The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  “No, we’re not there yet,” said Brennan, and he started to explain what they had discovered, trying to approach the subject delicately. Brown quickly got the picture.

  “You’re trying to tell me that this guy was shot,” he said. “I’m telling you, he wasn’t shot.” Showing he was already two steps ahead of them, he flatly refused to order the body exhumed. Exhumation is a pain in the ass. It is expensive, disturbing to the family, and a hell of a lot of work—not to mention, as he already had, unnecessary.

  And, as it happens, impossible, since Greg’s body had been cremated. The ovens were hot enough to destroy metal fragments—Brennan had checked. Maybe a mass spectrometer could find something in the ashes, but . . .

  “Listen, Doc,” Brennan proposed. “Let’s just take out the photos from the autopsy and go through them and see what we can find.”

  Brown humored them. As they passed the prints back and forth across the medical examiner’s desk, Brennan pointed out things.

  “What about this here,” he said, pointing at a spot of damage.

  “Yes, that’s the liver.”

  “And what about this here?”

  “Yes, that’s the intestines.”

  Brennan knew what he was looking at. The bullet had entered Greg’s scrotum and torn up through his torso. The scrotum skin was soft and pliable, and it had folded over the entry wound, making what it was less obvious. The internal injuries traced the bullet’s fatal trajectory. He asked, “Doc, could all of this damage been done—besides blunt-force trauma, could a bullet cause the same?”

  “Yes, it could, but that’s not what happened here. This man was beaten.”

  “OK, Doc, but could it have?”

  Brennan found something in a photo that supported his argument, that looked like a track.

  “You could get the same thing from being beaten,” Brown persisted.

  Then they got to the heart. Brown passed the photo to the detectives.

  “Doc!” Brennan said.

  “What?”

  “That’s a bullet hole, Doc.”

  Brown took the photo.

  “What?”

  Brennan pointed. “That’s a fuckin’ bullet hole.”

  Brown explained that sometimes when a person is kicked or hit with a blunt object in the chest, it is the right ventricle that normally bursts.

  “Doc, that’s a fucking bullet hole.”

  Brown looked again.

  “Yeah, that’s a bullet hole.”

  After a long moment he added, “The media is going to kill me on this.”

  Tim Steinmetz must have been feeling pretty OK about this meeting with the Texas cops. Getting called in had been a shocker. It was more than seven months since he and Lance Mueller had come home from the job in Beaumont. Now two cops from down there had come all the way to Wisconsin to see him and to question him about the guy who had died next door. It had been worrisome. He and Mueller had conferred about it beforehand by phone and made sure their stories were straight. Steinmetz met the detectives in an interview room at the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Department, and, really, they could not have been nicer. Tim sat in a swivel chair on one side of a big wooden table, and they sat opposite him with their notebooks open and files handy, very official. They thanked him for coming in. They chatted with him about the hassles of driving cross-country in a broken-down pickup. Nice guys. They assured him that this was just routine. They just needed a statement from him, that was all, something for their files.

  They walked him through the evening, asking a lot of questions, and Steinmetz answered diligently, trying to remember every detail—leaving out the part about the gun, of course—but, thank God, these guys did not push him at all.

  “You heard that the guy next door to you died?” asked the older one, the big guy with the white hair combed straight up in front, Ken Brennan.

  “We did hear that,” said Steinmetz. “But we didn’t know for sure what was going on. . . . We had no idea. We didn’t hear no commotion next door, no banging or nothin’. That’s why this is kind of weird.”

  Brennan and Apple walked him through the whole thing, taking notes. Then Apple wrote the statement out carefully, and asked Steinmetz to go through it, read it out loud, and make any corrections he wanted. He noticed that Apple had put down that he was an “apprentice,” so he changed that to “journeyman.” A few other little things. He initialed all the places where he made a change. Then they brought in a local cop to notarize the statement right there in front of him.

  “And that’s it, huh?” Steinmetz asked.

  “That’s it,” said Apple.

  “You guys flew all the way here for that?”

  So Tim was feeling pretty good when he stood up to go.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  “Hang on a second,” said Brennan. His tone was different now, harsh. “It was OK until you signed that statement. Now you’ve got a problem.”

  “OK,” said Steinmetz, startled. He sat down again.

  “Now tell us what really happened,” said Brennan. “Because we know what happened. Because now you’re going to jail with him. Do you want to go to jail with Lance?”

  “Why am I going to go to jail with Lance?”

  “You just made a false police report, that’s why,” said Brennan. “You want to go to jail for that?”

  “Tim, we know what happened,” said Apple, speaking more gently. “We know everything that happened down there. And I realize you are trying to be noble and protect your friend, but you are about to get your whole family in a bind, and it’s just not worth it. It’s not worth it.”

  “So, just tell us what happened,” said Brennan. “Just tell us what happened. Or, if you want to go to jail with him, go right ahead.”

  “No,” said Steinmetz.

