It is the perfect “locked room” mystery. Except it actually happened.
Kansas City. 1935. The depths of the Great Depression. A city run by the Pendergast political machine, a place where the mob walked openly in the streets and jazz filled the air. In the middle of this gritty, noir backdrop, a man walked into a hotel. He checked in. He never checked out.
What happened in Room 1046 of the Hotel President isn’t just a murder case. It is a rabbit hole so deep and so strange that it keeps internet sleuths awake at night nearly a century later. It has everything: anonymous callers, phantom letters written by a dead man, a mysterious “Don,” and a body tortured in a way that suggests pure, unadulterated rage.
This is the story of Roland T. Owen. Or rather, the man who called himself that.
The Man With No Past
It was 1:20 p.m. on January 2, 1935. A Wednesday. The man who pushed through the revolving doors of the Hotel President was a striking figure. He was young, maybe 20 or 25. Tall. Broad-shouldered. He had a “husky” build, the kind you get from hard labor or fighting.
But two things stood out.
First, his ear. It was a “cauliflower ear,” the disfigured cartilage common among prize fighters and wrestlers. Second, the scar. A jagged, angry white line on the side of his head, partially hidden by his hair. He looked like a man who knew how to handle himself.
He approached the front desk and asked for an interior room. He wanted it high up. He didn’t care about the view. He scribbled a name in the register: Roland T. Owen, Los Angeles.
He had no luggage.
Nothing. No suitcase. No garment bag. Just the coat on his back and a black overcoat over his arm. He paid for one day in cash. The clerk handed him the key to Room 1046 on the 10th floor.
On the way up, he chatted with the bellboy, Randolph Propst. It was small talk, but odd. Owen complained about the price. He said he’d tried to check into the nearby Muehlebach Hotel but refused to pay their $5 rate. The President was cheaper. When they entered 1046, Owen did something that would puzzle investigators later.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his entire inventory of worldly possessions: a brush, a comb, and a tube of toothpaste.
That was it. He placed them on the bathroom shelf. Then he and the bellboy walked back out into the hall. Owen had Propst lock the door, took the key, and left the hotel. He walked out into the cold January air.
It was the last time anyone would see him acting “normal.”
The Darkness in Room 1046
When Roland T. Owen returned, the strangeness began. It started with the darkness.
A maid named Mary Soptic went to clean the room later that afternoon. Owen was there. He told her to come in, but insisted she leave the door unlocked because he was “expecting a friend.”
The room was like a tomb. The shades were drawn tight against the window. The only light came from a small, dim desk lamp. Owen was sitting in the corner, jittery. Nervous. Soptic later told the police he seemed terrified. He sat there, brushing his hair over and over again. He put on his coat and left, telling her again: “Don’t lock the door.”
Why leave a hotel door unlocked in a city teeming with gangsters and thieves? Unless the person you are meeting doesn’t have a key. Or unless you are afraid that if you lock it, you’ll never get out.
At 4:00 p.m., Soptic returned with fresh towels. The door was unlocked. The room was still dark. Owen was lying on the bed, fully dressed in the dark, staring at the ceiling. On the desk, illuminated by that single dim lamp, was a note.
“Don, I will be back in fifteen minutes. Wait.”
Don. This is the first appearance of the mystery man. Who was Don? A lover? A hitman? A wrestling promoter? Or was Don not a person at all, but a code?
The Voice on the Phone
The next morning, Thursday, January 3rd, the weirdness escalated. Soptic went to clean the room at 10:30 a.m. The door was locked from the outside. She used her passkey. She assumed Owen was out.
He wasn’t.
He was sitting in the dark again. Silently. In the chair. As Soptic froze, the phone rang. Owen snatched it up. His voice was flat, devoid of emotion.
“No, Don, I don’t want to eat. I am not hungry. I just had breakfast.”
He hung up. Then, he started grilling the maid. He asked about her job. He asked about the hotel. He complained again about the price of the Muehlebach Hotel. It was a loop. A glitch in his behavior. Soptic finished her work and got out of there fast.
“We Don’t Need Any Towels”
That afternoon, Soptic made her final trip to Room 1046. She was bringing fresh towels again.
She heard voices. Two men. They were arguing. Not shouting, but the tension was thick enough to choke on.
