The Long and Confusing Murder of Artemus Ogletree/Roland T Owen
Early on the afternoon of January 2, 1935, Ogletree walked into the Hotel President, in what is now the Power & Light District of Kansas City, Missouri, and asked for an interior room several floors up, giving his name as Roland T. Owen, with a Los Angeles address. Staff remembered him as dressed well and wearing a dark overcoat; he brought no bags with him. Ogletree paid for one night. The staff noted that in addition to the visible scar on his temple, he had cauliflower ear, and concluded he was probably a boxer or professional wrestler. They believed him to be in his early 20s.
Randolph Propst, a bellhop, accompanied Ogletree up in the elevator to the 10th floor. On the way, Ogletree told him that he had spent the previous night at the nearby Muehlebach Hotel but found the nightly rate too high. Propst opened Room 1046, which per the guest’s request was on the inside, overlooking the hotel’s courtyard rather than the street outside. He watched as Ogletree took a hairbrush, comb and toothpaste from his overcoat pocket, the extent of his unpacking. After Ogletree put those items above the sink, he and Propst left the room. The bellboy returned to lock it, and gave Ogletree the key.
After returning to the lobby, he saw Ogletree leave the hotel. A short time afterward, Mary Soptic, one of the hotel maids, returned from a day off to work the afternoon shift. She went into Room 1046 and was surprised to find Ogletree there, since the previous night a woman had been in the room. She apologized, but he said she could go ahead and clean the room. While she did, she noticed that he had the shades drawn and left only one dim lamp on. This would remain the case when she encountered Ogletree in the room on other occasions during his stay. “He was either worried about something or afraid” in addition to this preference for low light, she told police later. After she had been cleaning for a few minutes, Ogletree put his overcoat on and brushed his hair. He then left, but asked her to leave the room unlocked as he was expecting some friends in a few minutes. Soptic did as he asked. At 4 p.m., she returned to the room with freshly laundered towels. Inside, the room was dark. She saw Ogletree lying on the bed, fully dressed. Visible in the light from the hallway was a note on his bedside table that read “Don: I will be back in fifteen minutes. Wait”.
The next morning, Soptic returned to Room 1046 around 10:30. The door was locked, which led her to assume that Ogletree was out since it could only be locked from the outside, but when she opened it with her own key Ogletree was present, sitting in the dark just where he had been the previous afternoon. The phone rang and he answered it. “No, Don, I don’t want to eat. I am not hungry. I just had breakfast … No, I am not hungry”, he said. Still holding the phone, Ogletree asked Soptic about her job as she cleaned. He wanted to know if she was responsible for the entire floor, and if the President was residential. He repeated his complaint about the Muehlebach’s exorbitant rates, after which she finished cleaning, and left. Again at 4 p.m., Soptic returned with fresh towels. Inside Room 1046, she could hear two men talking, so she knocked. A voice she described as loud and deep, probably not Ogletree’s, asked who it was. She responded that she had brought fresh towels, to which the voice said “We don’t need any”. Yet Soptic knew there were no towels in the room, as she had taken them herself in the morning.
At 11 p.m. Robert Lane, a city worker driving on 13th Street near Lydia Avenue, saw a man dressed in only an undershirt, pants and shoes run into his path and flag him down. When Lane stopped, the man apologized, saying he had taken Lane’s car for a taxi. The man asked Lane if he could take him to somewhere he might be able to get a taxi. Lane agreed and let the man in. “You look as if you’ve been in it bad”, he observed; the man swore he would kill someone else tomorrow, presumably in retaliation for whatever had been done to him. In the mirror Lane saw a deep scratch on the man’s arm; he also noticed that he was cupping his arm, possibly to catch blood from a more severe wound. At the nearby intersection of 12th Street and Troost Avenue, where taxi drivers often waited for fares during the overnight hours, Lane stopped and let the man out. The man thanked him, got out, and honked the horn of a taxi parked nearby, drawing the driver from a nearby restaurant, after which Lane drove away. After Ogletree’s death, Lane went to view the body. He saw the same scratch on the arm and went to the police, telling them he believed Ogletree had been the man he picked up.
