The perfect crime in hotel room 1046

A man “named” Roland T. Owens checked into the Hilton President hotel, on January 2, 1935 at 1:20 p.m. Two days later, on January 4, 1935, a bellboy would walk into a gruesome sight that led to the investigation of what could be considered the perfect crime in all of Kansas.

Roland T. Owens of Los Angeles had checked into the Kansas Hotel with only a black comb, a black toothbrush, and some toothpaste. Owens requested an interior room on a high floor, so he was given Room 1046. The staff mentioned having several interesting encounters with the guest.

Mary Soptio, a maid, reported that Owen let her into the room while he was inside and asked her to leave the door open because he was waiting for a friend to come in a few minutes. According to Soptio, the man seemed afraid of something. The maid returned to the room the next morning and found that the door was locked but from the outside. Once inside the room, Soptio noticed a note on the desk that read, “Don, I will be back in 15 minutes.” Donald Kelso was a friend that Owen had stayed with at other hotels in Kansas. Later that day, Soptio returned to the room to leave some towels but overheard two men arguing.

The night that Soptio heard the arguing, the hotel operator noticed that the phone in Room 1046 had been disconnected, so she sent a bellboy to ask the guest to reconnect it. The bellboy knocked and was told to enter by someone with a deep voice. However, the door was locked, so he knocked again and overheard someone saying to turn the lights on. The bellboy continued knocking but was not let in.

At 8:30 a.m. the next morning, bellboy Harold Pike was sent to Room 1046. He let himself in after no response and saw the guest breathing heavily while naked in bed. Pike assumed the guest was drunk, so he reconnected the phone and left.

According to the testimony of another bellboy, he was sent two hours later to reconnect the phone, and when he walked into Room 1046, he saw blood everywhere; on the walls, on the roof, on the bed, and in the bathroom. When the boy entered the bathroom, he found Owen in the bathtub with a clothesline around his neck, wrists and ankles tied with a clothesline, and cuts around his head and heart. The doctor later determined that one of his lungs had ruptured, he had been stabbed many times in the chest, and his skull had been fractured from three hits to the head. The doctor determined that the first of Owen’s injuries had occurred six to seven hours before he was discovered.

The doctor asked Roland T. Owen what had happened to him, and Owen responded that nobody had hurt him, he had simply fallen in the tub and hurt his head. Owen then fell unconscious, slipped into a coma, and passed away on January 5 at the hospital.

When the police started their investigation, they noticed that the hotel room had been missing all of Owen’s personal belongings. The police later determined that there was no one registered under the name Roland T. Owen in Los Angeles.

A few days later, the police announced that the unidentified man would be buried in a potter’s field and soon after received an anonymous call that asked police to bury him in Memorial Park. The anonymous caller offered to pay for it and mentioned something along the lines that Owen had cheated the game and cheaters always get what’s coming to them. The police received the money, and on the day of the funeral, thirteen roses arrived with a note that said, “Love forever, Louise,” according to Kansas City Magazine.

Two years after his death, in November 1936, Roland T. Owens was identified as Artemus Ogletree by his mother, Ruby. Ruby was able to identify her son by a scar on the side of his head.

Artemus Ogletree was a 19-year-old from Birmingham, Alabama, who left in April 1934 with his friend Joe Simpson to hitchhike across the country. According to Simpson, the pair went their separate ways in Los Angeles.

According to Ogletree’s mother, weeks after her son’s death, she had received a letter from him saying he was headed to New York City. The mother became suspicious because the letter was typed, and her son’s letters normally came handwritten since he didn’t know how to type. In April, she received another letter saying he was heading to France. On August 12, 1935, she received a call from a “good friend” of Ogletree’s, Godfrey Jordan, who had met Artemus Ogletree in Cairo, Egypt. The call lasted forty-five minutes, and the conversation left Ruby feeling odd.

Till this day, the murder of Artemus Ogletree remains unsolved. Detectives, true crimers, and other people who have heard of the case have their own theories on what happened in hotel Room 1046. Some theories include that Ogletree was killed for being unfaithful, that Donald Kelso had beat him to death, or that a man named Thomas Wilbur Barlow had killed him.

The case file of Artemus Ogletree is available to read at https://kansascitymag.com/news/longform/the-owen-case/.