On January 2, 1935, a mysterious young man walked into the Hotel President in downtown Kansas City and requested an interior room several floors above the street.
He signed the register as Roland T. Owen, claimed he was from Los Angeles and paid for one night.
He carried no suitcase.
His only belongings appeared to be a comb, a brush and a tube of toothpaste tucked inside his overcoat.
Hotel employees immediately noticed the tall, broad-shouldered stranger. A large scar ran along the left side of his head, leaving a bald spot near his misshapen ear. He wore a black overcoat and seemed determined to keep to himself.
Two days later, he would be carried out of Room 1046 barely alive.
And Roland T. Owen was not his real name.
The Man Sitting in the Dark
Shortly after Owen checked in, hotel maid Mary Soptic entered Room 1046 to clean. Owen told her he was preparing to leave but asked her not to lock the door. He said a friend would be stopping by soon.
The following day, Soptic returned and found the door locked from the outside.
She opened it with her passkey and was startled to find Owen sitting alone in the darkness. Only a small lamp illuminated the room.
The telephone rang while she was cleaning.
“No, Don, I don’t want to eat,” Owen said into the receiver. “I am not hungry. I just had breakfast.”
Later that afternoon, Soptic returned with fresh towels. This time, she heard two men speaking inside the room. When she knocked, an unfamiliar male voice answered.
“We don’t need any.”
Whatever was happening inside Room 1046, Owen was no longer alone.
The Phone Left Off the Hook
Early Friday morning, the hotel switchboard operator noticed that the telephone in Room 1046 had been off the hook for an unusual amount of time.
Bellboy Randolph Probst went upstairs and knocked.
A voice from inside told him to come in and turn on the lights, but the door was locked. Probst called through the door and told the occupant to replace the telephone receiver. Then he returned downstairs.
The phone came off the hook again.
Another bellboy, Harold Pike, was sent to the room. Pike entered with a passkey and saw a man lying naked across the bed in the dark. The telephone stand had been knocked over, and dark stains covered the bedding.
Pike assumed the guest was drunk. He replaced the telephone and left.
Several hours later, the phone was off the hook for the third time.
Probst returned, opened the door and finally switched on the lights.
The scene before him was horrific.
The young man was naked, beaten and bleeding. A cord had been tied around his neck, wrists and ankles. He had suffered multiple stab wounds to the chest and injuries severe enough to suggest that the attack had begun hours earlier.
Remarkably, he was still alive.
When investigators asked who had done this to him, he gave them almost nothing.
“Nobody.”
When they asked how he had been injured, he reportedly claimed he had fallen against the bathtub.
He slipped into a coma and died shortly after midnight on January 5, 1935.
A Room Stripped of Evidence
By the time police examined Room 1046, nearly everything belonging to the victim was gone.
His clothing had disappeared. So had his comb, brush and toothpaste. Even ordinary hotel items were reportedly missing.
Among the few objects left behind were a hairpin, a safety pin, part of a necktie label, two drinking glasses and a bottle believed to contain sulfuric acid.
Investigators had a murdered man, a nearly empty hotel room and a name that led nowhere.
“Roland T. Owen” did not appear to exist.
The victim’s body was placed on public display in the hope that someone would recognize him. Several people came forward, but no identification could be confirmed.
Eventually, authorities prepared to bury the unknown man in a pauper’s grave.
Then another mysterious telephone call came in.
“Love Forever, Louise”
An unidentified man contacted the funeral home and asked them to delay the burial. He promised to send money for a proper funeral.
The money reportedly arrived wrapped in newspaper.
According to contemporary accounts, thirteen roses were sent for the funeral with a card bearing a simple message:
Love forever, Louise.
The man who arranged the burial claimed he was acting for his sister. Neither he nor Louise was ever conclusively identified.
Someone knew the victim.
Someone cared where he was buried.
Yet no one was willing to publicly claim him.
His Name Was Artemus Ogletree
More than a year later, a woman in Birmingham, Alabama, recognized the victim from photographs connected to the case.
The murdered man was her teenage son, William Artemus Ogletree.
Artemus had left home in 1934 and headed west. His mother believed he was traveling and looking for work. She continued receiving letters that appeared to come from him, including messages claiming he was traveling through New York and preparing to sail overseas.
But some of those communications arrived after Artemus had already been murdered.
His mother found the letters suspicious. They were typewritten, although Artemus did not know how to type, and they contained expressions she did not recognize as his.
She also received a telephone call from a man calling himself Godfrey Jordan, who claimed Artemus was alive in Cairo, Egypt.
By then, Artemus had been dead for months.
Someone had apparently tried to convince his family that he was still traveling.
The Investigation Did Not End in Room 1046
The surviving police file shows that investigators continued chasing leads for years.
They exchanged letters with Artemus’s mother, the Birmingham Police Department, federal agencies and officials attempting to trace his supposed travels. They examined hotel registrations, false names and handwriting samples.
One trail centered on the name Donald Kelso and later led investigators to a man named Joseph Ogden. Years after the murder, evidence was submitted to the FBI laboratory for handwriting comparison.
The FBI concluded that Ogden had not written one of the key “Donald Kelso” signatures. Other questioned documents could not be conclusively connected to a single writer.
The lead faded, just like so many others.
No one was ever charged with the murder of Artemus Ogletree.
More than ninety years later, the same questions remain.
Who was “Don”?
Who sent the letters after Artemus was dead?
Who called his mother and claimed he was in Egypt?
Who paid for his burial?
And what happened inside Room 1046 before Artemus whispered that nobody had hurt him?
The public version of this mystery usually ends with the bloody hotel room, the anonymous roses and the strange name on the register.
But the police file tells a much larger story.
I have taken a deeper look at the investigation, Artemus’s disappearance, the false trail created after his death and the suspects police continued pursuing for years. The full long-form casefile—including the surviving police records—will be available through my Patreon.
[READ THE COMPLETE CASEFILE AND DOWNLOAD THE POLICE FILE ON PATREON]
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