1046
The case of the man in room 1046 is beyond bizarre, a bloody tale riddled with false clues and loose threads. For every detail that seems to offer an answer, there is another that only raises more questions.
On January 2, 1935, a man checked into room 1046 of the Hotel President in Kansas City, Missouri. He signed the register as Roland T. Owen. He carried no luggage, and when the bellboy let him into room 1046, the only items he removed from his pockets were a comb, a brush, and some toothpaste.
The man would not live to check out of the hotel.
When a maid came to clean the room on the day Owen checked in, she found him sitting with the shades drawn tight, and only one small lamp switched on for illumination. He told her to leave the door unlocked because he was expecting a friend, but left the room before the woman finished cleaning. She later said that he seemed nervous and frightened.
The maid returned again a few hours later to replace the towels, and found Owen back in the room, lying on the bed fully dressed. She noticed a note had been left on the table. It read, “Don, I will be back in fifteen minutes. Wait.”
At 10:30 A.M. on January 3, the same maid returned to clean the room. She found the door locked from the outside, and opened it with her passkey, assuming that Owen had gone out. Instead, she found him sitting alone in the dark. Shortly after she entered, the telephone rang, and Owen answered it, saying, “No, Don, I don’t want to eat. I am not hungry. I just had breakfast.”
Later, she returned to room 1046 to change out the towels. Upon her arrival, she heard two male voices talking inside the room. She knocked, but was turned away after being informed by a “rough” voice that the room didn’t need any towels. Little is known about Owen’s activities for the rest of the afternoon.
Later that night though, a motorist named Robert Lane picked up a stranger several blocks from the Hotel President. Though it was a cold evening, the man was dressed only in pants and an undershirt, and had a deep scratch in his left arm. The man flagged down Lane, and asked to be taken someplace to catch a cab. When Lane told his passenger that he looked as if he was having a bad night, the man replied, “I’ll kill that [expletive deleted by the newspapers of the time] tomorrow.” Lane would later identity the hitchhiker as none other than Roland T. Owen.
The next major event occurred at 7:00 A.M. on January 4, when the operator at the Hotel President noticed that the phone in room 1046 was off the hook. As fate would have it, Randolph Propst, the same bellboy who had checked Owen into the hotel, was sent up to tell the occupant of room 1046 to hang up the phone. When he got there, he found the door locked, with a “Don’t Disturb” sign hanging from the knob. He knocked and was told to “Come in,” however, the door was locked. He knocked again and was once more beckoned inside, this time being asked to “turn on the lights.” Assuming that the occupant of the room was drunk, Propst knocked a few more times, then shouted through the door for the occupant to hang up the phone. But the phone remained off the hook.
A different bellboy went up later that afternoon. He let himself into the room with a passkey, and found Owen lying on the bed in the dark, naked and seemingly inebriated. He also found that the phone stand had been knocked over. Without turning on any lights or conversing with Owen, the bellboy righted the phone stand, replaced the receiver in its cradle, and then exited the room.
Later, the operator noticed that the phone was off the hook once more. This time, she sent Propst back up to check it out. He opened the door with his passkey. There on the floor was a brutalized Roland T. Owen, naked and covered in blood. After turning on the lights, he found blood splattered across the bed, on the walls, and in the bathroom. Moments later, police arrived.
They discovered that Owen had been tied up and tortured for several hours. He had been stabbed multiple times, and his skull was fractured from repeated blows to the head. Somehow, Owen had survived the assault. When police tried to questioned him, all he would say was that he had fallen against the bathtub. Unfortunately though, he slipped into a coma and died that night.
Authorities scoured room 1046 for clues; what had happened? They found the label from a necktie, an unsmoked cigarette, a woman’s hairpin, a safety pin, and a small bottle of sulfuric acid. There were also two water glasses, one of which yielded four fingerprints that may have been female. But the most baffling development was yet to come. When police tried to confirm the victim’s identity, they could not find any record of a Roland T. Owen that matched the victim’s description. The man had checked in under a false name. Roland T. Owen was now a John Doe.
The body was brought to a local funeral home and publicly displayed, in the hope that someone could identify it. Several people believed that they did recognize the individual, but claimed to have encountered him under alternate names in different locations throughout the city. Unable to identify their victim, let alone his killer(s), the police were prepared to bury the man as a John Doe in the local potter’s field. Then, the funeral home received an anonymous call, asking that the internment be delayed until money could be sent to cover a proper funeral.
The money arrived anonymously, by special delivery, and the body was laid to rest in Memorial Park Cemetery in Kansas City, Kansas, under the name Roland T. Owen, which the caller insisted was real. An equally mysterious delivery of money went to a local florist to buy a bouquet of roses to lay on the grave, with a card.
A year later, in 1936, a woman from Birmingham, Alabama, read an account of the murder in the magazine American Weekly. She believed the dead man might be her friend’s missing son, Artemus, who had left home in April of 1934. Artemus Ogletree’s mother went on to positively confirm the body of Roland T. Owen as that of her son. Authorities assented to Eleanor’s claim: the victim had finally been identified. Of course, the mystery was far from over.
In the early 2000s, around 70 years after the murder, Dr. John Horner, a librarian at the Kansas City Public Library, received an anonymous out-of-state call. The caller said that he had been itemizing the belongings of an elderly person who had recently died. Among the deceased’s belongings was a box of newspaper clippings about the Artemus Ogletree/Roland T. Owen murder. In addition to the clippings, the caller claimed the box contained an object that had been mentioned in one of the articles. Alas, the caller refused to give Horner his name, or tell him precisely what it was that he found.
Who killed Artemus Ogletree?
Why was he murdered, and why did he assume the name Roland T. Owen?
At this point, the truth of what happened in room 1046 will likely remain a mystery.
Love forever
- Lousie
