August 13, 2024 • 48 mins
On January 2, 1935, a man checked into room 1046 at the Hotel President in Kansas City. He gave his name as Roland T. Owen, and listed his a home address in Los Angeles. Later, he was found brutally beaten, exhibiting signs of torture. He passed away shortly thereafter... and there the mystery begins. Roland, you see, was a fake name used by one Artemus Ogletree, from Birmingham, Alabama. Join the guys as they unravel the strange, twisting story of Artemus Ogletree's murder in tonight's classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
A classic episode for this evening. On January second, nineteen
thirty five, a man checks into the Hotel President in
Kansas City. He gives his name as Ronald t Owen,
and later he dies.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Yeah, but not just dies, He's found like destroyed, brutally attacked,
beaten to death.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Yeah, signs of torture. Somebody took their time with him.
Is the creepy thing.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
And this is always a tragedy whenever these things occur.
But as we learned in twenty nineteen, in this classic episode,
the guy's name Matt is not Roland t Owen.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
No, it's Artemis Ogletree and he's from Birmingham, Alabama.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
What happened?
Speaker 2 (00:46):
It's really weird.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Uh, Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Myne name is Nolan. They call me Ben.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
We are joined with our super producer Paul Mission Control Deck.
At most importantly, you are you. You are here, and
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
It's quite possible that some of us listening to the
show today or tonight, are listening in a hotel or
a motel or an airbnb.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
A holiday and perhaps sure, perhaps or an express holiday
and the.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Best Western or go classy, maybe a Western ooh, nights
nights in nights.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
In something ritzy like the Ritz.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Or a Hilton. Yeah, the hotel we're gonna be speaking
about today is currently a Hilton property.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Yes, perhaps nights in white satin. It's true.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Yes, you know that sounds actually not about knights at all.
It's about like knights as in the evening nights bathed
and dressed in white satin. Just realized that pretty recently. Unrelated,
But it's true. There are all sorts of strange things.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
That happen in hotels. Similar to spending time in an airport.
Spending time in a hotel is occupying a limbo, a
liminal space. It looks like a home. You do things
that you would do in a home, but it's not
really a home. There's something uncanny valley about it. And
today's story is about a very strange, extraordinary thing that
(02:33):
occurred in a hotel. And we don't mean extraordinary in
the way it's often misused today. Usually extraordinary is meant
as a compliment, but actually extraordinary just means something out
of the ordinary.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
And that is the way we are using it today.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
So let's set the scene on January the second, nineteen
thirty five, a well dressed young man calling himself Roland
t Owen while into the Hotel President in Kansas City, Missouri.
The man is not carrying luggage. He's heavy set. He
appears to be a fighter of some sort, or at
(03:11):
least someone who's had experience fighting, because he has a
visible cauliflower ear and a horizontal scar on the left
side of his face.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Quick cauliflower ear thing. You'll see this if you google
images of a lot of MMA fighters. You can see
what that looks like.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
And it's a very easy thing to spot. Right, This
man calling himself Roland t Owen requests a single room
with no windows facing the street. He pays cash, which
you could do at that time, right, which was the
normal way to pay for things in nineteen in nineteen
thirty five, and he checks into room ten forty six.
(03:51):
When the cleaning staff goes by his room, you know,
to change the sheets and change out the towels and stuff,
they find the man calling himself rolling t and sitting
in a dark room exhibiting signs of profound fright. He
tells the staff that he's expecting someone to drop by.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So, okay, so far, what we know scared guy sitting
you know, alone in a room that he wanted to
stay away, he wanted to be a little more anonymous
than usual, hiding out in a hotel. But it's you know,
it's it's mysterious, but it's not all that insane, right, Yeah,
it's a little.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Blair witchy though it reminds me of like the dude
standing facing the corner in the Blair.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
With you know.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Okay, and on its surface, it's not.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
That weird, but when you know a little more about
the backstory, it becomes even weirder.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And to explore this story, we're
going to shift through various different perspectives, primarily people who
work at the hotel. So first, what do you say,
let's start with the Maid's Tale. If we want to
make this Canterbury.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Tale as or a Hulu original, maybe oh.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Yes, yes, yes, the non Handmaid's Tail.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
That's right. So at ten thirty in the morning on
January third, the day after our our protagonist, I guess
Roland t Owen checks into the President.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Hotel, a man calling himself rolling to that's right.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
A member of the cleaning staff goes up to room
ten forty six where he is. She notices that the
door is locked, and she you know, it's kind of
a normal thing. Doors are locked. When the cleaning staff
comes by, they knock generally and say housekeeping. She opens
the door, and because she assumes that Owen is out,
maybe at breakfast or having a meeting or something, so
(05:41):
she notices the lights are off too, exactly, lights are off,
door is locked. I'm going to clean this room well instead.
As she opens the door, as we said earlier, she
sees him sitting alone in the dark. Yes, you heard
that correctly, just sitting there in the dark. Now, before
you say all that is so insane, I just have
to bring up a fact that I enjoy doing this
(06:02):
a lot.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Actually, is it usual to do that?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
I don't think it's that On you.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Tub, I'm right there with you. I spend hours each
week actually locked in a bathroom in the dark with
a shower on, just sort of thinking nice.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
I definitely take showers in the dark when I can.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Am I the outlier here? I think I'm the outlier here?
Oh yeah? Am I the only one that finds this strange?
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I don't know. I got into it when I was
a kid. We had a drum kit in this room
that had no windows in it in my parents' basement,
and I would go in there, shut the door and like,
use a flashlight or something. You turn the light on,
go sit down at my throne, and then turn off
all the lights and just practice playing drums in the
pitch black. And I found it to be riveting. So
now I just like to do things like that.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Didn't you have a similar setup with your drum kit
and your last house too?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
I did, but it was in a basement with one window.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I don't know, man that basement. When I went down there,
it felt like a kill room. Yeah, And I have
a very high tolerance for strangeness.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I think that was just the factor of the basement itself.
Having the drum kit was just a nice little accoutrement.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Where the walls covered in plastic.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Sometimes Yeah, okay, when you know when season was right,
you are not digging yourself out of this.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
The whole of weirdness very well.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Okay, So you so it sounds like two thirds of
us are on board with this. He might have also
been dozing off or sleeping. That's that's quite possible, right.
But the maid is standing there, you know, she notices
(07:44):
her senses somehow this person sitting in this room, and
she realizes the room is in fact occupied.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
And then.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Roland pretty much tells her not to touch the lights,
and he asked the maid to leave the door unlocked
as she exits, because you see, he says he is
again expecting someone. So this is the second time he
said this.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
And then, according to a Mental Floss article that's written
on this very subject, it says that the maid ended
up returning to that room to deliver fresh towels, and
this time when she went in, she found Owen lying
on his bed. Now he's fully dressed, but there's a
note on the desk that read down, I will be
back in fifteen minutes. Wait, and that's down spelled Don.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Yes, So who's now We've got Don and we've got
another person in the mix.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Is that like Donald or the Dawn?
Speaker 4 (08:40):
Oh my god, man, I never thought about it. Well,
this is this is gonna come back around.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yeah, this does come back around. And that's a good question.
Is is it kind of the theme? Is it kind
of like saying sir, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Or duke?
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Now we shift to the story of the motorist later
on this night, January third, there's a guy named Robert Lane.
That is his real name. He's not a guy who
calls himself that. And he is driving he picks up
a stranger a few blocks away from the hotel President.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
So the man was dressed only in pants and like
an undershirt, and he had a scar on his left arm,
not an open wound, but like a big, very obvious
kind of gash of a scar. And I was on
his left arm. And then when Lane told his passenger
that he looked as if he was having a rough night,
(09:36):
the man replied, I will kill that beep tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
And this beap comes.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
We come honestly by this beat because the reports about
this in the newspaper of the time in the area,
they removed this word and it's not clear what it
actually was.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Well, in this guy, Robert Lane that we're talking about,
he worked for the water department in Kansas City. So
It's not like he was just some random guy out there.
