward toward the bed, where Greg would likely have been sitting. The answer to Greg Flanagan's mysterious death was finally solved. He hadn't been attacked elsewhere, but had been shot through the wall.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Before investigators could move forward, one problem remained. From the beginning, Dr Tommy Brown had concluded that Greg Flanagan's death was a homicide caused by blunt force trauma. If Greg really had been shot through the wall, the medical evidence needed to support it before any further investigations could take place or charges be laid. When Dr Brown was told about the evidence found at the hotel, he responded plainly: "You're trying to tell me this man was shot? I'm telling you, he wasn't." Performing a second autopsy wasn't an option, as Greg had been cremated.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  All that remained were Dr Brown's notes, measurements and autopsy photographs, which he agreed to go over with the investigators. As Ken Brennan examined the photos, he kept returning to the same point. Greg's injuries weren't scattered. They appeared to follow a line that ran upward through his body, before returning to the small laceration in his groin. Ken suggested that if a projectile had entered there and travelled upward, it could account for the internal damage pattern they were seeing in the photographs. Dr Brown acknowledged that a bullet could produce a similar internal injury, but he maintained that, in his opinion, the cause remained blunt force trauma.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  As they continued to move through more photographs, Ken kept asking whether each injury could be consistent with a gunshot track. Dr Brown's answers remained cautious, until they reached the photographs of Greg's heart. He pointed out the ruptured right atrium, explaining this was something he'd seen in other cases involving significant blunt trauma to the chest. Ken studied the image carefully, before indicating a small defect in the tissue which he believed could be a bullet hole. He asked Dr Brown to look at it closer. The doctor maintained his initial explanation, but Ken asked him to look again.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Dr Brown studied it for a second time. There was a long pause.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  "Yeah", he agreed. "That's a bullet hole. The meteor is going to kill me on this."

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Room 349 now sat at the centre of the investigation, but the electricians who had occupied it, Lance Mueller and Tim Steinmetz, had long since left Beaumont and returned to their home state of Wisconsin. Police tracked Steinmetz down, and on June 1, 2011, he was summoned for an interview with Ken Brennan and Detective Apple at the Chippewa County Sheriff's Department. Asked to go back over the night at the MCM Elegante, Steinmetz maintained that he'd been out drinking with some of the others before returning to the room to go to sleep, and that they hadn't heard anything unusual coming from the room next door. Asked directly about Greg Flanagan's death,

• 42:07Speaker 00

  Steinmetz said they'd heard something had happened to the man in the adjoining room, but didn't know any details. Steinmetz was then presented with a written statement of his account, which he was asked to read over and sign. He made a few minor amendments before signing off on it. He then stood and asked if that was all. Ken Brennan told him to sit back down. He said the statement Steinmetz had just signed was false, and warned that making a false police report carried serious consequences. The investigators told Steinmetz that they already knew what had happened in Beaumont, and that if he continued to lie, he could place himself in legal jeopardy.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  “I know you know what happened,” Ken Brennan said. “Just tell us what happened.” Steinmetz’s posture changed. Finally, he started talking.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  According to Tim Steinmetz, on the night of Tuesday, September 15, 2010, he had been drinking beer in room 349 with Lance Mueller and Trent Passano. At some point, Mueller told Passano to go down to his car and bring back a bottle of whisky and his gun. Passano returned with a 9mm Ruger. Mueller took it, loaded it, and started playing around with it, pointing it at Steinmetz, who dropped to the floor and swore at him. Mueller then swung the gun toward Passano, who was standing near the foot of the bed. A moment later, he fired.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  For a second, Passano thought he’d been hit. Then he turned and saw a bullet hole in the wall behind him.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Mueller panicked. He bundled up the gun and hurried it back down to his car. By the time he returned, Passano had left for his own room, disgusted by what had happened. Not knowing if anyone had been in the room next door, Mueller and Steinmetz then went downstairs to the hotel bar. When they returned later, Steinmetz remembered hearing coughing through the wall from room 348.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  The next morning, he saw police outside the room, and then, later, a gurney in the hallway. That was when it hit him that the man next door was dead.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  It was the answer the investigators had been chasing for months, but one detail still sat uneasily. If Steinmetz had really heard coughing coming from Greg's room later that night, it meant he might have survived the gunshot for some time. But other witnesses had described Greg as having a persistent cough throughout the trip, and investigators believed Steinmetz might have correctly remembered the sound, but not the timing of when he heard it. Ken Brannan then asked Steinmetz the most obvious question: Did anyone knock on the door to check on Greg? "No," Steinmetz said.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  He started to say more, and then stopped. The investigators tried to call Lance Mueller, but he didn't answer. Assuming he was ignoring their calls, Tim Steinmetz agreed to call Mueller from his own mobile phone while the investigators recorded his conversation. Steinmetz kept his voice casual as he explained to Mueller that he'd just spoken to the investigators from Texas. When Mueller asked how it had gone, Steinmetz repeated the story they had previously agreed on, before eventually admitting he'd come clean and told the police the truth. There was a long silence.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Lance Mueller then asked Steinmetz if he'd told them about the gun going off. Steinmetz said yes. He told Mueller that the investigators believed Greg Flanagan had died from that gunshot. Mueller refused to accept it. He said his lawyer had obtained a copy of the autopsy report, and there was no mention of a gunshot wound. The case had been on the news, and no one had mentioned a firearm then either. Mueller had heard Greg's death described as a heart attack, or from something having fallen on him. "There was no way," he insisted, "that Greg had died from a bullet."