She knocked. “I have fresh towels,” she announced.
A voice boomed from inside. It wasn’t the soft, nervous voice of Roland T. Owen. This voice was deep, rough, and angry.
“We don’t need any!” the voice shouted. “Get away!”
Soptic knew there were no towels in there—she had taken the dirty ones that morning. But she didn’t argue. She left. She was the last hotel employee to hear anything from Room 1046 until the horror was revealed.
The Night of the Rough Party
The night of January 3rd was chaotic at the Hotel President. It seems the walls were thin, and the secrets were leaking out.
In Room 1048, next door, a woman named Jean Owen (no relation to Roland) was trying to sleep. She couldn’t. Through the wall, she heard a violent commotion. Male voices. Female voices. Swearing. It sounded like a “rough party.”
Later, the sounds changed. She heard a scuffle. Then, a gasping sound. A wet, gurgling rasp. At the time, she told herself it was snoring. Later, she would realize it was the sound of a man dying.
Down in the lobby, the night elevator operator, Charles Blocher, was seeing his own slice of the mystery. It was past midnight. A woman—a “commercial woman” who frequented the hotel with different men—came in looking for Room 1026. She couldn’t find her client. She was agitated.
An hour later, she was back. This time she was with a man. They went up to the 9th floor. At 4:00 a.m., she left the hotel alone. Fifteen minutes later, the man followed. He looked shaken.
Was this connected? Or just another sordid night in a big city hotel? The timing lines up perfectly with the gasping sounds next door.
The Man in the Undershirt
At 11:00 p.m. that same night, miles away from the hotel, a city worker named Robert Lane was driving through the dark streets. His headlights caught a figure running down the sidewalk.
It was winter. It was freezing. The man was wearing nothing but pants and an undershirt.
Lane stopped. The man thought he was a taxi. He hopped in. Lane looked him over. The stranger had a deep, jagged cut on his arm. He looked wild.
“You look as if you’ve been in it bad,” Lane said.
The stranger growled. “I’ll kill that [expletive] tomorrow.”
Lane dropped him off at a cab stand. He watched the man get into a taxi and speed away. Lane didn’t know it then, but he had likely just looked into the eyes of a killer—or a victim who had momentarily escaped his fate.
The Blood Bath
Friday morning. January 4th. The phone in Room 1046 was off the hook.
The operator noticed the line was open at 7:00 a.m. Three hours passed. No one hung up. She sent Randolph Propst, the bellboy, to check.
Propst found the door locked. A “Don’t Disturb” sign dangled from the handle. He knocked. A voice inside—weak, staggering—said, “Come in.”
“It’s locked!” Propst yelled.
“Turn on the lights,” the voice mumbled. Then silence.
Propst, annoyed, yelled at the guest to hang up the phone and walked away. He thought the guy was just drunk. An hour and a half later? Phone still off the hook. Another bellboy, Harold Pike, went up with a passkey.
Pike opened the door. The room was dark (always dark). He saw Owen lying naked on the bed. The phone stand was knocked over. Pike, assuming Owen was passed out drunk, simply set the stand upright, hung up the phone, and locked the door behind him. He didn’t turn on the light. If he had, he would have screamed.
11:00 a.m. The phone was off the hook again. Propst went back up. He was done with this guy. He opened the door. This time, he flipped the switch.
The room was a slaughterhouse.
Owen was crouched on the floor, holding his head in his hands. He was naked. There was blood on the walls. Blood on the ceiling. Blood soaking the bed. He had been tied up with cords (which were missing) and stabbed repeatedly in the chest. His skull was fractured. His neck was purple from strangulation.
“Who did this?” the detective asked when they arrived.
Owen, barely conscious, whispered his final lie. “Nobody. I fell against the bathtub.”
The Missing Evidence
Owen died in the hospital that night. He took his secrets with him. But the room left behind more questions than answers.
When police searched Room 1046, they found it had been stripped. Not just cleaned—purged.
- No clothes. Owen’s suit, coat, and shoes were gone.
- No toiletries. The brush, comb, and toothpaste? Gone.
- No soap or towels. The hotel soap and shampoo were missing.
- No weapon. No knife. No cords.
