April 3, 2019 • 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 know. M
(00:24):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Nolan. They call me Ben. We are joined
with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade. 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
(00:46):
an airbnb holiday and perhaps sure and perhaps or express
best Western or go classy, maybe a Western nights nights
in nights in something ritzy like the Ritz or Hilton. Yeah,
the hotel we're going to be speaking about today is
currently a Hilton property. Yerhaps nights in white satin. It's true. Yes,
(01:08):
you know that sounds actually not about nights at all.
It's about like knights asn't 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
that happen in hotels. Similar to um spending time in
an airport, Spending time in a hotel is is occupying
(01:29):
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 occurred in a hotel. And we don't
mean extraordinary in the way it's often misused today. Usually
(01:51):
extraordinary is meant as a compliment, but actually extraordinary just
means something out of the ordinary, and that is the
the way we are using it today. So let's set
the scene on January the second five, A well dressed
young man calling himself Roland t Owen walks into the
(02:11):
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 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.
Quick cauliflower ear thing. You'll see this if you google
(02:34):
images of a lot of m M A fighters. You
can see what that looks like. And it's a it's
a very easy thing to spot, right, This man calling
himself rolland t Owen requests the single room with no
windows facing the street. He pays cash, which you could
do at that time, right, which was the normal way
(02:55):
to pay for things, and he checks into room ten
forty six. When the cleaning staff goes by his room,
you know, to change the sheets, change out the towels
and stuff, they find the man calling himself Rolling t
o and sitting in a dark room exhibiting signs of
(03:15):
profound fright. He tells the staff that he's expecting someone
to drop by. 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 an hotel.
But it's you know, it's it's mysterious, but it's not
(03:37):
all that insane, right, Yeah, it's a it's a little
blair witchy though it reminds me of like the dude
standing facing the corner and the blair with you know,
and on its surface, it's not that weird, but when
you know a little more about the backstory, it becomes
even weirder. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And to explore this story,
we're going to shift through various differ print perspectives, primarily
(04:02):
people who work at the hotel. So first, what do
you say, let's start with the Maid's Tail. If we
want to make this Canterbury Tale esque or Hulu original
maybe oh yes, yes, yes, the non Handmaids tale. That's right.
So at ten thirty in the morning on January three,
the day after our our protagonist, I guess Roland t
(04:26):
Owen checks into the President hotel man calling himself Rollanto,
that's right, member of the cleaning staff goes up to
the room ten forty six where he is. She notices
that the doors locked, and she you know, it's kind
of a normal thing. Doors are locked when the cleaning
staff comes by. They knock generally in say housekeeping. She
opens the door, and she because she assumes that Owen
(04:49):
is out, maybe at breakfast or having a meeting or something,
because she notices the lights are off too, exactly, lights
are off, doors 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
(05:11):
up a fact that I enjoy doing this a lot
actually to do that, I don't think it's that on you.
Right there with you, I spend hours each week actually
in locked in a bathroom in the dark with the
shower on, just sort of thinking nice. I definitely take
showers in the dark one I can. Am I the
(05:33):
outlier here? I think I'm the outlier here? Oh yeah?
Am I the only one that finds this strange? 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 to 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.
(05:56):
And I found it to be riveting. Now, I just
like to do things like that. Didn't you have a
similar set up with your drum kit in your last
house too? I did, but it was in a basement
with one window. 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. I
(06:16):
think that was just the factor of the basement itself
having the drum kit was just a nice little where
the walls covered in plastic. Sometimes, Okay, when you know,
when season was right, you were not digging yourself out
of this the whole of weirdness very well, I don't
know what you're talking about, Okay, So you so it
(06:37):
sounds like two thirds of us are on on board
with this. He might have also been dozing off or sleeping,
That's that's quite possible, right. But the made is standing there,
you know, she notices or senses somehow this person sitting
(06:58):
in this room, and she realizes the room is in
fact occupied. And then 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
(07:19):
the second time he said this. 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 Dawn, I will be back in fifteen minutes. Wait,
(07:42):
and that's Dawn spelled d O N. Yes. So who's
now we've got done. We've got another person in the mix.
