Process Analysis Article

PROCESS ANALYSIS

There are two types of process-analysis essays.

The first is a how-to essay which tells the reader how to go through some step-by-step process.

The second is one which describes a process and tells how it happens.

The Body in 348

By Mark Bowden, Vanity Fair, May 2013

            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. 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.”

            The following morning, Susie Fleniken called Greg’s office. Husband and wife usually spoke every morning, but he hadn’t called. He wasn’t answering his phone. When he failed to turn up at the office, two of his co-workers drove over to the hotel and knocked on his door.

            There was no answer, so they got the hotel manager to open it. Their alarmed calls brought an ambulance and the Beaumont police. They found a middle-aged man dead on the rug, prone and doubled over, a spent cigarette cupped delicately between two stiff fingers of his left hand. Room 348 was stuffy and exceptionally warm.

            Detective Scott Apple showed up a little more than an hour later. But there was little here to interest him. No sign of a break-in or struggle. Nothing disturbed in the room. No blood or obvious wounds. Fleniken’s wallet was still in the back pocket of his jeans and had a stack of $100 bills in it, so robbery wasn’t an issue. Those staying in nearby rooms had heard nothing. At the hotel, the police saw the death as routine. A photographer snapped pictures to make a record of the scene, and the body was driven by a transport service to the Jefferson County medical examiner for an autopsy.

            Dr. Tommy Brown had a time-tested method. It took him 45 minutes to conduct a postmortem exam, inspecting a body inside and out, measuring and weighing organs, all the while describing what he found and noting the metrics that fleshed out the official form. On the table before him was a 55-year-old Caucasian male who appeared to be in decent shape. After methodical inspection, the only marks Brown found on the body were a one-inch abrasion on his left cheek, where his face had hit the rug, and, curiously, a half-inch laceration of his scrotum. The story his body told grew more intriguing. When Brown opened the front of the torso he discovered a surprising amount of blood and extensive internal damage. The condition of his insides reflected severe trauma: Fleniken had been beaten to death, or crushed. He had also taken a blow to the chest so severe it had caused lethal damage. On the official form, next to “Manner of Death,” Brown wrote, “Homicide.”

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            Over the next weeks and months Apple chased down every angle he could imagine to explain the death of Greg Fleniken. But about six months into it, he was stuck. The physical evidence didn’t add up. Unless Greg had been beaten to death elsewhere, and his body had been returned to the room and carefully placed on the rug, nothing about the scene added up to a crime. How does a man get beaten so severely that ribs crack, inner organs tear, and the heart ruptures, all without significant damage to his torso? Other than the bruising and the cut at his crotch, Fleniken’s outer body showed no signs of a beating. And how could such a rumble have taken place in the hotel room without a thing being toppled or even disturbed? Without anyone in adjacent rooms hearing a thing? And there was no answer to the all-important question: Why? Greg appeared to have had no enemies.

            Through the fall and into the winter of 2010, Apple pursued a number of possibilities. Maintenance records showed that at some point early in the evening of his death, while cooking pre-packaged popcorn in the microwave, Greg had inadvertently blown an electrical circuit. The outage had affected the adjacent room, 349, and the rooms directly underneath. Greg had called the front desk to report the outage and confessed his role sheepishly to the repairman who had come up to reset the breaker.

            This led to two theories. The first one involving the repairman never advanced beyond suspicion. The second theory involved a group of union electricians staying at the Eleganté, a few whom had been in the room next door, Room 349, on the night Greg died. They were in town for an extended stay, doing a job for an oil company. At night, they tended to assemble in one another’s rooms to drink. What if some of them had been partying next door when their electricity went out? Might one or more of them have knocked on Greg’s door and, perhaps drunk and annoyed, exchanged words with and then assaulted him in the hallway? Could Greg, badly beaten, have returned to his room and then collapsed? Some of the electricians had been questioned on the day the body was found, but none of them said they had had any interaction with the man in 348.