He was doing his job.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
When he interacted, right, And I have a proposition for
the table for the show. I have a proposition. We
do not know what expletive he used, and we don't
know exactly what the newspapers decided to censor.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
We may not ever know it.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, but I stumbled across this great anachronistic and I
think I said this to you know, this great anachronistic insult.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Better. So what if instead of saying, you.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Know, and whatever gutter tramp, I don't know, whatever weird
thing you want to put in there, what if he said,
I'll kill that sockdologizing old man trap.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Tomorrow, socktologizing old man trap, the.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Old man trap, you old man trap. I don't know
why that tickles me, but you're right. You're right.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
He did work for the water department. And then later
when he's given the opportunity to identify this hitchhiker, who,
as you said, was only in pants and an undershirt,
looking like he had been roaded hard and put away wet,
he said, yeah, that's the guy I picked up. And
(11:16):
they said that guy is roland T Owen, or at
least that's what he calls himself now.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
On this same night, January third, just a quick mention,
he was allegedly seen around the town at several bars,
hanging out with at least two women like that night,
seen hanging around doing stuff with them. The timelines are
a little bit weird, just just a little bit, but
(11:43):
they say he was on twelfth Street, which you know,
isn't isn't that far because we're we're our last person,
our Robert Lane. He actually interacted with rolling to Owen
along thirteenth Street, which is about a mile and a
half from the hotel. So you know, twelfth Street distance
(12:05):
is not that far from there, right.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
All right, So it's completely plausible that he could be
in that area, that there could be some sand to
those those reports which did not have they didn't get
widely publicized, if I'm correct, They were sort of hearsayers.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Some rumors.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
And we should also mention that the cleaning staff, the
member of the cleaning staff, her name was Mary Stoptik. Yes,
so speaking of staff, and we are building a case here,
we are going somewhere with this, folks. I know we're
taking a circuitous route But speaking of staff, let's go
to the first bell boy, whose name we don't have.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, so bell Boy one interacts around seven am with
our protagonist. It's January fourth, the phone operator at Hotel President.
Because you know, this an entire system of phone lines
going to all the different rooms, there's actually a human
being in nineteen thirty five that is operating these phones.
(13:09):
This operator notices that the receiver of the telephone in
ten forty six, where Roland is staying, is off the hook.
And so this bell boy goes up to check on
Owen and or at least to check up on the
phone itself. And when he gets there, he finds that
the door's locked and there's a do not disturb sign
hanging from the knob. It probably says something like nary
(13:31):
a disturbance something like that. He knocks and he hears
somebody from the other side of the room say come in,
and again he's like, the door's locked. Hello, door's locked.
Man inside the room just kind of ignores that he's
letting him know that the door is locked. But then
(13:51):
the guy.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Says, turn on the lights.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Kind Of hard to do that when you can't get
into the room. Bell boy just keeps on knocking, but
he ends up just leaving. But right before he leaves,
he shouts through the door, he said.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
The way he wants him to put his phone on
the hook, Right, it's what did the voice.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Put damn pout on the hook?
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Son?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Because that's because it's Hank Hill, that's the Yeah, it's
an approximation of what occurred. But yes, he just like
yells at him to put the phone back on the hook,
and the bellboy just doesn't have his past key on
him at that moment, so he can't go in and
do it, so he just kind of gives up and
goes downstairs.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
An hour's pass. Let's go to the second bell boy.
A different member of the hotel staff goes up later
that afternoon. So at seven am January fourth, when he
has the first guy has that weird interaction. In the afternoon,
this different guy goes up and he does have his
key on him, so he lets himself into the room
(14:50):
and he finds the man calling himself rolling t Owen,
lying on the bed in the dark, and from what
he could tell, this man was very much naked and
very much drunk. He also sees that the phone stand
has been knocked over, so he doesn't turn on the lights.
He doesn't say anything to this naked man reeking a booze.
(15:13):
He just hangs up the phone, cuts his losses leaves
the room.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Because at this point it's you know, it's been hours
and hours. The operator is like, somebody, hang up that phone.
I need order. I'm the operator here, hang up that phone.
So that bell boy just did it and got out.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
And we have two more perspectives that are crucial to
understanding this mystery. We'll get back to those after a
word from our sponsor. So we have our first returning
a recurring guest star here in this strange tale.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
The first bell boy comes back.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, as well as the phone operator.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
Oh that's right, Yeah, I should give her more credit.
Do you think she was a smooth operator?
Speaker 4 (15:59):
One would hope guaranteed, because she she runs a tight ship.
She doesn't like phones being off the hook.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
At our hotel.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
That's right, Because when we were talking about this, Matt,
I was sort of like man very particular, because I mean,
some people might take the phone off the hook so
they won't be disturbed. So wouldn't it be kind of
an affront to be disturbed?
Speaker 3 (16:19):
For trying to not be disturbed. That's a good question, agreed.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
It also it also may be a situation where, given
phone technology at the time, having one thing off the
hook could mess up the line for other other patrons.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Yeah, and you got to wonder too, was it like
a safety concern, you know what I mean, where like
they would want to be able to reach you or
let you know if there was a problem or I
don't know. Yeah, I'm just wondering what was the urgency
with sending a physical human to knock on the door
pretty aggressively if you ask me.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Maybe she yeah, heard this crazy noise on the on
this all the old switchboard, and she was like, get
this guy out of my ear holes.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
But she didn't want to say what yours hearing.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
She didn't want to say what she heard. Ye, she is.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
She is the best witness that we have yet to
I like really even discussed that we don't have information
about We need someone to go back to nineteen thirty
five and interview the phone operator. Yes, yes, if you
have your time machine, John Teetoor, Yeah right, help.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
So so, like, like you said, she's pretty ardent about this.
All phones shall be either in use or they darn
well better be hooked and on their proper stand So
she's a bit of a stickler. Perhaps she sends one
of the staff members up to check this out.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
He opens the door.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
He's got his key on him, and then he finds
the man calling himself rolling to and still naked, still nude,
but viciously brutalized. Someone has beaten the tar out of
him and he is on the edge of death. Of course,
the hotel calls the cops. The cops find blood spatters
(17:56):
festooning the walls, the bed, the bathroom, owen the guy
who calls himself that it appears to have been tortured,
so not just roughed up, but maliciously, purposely victimized, with
an emphasis more on making things painful rather than just
(18:17):
immediately killing the guy.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
Because he was stabbed, I believe dozens of times, very shallowly,
which you know, would show you that it was something
to keep him alive in order to maybe make him
talk or just extend that pain as much as possible.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Yeah, good observation, right, because it's very messy to kill
someone with a knife, but it's very easy. So whomever
it was, they knew what they were doing, and they
did not want to immediately kill him. His skull was
also fractured from what appeared to be a series of
intense impacts from a blunt object. Somehow, old boy is
(18:53):
still alive, at least for a second.
Speaker 4 (18:56):
And goodness gracious, did he have a strong desire cover
up who had done this to him. He literally said
something along the lines of I tripped and fell, you know,
onto a knife repeatedly. Yeah, very strange thing to say.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
He was trying to protect something or from body else,
or you know what he had done, Like if may
perhaps if the police knew who did this to him,
they might know something that he had done. So maybe
he was self preservation, or maybe he's protecting a third party,
or maybe he.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Was involved in criminal activity. I mean, that's what you
would think if your law enforcements once said I slipped
and fell, and maybe he was just like, I'm not
a rat, you know.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
That could be it.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
He also could have been completely insane from the pain
and torture and just you know, and it probably had
undergone some brain damage from being whatever kicked in the head.
I mean, if he had a serious fracture there.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Well that's almost certain because the next thing that happens
to Roland is he slips into a coma.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
And he doesn't make it through the night. Yeah, he's
not in the coma for long. He dies that evening.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
So this brings us to today's question, what happened to
the man calling himself Roland t Owen. Here's where it
gets crazy. It turns out there is no Roland t
Owen matching the description of this corpse. There are several
people with the name Roland Owen in the world at
(20:25):
this time and in the United States, and there are
plenty of dead people who have that name, but none
of them are this person. Roland t Owen cannot be identified,
and so law enforcement takes a tact that may be
surprising to some of us here in twenty nineteen. I've
never heard of this happening in the modern day.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
What do they do? Okay?
Speaker 4 (20:47):
So, yes, this is it's very strange, and we've talked
we've all talked about this off bike. How I don't
think any of us have ever heard of this exact
technique for identifying somebody.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
For other John Doe's, I've never heard of this.
Speaker 4 (21:03):
Yeah, they literally propped him up in a funeral home
like window, which is one of the most macabre things
I've ever seen. First of all, if I was walking
down the street and saw that with my kids or
something like that, I would consider that a personal affront.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
I certainly wouldn't be like, oh, look, it's Steve. I'd
be like, Jesus, what is that? Get me out of here, mom. No,
it is not a good thing, not a good look.
But yeah, they do this and it actually yields some hits.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yeah, several people around the area do recognize Roland to
and from various encounters with him while he was on
this side of the veil, but none of them know
him as anything other than Roland, and the police are
at this point, we should add, the police are befuddled
and they think that there's something something else at place,
(21:55):
something beyond the mundane although horrific tragedy of homicide, because
we didn't mention this when they found Owen right and
we said he was naked, but his hotel room had
also been ransacked. There were no towels, no shampoo, he
didn't have any clothes in the room. He had a
(22:15):
label for a necktie, a hairpin, a cigarette, a safety pin,
and a small sealed bottle of sulfuric acid.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
What right, what are you doing with that acid? Man?
Speaker 3 (22:30):
Well?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Then, also, don't they find a broken glass of some
sort somewhere?
