Room 1046

Hey, true weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. It's best not to think too much about this hotel room. Best not to think of how many other bodies have occupied this space, curled up in this bed, stared through those windows knelt on the cold tile of that bathroom floor. How many human dramas small and large played out within these walls. If ever a place has the right to be haunted. It's a hotel, especially an old hotel, one where guests checked in, but never left, at least not alive.

The only witness to what happened in that room is the room itself. And old buildings are very good at keeping their secrets. Back when prohibition had the rest of the country on that choke chain, Kansas City, Missouri basically said, Nah, boring. We're gonna pass but y'all enjoy that dry lifestyle. And just like that, Kansas City became a seething hotbed of liquor, dancing, debauchery and vice. In other words, a real good time. Even after prohibition ended in December 1933, Kansas City still managed to set the bar super high in terms of bad behavior and organized crime. The jazz clubs stayed open until sunrise. And whatever elicit pleasure you crave, Kansas City delivered. The town was run by a crime boss with the entirely wholesome name of Tom Pendergast. His biggest accomplice, Kansas City Police Chief Otto P. Higgins. For bootlegging to embezzlement, election fraud, bribery, Pendergast turned the town into an endless wide open party. And law enforcement turned a blind eye. Kansas City was a magnet for anyone starved for excitement and pleasure. And for small town dreamers who desperately, desperately wanted to trade their predictable futures for something brighter, louder and more colorful. It also beckoned enterprising criminals and the kinds of people who prey on the young, the unworldly, the innocent. It was the kind of place where a person could transform him or herself become something new. It was also the kind of place where a person could easily disappear by their own choice or not. On January 2, 1935, a guest checked into the city's Hotel President. This was a swanky spot, less than 10 years old and already famous for having hosted the 1928 Republican National Convention, where Herbert Hoover was nominated for president. 14 stories tall, with ballrooms and imposing meeting spaces, a two story presidential suite and even its own ice making plant. The Hotel President was the most famous person in the world. And that guest checking in on January 2 was a 19 year old named Roland T. Owens. The registration card that Owens filled out indicated that he was from Los Angeles. He was traveling alone with no luggage.

His only possessions appeared to be a black hairbrush and comb set and a tube of toothpaste. He requested a room with a window that did not face the street, at least a few floors up from the hotel. The clerk cheerfully obliged and a bellboy escorted Owens to room 1046. Hotel staff discovered almost immediately that there was something a bit off, a bit weird about the behavior of the guests in room 1046. Even by Kansas City's loose and raucous standards. It began with a member of the housekeeping staff, a hotel maid named Mary Scopio. When she arrived to clean the room for the first time, Owens was there. He chatted with Mary while he combed his hair and she tidied up. When she prepared to leave, Owens asked her to leave the door unlocked as he was expecting a visit from a friend. Okay, reasonable. It was later that same day, when Mary Scopio returned with fresh bed, fully dressed, window shades tightly drawn, all the lights off. Okay, a little bit strange, but Scopio had seen many in her days of cleaning the rooms at the Hotel President.

Maybe the man in room 1046 was just one more eccentric who'd been drawn to the lights and action and dark glamour that Kansas City was famous for. The next day brought an odd and maybe even sinister twist. The way the room door locks operated at the Hotel President was very different from what we're used to today at like Holiday Inn Express. The doors could be locked from both inside and outside. If the guests locked the door from the inside, hotel staff couldn't enter. If the door to the room was locked from the outside, the guest couldn't exit. I can't think what purpose this served, other than to create unnecessary confusion. But who knows? Maybe that dual locking system was what hotels did back then to just add one more layer of security for their guests.

Anyway, Mary Scopio found the door to room 1046 locked from the outside. Upon unlocking the door and entering the room, she was surprised again to encounter Mr. Owens. While dusting the room's writing desk, Mary couldn't help but see a note written in pencil. Scrawled on the paper were the words, Don, I'll be back in 15 minutes. Wait. And then the phone rang.

Answering Owens spoke briefly with a man he addressed as Don and declined a meal on the grounds that he had only just eaten breakfast. He hung up and then chatted the maid up as she worked, asking questions about her job and the hotel itself. And it was only after Mary left room 1046 that it occurred to her. The door had been locked from the outside, meaning someone had locked Owens in the room, whether deliberately or by idea. So one or two odd moments, but all in all, nothing so strange that Mary couldn't chalk it up to the vibe of Kansas City and the effect the place had on visitors. Until later that same day, when she headed to the 10th floor to deliver fresh towels. I'm telling you, the service at the hotel president was really something back in those days. She was approaching room 1046 and Mary was taken aback by the sounds of voices, apparently in a heated argument, male voices.