            Nine days after Greg’s death, Apple and a colleague returned to the third floor of the cabana wing to question two of these same men again, Mueller and Steinmetz. The two electricians said they thought they had heard the man in the next room coughing when they returned from the bar. Mueller seemed as confused as Apple was about the idea that something had crushed the man. “There’s nothing in these rooms heavy enough,” he said. Down the hall, they found three more of the electricians—Trent Pasano, Thomas Elkins, and Scott Hamilton. The men were friendly and tried to be helpful. Pasano said he had been in the room with Mueller and Steinmetz that night, but hadn’t seen anything.

            Weeks went by. Months went by. Michael Fleniken, Greg’s brother and partner hired a private detective from Houston, a former F.B.I. agent. Apple met with the man and reviewed the case. That was the last he saw of him.

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            The matter of Greg Fleniken was bound for the cold files until Susie hired detective Ken Brennan.

            Brennan worked Susie over first, asking her a lot of hard questions about their relationship, about Greg’s faithfulness, about insurance arrangements, satisfying himself that the wife had no clear motive to have him killed. “Let me ask you one more thing,” said Brennan. “Was there anything about the crime scene that didn’t seem right to you? That seemed off?” Susie told him that she was surprised that the room was so warm when Greg’s co-workers entered it the following morning. Her husband liked to crank up the A.C. at night.

            Then Brennan went home and made arrangements for a second trip, to Beaumont. Apple picked up Brennan and they visited the hotel room, where Apple showed him the crime-scene photos and the autopsy results, and reviewed what he had done over the previous seven months. Brennan heard him out and then announced, “I think I know how this guy died. I think I know when he died. I think I know who killed him. And I think I know how we’re going to catch him.”

            Brennan explained his conclusions to Apple. Susie had already told him how cold Greg kept his room. This helped fix the time of death. As Brennan saw it, the air conditioner had shut down with everything else when the circuit breaker blew. That time was known. Hotel records showed that their repairman had left Greg alive and well around 8:30 P.M. The movie resumed, and apparently Greg forgot to flip the A.C. back on. It would have taken a few minutes for the room to grow warm enough for him to notice, and by the time it had, he was dead. That’s why he had been found in a warm room.

            The cigarette scotched the notion that Greg had been beaten severely somewhere else, perhaps even just out in the hall, and then returned to 348. A hallway scenario might explain why nothing had been disturbed in the room, but the cigarette ruled that out. There was no way Greg’s attackers, returning him, would have added the fine touch of cupping one hand under his body and delicately placing a burning cigarette between his fingers. It was also unlikely, given the ruptured atrium, that Greg would have had time to return to the room after such a beating and calmly light up before keeling over. More likely, Greg had lit this cigarette himself before whatever happened to him happened. If Greg was right-handed, why was the cigarette found in his left hand? As Brennan pieced it together, examining the state of the room, Greg had gotten up from the bed and headed toward the door, shifting the cigarette to his left hand in order to grab the door handle with his right.

            He didn’t know yet how it had happened, but he was convinced that Greg had been quietly minding his own business just minutes, even seconds, before he was killed. This is what led to the electricians, who were close. Their room had been partly blacked out by the blown circuit at the same time Greg’s had been. So, of all the scenarios Apple had considered, this was the one that made the most sense. The union guys may well have been drunk, and may have confronted Greg in the doorway of his room, exchanged words, and kicked him to death right there. “I’m sure if they were drinking they had to talk about it to each other,” said Brennan. “So somebody knows about them. Probably one or two of their close friends or their co-workers are going to know about this.”

            They next paid a visit to Dr. Brown. Ken wanted to know if the injuries Brown had seen might have been caused by a severe beating. They might have, the doctor said. The laceration of the scrotum could have been caused by a hard kick, especially if the assailant had been wearing steel-toed boots. The electricians next door wore construction boots.

            Brennan asked Apple to start interviewing men who had worked with the union electricians the previous summer. He returned home to continue inspecting the hotel’s surveillance video. The cameras showed Greg coming in from work that evening. They showed several of the electricians making trips to their vehicles in the parking lot. But there was nothing obviously suspicious.

            When Brennan returned to Beaumont, in late May, he and Apple went to see some of the co-workers who had not yet been interviewed. By this time the union electricians had been gone for seven months. Apple’s efforts with the co-workers had uncovered nothing, but Brennan was convinced it was worthwhile. Human nature being what it was, if any of the electricians knew something about Greg’s death, word would have spread.

