Mystery of man found bound, stabbed in hotel bathtub remains unsolved

A young man walked into the Hotel President in Kansas City, Mo., on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 1935, and asked for a room on a high floor. He carried nothing but a brush, comb, and toothpaste and paid for a one-day stay. The visitor signed his name on the hotel register as “Roland T. Owen,” and said he came from Los Angeles.

No one saw him again until Thursday when Owen appeared at the front desk and paid for another day.

All was quiet until early Friday morning, when the hotel’s telephone operator noticed a receiver was off the hook in his room — 1046 — so she sent a bellboy to tell the occupant to hang up. Bellboys traveled up to the 10th floor three more times to deal with the phone. One used a passkey to enter the room, which was dark because the shades were drawn, and saw a man asleep, perhaps drunk, in bed. The bellboy took care of the phone and left.

Around 11 a.m., the phone was again off the hook. This time, the bellboy found Owen on the floor, bleeding. Blood drenched the sheets and spattered on the wall in the bedroom. Red droplets had even reached the ceiling.

“WEIRD SCENE OF DEATH,” was how the Kansas City Star headlined the story on Jan. 5, 1935.

Investigators arrived to find Owen in the bathtub. He was bleeding from stab wounds on his arms and his heart. One wound had penetrated a lung. His wrists and ankles were tied, and a short rope was looped around his neck, suggesting that the assailant had tortured the victim by choking him.

Despite all of that, and a skull fracture, he was still alive.

“Who did this?” a detective asked.

“Nobody,” Owen said.

The detective asked how he got hurt.

“Fell in the tub,” was his response.

Owen lapsed into a coma and died a few hours later.

A few possible clues — a hairpin, a label from a necktie, an unsmoked cigarette, and a broken glass with a woman’s fingerprint — remained in the room. Someone had removed all of Owen’s clothing as well as the hotel towels and soap.

Police tried to learn more about the dead man, starting in Los Angeles, but no record of a Roland T. Owen was found in that city. The name, police concluded, was probably an alias. Letters and photographs sent to police departments across the country turned up nothing.

One of the strongest clues to his identity was a wedge-shaped white scar, about 4½ at the base on the side of his head. He also had a cauliflower ear, suggesting he may have been a boxer or wrestler, but probes into these sports went nowhere.

Thousands viewed the body as it lay in a funeral parlor for 11 weeks. Some said they had seen the young man in the days before his murder, but no one knew who he was.

The corpse was headed for potter’s field in late March when the funeral parlor received a strange call — a man offering to pay for the burial. The money arrived wrapped in the pages of a newspaper.

Around the same time, another caller arranged for a bouquet of 13 American Beauty roses to be placed on the grave, with a card inscribed, “Love For Ever — Louise.”

On Dec. 31, the Kansas City Times called the murder “the strangest, most baffling case” for the city’s police department that year. It was the first of the city’s 74 murders in 1935; 15 remained unsolved as the year came to a close.

Months passed without a change in status: Victim unknown, case unsolved.

A break came more than 22 months after the murder. Ruby D. Ogletree, of Birmingham, AL, said the mystery man’s real name was Artemus Ogletree. He was 19, and she said she was his mother.

The distinctive scar on his head came from an accidental cooking oil burn when he was a baby.

Mrs. Ogletree said that her son left home in the spring of 1934 to hitchhike to California with a companion and that he landed in Kansas City in August. Shortly after the murder, she received a letter supposedly sent by him from Chicago. Two more followed later, one from New York, another from Paris.

But she doubted that these messages really came from her child. The writer used language that did not sound like him and the letters were written on a typewriter. Mrs. Ogletree said Artemus did not know how to type.

Seven months after the murder, she received a phone call from a man in Memphis. He said Ogletree had gone to Cairo, Egypt, and could not write because he lost a thumb during a fight in which he saved the caller’s life. Mrs. Ogletree’s information solved the mystery of the victim’s identity, but did not lead to the killer.

New York City police believed they found a possible suspect when they arrested a man and charged with the murder of a roommate in 1937. One of his aliases was “Donald Kelso,” a name that had appeared in Kansas City hotel registers where Ogletree had stayed. But that lead eventually went nowhere.

The murder — considered by some as a perfect crime — remains a mystery to this day. But that doesn’t mean people have stopped wondering.

In 2021, Kansas City Magazine published a feature on the case. It included newly revealed police files — witness statements, memos, photos, and other documents. The magazine made the official documents available “in hopes that someone out there might solve this almost mythical murder case.”

The records appear on the magazine’s website under the heading “Solve It.”