She later told police and one of those voices rough and sharp barked. We don't need any cows. The ferocity of the exchange startled her. She left, but according to other guests in the adjacent and nearby 10th floor rooms, the argument continued. And at least one guest told police that she heard both male and female voices shouting using profane language well into the night. We sure were different times in the hospitality industry. Clearly, you could expect endless deliveries of towels, maybe calling down to the front desk with a noise complaint was something no one did. Another difference. In those days, hotels had switchboard operators and hotel president employed operators around the clock. It was a hotel switchboard operator pulling middle of the night duty who first noticed something very specific about room 1046. The phone was off the hook. A bell boy was promptly summoned and dispatched to the room to ask the guest to please kindly return the telephone handset to its cradle. The bellboy said a man with a very deep voice answered his knocking but refused to open the door and allow the bellboy in. Instead, he kept demanding the bellboy turn on the lights. Bellboy wondered if the guest was drunk too drunk to even comprehend the situation. So he hollered put the phone back on the hook and left in frustration. It was the next morning at shift change when the next switchboard operator clocked in. Then another attempt was made to get the guest in room 1046 to hang up the phone. Yet another bellboy headed to the tenth floor was again refused entry and reported that a male voice had responded to his insistence that the phone be dealt with immediately with something that sounded like. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Well, 90 minutes later, the phone in room 1046 was still off the hook. The switchboard operator grabbed a bellboy named Harold Pike and sent him upstairs to deal with whatever drunken mayhem was preventing Owens from following such a simple request. Now, unlike his coworkers who'd stood on the hallway side of the locked door pleading with the guest, Pike was out of patience. There was no answer to his repeated knocking. Finding the door again locked from the outside, Pike pulled out his master key and let himself into the room with the shades and draperies firmly pulled against the bright morning light. The room was in darkness. Harold Pike later reported seeing a person he presumed was the guest sprawled naked across the bed, his breathing heavy. Pike said that there was clearly a large dark spot on the bedding, but in the dimness, he took it to be a shadow. Crossing the room, he swiftly and quietly placed the phone receiver back on its hook and departed. Two hours passed and once again, the switchboard operator calls for a bellboy to please go to room 1046. The phone was off the hook. Are you wondering why this was such an issue? Yeah, me too. So, I tried to figure out how those old time telephone switchboards work and as best I can tell, the phone being off the hook in room 1046 meant that a circuit was open. An indicator light would show that and probably drive the operator a little bit crazy, right? But there seems to be also the possibility that an off the hook phone somehow interfered with the overall operation of the switchboard. I am not an engineer, so it's hard to figure out exactly what the problem was, but clearly

there was a problem with the phone, which meant yet another bellboy being dispatched to room 1046. When he got there, he found the phone off the hook and the guest kneeling by the door, blood spilling from his head. There was blood spattered on the walls, on the floor, the bed, in the bathroom. The bellboy beat a hasty retreat, racing back downstairs to alert management and get help for the injured man. In the short time it took for police officers and a doctor to get to the 10th floor of the Hotel President, something very bizarre happened.

Entering room 1046, they found the guest in the bathtub. He was bound at the ankles and wrists with a length of clothesline, part of which was wrapped tightly around his neck. The man had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest, puncturing one lung. His head was battered, the skull fractured. Not all the blood was fresh. The doctor examining the man calculated that many of his injuries were between six and seven hours old, and you'll notice that I said examining the man and not examining the body. Because despite his grave injuries and near strangulation, the guest known as Roland T. Owens was still alive, barely. According to witnesses, Owen managed to choke out these words. Nobody hurt me. He said that he'd only against the bathtub. That was the last thing Roland T. Owens ever said in this lifetime. He slipped into a coma and died the next day. There were very few clues for police to work with. When Owens was found in the bathtub, he was naked. His clothing had vanished from the room, leaving both detectives and hotel management baffled. Police on the scene described the crime scene as crude but effectively muddled enough to create mystery, starting with the victim himself. Who was Roland T. Owens? He checked in with no luggage, remember? And when registering, he gave no address. Was he from Los Angeles as he claimed? If anyone in Kansas City knew the man, they weren't coming forward to say so. All police had to go on was the man's physical description. White male, approximately 25 years old, approximately 180 pounds, blue eyes, dark hair worn long and cobed over, a large distinctive wedge-shaped scar on the left side of his head, and sporting a cauliflower ear. That's an irreversible condition that can develop when the external part of the ear gets walloped but good. You often see it in boxers and wrestlers. That ear was a definite clue, but how could it ever be enough to solve the mystery? In her statement to police, hotel maid Mary Scopio said that Owens had given her the impression by his actions and facial expressions that he was either deeply worried or deeply fearful of what she had no idea. She also described being puzzled regarding the towels the afternoon that she'd returned with fresh towels and was gruffly told that no towels were needed. Well, that morning after cleaning the room, she hadn't replaced the used towels, meaning there were no towels at all in the room when she returned later that day. How could the guest not need towels, right? No towels at all. Still, the customer's always right.

