There’s nothing like checking into a hotel. You can kick back, relax, and let others take
care of everything. Just don’t go nuts at the mini-bar - those
little bags of pretzels add up. But when you check into a hotel, above all,
you’re trusting the hotel to provide safety and security. Your room is your sanctuary. This made it all the stranger when a man was
murdered in the safety of his hotel room, in the middle of one of America’s oldest
and most prestigious hotels. The year was 1935 in Kansas City, Missouri,
and the Hotel President 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, nominating Herbert Hoover for President. The hotel was best known for its Drum Room
lounge, which hosted legendary entertainers including Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra. Anyone who was anyone in Kansas City knew
that the Hotel President was the place to go people-watching. Their most infamous guest, however, was still
to come. Roland T. Owen was an unassuming man, walking
into the Hotel President and asking for an interior room on the upper floors on January
2nd. He claimed to be from Los Angeles, and those
who saw him during his stay at the hotel mostly remembered him for a nasty scar he had on
his temple and a deformed ear. That led many people to assume he was a professional
boxer. An odd, quiet man, he talked to bellhop Randolph
Propst on the way up to room 1046 and claimed to have been staying at another hotel but
wanted a cheaper one. But Propst noticed something odd - for a man
who had been traveling, Roland T. Owen barely had any baggage. Just a hairbrush, comb, and toothpaste in
his pocket, and no suitcase to be seen. Mr. Owen was a mysterious guest, but a bigger
mystery was about to put the Hotel President in the history books. Mr. Owen continued to puzzle the workers at
the hotel as he stayed there for two days. Maid Mary Soptic was shocked when she entered
the dark room and found Owen sitting there in the dark, with the shades closed and only
a dim lamp on. He told her to go ahead and clean, but something
felt odd to her 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 unlocked
- as if he was waiting for someone. Roland Owen stayed at the hotel for two days,
and the first night was when things started to get really eerie. When Mary returned, she found Owen lying on
his bed, fully dressed, and he had left a note on the bedside addressed to someone named
Don. It read “Don: I will 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,
like the fact that Owen’s room was locked from the outside at one point - but the door
could only be locked from the inside. When she entered, she heard the phone ring,
and Owen said “No, Don. I don’t want to eat. I am not hungry. I just had breakfast. No, I am not hungry.” Owen seemed to be planning on a long-term
stay, asking Soptic about the President’s residential rates. But his stay would be a lot 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 knocked, she heard a deep voice speaking,
definitely not Owen’s. She asked if they needed towels, and the mysterious
man said they didn’t. But she knew there were no towels in that
room. Jean Owen, who was staying in the room next
door, said she heard many people talking in room 1046, shouting and cursing. And as the night went on, the behavior around
the hotel only got stranger. A woman believed to be a prostitute wandered
the halls, looking for her client. She expected him in Owen’s room, but came
out empty. Outside, a city worker observed a man wearing
only an undershirt, pants, and shoes run into the street looking distressed. He was ranting, saying he would kill someone,
and looked wounded. Whether he was related to the mysterious goings-on
in Room 1046, no one was able to answer, but he disappeared into a taxi and was never seen
again. The next morning, everyone would be looking
for answers. It was an ordinary day on January 4th when
Della Ferguson came on shift as the switchboard operator at the Hotel President. She made her planned wakeup call to Room 1046,
when she noticed that the phone had been taken off the hook. She contacted Randolph Propst to check on
the room, and he found the door locked with a “Do not Disturb” sign on it. When he called out, a voice inside told him
to enter - but the door was still locked and no one was letting him in. He yelled to hang the phone up and left. Another bellboy, Harold Pike, had a key and
let himself in after the phone wasn’t hung up. He found Pike alone, in the dark, naked, and
unresponsive. There was no sign of anyone else, and Pike
put the phone on the hook and left. It was only two hours before the phone was
off the hook again, and when Propst entered the room, he found something very different
in the isolated, locked room. Owen was on the floor, on his hands and knees,
and his head was bloody. More disturbing, 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 blocked. Own had fallen in front of it, barring entry
with his body. They talked to the wounded man, and he eventually
forced his way up and let them in. Doctors were called to examine him, and what
they found was terrifying - and impossible to explain. Owen had been tied with cord around his neck,
wrists, and ankles. His neck showed signs of strangulation, and
he had been stabbed multiple times in the chest. He had a nasty skull fracture from blows to
the head, with the damage being so serious that blood splatters could be found on the
ceiling. When Dr. Harold Flanders, a local doctor asked
him what happened, Owen insisted he had fallen on the bathtub. When he was asked who hurt him, he said “nobody”. His injuries were serious, and he was rushed