  Out came the whole story, corroborated later that same day, June 1, 2011, in an interview with Trent Pasano, who had been in room 349 with Steinmetz and Mueller. Between the two accounts, the following scenario emerged. The electricians had been drinking beer. Mueller had asked Pasano to fetch a bottle of whiskey from his car and to also bring up his pistol, a 9 mm Ruger. When Pasano returned, Mueller had taken the handgun and, to the others’ alarm, started playing with it. He pointed it at Steinmetz, who dropped to the floor and cursed at him, and as he was pointing it in Pasano’s direction, at the foot of the bed, it went off. Pasano thought for a second he had been hit, but then turned to see a hole in the wall behind him. Mueller freaked out, they both said. Pasano and Steinmetz quickly shut the sliding door overlooking the pool and pulled the shades, worried that any people down there would be looking up after hearing the loud pop. Mueller bundled up the gun and took it back out to his car in the parking lot. By the time he returned, Pasano had left for his own room, disgusted. Mueller and Steinmetz went downstairs to the bar.

  Steinmetz said they had not known for sure there was anyone staying in the room next door until, as he remembered, they heard someone in the room coughing, very late, after midnight, when they came back from the bar.

  He held nothing back. Steinmetz’s second statement, the truthful one, laid out the whole thing. It was good to get it off his chest. When he and Mueller had seen the police in room 348 the next morning, and the gurney, they had been horrified. “I thought he had killed that guy.”

  The only detail that didn’t fit was this business of the two electricians’ hearing a cough behind the closed door when they returned from the bar. Neither Brennan nor Apple was inclined to place much weight on it for several reasons. If it were true, then Greg had survived the gunshot for far longer than the coroner believed possible, but it did not alter the cause of death. If anything, it made the electricians’ failure to check on him or call for help all the more egregious. More likely, Steinmetz and Mueller had heard Greg coughing in the room the previous evening. They had been staying next door that night too and had been down at the bar until late. On both nights they had been drunk. Fixing the cough la
te on the night Greg died was the only shred of Steinmetz’s story that contradicted the detectives’ reconstruction, and he—and Mueller—would cling to it, even though it hardly mattered.

  “Did anybody knock on the door to check on the guy?” Brennan asked.

  “No,” said Steinmetz. “I always ask myself, if I was in a situation like this, you know, what would I do, and I admit—”

  He never finished the thought. The detectives had something else they wanted him to do.

  “Hey, Lance, what’s up?” asked Steinmetz. He’d dialed Mueller on his cell phone. Apple and Brennan were recording the call.

  “Not much,” said Mueller. “Just sittin’ around.”

  “Well, I just got back from down there.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Well, I told them the whole story. You know, what had happened, that we were stickin’ to there, you know?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know, the story that we were stickin’ to, that we got home late that night, you know, and the guy coughed or whatever.”

  “Right.”

  “And, uh . . .” Stenmetz began to hem and haw. “And, uh, I was fixin’ . . . I was gonna leave there then, because your lawyer said it would be OK, right? You know?”

  “Right.”

  “And when I left there, they said, ‘OK, you know, tell us the truth.’ So I, you know, I told them the truth, what really happened.”

  There was a long silence on the other end.

  “About the gun going off and all that?” Mueller asked.

  “Yep.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Well, that I would be in trouble, you know, if I didn’t tell them.”

  Another silence.

  “So, what did they say?”

  “Not much. I don’t know if they are going to get ahold of you, or Trent, or what the hell they’re going to do.”

  Mueller sighed heavily. Then he groaned.

  “What did they mean by that? I mean, ‘Tell us the truth’? Did they say anything about the gun prior to that or what?”

  “No. They just said they knew exactly what happened. Told me to stop fuckin’ lyin’. They were pretty pissed. And then I told them exactly how everything went down, and what really and truly happened.” Steinmetz suggested that Mueller call Apple right away. “They are probably going to come and get your ass, now that they know the truth and everything. You should probably try and make some kind of effort, you know? . . . The guy, he died from the gunshot.”

  “Are you shittin’ me, Tim?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Oh my God, are you kidding me? Are you serious right now?”

  “I’m serious as a heart attack, Lance.”

  Mueller refused to believe him. For the next few minutes of the call, he went around and around with Steinmetz. His lawyer had obtained the autopsy report and assured him that the man had not died of a gunshot. The story had been all over the news. “It doesn’t make sense!” he said. “If there was a gunshot, if he was killed from, you know, a firearm, they would have said something on the damn news!” Mueller pointed out that the day Apple and the other detective had questioned them in their hotel room, the gun had been in a small cooler right on his bed. If they had been looking for a gun, why wouldn’t they have searched the room? Hadn’t they seen the hole in the wall? In the weeks and months since, he had worked hard to convince himself that the accidental gunshot and the death of the man in room 348 were unrelated—and the autopsy report had confirmed it.

  “It doesn’t make sense!” he protested. “First the coroner ruled that it was a heart attack. Then they started saying it was something fell on him. . . . There’s no way! There’s absolutely no way that guy was killed by a bullet!”

  He asked Steinmetz how he was doing.

  “How’m I doin’?” Steinmetz said. “Not good. I need to drink some more beers.”