Right. Mary didn't understand it, but at the time she didn't question it. Also questioned was the couple occupying the adjoining room. They were the ones who reported overhearing loud, profane arguing. That male voice and a female voice. This, they said, occurred at about 2 o'clock in the morning. Then at around 4 o'clock that morning, the couple described hearing heavy breathing. A sound, they said, was like a choked, heavy snoring. In a freaky coincidence, the woman happened to share the same last name as the victim, Owens. But after a thorough background check, police were satisfied that the couple knew nothing more and were not involved in the crime. And as for the other hotel guests on the tenth floor, they'd heard nothing at all unusual. Even the Kansas City Star newspaper agreed that this was a peculiar case. The front page headline on January 5th, 1935 blared, Weird Scene of Death. The only evidence left behind, other than the bloody body of Roland T. Owens, was an unsmoked cigarette, a lady's hairpin, and the label cut from a man's necktie. Even the soap and the much talked about towels disappeared from the bathroom. The only promising lead was four fingerprints lifted off of a drinking glass. The size of the prints suggested they came from a female, but those prints were never identified. It took very little time for Kansas City Police to learn that their counterparts in Los Angeles knew nothing of any person by the name of Roland T. Owens. In fact, there was no record of anyone with that name having ever lived in Los Angeles. Hoping that the big distinctive scar on the victim's head would be the clue that broke the case, police allowed thousands of members of the public to file through the mortuary where Owens' body was being kept. No one identified the man. Police reached out to other law enforcement agencies all over the country with no success. But clearly, someone who knew the dead man, or at least cared about his fate, was following the story very closely. Because when Kansas City Police made the announcement that Owens would be buried in a pauper's grave, the phone suddenly rang. No, said the anonymous mail caller. No, bury him at Memorial Park and I'll pay for it. Finally, a break. Police asked the caller what his connection to the dead man was, and according to documents in the official KCPD files, the caller responded.

Owen hadn't played the game fair and cheaters usually get what's coming to them. And then, sure enough, police received the anonymous donation that paid for Owens' funeral. Thirteen American beauty roses were delivered just in time for the service, and the attached card read, love forever, Louise. Desperate for answers, the police arranged to have the case featured in true crime magazines like Official Detective Stories, and they got a response. So many letters, so many missing young men, sons and brothers and husbands. The kooks came out in droves, just like they do today. There were suggestions that the killing was related to gangster activity and to foreign spies. And just when it seemed that the case of murder in room 1046 could not possibly get any weirder, it got weirder. It got a whole lot weirder. In mid-January 1935, two weeks after the murder of Roland T. Owens, a woman in Birmingham, Alabama named Ruby Ogletree received a typewritten letter, allegedly from her son, Artemis. No one in the family had seen Artemis since 1934 when he set out to try his luck in California. Getting a letter from her son wasn't unusual.

Artemis had been good about keeping in touch with his mother. It was the fact that the letter was typed, not handwritten, that caused Ruby to wonder. Her son had never learned to type. Maybe it was a new skill he had picked up while living in California. Then, three months later, another typewritten letter arrived. This one announcing that Artemis intended to travel to France. Ruby didn't know what to think.