to the hospital. But the mysterious Roland T. Owen would not
be giving away any more of his secrets. By the time they arrived at Kansas City General
Hospital, he had slipped into a coma and died soon thereafter. No one had seen anyone enter the room that
morning. There was no sign of a struggle in the room. Owen had been alive, if drunk when Propst
had entered the room. How did he get brutally murdered in a locked
hotel room? That’s what the Kansas City Police Department
wanted to find out. Jean Owen was briefly detained and interviewed,
but when her boyfriend backed up her story she was released. An autopsy of Owen revealed that he had been
fatally stabbed and bludgeoned, but one of the oddest things was that he had apparently
been wounded between 4 AM and 5AM based on the dried blood. That meant Owen had already been dying when
Pike entered his room and found him lying in bed. A thorough search of the room found few articles
belonging to Owen, but they also found no evidence of the knife used to kill him. That ruled out suicide. But other odd items were found around the
room, including a bottle of diluted sulfuric acid and a clothing tag from New Jersey. The crime scene team looked for fingerprints,
and found a set belonging to a woman that they didn’t match to anyone at the hotel. Was this mysterious visitor the one who spelled
the end for Roland T. Owen? The murder was front-page news, and detectives
soon believed that Roland T. Owen was not who he said he was. A phone call to Los Angeles for next of kin
came up empty, and the fingerprints of the deceased were sent to the Justice Department
to await a match. But the case seemed to be going cold - until
the Hotel President received a mysterious phone call. A woman phoned the front desk to ask what
Owen looked like, and claimed to know him from a town named Clinton only fifty miles
away. Sightings around the city came in, and the
Muehlebach Hotel - which the deceased had left due to high rates - reported that he
had checked in under another name, Eugene K. Scott. The LAPD confirmed that this was likely also
a fake name, and the mystery only deepened. Soon, people from all around came, claiming
to know the mysterious Mr. Owen under all different names. Was he the cousin of a man who came in to
see the body? No, that cousin died five years earlier. Was he a pro wrestler named Cecil Werner from
Little Rock, Arkansas? No, the wrestling promoter couldn’t make
a match. New murders in the city soon stole the spotlight,
and the mysterious death of Roland T. Owen - whoever he was - slipped away from the headlines. The body was going to be laid to rest 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 that the man had been involved in a sordid affair
while engaged to another woman. He said “Cheaters usually get what’s coming
to them” and hung up. Was the mystery man of Room 1046 killed in
a lover’s spat gone wrong? And who was he? The answers would be a long time in coming. It was over a year later when the next break
in the case would come. The images of the man were circulated around
the country, but it wasn’t until a friend of Ruby Ogletree of Birmingham, Alabama saw
him in the paper that the truth came out. Ruby quickly identified the man as her son,
Artemus Ogletree. Her boy had hitchhiked to California in 1934
and he hadn’t been home since, but she knew details around the case that proved she was
telling the truth. She quickly identified the cause of the distinctive
scar on his temple as an accident with cooking grease he had as a child. She even showed the investigators letters
her boy had sent here. There was just one problem. Several of the letters had been postmarked
AFTER Artemus Ogletree was murdered in Kansas City. Not just that, but Artemus was a simple boy
who didn’t know how to use a typewriter and used plain language. Several of the letters were typewritten and
used literary language. She had also received phone calls from people
who claimed 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 Ruby his name, and she gave it
to the police, but it has never been released. Who had been writing letters to a dead man’s
mother for years? With a new heap of evidence courtesy of Artemus’
grieving mother, the police reopened the case - and soon they had their top suspect. Joseph Martin was arrested in 1937 in New
York, after killing his roommate and trying to ship the body to Memphis. When they found his wallet full of fake identification,
they also found some handwriting that matched the letters received by Ruby Ogletree after
Artemus’ death. But no charges were ever filed, and the case
went cold. Who killed Artemus Ogletree in that locked
hotel room in the Hotel President? Was it Joseph Martin, as part of his long
career of crime? Was it an organized crime killing, and who
was Don? Was it not a name at all, and instead the
title of a mob boss Artemus Ogletree had crossed? Or was it a lover’s spat gone horribly wrong,
as Artemus’ broken engagement came back to end his life? Or was there something else lurking in Room
1046 of the Hotel President? Something unnatural that Artemus Ogletree
was terrified of, that could stab a man to death with no knife to be found, from behind
a locked door? The mystery is still unsolved, and investigators
still puzzle over it today. But the Hotel President is still taking guests
to this day. Ready to check in? For more on deaths no one can explain, check
out “The Most Shocking Unsolved Murders in the World”. Or for a much more pleasant hotel stay than
Artemus Ogletree had, why not watch “Inside the World’s Most Expensive Hotel Room”.