Someone had stayed in that room after stabbing Owen. They had meticulously packed up every single item that could identify him, cleaned up the weapon, and walked out, locking the door behind them. Why take the soap? Why take the cheap toothpaste? It suggests a professional cleanup, or perhaps a killer who needed to wash off the blood and didn’t want to leave a trace.
The only things left were a hairpin, an unsmoked cigarette, a safety pin, and a tiny label cut from a necktie.
Police checked with Los Angeles. No Roland T. Owen existed. They checked fingerprints. Nothing. The body was put on public display in a funeral home, a grim 1930s tradition, hoping someone would recognize him. Thousands walked by. No one knew him.
The Phantom Funeral and “Rockenflower”
Just as the city prepared to dump the John Doe into a pauper’s grave, the phone rang at the funeral home.
A man’s voice. Anonymous. He asked to delay the burial. “I will send funds,” he said. He claimed Owen was engaged to his sister. He said, “He just got into a jam.”
Money arrived. Cash wrapped in newspaper, sent via special delivery. It was enough for a plot in Memorial Park Cemetery. Then, the florist got a call. The same anonymous man ordered a massive bouquet of red roses for the grave.
The card was to read: “Love forever – Louise.”
Who was Louise? Was she the woman seen in the elevator? Was she the reason for the hairpin in the room? Or was she just another fiction created by the killers?
A year later, a woman named Eleanor Ogletree in Birmingham, Alabama, saw a magazine article about the “Mystery of Room 1046.” The description—the scar, the cauliflower ear—sounded like her missing brother, Artemus.
Artemus Ogletree.
He was a 17-year-old kid who had left home to travel. His mother, Ruby, had been receiving letters from him for months. But the letters were typed. Artemus didn’t know how to type. The tone was wrong. And here is where it gets terrifying: Some of the letters were mailed after Roland T. Owen was already dead.
Mrs. Ogletree also received a phone call from a man named “Jordan.” He claimed Artemus had saved his life in Egypt and married a wealthy woman in Cairo. It was a lie. An elaborate, international lie designed to stop a mother from looking for her murdered son. Why go to such lengths for a 17-year-old drifter?
The Deep Dive: Modern Theories
Decades have passed, but the internet has kept this case alive. Let’s look at the leading theories on what really happened in Room 1046.
1. The Wrestling Syndicate Hit
Tony Bernardi, a wrestling promoter, later identified the body as a man who called himself “Cecil Werner.” He had tried to sign up for matches. The cauliflower ear confirms Ogletree was involved in the grappling world. In the 1930s, wrestling was tightly controlled by the mob. Did Artemus refuse to throw a fight? Did he owe money? “Don” could have been a handler or a bookie.
2. The Love Triangle
The presence of the hairpin, the voices of a man and woman arguing, and the “Louise” card point to a romantic dispute. Perhaps Artemus was having an affair with a mobster’s girlfriend. The torture suggests deep, personal hatred—a crime of passion, not business.
3. The Spy Ring
This is the wildest, yet most persistent theory. The typing of the letters after death. The stories about Egypt and Cairo. The lack of luggage. The use of multiple aliases (Roland T. Owen, Eugene K. Scott, Cecil Werner). Was Artemus a low-level runner for an intelligence network who knew too much? The “cleanup” of the room was military-grade efficient.
The 2004 Phone Call
The story has one final, chilling postscript.
In 2012, John Horner, a librarian at the Kansas City Public Library, revealed a strange event. Around 2003 or 2004, someone from out of state called the library asking about the Ogletree case. The caller refused to give their name.
They said they were sorting through the belongings of a recently deceased elderly relative. Inside a box, they found a stack of old newspaper clippings about the murder in Room 1046.
But that wasn’t all.
The caller said the box also contained “something” that had been mentioned in the newspaper reports as missing from the room. Was it the handle of the knife? The missing cords? The tie with the missing label? Before the librarian could push for answers, the caller hung up. They never called back.
The mystery of Room 1046 remains unsolved. Somewhere, in a dusty attic or a landfill, the final piece of the puzzle lies hidden. Until then, Artemus Ogletree waits in his grave, silenced by a darkness that refuses to lift.
Originally posted 2016-09-11 18:23:35. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Originally posted 2016-09-11 18:23:35. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