  Mueller apparently applied the same remedy, because he later phoned Brennan, clearly intoxicated, and started trying to explain himself. He said he wanted to make a statement.

  “You’re drunk,” Brennan told him. “I suggest you call your fuckin’ attorney.”

  Brennan was worried when the judge started reading the sentence. He had flown to Beaumont on October 29, 2012, to join Susie Fleniken and Scott Apple and a group of Greg’s family members and friends for the sentencing of Lance Mueller. The electrician had entered a no-contest plea to manslaughter. As Brennan remembered it, the judge began by saying that this whole tragedy might be seen just as a terrible accident.

  Oh fuck, thought Brennan, here it goes. Don’t tell me this guy is going to get a year or something.

  But then the judge started cataloguing the long list of willfully irresponsible choices that had led to this day.

  More like it, thought Brennan.

  The judge gave Mueller ten years, half of what the law allowed. The apology Mueller offered in court, no matter how sincere, came way too late. There was his criminally irresponsible decision to drunkenly play with the gun. As Steinmetz had said, they had suspected from the start that this errant bullet had at least helped kill the man in room 348. Even a heart attack, which had been the first assumption as the police rolled his body out on a gurney, might have been triggered by the gunshot. Then, after the coroner ruled that Greg had died of blunt-force trauma, Mueller was happy to accept that something had crushed him to death, even if it was hard to imagine what. Still, he had been worried enough about the gunshot. He had himself patched the hole with toothpaste. He had hidden the gun immediately in his car, then stashed it with a friend for the first days after the incident, and then had handed it over to an attorney for safekeeping before he left Texas.

  What a huge mistake. If he had come forward at any time prior to Brennan and Apple solving the mystery, which had taken about eight months, it is unlikely he would have been charged with any crime, much less gone to jail. Mueller had gambled from the start that whatever connection he had to Greg’s death would never be discovered. The odds were his favor too. If Susie had not made that phone call to Ken Brennan, it’s doubtful Mueller would have lost the bet. As it was, even after the connection to his gunshot was made, the county district attorney’s office had been reluctant to prosecute the case as a felony.

  Brennan had responded by confronting the DA when he found out that the prosecutor might opt for a plea deal. He had flown to Beaumont and joined a meeting between Apple and Paul Noyola, an investigator for the DA’s office. Noyola explained that accidental gun discharges in Texas were not uncommon, that juries and judges tended to understand them, and that, well, the whole issue of accident versus manslaughter was a fairly gray area of the Texas criminal code. The gun was still locked in Mueller’s lawyer’s safe, Noyola said, and he was making noises about fighting efforts to turn it over. In other words, the whole thing was looking like more of a hassle than a slam dunk.

  “I suggest you go down there with a search warrant and a fuckin’ blowtorch and go get the fucking weapon!” Brennan said. “It’s evidence of a capital crime. What the fuck are you talking about?”

  The private detective was incensed. He arranged to bring Susie to Beaumont for a private meeting with the assistant DA in charge of the case. Here’s what he remembers saying:

  “The victim was important to everybody here,” he began, gesturing around the table. “And we’re not going to let this thing be brushed under the rug, [or] let somebody take a plea on this. This is not a fucking accident. An accident is when somebody comes in, has taken off their gun, their gun discharges, and God forbid, somebody is hit . . . That’s one thing. It’s completely different when somebody fuckin’ brings a gun that they shouldn’t have [Mueller had a prior conviction that Brennan assumed should have barred him from carrying a gun] into another fuckin’ state, shit-faced drunk, fucking around with a gun. The people with him realize that something bad could happen. They make the guy unload it, put it in the car. Then he goes and gets
another guy to bring it back in. He’s fucking around with it, drunk again, and discharges a round. Almost kills the guy he’s with. And then he does kill somebody on the other side of the wall. He knows that’s something that could happen; it’s an occupied hotel. He doesn’t even bother to knock on the door next door to see if anybody’s hurt. And after that, his answer to the whole thing is to go get drunk some more in the fucking bar of the hotel? And then when he sees a body being taken out the next day, and he is one hundred percent certain he killed somebody, he decides not to say anything about it but run to his attorney and leave the fucking weapon in a safe, and the fucking attorney doesn’t say anything about it either? You know what that is? That’s fucking murder. So if you think we’re going to forget about this fucking thing, think again. Because that ain’t fuckin’ happening.”

  Brennan’s anger can fill a room.

  After Mueller was sentenced, Brennan and Apple went out for a celebratory lunch. Brennan ordered a cocktail. Apple, who was on duty, didn’t. They made plans to play golf together.

  In the courtroom that day, Susie Fleniken had had a chance to speak to Mueller directly.

  “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,” she said. “You would never have come forward with the truth. . . . 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, 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.”

  Later, Susie told me that she watched Mueller’s face as the sentence was pronounced and that he had looked terribly shocked. That was good, she thought. He’s shocked, but not as shocked as my husband was.

  That night in room 348, relaxing, smoking, watching Iron Man 2, Greg Fleniken could not have known what hit him in the moments before he died.