• 46:44Speaker 00

  But in trying to deny it, Mueller had acknowledged exactly what the investigators had hoped he would. He knew about the gunshot in room 349, and he had agreed to the false story. The police tracked Trent Pisano down, and he corroborated Steinmetz's version of events. Lance Mueller was subsequently charged with manslaughter, a charge which carried a maximum of 20 years in prison, and released on bail. With the truth finally revealed, a memory resurfaced for Detective Apple. When he had attended the hotel with some officers on the morning that Greg's body was

• 47:24Speaker 00

  found, they'd been standing around waiting for the body to be transported to the morgue. Mueller and Steinmetz had arrived at their room and stood around awkwardly. To break the silence, Detective Apple had asked the two men how they were going. Mueller had responded: "I was doing better, till now." When the case reached court in Jefferson County in September 2012, 48-year-old Lance Mueller did not deny that the gun had fired, but he disputed the outcome. His position was that the discharge had been accidental, and that he didn't know the bullet had struck anyone in the adjoining room.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  To pursue manslaughter, the prosecutors didn't need to prove intent to kill, but they did need to show that Mueller's conduct met the threshold of recklessness, and that his actions had caused Greg's death. Having sought an opinion from another medical examiner, the prosecution's case was that Greg had been relaxing on his bed when a bullet entered his scrotum, tearing upward into his body, lacerating organs and breaking bones, before lodging deep in his chest. The bullet wound had not been visible because it was hidden by folds of flesh, which resulted in the mark looking more like a bruise.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  In contrast to Dr Brown, who believed it would have taken Greg anywhere between thirty seconds and ten minutes to die from his injuries, the second medical examiner estimated that Greg could have been alive for hours. The gunshot likely caused him to lurch to his feet and then stagger to the spot where he was later found by his coworkers. It was a painful, silent death, one which Lance Mueller did nothing to help. Immediately after discharging the gun, he concealed the damage in the wall with toothpaste, removed the weapon, and made no effort to check on Greg, or alert hotel staff or the police while Greg's death was still being treated as a medical event.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  The prosecution also pointed out that while on bail, Mueller had been arrested in Wisconsin for drunk driving. It was his fourth such offence, and, given that alcohol had also been involved with the Greg Flanagan incident, the prosecution honed in on this hard. Lance Mueller ultimately entered a no contest plea to manslaughter, which meant that he didn't admit guilt, but didn't contest the charge either. By the time Mueller's sentencing hearing took place the following month, over two years had passed since Greg Flanagan's death. It had been an incredibly difficult time for Susie Flanagan.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  Before the case had been solved, the thought that Greg had been savagely beaten and left dead by persons unknown had left her terrified that she could be next. Since the truth had come out, Susie Flanagan had also filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the MCM Elegant, as well as the hotel's security team, arguing that the hotel had failed to take action against the disruptive behaviour of the occupants of Room 349, and the security hadn't performed an adequate investigation of the incident. She also named Lance Mueller, Trent Passano, and Timothy Steinmetz in the claim, accusing them of failing to report the incident to the police.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  The case was ultimately dropped, and no charges were laid against Steinmetz and Passano in relation to Greg's death, because they didn't handle the weapon.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  The stakes were therefore high for Susie on the day of Mueller’s sentencing, as she wanted someone to be held accountable. She was joined at the Jefferson County Courthouse by many of Greg’s loved ones, as well as Ken Brennan and Detective Apple, as she delivered an impassioned victim impact statement. Addressing Mueller directly, Susie said: “I have waited over two years to look you in the face, eye to eye, and simply have the chance to speak directly to you. You would never have come forward with the truth. You murdered Greg. No, you didn’t intentionally seek him out to murder him, but you murdered him, with

• 51:50Speaker 00

  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. He meant nothing to you.” She also made it clear that she would not have let the matter go, saying: “You have met your match. I would have spent the rest of my life tracking you down.” The judge focused not just on the gunshot itself, but the entire situation, which included the irresponsible decision to bring a handgun into a hotel room when alcohol was involved,

• 52:31Speaker 00

  and the egregious actions that came afterwards. Susie watched Mueller’s expression as he was sentenced to 10 years in a Texas prison. She was pleased to see that he looked shocked. Outside court, she told reporters that drivers who hit a dog on the side of the road show more compassion than Lance Mueller did for her husband. She thought Greg would have been proud of her for pursuing the truth, remarking: “I think Greg would say, ‘Good for you, Sue. You stuck with it. You found out who did it, brought them to court, and now, please go and have a happy life.”

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