The Body In Room 348

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The Body in Room 348

The corpse at the Eleganté Hotel stymied the Beaumont, Texas, police. They could find no motive for the killing

of popular oil-and-gas man Greg Fleniken—and no explanation for how he had received his strange internal

injuries. Bent on tracking down his killer, Fleniken’s widow, Susie, turned to private investigator Ken Brennan,

the subject of a previous Vanity Fair story. Once again, as Mark Bowden reports, it was Brennan’s sleuthing

that cracked the case.

By Mark BowdenPhotograph by Dan Winters

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EARLY CHECKOUT The third-

floor hotel room where Greg

Fleniken’s body was found—cause of

death a mystery.

Greg Fleniken traveled light and

lived tidy. After so many years on the

road, he would leave his rolling

suitcase open on the floor of his

hotel room and use it as a drawer.

Dirty clothes went on the closet

floor. Shirts he wanted to keep

unwrinkled hung above. Toiletries

were in the pockets of a cloth folding

case that hooked onto a towel rack in

the bathroom. At the end of the day

he would slide off his worn brown

leather boots and line them up by

the suitcase, drop his faded jeans to

the floor, and put on lightweight

cotton pajama bottoms.

Most evenings he never left the room. He would crank up the air conditioner—he liked a cool room at night—and sit on the

bed, leaning back on two pillows propped against the headboard. Considerately, to avoid soiling the bedspread, he would

lay out a clean white hand towel, on which he placed his ashtray, cigarette pack, lighter, BlackBerry, the TV remote, and a

candy bar. He smoked and broke off candy bits while watching TV. This is where Greg was on the evening of Wednesday,

September 15, 2010, in Room 348 of the MCM Eleganté Hotel, in Beaumont, Texas—lounging, smoking, snacking on a

Reese’s Crispy Crunchy bar, sipping root beer, and watching Iron Man 2.

He missed the ending.

Greg was accustomed to solitary nights. As a young man he had worked as a chief engineer on oceangoing vessels,

spending months at sea. In middle age he had re-invented himself as a landman, a familiar occupation in South Texas,

easing the exploitation of mineral rights on private property for gas and oil companies. Slender, with a close-cropped

white beard and the weathered skin of a lifelong outdoorsman, he had partnered with his brother, Michael, in a thriving

oil-land leasing business based in this small city east of Houston. Every Monday morning he would make the two-hour

drive in his pickup from Lafayette, Louisiana, heading west on Interstate 10 through scruffy Gulf-shore farmland broken

only by cell-phone towers, oil derricks, and billboards advertising motel chains, bayou restaurants, “Adult Superstores,”

and other local attractions. It took him through the stink of the big ConocoPhillips refinery at Lake Charles, a forest of

piping, giant tanks, and towering chimneys. The hotel was just off the cloverleaf outside Beaumont. His company rented

him a room in the “cabana,” a three-story wing that wrapped around a small swimming pool framed by potted palms.

That Wednesday night, watching his movie, Greg got an e-mail from his wife, Susie, shortly after seven. Susie was using a

computer program to file for a tax extension. After she reported her progress he wrote back, “You’re doin’ good, babe.”

At some point during the loud, computer-generated showdown at the end of the film, amid all the fake violence, Greg was

struck from nowhere with a very real and shattering blow. A blow so violent it would blind a man with pain. He managed

to get off the bed and move toward the door before he fell, legs splayed and face-first.

He was probably dead by the time his face hit the green rug.

Disclaimer: the case outlined in the following article may disturb some readers.