The Lingering Mystery of Room 1046

On the morning of January 4th, 1935, new switchboard operator Della Ferguson arrived at the Hotel President in Kansas City, Missouri, just in time for her shift. Shortly after arriving (as she began to make her rounds through the plethora of wake-up calls) she noticed that the indicator light was on for room 1046. The phone was off the hook.

She called down to the main desk where Randolph Propst — a bellhop — pulled the assignment to go up to the room. Propst knew the room and knew the guest inside too. He had taken the young man up 2 days previously and remembered his face and the lack of unpacking he had done.

When Propst arrived, there was a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door. Knowing his orders, he gave it several loud knocks anyway, after which he was told to enter. When he tried to enter room 1046, however, he found the door was locked from the inside.

“Come in.” The voice was rough, but soft.

But Propst could not get the door open. He shouted through the door, believing the guest was just drunk, and told him to hang up the phone. Considering his job done, Propst made his way back downstairs — completely unaware of the horror that was about to unfold.

The Mystery of Room 1046

The Mystery of Room 1046 is a puzzle that has challenged true-crime and mystery nerds alike for more than eighty decades. A young man, a brutal death, and a series of shady and nameless figures make for a story that reads more like a soap opera than actual reality.

It is reality, though. It happened, and a teenaged boy was brutalized to death in the middle of a bustling hotel. To this day, the final harrowing moments of Artemus Ogletree remain cloaked in misunderstanding and confusion. Short of his injuries, little else is known about this young man or the life he lived between his upbringing in Alabama and his death in Kansas city.

Make sense of it we try, however, and as the anniversary of his death approaches, it’s a good time to dust off the cobwebs and look for light in what remains a completely senseless murder.

A stranger from a strange land.

Artemus Ogletree checked into the Hotel President on January 2nd, 1935. He strolled across the lobby early in the afternoon and asked for an interior room in the Power & Light District hotel. He also requested that the room be several floors up, and gave his name not as Artemus, but as Roland T. Owen — an erroneous name which would cause no end of confusion later on down the road.

Ogletree (or “Owen” as he was then known by hotel staff) was shown to his room by the bellboy Propst, who remembered him as being dressed very well and wearing a dark overcoat. Strangely, he brought no bags with him and carried only a hairbrush, comb, and toothpaste (presumably in his pockets).

The mysterious young man was good looking, but had a visible scar on his temple and cauliflower ear; which led staff to believe he may be some type of boxer or professional wrestler. He spoke well and appeared to be in his early 20s. According to his registration documents, he originated from Los Angeles.

Propst showed “Owen” up to his room, where he promptly unloaded his meagre belongings. Needing nothing else, Propst was dismissed and left the room. The guest — still in his overcoat — left shortly after him.

Things seemed normal until Mary Soptic, a hotel maid, returned that afternoon to start her shift. Room 1046 was on her rota, but when she arrived she was surprised to find Ogletree in the room. He was sitting quietly in dim light with the shades drawn and one single lamp on.

After cleaning for a few minutes, Ogletree stood up, brushed his hair and then left, requesting that she leave the room unlocked for some friends he had arriving shortly.

The bizarre happenings begin.

It’s easy to dismiss all the above as normal, or explainable coincidences. Sometimes, people need to get out of town, or they need to change their names. That doesn’t mean they were necessarily up to anything insidious or malicious in nature.

This is the point in the Room 1046 mystery where things begin to get very strange, though.

Soptic returned to room 1046 later in the afternoon on January 2nd (the day of Ogletree / Owen’s arrival). When she entered at 4PM, she received another surprise when she found that the young man was back in the room. This time, however, he was lying on the bed — fully dressed — and in total silence. Next to him on the nightstand, a small note was visible.

“Don: I will be back in fifteen minutes. Wait.”

Soptic was on edge, but there was nothing that could be done about it. After all, stranger things had happened in hotel rooms. And stranger things were certainly going to happen in this hotel room.

The next person to see Ogletree was once again Soptic. She returned to room 1046 at 10:30 the next morning (January 3rd). Initially, she found the door locked, which led her to believe that Ogletree was out. Opening the door with her own key, however, she found that the young man was indeed in the room and (once again) sitting in the dark exactly where he had been the afternoon before.

Mary Soptic went about her tidying duties, replacing towels and putting the room to rights. As she cleaned, the phone rang and the young man answered it.

“No, Don, I don’t want to eat. I am not hungry. I just had breakfast…No, I am not hungry.”

Still holding on to the phone, Ogletree turned the conversation to her.

“Are you responsible for the entire floor?”

“Is this hotel a residential one?”

Soptic answered his questions and listened as he complained about the exorbitant rates at the Muehlebach Hotel, before finishing her job and quickly retreating from the room. She would later tell police that she felt like the young man was afraid or running from someone.