Then, on August 12th, 1935, Ruby received a long-distance telephone call from a man calling himself Godfrey Jordan and claiming to be a very dear friend of her son, Artemis. The man talked for nearly an hour, telling a wild tale of how Artemis had saved him from a band of thugs in Cairo, Egypt. Call it a mother's intuition. Call it whatever you want. But Ruby knew that something was surely very, very wrong, and her son, Artemis, was at the bull's-eye center of whatever that wrongness was. Here's a little free advice. Do not mess with a mama. Especially do not mess with an Alabama mama who has the sickening feeling that something has gone terribly amiss with one of her children. Ruby wrote to the U.S. Department of State. Was there a record of a passport issue to one Artemis Ogletree? She wrote to U.S. Customs. Was there a one Artemis Ogletree traveling abroad without a passport, which was a totally legitimate question given that U.S. citizens were allowed to travel outside the country without a passport until 1941. Ruby wrote to authorities in Cairo, Egypt.

She wrote to the FBI. She wrote to then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the days and months after the murder, Owens' photograph had been circulated far and wide. The case was catnip for the true crime tabloids. The story went national, big time. And then in November 1936, the murder victim known as Roland T. Owens was finally and officially identified as Artemis Ogletree. Kansas City police had been right to pin their hopes on the victim's distinctive scar. It was, his mother Ruby explained, the result of a terrible grease burn her son had suffered at just 11 months old. Knowing the real identity of their victim at long last was a win for the Kansas City PD. But it wasn't enough to solve the case. Who was the mysterious Don? The man Mary Scopio heard the guest in room 1046 talking to on the phone. The Don of the note scrawled in pencil on the desk. And who was Louise of the 13 roses delivered to the funeral? And why in the world would anyone so brutally kill a 19-year-old boy from Birmingham?

Because that, according to his mother, was his true age. Artemis Ogletree was just 19 when he died of the wounds so violently inflicted in that hotel room. Just 19, bleeding out in a bathtub, hands and feet bound, a rope yanked tight around his throat. Hadn't played the game fair and cheaters usually get what's coming to them. It was Ruby Ogletree who helped police in Kansas City flesh the case out a little bit. She knew her son had stayed at another hotel in the city before checking into the hotel president. It was the St. Regis Hotel and Artemis had his room with another man. Was it the mysterious Don? Artemis had registered at the St. Regis under a different name, Eugene K. Scott. Police learned that young Artemis had been seen in the company of a man who'd signed the hotel register, Donald Kelso. Slam dunk, right? But no. To their frustration, police were unable to establish that roommate's identity. And there were suspects in the case for sure, though many fell into the Hail Mary category. The nature of the crime scene and Artemis's bondage suggested that maybe there was some kind of deviant sexual play involved. Police dutifully began looking at men with a track record of what they used to call crimes against nature. They called them sex maniacs back then. Very individuals were brought in, questioned, made to provide handwriting samples. They were looking for a signature that matched the mysterious Donald Kelso in the St. Regis Hotel log and they didn't find it. The lead detective in the case, T.J. Higgins, was busy chasing another lead. It was a convicted killer in New York named Joseph Ogden. Ogden was your classic sadistic murder monster. He shot a man named Oliver George Sinekal. Then he chopped the body up, removing a very distinctive tattoo in the process, and stuffed the dismembered remains into a steamer trunk headed for Memphis, Tennessee. Back then, just like now, there was always the risk of luggage being lost or delayed and that's what happened to the trunk packed with the poor of Mr. Sinekal's remains.

The grim discovery was made at Penn Station. Ogden was tried and convicted and sent off to Sing Sing. His records revealed that Ogden had served plenty of time prior to this in multiple prisons and even a couple of insane asylums, including one in Birmingham, Alabama. Is it possible he somehow crossed paths there with young Artemis Ogletree? And bombshell, Joseph Ogden had a slew of aliases, one of which was the name Donald Kelso. Kansas City police thought for sure they had their man until the FBI shut it down, saying sorry, but the handwriting just doesn't match. And you could leave it here, convinced that Ogden did it, that the FBI was somehow mistaken. But then there's a mother's intuition. Ruby Ogletree, no matter how devastated she was by the cruel and tragic loss of her son, would not give up. She had a feeling, a strong feeling, a mother's feeling that the killer was someone very close to the family. Ruby had written letters to the Kansas City PD asking them to look at a man named Joe Simpson. See, Joe Simpson and Artemis Ogletree had left Birmingham together, hitchhiking across the country to California. When her son seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, Ruby naturally turned to the one friend and companion who might be able to offer information. But no matter how she tried, Simpson dodged her, repeatedly agreeing to meet, only to stand the grieving woman up. Police insisted that Simpson had been interviewed and ruled out as a suspect. But a mother's instinct is a powerful thing, and Ruby remained convinced that Joe Simpson knew far more than he was telling. It was almost four years to the day of her son's death when Ruby finally succeeded in confronting Simpson. Conversation only confirmed her worst fears. She wrote to the Kansas City Police Department that she had no doubt whatsoever that the man who called her on the phone, the man who said he was Godfrey Jordan, the teller of those crazy tales of Cairo, Egypt, that was none other than Joe Simpson. And ferocious mama bear that she was, Ruby straight up called Simpson out. She told him that she knew his voice was the same as the caller that night in August 1935. She told police in her letter that Simpson had flushed red and was unable to look her in the eyes.

