Mystery of Room 1046 (The Unsolved Murder Room)

There's nothing like checking into a hotel. You can kick back, relax and let others take care of everything. But don't go crazy in the minibar: those pretzel bags add up. But when you check into a hotel, above all, you trust that the hotel will provide you with safety and security. Your

room

is your sanctuary. This made it even stranger when a man was

murder

ed in the safety of his hotel

room

, in the middle of one of the oldest and most prestigious hotels in America. The year was 1935 in Kansas City, Missouri, and the President Hotel was one of the crown jewels of the city's Power & Lights district.

Less than ten years earlier, it had even hosted the Republican National Convention, which nominated Herbert Hoover for president. The hotel was best known for its Drum Room lounge, which hosted legendary artists such as Ol' Blue Eyes and Frank Sinatra. Anyone who was in Kansas City knew that the President Hotel was the ideal place to people watch. However, their most famous guest was yet to arrive. Roland T. Owen was a modest man who walked into the President Hotel and requested an inside room on the upper floors on January 2. He claimed to be from Los Angeles, and those who saw him during his stay at the hotel remembered him mainly for an ugly scar on his temple and a deformed ear.

That led many people to assume that he was a professional boxer. A strange and quiet man, he spoke with bellman Randolph Propst on the way to room

1046

and stated that he had stayed at another hotel but that he wanted a cheaper one. But Propst noticed something strange: For a man who had been traveling, Roland T. Owen hardly carried any luggage. Just a hairbrush, a comb and toothpaste in his pocket, and no suitcase in sight. Mr. Owen was a mysterious guest, but a bigger

mystery

was about to put the President Hotel in the history books. Mr. Owen continued to baffle the hotel workers while he remained there for two days.

The maid Mary Soptic was surprised when she entered the dark room and she found Owen sitting there in the dark, with the blinds closed and only a dim lamp on. He told her to go ahead and clean up, but something seemed strange about the room. No one ever saw Owen turn on the lights in his room and he always seemed nervous. He left and asked her to leave the room open, as if she was waiting for someone. Roland Owen stayed at the hotel for two days and the first night was when things started to get really disturbing.

When Mary returned, she found Owen lying on her bed, fully dressed, and had left a note next to the bed addressed to someone named Don. She said, “Don: I'll be back in fifteen minutes. Wait." But no one had ever seen anyone else enter the room. Whoever Don was, Owen seemed to communicate with him more than any of the guests or staff. Mary Soptic reported many strange things, such as the fact that the room Owen's door was locked from the outside at one point, but the door could only be locked from the inside. When he entered, he heard the phone ring and Owen said, “No, Don.

I'm not hungry. I just had breakfast. , I'm not hungry." Owen appeared to be planning a long-term stay and asked Soptic about the president's residential rates. But his stay would be much shorter than anyone expected. When Soptic returned to furnish Owen's room at 4 pm on the second day, she heard two men talking inside. When she called, she heard a deep voice speaking, definitely not Owen's. She asked if they needed towels and the

mystery

man said no. But she knew there were no towels in that room. Jean Owen, who was staying in the next room, said she heard many people talking in room

1046

, shouting and cursing.

And as the night wore on, the behavior at the hotel became increasingly strange. A woman who believed herself to be a prostitute wandered the hallways looking for her client. She was waiting for him in Owen's room, but she came out empty. Outside, a city worker observed a man dressed only in a T-shirt, pants and shoes running toward the street with a distressed expression. He was ranting, saying that he would kill someone and seemed hurt. No one could answer whether he was related to the mysterious events in room 1046, but he disappeared in a taxi and was never seen again.

The next morning, everyone would be searching for answers. It was an ordinary day, January 4, when Della Ferguson came on shift as a telephone operator at the President Hotel. She made her planned wake-up call to room 1046, when she noticed that the phone had been picked up. She contacted Randolph Propst to check on the room and he found the door closed with a "Do Not Disturb" sign. When she knocked, a voice inside her told her to come in, but the door was still closed and no one was letting her in. She yelled for them to hang up the phone and left.

Another bellhop, Harold Pike, had a key and entered after they didn't hang up the phone. She found Pike alone, in the dark, naked and unconscious. There was no sign of anyone else, and Pike hung up the phone and left. Only two hours passed before the phone went off the hook again, and when Propst entered the room, he found something very different in the isolated and closed room. Owen was on the ground, on his hands and knees, and his head was bloody. The most worrying thing was that there was blood all over the walls, on the bed and in the bathroom.

Propst ran downstairs to get help, but when they returned, the door was locked. His had fallen in front of him, preventing entry with his body. They spoke to the injured man, who finally made his way and let them enter. They called doctors to examine him and what they found was terrifying and impossible to explain. Owen had been tied with rope around his neck, wrists and ankles. His neck showed signs of strangulation and he had been stabbed several times in the chest. He suffered a serious skull fracture from blows to the head, and the damage was so severe that blood spatters could be found on the ceiling.