A mysterious voice.

That afternoon, Soptic returned to the room one last time. She arrived around 4PM and heard the voices of 2 men talking behind the door.

Holding a stack of fresh towels, she knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” The voice was unfamiliar.

Soptic identified herself and mentioned the towels, after which she was promptly dismissed.

“We don’t need any,” the mysterious voice spoke again, making it clear that she was to clear off.

Although she knew there were no fresh towels in the room, Soptic did as she was told and moved off down the hall. Ogletree was not seen again until he was in a puddle of his own blood and inches from death.

The morning of January 4th, 1935.

The following morning — January 4th, 1935 — Della Ferguson (the hotel switchboard operator) she came into work as normal. It was a new role for her, and a good one. As she flipped across the switchboard, she could not have imagined, though, the horror that was coming next.

Shortly after arriving for work Ferguson noticed that an indicator light was on for room 1046 — the room Artemus Ogletree (currently using the name Roland T. Owen) had been in the day before. This light indicated that a phone was off the hook, so Roland called down to the busboys who sent up Randolph Propst to check things out once more.

Soptic was on edge, but there was nothing that could be done about it. After all, stranger things had happened in hotel rooms. And stranger things were certainly going to happen in this hotel room.

Soptic was on edge, but there was nothing that could be done about it. After all, stranger things had happened in hotel rooms. And stranger things were certainly going to happen in this hotel room.

The bellboy first arrived at room 1046 shortly after 7AM. When arrived, he noticed a “Do Not Disturb” sign was hanging from the door. Following orders, he ignored the sign and knocked on the door anyway to try and make contact with Ogletree within.

“Come inside,” a quiet voice said from the other side of the door.

Propst tried the handle, but the door was locked from the inside. The bellboy, suspecting he was dealing with the hangover of a new year reveler, knocked again.

“Turn on the lights,” the voice said faintly, but the door remained locked.

“Hang the phone up!” Propst shouted through the wall before walking away. When he got back downstairs, he called Ferguson at the switchboard.

“He’s probably just drunk,” Propst told the newly hired operator. “Wait another hour and see what happens.”

One hour later, a different bellboy (Harold Pike) was sent up to the 10th floor to check things out, as the phone was still off the hook. When he arrived, the door was still locked. Pike had a key, however, so he let himself into the room despite the “Do Not Disturb” sign that still hung from the door.

Inside, Ogletree was laying quietly in the dark on the bed. Pike described him as being “naked and drunk” and also described some dark stains he could see on the bed in the light of the hallway.

Rather than turning on the light, Pike trusted his assumptions as true and moved to hang up the phone. It had been knocked from the stand and was disconnected on the floor nearby. He collected the parts and reassembled it on the nightstand before quickly exiting the room. He did not question Ogletree and Ogletree (or “Owen”) said nothing to Pike.

A horrifying discovery.

By 10:30AM another switchboard operator in the Hotel President realized that the indicator light was on yet again for room 1046. Once more, Rudolph Propst was sent up to the 10th floor, where he spied the familiar “Do Not Disturb” sign. Instead of knocking, though, he went straight to the key in his pocket.

Propst was horrified by what he discovered.

The guest they called “Owen” was on his knees in the doorway of the modest hotel room. His elbows were stretched in front of him and held the weight that his legs could no longer bear. His head was bloodied and there were dark stains around him. Lights flipped on, a horror scene was illuminated.

The room was a bloodbath.

Violent streaks of red stained the walls of the main room and the bathroom. Even the bed was soaked with a thick, dark pool of it that made the bellboy’s stomach turn.

Out of instinct, he went to the phone and put it back on the hook before running downstairs for help. A few minutes later, he returned with the assistant manager of the hotel, but they struggled to get the door open as Ogletree had wedged himself behind it.

Somehow, the young man roused himself eventually and crawled out from behind the door. The two hotel staff entered the room and followed the young man to the bathroom where he sat himself on the edge of the tub. The manager called the police, and they were soon joined by the Dr. Harold Flanders of Kansas City General Hospital.

The young Ogletree was in bad shape. He had been bound with cord around his neck, his wrists, and his ankles. There was deep bruising to his neck, and it looked as though someone had attempted to strangle him. In his chest were multiple puncture wounds, including one above the heart which had managed to puncture his lungs. His skull was also fractured on the right side — seemingly from an array of blunt-force trauma — and there was a spray of blood splatter across the ceiling of the room.

Ogletree (who at this time was still being identified as Roland T. Owen) was questioned heavily while they cut the cords from his wrist.

“Who did this to you?”

“Nobody.”

The final ride (a mystery begins).

The young man was taken to the hospital and was questioned all the way about who had done this to him and why. Unfortunately, he refused to give them an honest answer. Opting, instead, to tell authorities that he had fallen and hit his head on the bathtub.