She wrote, he did say he did believe the case would never break as there were no clues and left nothing for the G-men to work on. I said Kansas City can well boast of it being the perfect crime. He laughed and said, it is. They'll never get the ones who killed him. First of all, he laughed at a grieving mother. Murderer or not, Joe Simpson was definitely a cold-hearted, vicious little tool. And in what feels like a flourish, he promised to send a Ruby a letter he'd received from her son. Badly typed, he chuckled. And then he never showed up with the letter. Not that Ruby believed for a second that the letter was authentic. As she had been telling police for years, her son didn't know how to use a typewriter. Which to be fair, is not sufficient evidence of anything. A type writer isn't a complicated machine and Artemis could well have picked up the skill while living in California. Still, you can see how a desperate and grieving parent would grab at any and every scrap of evidence or info or hope. And it's not like the Kansas City PD didn't work the case hard. They did for 15 years. In 1950, the case went cold. But even now, KCPD detectives still pull the file in the hopes of finally solving the mystery of the terrible events of January 1935 in room 1046 of the hotel president. Which still stands today. It did close in 1980, but after a $45 million plus renovation, it reopened in 2005 under the Hilton Hotels brand. You can book a room there right now. Just look for the Hilton President Kansas City on Baltimore Avenue. You can't stay at the St. Regis unless you're planning to sign a lease. That hotel is now an apartment complex on Ward Parkway. And you can head over to Memorial Park Cemetery and visit the grave of the man buried as Roland T. Owens, but later revealed to be Artemis Ogletree. What you can't do, what you can't have is find a satisfying ending to this very troubling tale. This case is unsolved, which is not at all the same thing as unknowable. Because someone did know, maybe does know. Someone lived or is maybe still living with the weight of that And here's the final very weird detail in this story. About 20 years ago, a Kansas City historian named John Horner received a call at his workplace, the Kansas City Public Library. The caller was sorting through the possessions of a deceased elderly family member. Strangely, there was this one shoebox stuffed to the brim with newspaper clippings about the mystery murder in room 1046. Inside that box, the caller claimed, was an item mentioned in nearly every news story about the case. The caller would not identify him or herself. And Horner apparently waited nearly a decade before going public with the story. Is it true? No one knows. It's doubtful we'll ever know the truth of what happened that night in room 1046. Someone committed murder. And it was slow, gruesome torture. And they got away with it. Because some people do get away with murder. I mean, since roughly a third of all murders go unsolved, chances are pretty

good that you've encountered a killer, sat next to one on a flight, joked with one. One of those endless team building meetings at your job. It's not impossible. The average person walks right past as many as 36 murderers in their lifetime. People have taken a life in violence, maybe just once and then never again. A moment of blinding rage, a terrible impulse obeyed. Look around. Most murderers are just regular people. Even killer cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was described as surprisingly ordinary, ordinary, just like you and me.

Unless of course, maybe you're different. Maybe you see a every single day. Next time on true weird stuff. It's a ghost story. A true ghost story. The question is, which one was the ghost? See on the next true weird stuff. So Sherry, I love this story. I love the mystery of the story. I love the time period of this story. Where did you find this story? So I am I have an obsession with old hotels, like really old hotels. And I try to if I have the chance to stay in a very, very old hotel, I always take it because I feel like so much human life has been lived in those walls. And I try to and you know, a lot of it super mundane, right? You know, business travelers, people just passing through, but places soak up the energy of the people that come through them. At least that's what I think. And old hotels are fascinating, because people behave differently in hotels. The anonymity of the space can be a trigger for people to drop inhibition.