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Oh yeah, in the sink with the jagged edge. And
the only prints they've found, because they didn't have fingerprint
technology in the nineteen thirties, came from the telephone stand
and the police for some reason, correct us if you're
a forensic expert, but the police, for some reason say, well,
these the fingerprints of a woman.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Is that profiling? But I guess it would be if
it's police officers trying to I don't.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Maybe the person just had dainty hands.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Who knows. Okay, so.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
People could identify his body. Some knew him as Roland,
but other people knew him by different names. You know,
we don't have those names today, but like, oh, that's
Alvin or Alfonso or Beauregard.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
And it turned out he stayed in more than one hotel.
Before he stayed at the Hotel President, there was another
hotel called the mule Bach Hotel.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
And they knew him as Eugene K. Scott.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, and they said he like stayed there for one
night and that was.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
It and didn't want windows facing the street.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Yeah hmm, what is he up to? Oh? He also
stayed the same regis that's another nice hotel in the area.
Oh in this time his name, now this is gonna
be we don't want to spoil too much, but his
name here. He called himself Duncan Ogle Tree at that hotel,
(24:01):
and he shared a room with another man who was
known as Donald Kelso. There's our Don Don?
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Is that our don Don? Donald Kelso?
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Then there was a wrestling promoter who said that Owen,
remember looked like a fighter, had approached him a few
weeks ago or a few weeks earlier and said, I'd
like to sign up for some wrestling matches, but don't
call me Roland t Owen.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
My name is Cecil Warner.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Cecil Werner. Interesting. So all right, now I'm getting a
little more of a picture. I'm assuming everyone listening, all
of us have heard of these, I guess smaller wrestling
matches or more localized wrestling matches. They can range from
like family friendly to the macabre. Essentially, now I'm imagining
(24:55):
all these shallow cuts on him and injuries to head.
He's a local wrestler that maybe takes things too far,
but we'll get into that later.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, this not entirely related or tangentially related at best,
But have you guys ever seen those kind of local
wrestling matches? Yea, I saw it when I saw one
where the blood was definitely real and these guys were
not we're not faking it all due respect to the
k fabe or whatever they call it in w w E,
(25:29):
but these guys were actually beating the snot out of
each other.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
The one that I went to was super theatrical in
the sense that, like, the bad guy was often some
sort of foreigner I'm doing fingers, yeah and uh, and
the good guy was like swathed in like an American
flag or something like that, and there was some real
hooting and hollering from the stands. I was out and
down the country, down in rural Georgia. It was what
(25:57):
it was a real experience.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Were we were we friends, we met when you went it.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Was pretty recently, Okay, Yeah, because I feel like I
remember that story, I would still I would still go
check out one of those matches. But yeah, maybe maybe
he was involved in something related to wrestling, to fixing
a match, right, or something with the organized crime, but.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Or participating in a match.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Mm hmm. But that's that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
The police or at their wits end due to the
circumstances of the discovery and the circumstances of this man's death,
they say they need to identify him because they have
the feeling that this may be a bread crumb leading
to something much, much, much more sinister. And they put
his body on display, and they put take out an
(26:45):
ad to got ads telling people to help and to
show up at this funeral.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Home for the viewing.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Hundreds of people go, and as we said, a lot
of them know this guy under various different names, and
far be it from me to criticize and for traveling
under different names.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
What a lot of it goes back to that scar
that he had on the left side of his face,
right and the ear in the ear, because it's just something,
like you said earlier, Ben, you just would recognize that.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
So people are following this story in the local papers
of the time, and the million dollar question is who
the hell is this. Eventually people just throw out their
hands and say, you know, we tried our best. You
can't win them all. They make plans to bury, the
body of the man calling himself rolling te West and
Eugene and Cecil and so on in an unmarked grave
(27:36):
at a potter's field. And a potter's field is where
bodies will be inturned if they have no survivors to
take care of them, or if they have no funds
or no will, or they can't be identified.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Now, just okay, let's go back to when the news
article comes out where they're announcing here's this unidentified person.
Let us know if you've heard of this person before,
an anonymous person. A woman calls the local paper and
she says that somebody somewhere, some anonymous person is going
(28:13):
to pay for a proper funeral role for this person
known as Roland. And when when the local paper inquires about, well, hey,
do you know what happened to him or why he
ended up in this state, she says, quote, he got
into a.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Jam, got into a jam. Who is this Dennis Reynolds.
This is like a Dennis jammed up when he get
jammed up, buddy, Oh boy, But seriously, that's that's a
strange thing to say, right, And shortly afterwards, another person
(28:48):
calls him anonymously. This time it's a man and they
call the funeral home and he confirms that he'll be
paying for the funeral of this person, calling themselves and
t Owen, and he has some conditions along with his
payment and says, not only will I pay for the funeral,
but he is going to be there. Is my wish
(29:11):
they be buried in this specific cemetery, And then he.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Says he'll be near my sister.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
The man mentioned specifically Memorial Park cemetery, and if we
were to paraphrase, he tells the He tells law enforcement
that Roland had jilted a girl that he, the unidentified caller,
had planned to marry, and that the three of them
had met up at the hotel President Ooh, and the
(29:42):
caller says.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
Chaders usually get what's coming to them. I'm not sure
why they're all Southern, but it's just more fun than
I says, a fun one to do.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
I think we're just feeling it, you know, feeling, and
we would we would need to put in some more
research to really give a Missouri accent.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah, don't know what that would be. Kansas City.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
That's what people call you, right, they call you Kansas City.
So he hangs up, right, after he says, cheaters usually
get what's coming to them. Dial tone, noise, the whole nine.
Multiple unidentified people send flowers to the funeral. One order
for flowers five dollars worth of flowers has a car attached,
(30:27):
and it says love Forever Louise Louis, and then time passes.
It isn't until nineteen thirty six when a woman from Birmingham,
Alabama reads an account of this unsolved murder in the
magazine American Weekly, and.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
He she thinks it's.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Fairly apparent in the article that this guy's name was
not rolling to Owen, nor was it any of the
other names he used. Most likely, so this lady says,
this corpse might be the missing child of my good friend.
He left home in April of nineteen thirty four. But
(31:14):
his name isn't Roland.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
And we'll tell you what his name is after aword
from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
All right, ready for this Artemis Ogletree.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Ah, you recall Ogletree from.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
Earlier Duncan ogle Tree.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeh, yes, okay. Interesting.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
So the woman who finds this article in American Weekly,
she reaches out to Artemis's mother, Missus Ogletree, and she
goes on the mother to positively confirm the body of
Roland t Owen as that of her son, and law
enforcement says, all right, we believe you. We agree with
(32:01):
your claim. The timeline checks out. This is your son.
We have finally identified this victim. It is an Artemis
ogle Tree. He had left home. He had left Alabama
in April of nineteen thirty four, ostensibly to travel to California.
But it's weird because for some time the family, the
(32:26):
ogle Tree family, thought he was completely fine. You see,
sometime after Ogletree's physical death, the family had received two
letters from Artemis, two typewritten letters after his murder, where
he claimed everything was fine, don't worry about him.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Plans have changed. He's now traveling the world.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
So they did not know he was dead, but he
certainly didn't write these letters.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
That's right, because generally when the mother had received letters
from her son, they were all handwritten in a very
specific handwriting that her son uses. These typed out writer
letters were much more formal than what she was used
to receiving, which definitely made them, or at least set
them apart, and made her a bit suspicious about them.
(33:17):
Then before the mother actually found out that the son
was dead. She had received a phone call from some man,
some I guess anonymous person. But this person called themselves Jordan.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
This is so weird.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Yeah, and he claimed Jordan claimed that Artemis was now
living in Cairo, Egypt, had become married to some at
least unknown to the mother, wealthy woman, and that everything
was okay and he was just he was living out
his life now in Cairo.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
Yeah, it's very strange.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
So the authorities said, let's not push our luck. We'll
settle for identifying the body. Yeah, you know this. We
may never identify the the murderer or the murderers, but
it's amazing that we're able to bring closure to this grizzly,
grizzly story. So these letters, by the way, said various
(34:15):
different things. One said he was in Chicago, one said
he was sailing from New York to Europe. It appeared
as though they were real time updates. And at this point,
we can try to go a bit further than the
police went. We don't have to settle for just identifying
(34:38):
the body. You see, in the decades, almost a century
of time since the discovery of the murder and the
death of Artemis ocal Tree. Hundreds of thousands of people
have been working the case, attempting to figure out what
(34:58):
actually happened to this poor, unfortunate young man, and they've
built some pretty interesting theories here.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Was it a jilted lover situation? We've talked about those possibilities.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
Did the unidentified male caller have a part in ogle
Tree's murder?
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Jordan, Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
Was one of Was he possibly one of Louise's siblings,
a relative.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Of some kind?