            Yes, most of the men had heard about the man who died in the Eleganté Hotel. All of what these men knew was second- or thirdhand or worse, and was predictably confused. As Brennan would remember it later, one of the crew foremen, a man named Aaron Bourque, had heard something about a gun going off in a boardinghouse. “No,” Apple corrected him. “That’s not the same case. This was the one where a man got in a fight at the Eleganté Hotel.” Bourque had heard nothing about that. As they drove away from Bourque’s house, Brennan said, “We need to go back to the hotel. We’re going to look for a bullet.”

            In Room 348 they began inspecting the floor, the furniture, the walls—everything. They were about to give up when he noticed an indentation in the wall alongside the closed door that led into the adjoining room. The indentation was a repair job. It appeared to be right where the handle of the door would hit the wall—typical hotel-room wear and tear. But when he swung the door open, the knob and the dent didn’t quite match. The doorknob touched the wall slightly to the right.

            “Let’s take a look at the other side,” Brennan suggested. When they got the hotel security guy to let them into Room 349, there was no mistaking what they found on the wall there. Brennan stood alongside a small neat hole in the wall that had been patched with a daub of faintly pink filler that turned out to be dried toothpaste. He measured its height against his hip, then walked back to 348 and measured the indentation. They lined up. A bullet had gone through the wall. The small, neat hole in 349 marked its entry; the larger hole in 348, its exit.

            Beaumont’s crime-scene investigators carefully excavated both holes and shined a laser through. The trajectory pointed straight up to the bed where Greg had been sitting, smoking, eating candy, and watching his movie. But in order to act—in order to bring Greg’s killer or killers to justice—they would have to get the coroner to re-write his findings. You could not argue in court that a defendant had shot someone if the medical examiner’s office had concluded that the victim had not been shot.

            Dr. Brown was not convinced. “You’re trying to tell me that this man was shot,” he said. “I’m telling you he wasn’t shot.” He could see where this was heading, and he flatly refused to order the body exhumed. As it happens, it was impossible, since the body had been cremated.

            “Listen, Doc,” Brennan proposed, “let’s just take out the photos from the autopsy and go through them and see what we can find.” Brennan knew what he was looking at. The bullet had entered Greg’s scrotum and torn up through him. The skin of the scrotum was soft and pliable, and it had folded over the entry wound, making it less obvious what it was. The internal injuries traced the bullet’s fatal trajectory. Brennan asked, “Doc, could all of this damage have 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.” Brennan found something in a photo that supported his argument. It looked like a track. “You could get the same thing from being beaten,” Brown explained. Then they got to the heart. Brown passed the photo to the detectives. “Doc!,” Brennan said.

“That’s a bullet hole, Doc.” Brown took the photo. “Yeah, that’s a bullet hole.” After a long moment he added, “The media is going to kill me on this.”

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            Tim Steinmetz must have been feeling pretty O.K. about this meeting with the Texas cops. 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. 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. Brennan and Apple took notes, then Apple carefully wrote out Steinmetz’s statement.

            “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.

            “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 a friend, but you are about to get your whole family in a bind, and it’s not worth it. It’s not worth it.”

            Out came the whole story, corroborated later that same day, June 1, 2011, in an interview with Trent Pasano, who had been in 349 with them. Between the two accounts, the following scenario emerged: They had been drinking beer. Mueller 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 took out 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 he was pointing it in Pasano’s direction, at the foot of the bed, when it went off. Pasano thought for a second that he had been hit, but then turned to see a hole in the wall behind him. Mueller freaked out, they both said. Mueller bundled up the gun and took it back out to his car. When 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 he and Mueller had seen the police at Room 348 the next morning with a gurney.

            The judge gave Mueller 10 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 the 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 had ruled that Greg had died of blunt-force trauma, Mueller was happy to accept that something might have 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 few days after the incident, and had then 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’s solving the mystery, which had taken about eight months, it is unlikely he would have been charged with manslaughter, much less have gone to jail. Mueller had gambled from the start that whatever connection he had to Greg’s death would never be discovered.

            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. Mueller knew exactly what was hitting him.