People have like assignations and rendezvous and get up to mischief in hotels. And so I always felt like old hotels have great stories to tell. And there are a handful of really old hotels in Philadelphia, where I was born and went to college. And, and so just mesmerized by these buildings, right? So I thought, well, I'm going to do a true weird episode on like old hotels, because I know that these places are haunted. And you would be surprised, I have like a list of hotels where truly terrible things happened. You know, like, back in the day when buildings were all made of wood, and we didn't have great fire suppression systems, or even really any strategy for evacuating in the event of a fire, whole hotels would go up in flames. So many people would lose their lives. So I'm roaming around the world, like, looking at different hotels and looking at all the possible stories. And like you, I'm very, very fascinated with this era in American history, the whole years leading up to and just after Prohibition ended. And I had heard of the Roland T. Owens, the mystery at this hotel in Kansas City, but I've never taken a big deep dive into it.

And like you, once I once I landed at the Hotel President, I pushed all the other hotels aside and thought this one, because it's unsolved. And I'm fascinated by these decades old cold cases. Even though I'm with the mom on this one. I think Simpson, I think Joe Simpson knows far more than he's telling. I'm not saying he's the murderer. But I think he knows far more than he's telling, and was protecting himself by not dropping names. What did you think?

Yeah, there's a lot of mystery with that. And I would go, I would go along with trusting whatever her instinct is with that. It's so I mean, he's 19 years old. So I want you to just kind of think about it. He's 19 years old, he left home at 18. So he came from a really nice little family in Birmingham, Alabama. But he's he's 18 years old. And the future is just so bright. You know, this is before you know, World War Two, like Prohibition ended. There was there was so much out there for a young adventurous guy. So he and his buddy hitchhiked to California. And the story could have ended a gazillion different ways. But why did it end with him weirdly bound and bleeding out in a hotel bathtub in Kansas City under a fake name? What was that? And then had checked into yet another hotel using a fake name. So it does make you wonder he got, you know what you can say, like, this is going to sound like an expression that your mom used to use, but he fell in with a bad crowd. I think we can probably just go ahead and put that out there.

Right? Yeah. And, you know, the idea of was he getting did he some espionage? Or was it involved with the mob? Or was there? You know, was there some sexual component to this? I mean, was he did he have a little crush on a gangster sweetheart? And did she maybe enjoy that attention and reciprocate those feelings a little bit. And he paid for that with his life. And maybe she was the Louise who sent the roses to his funeral. Yeah, there's one thing. Yeah, that was one. And the fact that there was an argument and it involved a woman's voice. Because I don't know, there was a thought that I had he's 19 years old. He's from Birmingham, Alabama. Is there a possibility that he had a secret lifestyle and was trying to hide that? And somehow that came into play somehow in this, that was one of the things that went through my mind as you were going through this? Well, and the the so I thought it was a really powerful coincidence that Joseph Ogden, the killer in New York who had as an alias Donald Kelso. I thought that was an awfully interesting and big coincidence that Donald Kelso was the name used on the registration at the St. Regis Hotel in Kansas City, right? Donald Kelso is not John Smith, right? It doesn't seem like the most common name. And I know the FBI shouted down the handwriting. But if I had to, if I had to put myself out on a limb here, doesn't it seem kind of sketchy and unlikely that we would have that as a coincidence? Yeah, I think that's a pretty big coincidence.

Yeah, I don't think that's coincidence at all. I think that that, you know, it's, it lets you know that there's something more sinister connected to it. So maybe these two young men hitchhike to California, and you know, they're, they try to make their way, but they've got nothing. And so, you know, maybe you, you do a couple of odd jobs for somebody sketchy. And maybe one of those jobs sends you to Kansas City, which as we in the beginning of the story, Kansas City kind of skipped prohibition. They were like, yeah, it's a hard no from us.

And so while the rest of the country was throwing their whiskey into the sewer, and locking up their bootleggers, Kansas City was like, yeah, you know what, we're gonna, we're gonna go a different way. And so I can imagine like, if you fell in with a tough crowd in California, and now we got a little job, we need you to handle in Kansas City. So of course, you're going to use a different name, you're not if something illegal, you're not going to check in under your own name. And so now you're at the St. Regis. And there's some heat, maybe there's some attention. So you leave, you go to the hotel president, you check in as yet another name.