Speaker 4 (35:26):
Was Memorial Park Cemetery a place where ogle Trees spurn
Lever could visit her grave. My question there, though, is
why why bury your enemy next to the person who
he wronged, who you did him in for.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
It feels like a mob move.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
It feels like a mob move or kind of a
twisted some sort of weird vengeance kind of thing, like
where it's like a power move. I don't know, it's very,
very weird.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
It's like, Louise, my sister, I love you, but I
cannot let this disrespect go unpunished.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
There you go. Well, let's get back into just the
concept of the jilted lover's theory here. So what we
do know or at least what we have heard here
throughout the story is that perhaps Ogletree was in the
middle of some kind of love triangle and it the
question then is whether or not, like which side of
the triangle he's on. Essentially, was he betrothed to someone
(36:23):
where and he messed up, was his partner messing up
in some way doing something with someone else, or was
the other person like the husband or something to that effect. So,
and there's really no way for us to know for
sure like what that situation was, and it's difficult to
go down all the different paths and try to figure
(36:45):
that out. But we do know that this Dawn character
was somehow in his room involved in some way. At
least there would be more information there if you could
find it with this person and the other Louise is
a possibility, and then you've got the fingerprints. I would
say that's one of the more promising theories, one of the.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
More promising avenues. Yeah, there's another thing that occurs in
nineteen thirty seven. There's a guy named Joseph Ogden that's
the alias, never says his real name, and the police
don't believe him. He is arrested for the murder of
his roommates. Turns out Joseph Ogden is not this guy's
only AKA. He's also been known to go under the
(37:29):
moniker of Donald Kelso. Uh oh, and his description matches
the description of the Donald Kelso who had stayed at
the Saint Regis with Artemis when he was going by
the name Duncan Ogle Tree dude.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
But again, here's the deal this. I guess there wasn't
much else to learn here, or it was just never
pursued for one reason or another, So we don't know
anything more about this lead. And then let's bring in Jordan,
the caller you brought up. Could this guy have actually
like that caller who call himself Jordan? Could that have
also been Kelso slash Ogden, whoever that guy was, And
(38:10):
was he just trying to cover his tracks by saying, oh,
he's out in Cairo somewhere, don't worry about him, he's fine.
But either way, this person, Jordan, this caller made himself
very suspicious.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Right because all we know about this caller is that
they called themselves Jordan. Yeah, they don't present identification or
a birth certificate or anything like that. And frankly, we
have two people who were definitely using multiple fake names,
right mm hmm, Kelso and Ogletree. We don't really know
(38:45):
why they were using these fake names, and that that
I think is a fascinating twist to this tale, because
that's something they did they don't want you to know,
and was much easier to travel under an assumed name
at the time.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
This has caused some people.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
You can find these in various like independent investigation threads
or the excellent subreddit Unresolved Mysteries. Various people have due
to the secrecy and the fact they was traveling at
one point with another guy. They've said perhaps he was
assuming a false identity to pursue a same sex relationship,
(39:21):
which would have been very controversial at that time. Absolutely,
but in all fairness, there's not a whole lot like
there's no proof that that was not the case, but
there's not really any proof that it was the case.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
So that's clearly speculation.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Absolutely, it could be sure, but who knows.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
Well.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
The other big question is was there any kind of
drugs drug involvement one way or the other, in use
or in sales.
Speaker 4 (39:49):
Perhaps, Yeah, I don't see how I kind of almost
lump that in with any potential mob connection. Right, they've
been part and parcel of the same kind of toxic reallylationship.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
You know, it seemed like he was drinking very, very heavily,
at least by the time he got to a hotel.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
President. Yeah, you learn about the other stuff.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Well, so okay, so using assumed names because you're doing something,
you're you're involved in some kind of illegal activity. That's
why you don't want it to be known who you
actually are. That's so that's what we're saying. I mean,
I can I can imagine that there's a Isn't it
kind of known that in Kansas City, Missouri, around the
(40:28):
nineteen thirties, organized crime was a thing.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Oh yeah, this might this might be surprising to some
of us listening, but it's true. The Kansas City Crime Family,
also known as the Savella Crime Family, is a mafia
mafia outfit based in Kansas City, Missouri. They've been there
since nineteen twelve, when the founders, the di Giovanni brothers,
(40:53):
fled Sicily and landed in Kansas City, Missouri.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
I don't know about you, guys, but when I think
of Kansas City, I think of stuff like barbecue or
maybe there's some great art museums, but I don't immediately
think of the Mob.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
I'm just gonna admit that I don't think about Kansas City,
Missouri enough, and I vow to think about it more.
Speaker 4 (41:13):
Very take that vow very seriously, Matt, I am. You
can't vow lightly, sir. I'm gonna quizz you on Kansas
City in a week's time.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
All right, do it.
Speaker 4 (41:22):
I just know there was a place I think in
New York called Max's Kansas City, and it's not in
Kansas City.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
That's all I know. A restaurant.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
I think it's like it was a famous music venue.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Okay, Well, here's here's the weird thing. Not only is
the Mob a force to be reckoned with in Kansas City, Missouri.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
But they.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Had a lot of para governmental control, meaning that you
know you've heard the stories. We also have a great story.
I of got to tell you guys off air to
see if we can get it on the show. But
we've some of your fellow listeners before to send in
stories about small town corruption Kansas City in well, it's
not a small town in the turn of the century,
(42:09):
in the early nineteen hundreds, there is a lot of
rank corruption prohibition ended in nineteen thirty three, So just
like a few years before, Artemis Ogletree meets his untimely
end and the family made a lot of coint off prohibition,
(42:30):
but they also diversified, so they have different rackets, protection
money from bars and restaurants, right, and things get ugly.
They're involved in politics too, you know, cooking the books
and the race for governor of Missouri and things like that.
So it is completely possible that when we add up
(42:55):
these dots, these break crumbs, it's completely possible that there's
an argument for or a criminal underground or the mob.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Can I add one extra thing on top of this
mob connection, because I can totally see this reasoning and
we've illuminated it pretty well. What if he's on the
other side of the law. What if he and Dawn
or maybe just he was actually an agent of some
sort that was investigating some of the organized crime and
(43:27):
that's why he ended up getting taken out, And then
it's the mob connections that are arranging his funeral or
you know, paying for his funeral, putting him by his sister.
What if he was a rat?
Speaker 3 (43:41):
Maybe?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
I mean, the only the cops did hold that funeral. Right, Yeah,
there was a funeral service, but the detectives on the
case were the only people who attended the funeral. Aha,
which also makes you think, you know what I mean,
because if it's just a case, why would you go
to the funeral.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
To just to to case the joint to see if
anybody shows.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
Up, right, to see if someone takes the bait.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Or if he is a part of your team.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Or if he's you know, if he's one of those
undercover cops. People who work undercover at that at that
kind of level of intelligence. It's brutal life, and you
know a lot of times they're never in the spotlight.
They can't compromise.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
I'm thinking, whire, It's true, Ben, Thanks, Matt. I was
just going to keep saying each other's.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Names in the State Department.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
So so.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
It is true. It's it's not proof positive. It is
true that the Kansas mob could and did murder multiple
people in this time period without a ton of interference
from regional or federal authorities, some because they were bought
off or they were already in the thick of the corruption,
and others because their hands were tied.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
Right, So is that the end of the story. Not really.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
This is very strange because we have to ask ourselves
whether a cover up persist. You see, decades and decades later,
there's a researcher based at the Kansas City Public Library.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Unlike a lot.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Of residents or residents of Missouri or residence of Kansas City,
this researcher has a hobby they look into these kind
of cases, so they are familiar with the case of
Artemis Okle Tree. They receive an anonymous phone call and
the caller first starts asking questions, have you heard of
the Ogletree case? Have you heard of the person calling
(45:40):
themselves Roland t Owen, and they say, yes, I'm familiar
with it. I'm a researcher. And then this anonymous caller
says they had someone who's close to them pass away,
and they've been going through the belongings of this person
because they had died quite recently, and they found a box.
Within this box, there were multiple newspapers flippings all about
(46:01):
the same story, the so called mystery of Room ten
forty six. But that's not all they find. They also
say they find something that's the quote, something that was
mentioned in these articles. M and then they hang up.
These people have terrible phone etiquette. Really, it's like out
(46:25):
in television and in film. No one ever says goodbye
on the phone. Yeah, and there's immediately a dial town. Yes,
it's true, as we know, it is not how phones work.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah, that's right. So that's where we're left at this
point in twenty nineteen, the old Artemis Ogletree rowing to
Owen story. That's where we're left.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Who was this mystery caller? Was it a surviving relative
of ogle Tree's murderer and a surviving relative or friend
of his former lover, his paramore.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
What do you think, honestly? Do you think it was
mob involvement? Do you think it was just a love
triangle gone wrong? Uh? Just tell us, tell us your
best theory and support it please with arguments. Then we
will combine all of those, and Ben and Nolea and
I will sit around a desk somewhere and we'll figure
(47:22):
it out just just to ourselves. We will tell you
guys about it.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
And also, if you are listening to this and you
are related to someone with inside knowledge of this case,
and you want to break it down for us anonymously,
we'd love to hear you out you can write, and
that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait
to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy to
find online.
Speaker 4 (47:45):
Find us at the handle conspiracy Stuff, where we exist
on Facebook x and YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
We're conspiracy Stuff.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Show call our number. It's one eight three three std WYTK.