Is that like Donald or the Dawn? Oh my god, man,
I never thought about this is gonna this is gonna
come back around. Yeah, this does come back around. And
that's a good question. Is is it kind of the thing?
It's kind of like saying sir, you know what I mean?
(08:03):
Or duke. Uh. Now we shift to the story of
the motorist later on the same night, January three, 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. So the man was dressed
(08:26):
only in pants and like an undershirt. Uh. 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. The man replied, UM,
(08:49):
I will kill that babe tomorrow. Uh. And when this
beap comes, we come honestly by this beat because the
reports about this in the newspaper at the time in
the area, they removed this word and it's not clear
what it actually was. And this guy, Robert Lane that
we're talking about, he he worked for the water department
(09:10):
in Kansas City, so it's not like he was just
some random guy out there. He was doing his job
when he interacted, right, And I have a proposition for
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. We
(09:31):
may not ever knew it. But I stumbled across this
great anachronistic and I think I said this to you know,
this great anachronistic insult. So what if instead of saying,
you know, and whatever, uh gutter tramp, I don't know,
whatever weird thing you want to put in there, what
(09:51):
if he said, I'll kill that sockdologizing old man trap
tomorrow s a pologizing old man trap. The old man trap,
the old man trap. I don't know why that tickles me,
but you're right, you're right. He he did work for
the water department. And then later when he's given the
(10:13):
opportunity to identify this hitchhiker who, as he said no,
was only in pants and an undershirt, looking like he
had been road hard and put away wet, he said, yeah,
that's the guy picked up and they said that guy
is Roland t Owen, or at least that's what he
calls himself. Now. On this same night, January three, just
(10:35):
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. Uh,
the timelines are a little bit weird, just just a
little bit, but they say he was on twelfth Street,
(10:56):
which you know, isn't isn't that far Because we're we're
our last person, our Robert Lane. He he actually interacted
with Roland t o n Along, which is about a
mile and a half from the hotel. So, uh, distance
is not that far from there, right, all right, So
(11:18):
it's 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 UM, they didn't get widely publicized,
if I'm correct, they were sort of hearsayers, some rumors.
And we should also mention that the cleaning staff, the
(11:40):
member of the cleaning staff, her name was Mary Soptick.
As 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, who whose name
we don't have. So bell Boy one interacts around seven
(12:04):
am with our protagonist, Uh, it's January four, the phone
operator at Hotel President. Because you know there's an entire
system of phone lines going to all the different rooms,
there's actually a human being in that is operating these phones. Um.
This operator notices that the receiver, the telephone in ten
forty six where Roland is staying, is off the hook.
(12:27):
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 doors locked and there's a do not disturb sign
hanging from the knob. It probably says something like um
narre a disturbance or something like that. Uh, he knocks
and he hears somebody from the other side of the
(12:47):
room say come in, and again he's like, doors locked, Hello,
doors locked. Um Man inside the room just kind of
ignores that. He's letting him know that the door is locked.
But then the guy says, turn on the lights. Kind
of hard to do that when you can't get into
(13:08):
the room. Bell boy just keeps on knocking, but he
ends up just leaving. But right before he leaves, he
shots through the door. He said he wants him to
put his phone on the hook. Right, it's just the
book Damn Power on the hook Son, because that's because
it's Hank Hill. That's yeah, it's an approximation of what occurred.
(13:30):
But yes, he just like yells at him to put
the phone back on hook. And the bellboy just doesn't
have his pass 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. An hour's pass
let's go to the second bell boy, different member of
the hotel staff, goes up later that afternoon. So at
seven am January four, when he has the first guy
(13:51):
has that weird interaction. In the afternoon, this different guy
goes up uh and he does have his key on him,
so he let himself into the room and he finds
the man calling himself rolling t o and lying on
the bed in the dark, and from what he could tell,
this man was very much naked and very much drunk.