But now a lot of your poor impulsive choices that you're making, because you're 19. And your frontal lobes aren't fully developed. And your hormones are wild. And the gangster's girlfriend is a knockout. And it all kind of catches up with you in room 1046 at the hotel president. And maybe the guy that they hire to put you down is using the alias Donald Kelso, but his real name is Joseph Ogden. And maybe your buddy Joe Simpson knows all of this, but he's taken it to the grave.

Because he'll be damned if he's going to be next. I like that. Yeah, that, that is very plausible as well. And that so then you have to ask yourself, why those phone the letters to the mother, why the phone calls? Well, this is this is a lady that you grew up knowing. And you know, her son is has been killed. And she doesn't know that. And maybe she's never going to know it. And maybe you have some half ass notion that this is going to be comforting. And also that it's going to cover the trail. That more? Yeah, the second Yeah, yeah, like you got it. You've got to find a way to kick some sand over these tracks. Joe Simpson, because you're an amateur playing in with the grownups and the big dirty leagues. And you are not you are not qualified. So you do something really foolish, which is contact the victim's mother.

And the whole doesn't the whole he saved me from some thugs in Egypt sound like the sort of crap a 19 year old would make up? It does. It's it's such a tall tale. I mean, it really is. Also, the the other thing that was kind of fascinating about this to me is our appetite for true crime did not start with podcasts and Dateline. No, no, we've had an appetite for it.

It's just it's shifted. It went from magazines and books and that sort of thing over to things like podcasts and TV shows and that sort of thing. It's just interesting that the fascination that we have for this, that people had that fascination all these years ago. And I imagine why there was pressure on the Kansas City Police Department to keep this as an ongoing investigation for 15 years after the crime had stopped. After the crime may be committed, I mean, Yeah, and they they continue to dust it off and look at it. And there are a lot of people in Kansas City who think they know who have maybe a theory of the case similar to what we just kind of laid out, who think they know who did it, which is not the same thing as being able to prove who did it. Right.

We didn't have DNA evidence back then. The fingerprints, the four fingerprints were never identified, although they were they were so small that they you know, they were like, it's probably a lady. Right. Yeah. So the one point the maid went into the room and I'm trying to remember what it was you said the maid went into the room and he was dressed in like a suit sitting on the edge of the bed. Is that correct? In the dark.

In the dark. In the dark. He was high. He was hiding in that room. If you look at the behavior, he asked for a room with a window that didn't face the street. That's right. All of the drapes and blinds were drawn and pulled. The lights were never on in the room. He was scared. He was a scared 19 year old kid. Although back then, you know, you were to be a fully grown man at that age, but I think he was a scared 19 year old kid from Alabama way out of his depth.

So in the very big city, the being bound up. Let's talk about that for one second. So if the let's just say it was mobs mobsters that killed him or whatever. They wouldn't do that. They just kill him unless they bound him up because they were trying to get information from him. It was like he was beaten and he was stabbed. I'm just wondering if perhaps he knew something and that is what what ultimately caused his demise. I felt like and that's a strong possibility. I felt like he was not given the courtesy of a swift death, you know, like the classic bullet, you know, execution style bullet in the head that you see in a lot of your gangland I felt like he was tortured. Yeah. In the service of teaching him a lesson. That could be. Yeah. And it's very weird because his last words were there he is. He's he's bound. He's bleeding out. He's battered and bruised. He's in the bathtub and his last words were nobody hurt me like what clearly you could not and did not do this to yourself like right up till the end because maybe he thought maybe he thought and this this part of the story just broke my heart the more I sat with it when they burst into the room and they found him and he's nobody hurt me. He probably didn't think those were his last words. Max. No. No. I think that he did that because he was he was still afraid of whoever did it to him and he was he was going to be rescued but he was going to make it clear. He wasn't a rat. Nobody did this to him. Right. Right. So so it doesn't feel like it feels like he was hiding and found and confronted and tortured and then died which tells me that he was being punished for something. Then you look at the roses and Louise and you know what that all makes sense that in fact that makes the most sense and the fact that she was there at some point along the line because whoever it was in that adjoining room we heard female voice as well in addition to male voices and the the fingerprints on the glass female fingerprints. They think that all makes sense that that really does and he just kind of haplessly stumbled into this and you know what else I wonder I have a feeling I can't prove it and I had no way to believe me. I tried like I I looked and tried but the problem is that when you don't have any names because this card was signed love Louise, but we don't know if that was a real person. I wondered after they finished punishing Artemis Ogletree was Louise's turn. And women today disappear every hour every minute and are never found again never seen again. So now I'm in I'm like digging through the databases and searching for you know a missing woman female body found well. There's a lot of that. I couldn't I couldn't figure out how to connect one of those with this Louise, but I did wonder if she was the next to be punished and because her body wasn't found in a hotel room in a swanky Kansas City hotel. There's not a giant unsolved cold case mystery about it. What do you think? Yeah, I would say that that that's very likely. But I think the idea that he moves on a woman or was interested in a woman who was