Speaker 3 (47:57):
Leave a voicemail and if you have more to say,
we can't wait to hear from you at our good
old fashioned email address where we are conspiracy at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
A classic episode for this evening. On January second, nineteen
thirty five, a man checks into the Hotel President in
Kansas City. He gives his name as Ronald t Owen,
and later he dies.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Yeah, but not just dies, He's found like destroyed, brutally attacked,
beaten to death.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Yeah, signs of torture. Somebody took their time with him.
Is the creepy thing.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
And this is always a tragedy whenever these things occur.
But as we learned in twenty nineteen, in this classic episode,
the guy's name Matt is not Roland t Owen.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
No, it's Artemis Ogletree and he's from Birmingham, Alabama.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
What happened?
Speaker 2 (00:46):
It's really weird.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Uh, Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Myne name is Nolan. They call me Ben.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
We are joined with our super producer Paul Mission Control Deck.
At most importantly, you are you. You are here, and
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
It's quite possible that some of us listening to the
show today or tonight, are listening in a hotel or
a motel or an airbnb.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
A holiday and perhaps sure, perhaps or an express holiday
and the.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Best Western or go classy, maybe a Western ooh, nights
nights in nights.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
In something ritzy like the Ritz.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Or a Hilton. Yeah, the hotel we're gonna be speaking
about today is currently a Hilton property.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Yes, perhaps nights in white satin. It's true.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Yes, you know that sounds actually not about knights at all.
It's about like knights as in the evening nights bathed
and dressed in white satin. Just realized that pretty recently. Unrelated,
But it's true. There are all sorts of strange things.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
That happen in hotels. Similar to spending time in an airport.
Spending time in a hotel is occupying a limbo, a
liminal space. It looks like a home. You do things
that you would do in a home, but it's not
really a home. There's something uncanny valley about it. And
today's story is about a very strange, extraordinary thing that
(02:33):
occurred in a hotel. And we don't mean extraordinary in
the way it's often misused today. Usually extraordinary is meant
as a compliment, but actually extraordinary just means something out
of the ordinary.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
And that is the way we are using it today.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
So let's set the scene on January the second, nineteen
thirty five, a well dressed young man calling himself Roland
t Owen while into the Hotel President in Kansas City, Missouri.
The man is not carrying luggage. He's heavy set. He
appears to be a fighter of some sort, or at
(03:11):
least someone who's had experience fighting, because he has a
visible cauliflower ear and a horizontal scar on the left
side of his face.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Quick cauliflower ear thing. You'll see this if you google
images of a lot of MMA fighters. You can see
what that looks like.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
And it's a very easy thing to spot. Right, This
man calling himself Roland t Owen requests a single room
with no windows facing the street. He pays cash, which
you could do at that time, right, which was the
normal way to pay for things in nineteen in nineteen
thirty five, and he checks into room ten forty six.
(03:51):
When the cleaning staff goes by his room, you know,
to change the sheets and change out the towels and stuff,
they find the man calling himself rolling t and sitting
in a dark room exhibiting signs of profound fright. He
tells the staff that he's expecting someone to drop by.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So, okay, so far, what we know scared guy sitting
you know, alone in a room that he wanted to
stay away, he wanted to be a little more anonymous
than usual, hiding out in a hotel. But it's you know,
it's it's mysterious, but it's not all that insane, right, Yeah,
it's a little.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Blair witchy though it reminds me of like the dude
standing facing the corner in the Blair.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
With you know.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Okay, and on its surface, it's not.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
That weird, but when you know a little more about
the backstory, it becomes even weirder.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And to explore this story, we're
going to shift through various different perspectives, primarily people who
work at the hotel. So first, what do you say,
let's start with the Maid's Tale. If we want to
make this Canterbury.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Tale as or a Hulu original, maybe oh.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Yes, yes, yes, the non Handmaid's Tail.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
That's right. So at ten thirty in the morning on
January third, the day after our our protagonist, I guess
Roland t Owen checks into the President.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Hotel, a man calling himself rolling to that's right.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
A member of the cleaning staff goes up to room
ten forty six where he is. She notices that the
door is locked, and she you know, it's kind of
a normal thing. Doors are locked. When the cleaning staff
comes by, they knock generally and say housekeeping. She opens
the door, and because she assumes that Owen is out,
maybe at breakfast or having a meeting or something, so
(05:41):
she notices the lights are off too, exactly, lights are off,
door is locked. I'm going to clean this room well instead.
As she opens the door, as we said earlier, she
sees him sitting alone in the dark. Yes, you heard
that correctly, just sitting there in the dark. Now, before
you say all that is so insane, I just have
to bring up a fact that I enjoy doing this
(06:02):
a lot.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Actually, is it usual to do that?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
I don't think it's that On you.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Tub, I'm right there with you. I spend hours each
week actually locked in a bathroom in the dark with
a shower on, just sort of thinking nice.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
I definitely take showers in the dark when I can.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Am I the outlier here? I think I'm the outlier here?
Oh yeah? Am I the only one that finds this strange?
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I don't know. I got into it when I was
a kid. We had a drum kit in this room
that had no windows in it in my parents' basement,
and I would go in there, shut the door and like,
use a flashlight or something. You turn the light on,
go sit down at my throne, and then turn off
all the lights and just practice playing drums in the
pitch black. And I found it to be riveting. So
now I just like to do things like that.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Didn't you have a similar setup with your drum kit
and your last house too?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
I did, but it was in a basement with one window.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
I don't know, man that basement. When I went down there,
it felt like a kill room. Yeah, And I have
a very high tolerance for strangeness.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I think that was just the factor of the basement itself.
Having the drum kit was just a nice little accoutrement.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Where the walls covered in plastic.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Sometimes Yeah, okay, when you know when season was right,
you are not digging yourself out of this.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
The whole of weirdness very well.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Okay, So you so it sounds like two thirds of
us are on board with this. He might have also
been dozing off or sleeping. That's that's quite possible, right.
But the maid is standing there, you know, she notices
(07:44):
her senses somehow this person sitting in this room, and
she realizes the room is in fact occupied.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
And then.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Roland pretty much tells her not to touch the lights,
and he asked the maid to leave the door unlocked
as she exits, because you see, he says he is
again expecting someone. So this is the second time he
said this.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
And then, according to a Mental Floss article that's written
on this very subject, it says that the maid ended
up returning to that room to deliver fresh towels, and
this time when she went in, she found Owen lying
on his bed. Now he's fully dressed, but there's a
note on the desk that read down, I will be
back in fifteen minutes. Wait, and that's down spelled Don.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Yes, So who's now We've got Don and we've got
another person in the mix.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Is that like Donald or the Dawn?
Speaker 4 (08:40):
Oh my god, man, I never thought about it. Well,
this is this is gonna come back around.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yeah, this does come back around. And that's a good question.
Is is it kind of the theme? Is it kind
of like saying sir, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Or duke?
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Now we shift to the story of the motorist later
on this night, January third, there's a guy named Robert Lane.
That is his real name. He's not a guy who
calls himself that. And he is driving he picks up
a stranger a few blocks away from the hotel President.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
So the man was dressed only in pants and like
an undershirt, and he had a scar on his left arm,
not an open wound, but like a big, very obvious
kind of gash of a scar. And I was on
his left arm. And then when Lane told his passenger
that he looked as if he was having a rough night,
(09:36):
the man replied, I will kill that beep tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
And this beap comes.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
We come honestly by this beat because the reports about
this in the newspaper of the time in the area,
they removed this word and it's not clear what it
actually was.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Well, in this guy, Robert Lane that we're talking about,
he worked for the water department in Kansas City. So
It's not like he was just some random guy out there.
He was doing his job.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
When he interacted, right, And I have a proposition for
the table for the show. I have a proposition. We
do not know what expletive he used, and we don't
know exactly what the newspapers decided to censor.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
We may not ever know it.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, but I stumbled across this great anachronistic and I
think I said this to you know, this great anachronistic insult.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Better. So what if instead of saying, you.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Know, and whatever gutter tramp, I don't know, whatever weird
thing you want to put in there, what if he said,
I'll kill that sockdologizing old man trap.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Tomorrow, socktologizing old man trap, the.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Old man trap, you old man trap. I don't know
why that tickles me, but you're right. You're right.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
He did work for the water department. And then later
when he's given the opportunity to identify this hitchhiker, who,
as you said, was only in pants and an undershirt,
looking like he had been roaded hard and put away wet,
he said, yeah, that's the guy I picked up. And
(11:16):
they said that guy is roland T Owen, or at
least that's what he calls himself now.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
On this same night, January third, just a quick mention,
he was allegedly seen around the town at several bars,
hanging out with at least two women like that night,
seen hanging around doing stuff with them. The timelines are
a little bit weird, just just a little bit, but
(11:43):
they say he was on twelfth Street, which you know,
isn't isn't that far because we're we're our last person,
our Robert Lane. He actually interacted with rolling to Owen
along thirteenth Street, which is about a mile and a
half from the hotel. So you know, twelfth Street distance
(12:05):
is not that far from there, right.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
All right, So it's completely plausible that he could be
in that area, that there could be some sand to
those those reports which did not have they didn't get
widely publicized, if I'm correct, They were sort of hearsayers.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Some rumors.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
And we should also mention that the cleaning staff, the
member of the cleaning staff, her name was Mary Stoptik. Yes,
so speaking of staff, and we are building a case here,
we are going somewhere with this, folks. I know we're
taking a circuitous route But speaking of staff, let's go
to the first bell boy, whose name we don't have.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, so bell Boy one interacts around seven am with
our protagonist. It's January fourth, the phone operator at Hotel President.
