Shadows in Room 1046: True Crime Stories Reimagined

The man in room 1046 told police he fell in the tub. This was a lie. A terrible, obvious lie. But it was the last thing he would ever say to them. It was January fourth, 1935. The Hotel President in Kansas City was a grand old place, but what happened that morning was ugly. A bellboy named Randolph Propst was sent to room 1046. The phone was off the hook. He knocked. A low voice mumbled something like “come in.” He knocked again. The voice repeated, “come in, turn on the lights.” But the door was locked.

From the outside. Randolph announced he had a master key. He opened the door and stepped into darkness. The only light came from a small table lamp, turned low. And in its dim glow, he saw the man. He was on the bed, naked, surrounded by dark, soaked sheets. The bellboy saw the man’s head. He saw the blood. He put the phone back on its cradle, turned to leave, and locked the door behind him. He had to get his boss. When the police arrived, the scene was a violation.

The man—who had checked in two days earlier as Roland T. Owen—was barely conscious. His wrists and ankles had deep ligature marks. Rope burns. His neck was bruised. His skull was fractured. One of his lungs was punctured by a broken rib. And yet, when Detective Ira Johnson asked him what happened, he whispered that he’d quarreled with no one. He said he fell. He hit his head on the bathtub. That was all. He passed out soon after. He was taken to the hospital, where he slipped into a coma and died just after midnight.

The investigation began, but it was like trying to assemble a puzzle with half the pieces missing, and the other half belonging to a different box entirely. The man had no luggage. Just a comb, a brush, and a tube of toothpaste. In the room, police found four small fingerprints on the telephone stand—too small to be the victim’s. They found an unsmoked cigarette, a hairpin, and a safety pin. The man had given his address as Los Angeles, but the L.A. police had no record of a Roland T.

Owen. His fingerprints matched no one in any national database. The case was a void. Then, the stories started to surface. The hotel staff began to piece together a timeline. A maid, Mary Soptic, had cleaned his room the day before. He’d seemed nervous. He asked her to leave the door unlocked because he was expecting a friend. Later that afternoon, she returned with fresh towels and found him lying on the bed, in the dark. A note on the table read, “Don, I will be back in fifteen minutes.

Wait.” The next morning—the morning he was found—she heard two voices in the room. A man said, “No, Don, I don’t want to eat. I’m not hungry.” The identity of this “Don” was a complete mystery. He was a ghost, a voice in a dark room who was never seen. Who was he? Was he the killer? Or was there someone else? Because another guest reported hearing a loud argument from 1046 that night. A man and a woman. For more than a year, the man in room 1046 remained a ghost.

He was buried in a potter’s field, an unidentified man with a violent secret. The police file grew thicker with dead ends. Kansas City Police Chief Otto Higgins, a man who had been a detective for a quarter-century, told reporters the case came “nearer to being the perfect crime than any other murder Kansas City has seen.” The trail was cold. The story was over. Except it wasn't. In the spring of 1936, a woman in Alabama named Ruby Ogletree was reading a magazine.

She saw a story about an unsolved murder in Kansas City. The description of the man… the scar on his head, the cauliflower ear… it sounded familiar. It sounded like her son, Artemus, who had left home in 1934 to travel the country. She contacted the authorities. They sent her a photograph of the man from room 1046. It was him. The ghost finally had a name: Artemus Ogletree. He was just a boy, really. Seventeen years old. But this revelation didn't solve the mystery.

It deepened it. Because Ruby Ogletree told the police something impossible. She said that after Artemus was killed in January of 1935, she had received three letters from him. All typewritten. One, sent from Chicago just weeks after his death, claimed he was about to sail for Europe. Another mentioned he was in Cairo, Egypt. Someone had murdered her son… and then launched a bizarre, elaborate campaign to convince his family he was still alive. Why? What was the point of this cruel theater?

The new information gave the police a name, but it pulled the motive even further out of reach. Robbery seemed unlikely; nothing of value was taken. Revenge? For what? A teenage boy hitchhiking across America doesn't usually make enemies powerful enough to orchestrate something like this. The police chased down every lead. They investigated a report of a man named "Don" who had been seen in a fight with another man over a woman. They looked into a mysterious phone call made from a nearby town by a man asking if "Roland Owen" was okay.

Nothing. Every path led back to the same dark, locked room. And then there was the final, chilling detail. After Artemus was identified, his mother arranged to have his body moved to a cemetery in Birmingham. Sometime after the funeral, a woman called the funeral home. She also called a local florist, demanding to know the location of his grave. She seemed angry, telling the florist that the hotel and the police were to blame for his death. A few days later, thirteen American Beauty roses appeared at Artemus’s grave.

Attached was a small card. It had just four words, and a name. “Love for ever — Louise.” The florist told police the woman had paid in cash, and insisted her identity be kept secret. No one ever found out who Louise was. Or Don. The file on Artemus Ogletree remains open. But as one modern Kansas City sergeant said, looking at the faded, typewritten pages from 1935… “There’s really nothing here that I would compare to a modern incident report.” It’s not a report.

It’s a story with the last chapter torn out. A question mark carved onto a tombstone.