taken by like a mobster or somebody who was that that all makes that actually makes the most sense out of any of this. And so we'll never know again. This is one of those cases where there won't be justice where that grieving mother Ruby Ogletree drew her last breath with no idea of who had done this terrible thing to her son. Like I mean a kid who should never have found himself in that situation. She never knew the police all those police detectives that work the case never knew. And there's no justice and somebody maybe more than one somebody got away with murder. And this is something for all of our true weirdos listen to this right now. This is a side alley that Max and I are fascinated and obsessed with the idea that murderers walk amongst us. Yeah. And that you've passed one 36 times in your life and not known it. That's a real DOJ statistic by the way. I didn't just make that up.

Listen I believe that because how many times have we seen a cold case that is solved because of DNA and the person committed this crime and it might have been like a rape and a strangulation or a stabbing and something that's just horrific and then somehow they reenter their life and never do anything like that ever again and get married and have kids and work for a job for 2530 years and then they catch them and they're in their 70s. So I would say yeah, that's I mean you think like how did how did you live with that? I don't I don't and and here's the thing. There are people who can live with that and people who can't there are people who are leaky that the it's leaking out of them at every turn. They can't they have such in a way. It's kind of it argues in their favor. They have so much conscience and empathy and decency that they literally cannot live with their own actions. Those are the people that get caught. Those are the people that confess. It's the rest of them. See this is why I can't commit murder. I'd be committing murder all over the place if it wasn't for that. I'd be. Oh, I couldn't I couldn't know I could I couldn't live with it, but I heard somebody say something the other day that I thought was fascinating. They said. Would you ever take a life?

What's your first thought when you hear that not me? No, of course I never would and they said you ever run a red light. You ever read a light that was not quite that was that was not quite right and you kind of said, I'm in a hurry. I could go through and how easily you can take a life through something like that. So the decisions these little decisions that we make throughout the course of our life determine whether we will kill somebody or not in some of those situations, even if it isn't intentional and that would be like. I mean it would be a terrible thing and there are so many people that live with that that have been in accidents. You know where there were fatalities and I went to high school with a boy. He was a couple of years ahead of me who so I was like I think a sophomore and he was a senior and he lost control of his vehicle on a wet rainy night.

He's a novice driver and he hit it. He had another kid on a ten-speed bike. The kid didn't make it and that that boy has had to carry that and live with that for his whole life and that is an unbearably heavy burden like I can't imagine it, but the people we're talking about the people that you pass at Target that have committed intentional murder. Yes, they killed somebody and maybe they regret it. Maybe they regret it very very deeply, but they got away with it and you're going to pass thirty-six of them or more in your lifetime. So you just don't know right. You don't we don't know. We don't know what secrets other people carry inside, but this is a case. I do wish could be solved for what is left of the Ogletree family in Alabama. They deserve that and Artemis Ogletree AKA Roland T Owens deserves more than to be you know the featured player in a true crime tale. Don't you think? Yeah, don't you wish while this is an interesting story to us to think about there is the reality of the fact that there he has real family that is still connected to him that would love to have this answer and the people who perpetrated this they have family to think about that.

Think about how quickly we lose track of our ancestors. What can you really tell me about your father's father father's father? What do you really know? How many generations can most of us go back? What kind of secrets what kind of secrets are in your own family and imagine what kind of secrets are in the families of all of the people involved in the mystery of room 1046. It's a lot to walk around with. Thanks for listening to this episode. We'll see you on the next true weird stuff and if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered and we really appreciate it. If you subscribe rate and review true weird stuff, hit our website true weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram and Twitter true weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me Sheri Lynch along with my deeply weird director Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr original graphics by Kevin Nash original artworks by Olivia excellent true weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash copyright 2023 Now! Media all rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.