Because you know, this an entire system of phone lines
going to all the different rooms, there's actually a human
being in nineteen thirty five that is operating these phones.
(13:09):
This operator notices that the receiver of the telephone in
ten forty six, where Roland is staying, is off the hook.
And so this bell boy goes up to check on
Owen and or at least to check up on the
phone itself. And when he gets there, he finds that
the door's locked and there's a do not disturb sign
hanging from the knob. It probably says something like nary
(13:31):
a disturbance something like that. He knocks and he hears
somebody from the other side of the room say come in,
and again he's like, the door's locked. Hello, door's locked.
Man inside the room just kind of ignores that he's
letting him know that the door is locked. But then
(13:51):
the guy.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Says, turn on the lights.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Kind Of hard to do that when you can't get
into the room. Bell boy just keeps on knocking, but
he ends up just leaving. But right before he leaves,
he shouts through the door, he said.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
The way he wants him to put his phone on
the hook, Right, it's what did the voice.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Put damn pout on the hook?
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Son?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Because that's because it's Hank Hill, that's the Yeah, it's
an approximation of what occurred. But yes, he just like
yells at him to put the phone back on the hook,
and the bellboy just doesn't have his past key on
him at that moment, so he can't go in and
do it, so he just kind of gives up and
goes downstairs.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
An hour's pass. Let's go to the second bell boy.
A different member of the hotel staff goes up later
that afternoon. So at seven am January fourth, when he
has the first guy has that weird interaction. In the afternoon,
this different guy goes up and he does have his
key on him, so he lets himself into the room
(14:50):
and he finds the man calling himself rolling t Owen,
lying on the bed in the dark, and from what
he could tell, this man was very much naked and
very much drunk. He also sees that the phone stand
has been knocked over, so he doesn't turn on the lights.
He doesn't say anything to this naked man reeking a booze.
(15:13):
He just hangs up the phone, cuts his losses leaves
the room.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Because at this point it's you know, it's been hours
and hours. The operator is like, somebody, hang up that phone.
I need order. I'm the operator here, hang up that phone.
So that bell boy just did it and got out.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
And we have two more perspectives that are crucial to
understanding this mystery. We'll get back to those after a
word from our sponsor. So we have our first returning
a recurring guest star here in this strange tale.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
The first bell boy comes back.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, as well as the phone operator.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
Oh that's right, Yeah, I should give her more credit.
Do you think she was a smooth operator?
Speaker 4 (15:59):
One would hope guaranteed, because she she runs a tight ship.
She doesn't like phones being off the hook.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
At our hotel.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
That's right, Because when we were talking about this, Matt,
I was sort of like man very particular, because I mean,
some people might take the phone off the hook so
they won't be disturbed. So wouldn't it be kind of
an affront to be disturbed?
Speaker 3 (16:19):
For trying to not be disturbed. That's a good question, agreed.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
It also it also may be a situation where, given
phone technology at the time, having one thing off the
hook could mess up the line for other other patrons.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Yeah, and you got to wonder too, was it like
a safety concern, you know what I mean, where like
they would want to be able to reach you or
let you know if there was a problem or I
don't know. Yeah, I'm just wondering what was the urgency
with sending a physical human to knock on the door
pretty aggressively if you ask me.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Maybe she yeah, heard this crazy noise on the on
this all the old switchboard, and she was like, get
this guy out of my ear holes.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
But she didn't want to say what yours hearing.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
She didn't want to say what she heard. Ye, she is.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
She is the best witness that we have yet to
I like really even discussed that we don't have information
about We need someone to go back to nineteen thirty
five and interview the phone operator. Yes, yes, if you
have your time machine, John Teetoor, Yeah right, help.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
So so, like, like you said, she's pretty ardent about this.
All phones shall be either in use or they darn
well better be hooked and on their proper stand So
she's a bit of a stickler. Perhaps she sends one
of the staff members up to check this out.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
He opens the door.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
He's got his key on him, and then he finds
the man calling himself rolling to and still naked, still nude,
but viciously brutalized. Someone has beaten the tar out of
him and he is on the edge of death. Of course,
the hotel calls the cops. The cops find blood spatters
(17:56):
festooning the walls, the bed, the bathroom, owen the guy
who calls himself that it appears to have been tortured,
so not just roughed up, but maliciously, purposely victimized, with
an emphasis more on making things painful rather than just
(18:17):
immediately killing the guy.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
Because he was stabbed, I believe dozens of times, very shallowly,
which you know, would show you that it was something
to keep him alive in order to maybe make him
talk or just extend that pain as much as possible.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Yeah, good observation, right, because it's very messy to kill
someone with a knife, but it's very easy. So whomever
it was, they knew what they were doing, and they
did not want to immediately kill him. His skull was
also fractured from what appeared to be a series of
intense impacts from a blunt object. Somehow, old boy is
(18:53):
still alive, at least for a second.
Speaker 4 (18:56):
And goodness gracious, did he have a strong desire cover
up who had done this to him. He literally said
something along the lines of I tripped and fell, you know,
onto a knife repeatedly. Yeah, very strange thing to say.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
He was trying to protect something or from body else,
or you know what he had done, Like if may
perhaps if the police knew who did this to him,
they might know something that he had done. So maybe
he was self preservation, or maybe he's protecting a third party,
or maybe he.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Was involved in criminal activity. I mean, that's what you
would think if your law enforcements once said I slipped
and fell, and maybe he was just like, I'm not
a rat, you know.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
That could be it.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
He also could have been completely insane from the pain
and torture and just you know, and it probably had
undergone some brain damage from being whatever kicked in the head.
I mean, if he had a serious fracture there.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Well that's almost certain because the next thing that happens
to Roland is he slips into a coma.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
And he doesn't make it through the night. Yeah, he's
not in the coma for long. He dies that evening.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
So this brings us to today's question, what happened to
the man calling himself Roland t Owen. Here's where it
gets crazy. It turns out there is no Roland t
Owen matching the description of this corpse. There are several
people with the name Roland Owen in the world at
(20:25):
this time and in the United States, and there are
plenty of dead people who have that name, but none
of them are this person. Roland t Owen cannot be identified,
and so law enforcement takes a tact that may be
surprising to some of us here in twenty nineteen. I've
never heard of this happening in the modern day.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
What do they do? Okay?
Speaker 4 (20:47):
So, yes, this is it's very strange, and we've talked
we've all talked about this off bike. How I don't
think any of us have ever heard of this exact
technique for identifying somebody.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
For other John Doe's, I've never heard of this.
Speaker 4 (21:03):
Yeah, they literally propped him up in a funeral home
like window, which is one of the most macabre things
I've ever seen. First of all, if I was walking
down the street and saw that with my kids or
something like that, I would consider that a personal affront.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
I certainly wouldn't be like, oh, look, it's Steve. I'd
be like, Jesus, what is that? Get me out of here, mom. No,
it is not a good thing, not a good look.
But yeah, they do this and it actually yields some hits.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yeah, several people around the area do recognize Roland to
and from various encounters with him while he was on
this side of the veil, but none of them know
him as anything other than Roland, and the police are
at this point, we should add, the police are befuddled
and they think that there's something something else at place,
(21:55):
something beyond the mundane although horrific tragedy of homicide, because
we didn't mention this when they found Owen right and
we said he was naked, but his hotel room had
also been ransacked. There were no towels, no shampoo, he
didn't have any clothes in the room. He had a
(22:15):
label for a necktie, a hairpin, a cigarette, a safety pin,
and a small sealed bottle of sulfuric acid.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
What right, what are you doing with that acid? Man?
Speaker 3 (22:30):
Well?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Then, also, don't they find a broken glass of some
sort somewhere?
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Oh yeah, in the sink with the jagged edge. And
the only prints they've found, because they didn't have fingerprint
technology in the nineteen thirties, came from the telephone stand
and the police for some reason, correct us if you're
a forensic expert, but the police, for some reason say, well,
these the fingerprints of a woman.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Is that profiling? But I guess it would be if
it's police officers trying to I don't.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Maybe the person just had dainty hands.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Who knows. Okay, so.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
People could identify his body. Some knew him as Roland,
but other people knew him by different names. You know,
we don't have those names today, but like, oh, that's
Alvin or Alfonso or Beauregard.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
And it turned out he stayed in more than one hotel.