At 7 a.m., a new switchboard operator, Della Ferguson, came on shift. She was preparing to make a requested wakeup call to Room 1046 when she noticed a light indicating that the phone there was off the hook. Propst, who had led Ogletree there two days earlier, was on shift again and drew the assignment. The door to Room 1046 was locked, with a “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging from the doorknob. After several loud knocks, a voice from inside told him to enter; however he could not as the door had been locked. The same voice told him, after another knock, to turn on the lights, but he still could not enter. Finally, Propst just shouted through the door to hang the phone up, and left. Propst told Ferguson that the guest in Room 1046 was probably drunk and she should wait another hour. At 8:30 a.m., the phone had still not been hung up. Another bellboy, Harold Pike, was sent to the 10th floor. The “Do Not Disturb” sign was still on the door, and it was still locked, but Pike had a key and let himself in. Inside he found Ogletree in the dark, lying on the bed naked, apparently drunk. The light from the hallway showed some dark spots on the bedding, but rather than turn on the room light Pike went to the telephone stand, where he saw the phone had been knocked to the floor. He put it back on the stand, replacing the handset. Shortly after 10:30 a.m., another operator reported that the phone in Room 1046 was once again off the hook. Again Propst was sent to the room to see what was going on; the “Do Not Disturb” sign remained on the knob. This time he had a key, and after his knocks drew no response, he opened the door and found Ogletree on his knees and elbows two feet (60 cm) away, his head bloodied. Propst turned the light on, put the phone back on the hook, and then noticed blood on the walls of both the main room and bathroom, as well as on the bed itself.
Propst went downstairs immediately for help. He returned with the assistant manager, but when they did they could only open the door six inches (15 cm), as Ogletree had in the interim fallen on the floor. Eventually Ogletree got up and when the two hotel employees were able to enter the room, he went and sat on the edge of the bathtub. The assistant manager called the police; they were joined by Dr. Harold Flanders of Kansas City General Hospital. Ogletree had been bound with cord around his neck, wrists, and ankles. His neck had further bruising, suggesting someone had been attempting to strangle him. He had been stabbed more than once in the chest above the heart; one of these wounds had punctured his lung. Blows to his head had left him with a skull fracture on the right side. In addition to the blood Propst had seen, there was some additional spatter on the ceiling. Dr. Flanders cut the cords from Ogletree’s wrist and asked him who had done this to him. “Nobody”, Ogletree answered. Asked, then, what had caused these injuries, he said he had fallen and hit his head on the bathtub. The doctor asked if he had been trying to kill himself. After saying no, Ogletree lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital. He was completely comatose by the time he arrived and died shortly after midnight on January 5.
The case returned to the newspapers on March 3, when the funeral home where the body had been kept announced it would be burying the man in the city’s potter’s field the next day. That day, the funeral home received a call from a man who asked that the funeral be delayed so they could send the funeral home the money for a grave and service at Memorial Park Cemetery in Kansas City, Kansas, so, the caller said, the dead man would be near his sister. The funeral director warned the caller he would have to tell the police about the call; the caller said he knew and that did not bother him.
The caller was slightly more forthcoming when the funeral director asked why Ogletree had been killed. According to the caller, Ogletree had had an affair with one woman while engaged to marry another. The caller and the two women had apparently arranged the encounter with him at the President in order to exact revenge. “Cheaters usually get what’s coming to them!” the caller said, and hung up.
The service was postponed per the anonymous caller’s request. On March 23, the funeral home received a delivery envelope, the address carefully lettered using a ruler with $25 ($500 in current dollars) wrapped in newspaper; it was enough to cover the expenses. The sender was unknown.
Two additional envelopes with $5 each were sent to a local florist for an arrangement of 13 American Beauty roses to go with the grave, after a similar call was made to them; both phone calls turned out to have been made from pay phones. Included with this payment was a card, with disguised handwriting, reading “Love Forever – Louise”. The funeral was held shortly afterwards. Besides the officiating minister, the only attendees were police detectives, some of whom served as pallbearers. Other detectives, posing as gravediggers, staked out the grave for the next several days, but no one came to visit.
Several days after the funeral, a woman called the Kansas City Journal-Post’s newsroom to inform them that their earlier story that the dead man from Room 1046 would be buried in a pauper’s grave was incorrect, that he had in fact been given a formal funeral. She said the funeral home and flower shop could verify this. Asked to identify herself, she said “Never mind, I know what I’m talking about”, Pressed for what that was, she responded, “He got into a jam”, and ended the conversation.
