Man dies in hotel room with torn organs. But his body has zero signs of attack, and the story only gets stranger

On September 16, 2010, coworkers found Greg Fleniken dead on the floor of Room 348 at the MCM Elegante Hotel in Beaumont, Texas. The 55-year-old man from Lafayette, Louisiana, was lying face down in his pajamas with a cigarette still in his hand. The door was locked from the inside. His wallet was still there. Nothing looked out of place.

According to Vanity Fair, when the local coroner Dr. Tommy Brown checked the body, he found something strange. Fleniken’s ribs were broken. His chest bone was cracked. His heart and liver were torn up inside. The strangest thing was a dark purple wound on his private area that looked crushed. But here’s the weird part. There were no bruises anywhere else on his body. No cuts. No marks on his chest. The damage inside looked like he had been in a bad car crash, but he was just lying on a hotel room floor.

Dr. Brown first thought the damage came from CPR. But Fleniken had been dead for hours before anyone found him. Nobody tried to bring him back to life. The coroner said it was murder but couldn’t figure out how. It took almost two years to solve what happened.

How a private eye found the missing clue

Fleniken’s wife Susie was not happy with the answers she got. She hired private investigator Ken Brennan. He used to work for the DEA. Brennan teamed up with Detective Scott Apple. They looked into what Greg did on his last night. They started looking closely at three electricians from Wisconsin who were staying in Room 349, right next to Fleniken’s room.

Brennan and Apple went back to Room 348 to look around again. That’s when Brennan saw something everyone else missed. There was a tiny hole in the wall. It was small enough that people walked right past it. In Room 349, they found another hole that someone had filled up with toothpaste.

The police brought in the electricians for questions. Tim Steinmetz finally told them what really happened. On the night Fleniken died, his coworker Lance Mueller had been drinking. Mueller was showing off a 9mm Ruger gun. He was playing around with it, acting like he was in an old cowboy movie. The gun went off. The bullet went through the wall and hit Fleniken while he was lying in bed watching Iron Man 2. The men got scared. They plugged the hole with toothpaste. They never checked to see if anyone got hurt next door.

The bullet went into Fleniken’s body through his private area. It went up inside him, breaking bones and tearing his organs. Sometimes when skin is loose, it can close back up after someone dies. This hides the bullet hole. Mueller said he didn’t mean to kill anyone in October 2012. He got 10 years in prison. “You murdered him, with every lie you told, with every intentional selfish deception,” Susie said to Mueller in court, according to Vanity Fair. The case later appeared in true crime documentaries and is now known as one of the most mysterious cases that got solved after years of hard work.