Ogletree lost consciousness on the way to the hospital and died shortly after midnight on the morning of January 5th, 1935. He was comatose the entire time and gave no further information as to who had attacked him and why.

The Kansas City Police Department started investigating the murder right away, but it only lead them into more question than answers.

After processing the crime scene, they discovered that much of the blood was dried; indicating that the crime had occurred between 4AM and 5AM on the 4th of January. There were no clothes in any of the drawers, and there was no soap, shampoo, or any of the towels provided by the hotel. There were also no knives, which led the investigators to to believe that the stab wounds in Ogletree’s chest could not have been caused by a suicide attempt.

The scene was not the only confusing point in the case, however.

It soon became apparent that the young man who the hotel had known as “Roland T. Owen” was not in fact that person at all. In an attempt to notify next of kin, the Kansas City PD contacted the LAPD and discovered that there was no record for a “Roland T. Owen” in Los Angeles. They took fingerprints from the dead man and sent them to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, where they became even more confident that the name was an alias.

Kansas City was now dealing with a nameless young man, who had been brutalized behind a locked door by a faceless monster. Desperate for any lead they could get, the police took the investigation to the media where tips started to roll in. None of these tips, however, turned up any leads. New homicides began to come in, and the mysterious young man’s case began to run cold.

The funeral.

With no name and next of kin, the city made the decision to lay the young man’s body to rest in a potter’s field. His body had laid in the morgue for more than 2 months and no one had successfully managed to identify him or claim him (though a few people did try). In a final attempt to inform anyone who may know the young victim, Kansas City published details of his funeral, which resulted in a bizarre and chilling phone call.

The same day that the funeral announcement was made, the funeral home phone began to ring. The caller did not identify himself, but he asked that the potter’s funeral be delayed so that he could make arrangements for the body at Memorial Park Cemetery in Kansas City, Kansas. He needed time to get the money to the funeral home; or so he claimed. He also wanted the body to be interred “near his sister”.

Obliging, the director agreed, but let the mystery caller know that he would have to inform the police about the call. The caller was unbothered and was even more forthcoming when it came to details about Ogletree’s death.

“What happened to him?”

“He had an affair with one woman while engaged to another.”

It was a story that was both common and unbelievable. The unidentified called revealed the details of the torrid affair. According to the stranger, the two women and the caller themselves had arranged a meeting with Ogletree. The arrangement had been made in order to exact revenge.

“Cheaters usually get what’s coming to them!” the caller told the funeral home director before hanging up.

As requested, the service was postponed and on March 23rd the money for a new funeral arrived — received in a plan delivery envelope with an address which had carefully been lettered using a ruler. Inside was $25 (which is equivalent to $500 in today’s money) wrapped in a newspaper. There was no indication of a sender.

Along with this envelope, two other envelopes containing $5 were also sent to a local florist, which was meant to supply 13 American Beauty roses to be placed on the gravesite.

Police attempted to track the calls (and the envelopes) but had no success. Their leads led them back to pay phones and disguised handwriting. No one arrived for the funeral save for a handful of police detectives, and no one came to visit the gravesite in the coming days and weeks.

More confusion than solution.

So what happened to Artemus Ogletree?

Images of the dead man continued to be circulated in national newspapers in the months after his death and subsequent burial. Eventually, these images made their way to Birmingham, Alabama and the eyes of on Ruby Ogletree, who recognized the young man as her son.

“He looks a great deal like my son, Artemus,” she told them. The family had not seen the young man since he had left Birmingham at the age of 17 in 1934, to hitchhike to California. Though they had not seen him, they occasionally corresponded with him through the mail.

After providing some information to the Kansas City Police, it became clear that the young man was indeed the estranged Ogletree son.

The corpse had borne a strange scar across the scalp which had been inflicted when young Artemus has been burned by hot grease in a household accident. No hair had grown in the spot since, and the strange mark had been used on the front of the papers to help in identification.

Identifying the young man put none of the questions to rest, however.

It turns out the family had been receiving letters from Ogletree after his death. The first (received in early 1935) had been postmarked in Chicago, with another arriving months later — claiming that Artemus was making his way to Europe. In August of that same year, Ogletree’s mother received a phone call from Memphis, Tennessee. The caller claimed that her son had saved his life and was now living in Cairo, Egypt, where he had married a rich woman and was thriving in the sun.

To this day, questions continue to circle around this mystery. No suspects were ever identified, and no killers were ever brought to justice. While a number of theories and reported sightings have bubbled up throughout the years, nothing concrete has even been proved or shone a light on any new evidence.

Whoever he was and whatever he had done, Artemus Ogletree died a horrible death that he didn’t deserve. Alone, bludgeoned, stabbed, and bleeding — he lost his life in the darkness with not so much as justice or the hope of a second chance.