Before he stayed at the Hotel President, there was another
hotel called the mule Bach Hotel.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
And they knew him as Eugene K. Scott.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, and they said he like stayed there for one
night and that was.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
It and didn't want windows facing the street.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Yeah hmm, what is he up to? Oh? He also
stayed the same regis that's another nice hotel in the area.
Oh in this time his name, now this is gonna
be we don't want to spoil too much, but his
name here. He called himself Duncan Ogle Tree at that hotel,
(24:01):
and he shared a room with another man who was
known as Donald Kelso. There's our Don Don?
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Is that our don Don? Donald Kelso?
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Then there was a wrestling promoter who said that Owen,
remember looked like a fighter, had approached him a few
weeks ago or a few weeks earlier and said, I'd
like to sign up for some wrestling matches, but don't
call me Roland t Owen.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
My name is Cecil Warner.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Cecil Werner. Interesting. So all right, now I'm getting a
little more of a picture. I'm assuming everyone listening, all
of us have heard of these, I guess smaller wrestling
matches or more localized wrestling matches. They can range from
like family friendly to the macabre. Essentially, now I'm imagining
(24:55):
all these shallow cuts on him and injuries to head.
He's a local wrestler that maybe takes things too far,
but we'll get into that later.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, this not entirely related or tangentially related at best,
But have you guys ever seen those kind of local
wrestling matches? Yea, I saw it when I saw one
where the blood was definitely real and these guys were
not we're not faking it all due respect to the
k fabe or whatever they call it in w w E,
(25:29):
but these guys were actually beating the snot out of
each other.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
The one that I went to was super theatrical in
the sense that, like, the bad guy was often some
sort of foreigner I'm doing fingers, yeah and uh, and
the good guy was like swathed in like an American
flag or something like that, and there was some real
hooting and hollering from the stands. I was out and
down the country, down in rural Georgia. It was what
(25:57):
it was a real experience.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Were we were we friends, we met when you went it.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Was pretty recently, Okay, Yeah, because I feel like I
remember that story, I would still I would still go
check out one of those matches. But yeah, maybe maybe
he was involved in something related to wrestling, to fixing
a match, right, or something with the organized crime, but.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Or participating in a match.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Mm hmm. But that's that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
The police or at their wits end due to the
circumstances of the discovery and the circumstances of this man's death,
they say they need to identify him because they have
the feeling that this may be a bread crumb leading
to something much, much, much more sinister. And they put
his body on display, and they put take out an
(26:45):
ad to got ads telling people to help and to
show up at this funeral.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Home for the viewing.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Hundreds of people go, and as we said, a lot
of them know this guy under various different names, and
far be it from me to criticize and for traveling
under different names.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
What a lot of it goes back to that scar
that he had on the left side of his face,
right and the ear in the ear, because it's just something,
like you said earlier, Ben, you just would recognize that.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
So people are following this story in the local papers
of the time, and the million dollar question is who
the hell is this. Eventually people just throw out their
hands and say, you know, we tried our best. You
can't win them all. They make plans to bury, the
body of the man calling himself rolling te West and
Eugene and Cecil and so on in an unmarked grave
(27:36):
at a potter's field. And a potter's field is where
bodies will be inturned if they have no survivors to
take care of them, or if they have no funds
or no will, or they can't be identified.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Now, just okay, let's go back to when the news
article comes out where they're announcing here's this unidentified person.
Let us know if you've heard of this person before,
an anonymous person. A woman calls the local paper and
she says that somebody somewhere, some anonymous person is going
(28:13):
to pay for a proper funeral role for this person
known as Roland. And when when the local paper inquires about, well, hey,
do you know what happened to him or why he
ended up in this state, she says, quote, he got
into a.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Jam, got into a jam. Who is this Dennis Reynolds.
This is like a Dennis jammed up when he get
jammed up, buddy, Oh boy, But seriously, that's that's a
strange thing to say, right, And shortly afterwards, another person
(28:48):
calls him anonymously. This time it's a man and they
call the funeral home and he confirms that he'll be
paying for the funeral of this person, calling themselves and
t Owen, and he has some conditions along with his
payment and says, not only will I pay for the funeral,
but he is going to be there. Is my wish
(29:11):
they be buried in this specific cemetery, And then he.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Says he'll be near my sister.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
The man mentioned specifically Memorial Park cemetery, and if we
were to paraphrase, he tells the He tells law enforcement
that Roland had jilted a girl that he, the unidentified caller,
had planned to marry, and that the three of them
had met up at the hotel President Ooh, and the
(29:42):
caller says.
Speaker 4 (29:44):
Chaders usually get what's coming to them. I'm not sure
why they're all Southern, but it's just more fun than
I says, a fun one to do.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
I think we're just feeling it, you know, feeling, and
we would we would need to put in some more
research to really give a Missouri accent.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah, don't know what that would be. Kansas City.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
That's what people call you, right, they call you Kansas City.
So he hangs up, right, after he says, cheaters usually
get what's coming to them. Dial tone, noise, the whole nine.
Multiple unidentified people send flowers to the funeral. One order
for flowers five dollars worth of flowers has a car attached,
(30:27):
and it says love Forever Louise Louis, and then time passes.
It isn't until nineteen thirty six when a woman from Birmingham,
Alabama reads an account of this unsolved murder in the
magazine American Weekly, and.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
He she thinks it's.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Fairly apparent in the article that this guy's name was
not rolling to Owen, nor was it any of the
other names he used. Most likely, so this lady says,
this corpse might be the missing child of my good friend.
He left home in April of nineteen thirty four. But
(31:14):
his name isn't Roland.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
And we'll tell you what his name is after aword
from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
All right, ready for this Artemis Ogletree.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Ah, you recall Ogletree from.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
Earlier Duncan ogle Tree.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeh, yes, okay. Interesting.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
So the woman who finds this article in American Weekly,
she reaches out to Artemis's mother, Missus Ogletree, and she
goes on the mother to positively confirm the body of
Roland t Owen as that of her son, and law
enforcement says, all right, we believe you. We agree with
(32:01):
your claim. The timeline checks out. This is your son.
We have finally identified this victim. It is an Artemis
ogle Tree. He had left home. He had left Alabama
in April of nineteen thirty four, ostensibly to travel to California.
But it's weird because for some time the family, the
(32:26):
ogle Tree family, thought he was completely fine. You see,
sometime after Ogletree's physical death, the family had received two
letters from Artemis, two typewritten letters after his murder, where
he claimed everything was fine, don't worry about him.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
Plans have changed. He's now traveling the world.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
So they did not know he was dead, but he
certainly didn't write these letters.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
That's right, because generally when the mother had received letters
from her son, they were all handwritten in a very
specific handwriting that her son uses. These typed out writer
letters were much more formal than what she was used
to receiving, which definitely made them, or at least set
them apart, and made her a bit suspicious about them.
(33:17):
Then before the mother actually found out that the son
was dead. She had received a phone call from some man,
some I guess anonymous person. But this person called themselves Jordan.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
This is so weird.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Yeah, and he claimed Jordan claimed that Artemis was now
living in Cairo, Egypt, had become married to some at
least unknown to the mother, wealthy woman, and that everything
was okay and he was just he was living out
his life now in Cairo.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
Yeah, it's very strange.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
So the authorities said, let's not push our luck. We'll
settle for identifying the body. Yeah, you know this. We
may never identify the the murderer or the murderers, but
it's amazing that we're able to bring closure to this grizzly,
grizzly story. So these letters, by the way, said various
(34:15):
different things. One said he was in Chicago, one said
he was sailing from New York to Europe. It appeared
as though they were real time updates. And at this point,
we can try to go a bit further than the
police went. We don't have to settle for just identifying
(34:38):
the body. You see, in the decades, almost a century
of time since the discovery of the murder and the
death of Artemis ocal Tree. Hundreds of thousands of people
have been working the case, attempting to figure out what
(34:58):
actually happened to this poor, unfortunate young man, and they've
built some pretty interesting theories here.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Was it a jilted lover situation? We've talked about those possibilities.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
Did the unidentified male caller have a part in ogle
Tree's murder?
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Jordan, Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
Was one of Was he possibly one of Louise's siblings,
a relative.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Of some kind?