When Dr. Harold Flanders, a local doctor, asked him what had happened, Owen insisted that he had fallen in the bathtub. When asked who hurt him, he said “no one.” His injuries were serious and he was rushed to the hospital. But the mysterious Roland T. Owen would reveal no more secrets. By the time they arrived at Kansas City General Hospital, he had fallen into a coma and died shortly afterward. No one had seen anyone enter the room that morning. There were no signs of a struggle in the room. Owen was alive, although drunk, when Propst entered the room.

How was he brutally

murder

ed in a locked hotel room? That's what the Kansas City Police Department wanted to find out. Jean Owen was detained and briefly interviewed, but when her boyfriend backed up her story she was released. An autopsy on Owen revealed that he had been fatally stabbed and beaten, but one of the strangest things was that he had apparently been wounded between 4 a.m. and 1 p.m. m. and 5 a.m. m. according to dried blood. That meant Owen was already dying when Pike entered his room and found him lying in bed. A thorough search of the room found few items belonging to Owen, but they also found no evidence of the knife used to kill him.

That ruled out suicide. But other strange objects were found in the room, including a bottle of diluted sulfuric acid and a clothing tag from New Jersey. The crime scene team searched for fingerprints and found a game belonging to a woman who did not match anyone at the hotel. Was it this mysterious visitor who marked the end of Roland T. Owen? The murder made front-page news and detectives soon believed that Roland T. Owen was not who he said he was. A phone call to Los Angeles to search for next of kin came up empty, and the deceased's fingerprints were sent to the Department of Justice pending a match.

But the case seemed to be going cold, until the President Hotel received a mysterious phone call. A woman called the front desk to ask what Owen was like and she claimed to know him from a town called Clinton just fifty miles away. Sightings came from all over the city and the Muehlebach Hotel, which the deceased had vacated due to high rates, reported that he had checked in under another name, Eugene K. Scott. The Los Angeles police confirmed that it was probably a fake name as well, and the mystery only deepened. Soon, people came from all over, claiming to know the mysterious Mr.

Owen under different names. Was he the cousin of a man who came to see the body? No, that cousin died five years earlier. Was he a professional wrestler named Cecil Werner from Little Rock, Arkansas? No, the wrestling promoter couldn't make a match. New murders in the city soon gained attention, and the mysterious death of Roland T. Owen, whoever he was, disappeared from the headlines. The body was to be buried in a potter's field when the funeral home received a mysterious phone call saying they would pay for a grave and service at a nearby cemetery. The funeral director asked what they knew about the death and the person said the man had been involved in a sordid affair while he was engaged to another woman.

He said, "Cheaters usually get what they deserve" and hung up. Was the mystery man in room 1046 murdered in a lover's quarrel gone wrong? And who was he? The answers would take a long time to arrive. It was more than a year later when the next break in the case would come. Images of the man circulated around the country, but it wasn't until a friend of Ruby Ogletree's from Birmingham, Alabama, saw it in the newspaper that the truth came to light. Ruby quickly identified the man as her son, Artemus Ogletree. Her son had hitchhiked to California in 1934 and had not returned home since, but she knew details of the case that proved he was telling the truth.

She quickly identified the cause of the distinctive scar on his temple as a kitchen grease accident he had as a child. She even showed investigators the letters her son had sent here. There was just one problem. Several of the letters were postmarked AFTER the murder of Artemus Ogletree in Kansas City. Not only that, Artemus was a simple boy who didn't know how to use a typewriter and used simple language. Several of the letters were typewritten and used literary language. He had also received phone calls from people claiming to know Artemus, including one with a wild story about being in Egypt with him and Artemus saving his life in a fight.

The man gave his name to Ruby and she gave it to the police, but it was never revealed. Who had been writing letters to the mother of a dead person for years? With a fresh pile of evidence courtesy of Artemus' grieving mother, the police reopened the case and soon had their prime suspect. Joseph Martin was arrested in 1937 in New York after killing his roommate and attempting to ship the body to Memphis. When they found his wallet filled with fake IDs, they also found some writing that matched letters received by Ruby Ogletree after Artemus' death. But charges were never filed and the case was frozen.

Who killed Artemus Ogletree in that locked room at the President Hotel? Was it Joseph Martin, as part of his long criminal career? Was it an organized crime murder and who was Don? Wasn't it a name at all, but the title of a mob boss that Artemus Ogletree had crossed? Or was it a lovers' quarrel gone horribly wrong, when Artemus's broken engagement came back to take his life? Or was there something else lurking in room 1046 of the President Hotel? Something unnatural that terrified Artemus Ogletree, that he could stab a man to death without a knife being found, behind a closed door?

The mystery has not yet been solved and researchers still puzzle it today. But the President Hotel continues to receive guests to this day. Ready to register? For more information about deaths no one can explain, see "The World's Most Shocking Unsolved Murders." Or for a much more enjoyable hotel stay than Artemus Ogletree had, why not watch “Inside the World's Most Expensive Hotel Room”?