Speaker 4 (35:26):
Was Memorial Park Cemetery a place where ogle Trees spurn
Lever could visit her grave. My question there, though, is
why why bury your enemy next to the person who
he wronged, who you did him in for.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
It feels like a mob move.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
It feels like a mob move or kind of a
twisted some sort of weird vengeance kind of thing, like
where it's like a power move. I don't know, it's very,
very weird.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
It's like, Louise, my sister, I love you, but I
cannot let this disrespect go unpunished.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
There you go. Well, let's get back into just the
concept of the jilted lover's theory here. So what we
do know or at least what we have heard here
throughout the story is that perhaps Ogletree was in the
middle of some kind of love triangle and it the
question then is whether or not, like which side of
the triangle he's on. Essentially, was he betrothed to someone
(36:23):
where and he messed up, was his partner messing up
in some way doing something with someone else, or was
the other person like the husband or something to that effect. So,
and there's really no way for us to know for
sure like what that situation was, and it's difficult to
go down all the different paths and try to figure
(36:45):
that out. But we do know that this Dawn character
was somehow in his room involved in some way. At
least there would be more information there if you could
find it with this person and the other Louise is
a possibility, and then you've got the fingerprints. I would
say that's one of the more promising theories, one of the.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
More promising avenues. Yeah, there's another thing that occurs in
nineteen thirty seven. There's a guy named Joseph Ogden that's
the alias, never says his real name, and the police
don't believe him. He is arrested for the murder of
his roommates. Turns out Joseph Ogden is not this guy's
only AKA. He's also been known to go under the
(37:29):
moniker of Donald Kelso. Uh oh, and his description matches
the description of the Donald Kelso who had stayed at
the Saint Regis with Artemis when he was going by
the name Duncan Ogle Tree dude.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
But again, here's the deal this. I guess there wasn't
much else to learn here, or it was just never
pursued for one reason or another, So we don't know
anything more about this lead. And then let's bring in Jordan,
the caller you brought up. Could this guy have actually
like that caller who call himself Jordan? Could that have
also been Kelso slash Ogden, whoever that guy was, And
(38:10):
was he just trying to cover his tracks by saying, oh,
he's out in Cairo somewhere, don't worry about him, he's fine.
But either way, this person, Jordan, this caller made himself
very suspicious.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Right because all we know about this caller is that
they called themselves Jordan. Yeah, they don't present identification or
a birth certificate or anything like that. And frankly, we
have two people who were definitely using multiple fake names,
right mm hmm, Kelso and Ogletree. We don't really know
(38:45):
why they were using these fake names, and that that
I think is a fascinating twist to this tale, because
that's something they did they don't want you to know,
and was much easier to travel under an assumed name
at the time.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
This has caused some people.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
You can find these in various like independent investigation threads
or the excellent subreddit Unresolved Mysteries. Various people have due
to the secrecy and the fact they was traveling at
one point with another guy. They've said perhaps he was
assuming a false identity to pursue a same sex relationship,
(39:21):
which would have been very controversial at that time. Absolutely,
but in all fairness, there's not a whole lot like
there's no proof that that was not the case, but
there's not really any proof that it was the case.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
So that's clearly speculation.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Absolutely, it could be sure, but who knows.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
Well.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
The other big question is was there any kind of
drugs drug involvement one way or the other, in use
or in sales.
Speaker 4 (39:49):
Perhaps, Yeah, I don't see how I kind of almost
lump that in with any potential mob connection. Right, they've
been part and parcel of the same kind of toxic reallylationship.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
You know, it seemed like he was drinking very, very heavily,
at least by the time he got to a hotel.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
President. Yeah, you learn about the other stuff.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Well, so okay, so using assumed names because you're doing something,
you're you're involved in some kind of illegal activity. That's
why you don't want it to be known who you
actually are. That's so that's what we're saying. I mean,
I can I can imagine that there's a Isn't it
kind of known that in Kansas City, Missouri, around the
(40:28):
nineteen thirties, organized crime was a thing.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Oh yeah, this might this might be surprising to some
of us listening, but it's true. The Kansas City Crime Family,
also known as the Savella Crime Family, is a mafia
mafia outfit based in Kansas City, Missouri. They've been there
since nineteen twelve, when the founders, the di Giovanni brothers,
(40:53):
fled Sicily and landed in Kansas City, Missouri.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
I don't know about you, guys, but when I think
of Kansas City, I think of stuff like barbecue or
maybe there's some great art museums, but I don't immediately
think of the Mob.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
I'm just gonna admit that I don't think about Kansas City,
Missouri enough, and I vow to think about it more.
Speaker 4 (41:13):
Very take that vow very seriously, Matt, I am. You
can't vow lightly, sir. I'm gonna quizz you on Kansas
City in a week's time.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
All right, do it.
Speaker 4 (41:22):
I just know there was a place I think in
New York called Max's Kansas City, and it's not in
Kansas City.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
That's all I know. A restaurant.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
I think it's like it was a famous music venue.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Okay, Well, here's here's the weird thing. Not only is
the Mob a force to be reckoned with in Kansas City, Missouri.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
But they.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Had a lot of para governmental control, meaning that you
know you've heard the stories. We also have a great story.
I of got to tell you guys off air to
see if we can get it on the show. But
we've some of your fellow listeners before to send in
stories about small town corruption Kansas City in well, it's
not a small town in the turn of the century,
(42:09):
in the early nineteen hundreds, there is a lot of
rank corruption prohibition ended in nineteen thirty three, So just
like a few years before, Artemis Ogletree meets his untimely
end and the family made a lot of coint off prohibition,
(42:30):
but they also diversified, so they have different rackets, protection
money from bars and restaurants, right, and things get ugly.
They're involved in politics too, you know, cooking the books
and the race for governor of Missouri and things like that.
So it is completely possible that when we add up
(42:55):
these dots, these break crumbs, it's completely possible that there's
an argument for or a criminal underground or the mob.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Can I add one extra thing on top of this
mob connection, because I can totally see this reasoning and
we've illuminated it pretty well. What if he's on the
other side of the law. What if he and Dawn
or maybe just he was actually an agent of some
sort that was investigating some of the organized crime and
(43:27):
that's why he ended up getting taken out, And then
it's the mob connections that are arranging his funeral or
you know, paying for his funeral, putting him by his sister.
What if he was a rat?
Speaker 3 (43:41):
Maybe?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
I mean, the only the cops did hold that funeral. Right, Yeah,
there was a funeral service, but the detectives on the
case were the only people who attended the funeral. Aha,
which also makes you think, you know what I mean,
because if it's just a case, why would you go
to the funeral.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
To just to to case the joint to see if
anybody shows.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
Up, right, to see if someone takes the bait.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Or if he is a part of your team.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Or if he's you know, if he's one of those
undercover cops. People who work undercover at that at that
kind of level of intelligence. It's brutal life, and you
know a lot of times they're never in the spotlight.
They can't compromise.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
I'm thinking, whire, It's true, Ben, Thanks, Matt. I was
just going to keep saying each other's.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Names in the State Department.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
So so.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
It is true. It's it's not proof positive. It is
true that the Kansas mob could and did murder multiple
people in this time period without a ton of interference
from regional or federal authorities, some because they were bought
off or they were already in the thick of the corruption,
and others because their hands were tied.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
Right, So is that the end of the story. Not really.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
This is very strange because we have to ask ourselves
whether a cover up persist. You see, decades and decades later,
there's a researcher based at the Kansas City Public Library.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Unlike a lot.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Of residents or residents of Missouri or residence of Kansas City,
this researcher has a hobby they look into these kind
of cases, so they are familiar with the case of
Artemis Okle Tree. They receive an anonymous phone call and
the caller first starts asking questions, have you heard of
the Ogletree case? Have you heard of the person calling
(45:40):
themselves Roland t Owen, and they say, yes, I'm familiar
with it. I'm a researcher. And then this anonymous caller
says they had someone who's close to them pass away,
and they've been going through the belongings of this person
because they had died quite recently, and they found a box.
Within this box, there were multiple newspapers flippings all about
(46:01):
the same story, the so called mystery of Room ten
forty six. But that's not all they find. They also
say they find something that's the quote, something that was
mentioned in these articles. M and then they hang up.
These people have terrible phone etiquette. Really, it's like out
(46:25):
in television and in film. No one ever says goodbye
on the phone. Yeah, and there's immediately a dial town. Yes,
it's true, as we know, it is not how phones work.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah, that's right. So that's where we're left at this
point in twenty nineteen, the old Artemis Ogletree rowing to
Owen story. That's where we're left.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Who was this mystery caller? Was it a surviving relative
of ogle Tree's murderer and a surviving relative or friend
of his former lover, his paramore.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
What do you think, honestly? Do you think it was
mob involvement? Do you think it was just a love
triangle gone wrong? Uh? Just tell us, tell us your
best theory and support it please with arguments. Then we
will combine all of those, and Ben and Nolea and
I will sit around a desk somewhere and we'll figure
(47:22):
it out just just to ourselves. We will tell you
guys about it.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
And also, if you are listening to this and you
are related to someone with inside knowledge of this case,
and you want to break it down for us anonymously,
we'd love to hear you out you can write, and
that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait
to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy to
find online.
Speaker 4 (47:45):
Find us at the handle conspiracy Stuff, where we exist
on Facebook x and YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
We're conspiracy Stuff.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Show call our number. It's one eight three three std WYTK.
Speaker 3 (47:57):
Leave a voicemail and if you have more to say,
we can't wait to hear from you at our good
old fashioned email address where we are conspiracy at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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