(14:14):
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 reaking a booze. He just
hangs up the phone, cuts his losses leaves the root
because at this point it's you know, it's been hours
and hours. The operator is like, somebody, hang up that phone.
(14:35):
I need order. I'm the operator here, hang up that phone.
So that bellboy just did it and got out. And
we have two more perspectives that are crucial to understanding
this mystery. Will get back to those after a word
from our sponsor. So we have our first returning a
(14:58):
recurring guest star he or in this strange tale. The
first bellboy comes back. Yeah, as well as the phone operator.
Oh that's right, Yeah, I should give her more credit.
Do you think she was a smooth operator? One would
hope you geed because she she runs a tight ship.
She doesn't like phones being off the hook Hotel. That's right,
(15:19):
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 for trying to not be disturbed?
That's a good question, agreed. It Also it also may
be a situation where, given phone technology at the time,
(15:39):
having one thing off the hook could mess up the
line for other other patrons. And you gotta 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.
And I don't know, I'm just wondering what what was
the urgency with sending a physical human to knock on
the door pretty aggressively if you ask me, Maybe she yeah,
heard this crazy noise on the on the all the switchboard,
(16:02):
and she was like, get this guy out of my
ear holes. But you don't want to say she didn't
want to say what she heard. She is the best
witness that we have yet too I like really even
discussed that we don't have information about we need someone
to go back to and interview the phone operator. Yes, yes,
if you have your time, don John t door right.
(16:26):
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. He
opens the door, he's got his key on him, and
(16:49):
then he finds the man calling himself rolling t o
and still naked, still nude, um but viciously brutalized. Someone
has eaten 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 festooning the walls,
(17:09):
the bed, the bathroom. Roland t 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 um making things painful rather than just
immediately killing the guy because he was stabbed. I believe
(17:32):
dozens of times very shallowly, which into 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. 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
(17:54):
immediately kill him. His skull was also fractured from what
appeared to be a series of tense impacts from a
blunt object. Somehow, old boy is still alive, at least
for a second. And goodness gracious, did he have a
strong desire to cover up who had done this to him.
He literally said I something along the lines of I
(18:17):
tripped and fell, you know, onto a knife repeatedly. Yea
very strange thing to say. He was trying to protect
something or from body else, or or you know what
he had done, Like if maybe perhaps if the police
knew who did this to him, they might know something
that he had done. So maybe he was self preservation,
(18:37):
or maybe he's protecting a third party, or maybe he
was involved in criminal activity. I mean, that's what you
would think if your law enforcements. Once I slipped and
fell and maybe he was just like, I'm not a rat.
You know, it could be it. He also could have
been completely insane from the pain in torture and just
you know, and it probably had a undergone some brain
(18:58):
damage from me and whatever kicked in the head. I mean,
if he had a serious fracture there, well that's almost
certain because the next thing that happens to Roland is
he slips into a coma and he doesn't make it
through the night. Yeah, he's not in the coma for long.
He dies that evening. So this brings us to today's question,
what happened to the man calling himself Roland t Owen.
(19:22):
Here's where it gets crazy. It turns out there is
no Roland t o and matching the description of this corpse.
There are several people with the name Roland Owen in
the world at 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
(19:46):
cannot be identified, and so law enforcement takes attacks that
may be surprising to some of us here in nineteen
I've never heard of this happening in the modern day.
What do they what do they do. Okay, so, yes,
this is it's very strange and we've talked to We've
all talked about this off bike. How I don't think
any of us have ever heard of this exact technique
(20:08):
for identifying somebody, um, even for other John does I've
never heard of this. Yeah. They they literally propped him
up in a funeral home like window, which is one
of the most maccab 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. I certainly wouldn't be like, oh, look,
(20:30):
it's Steve. I'd be like, Jesus, what is that. Get
me out of here? Uh mom, you know. And it's
not a good thing, not a good look. But yeah,
they do this and it actually uh yields some hits, right. Yeah.
Several people around the area do recognize Roland t O
and from various encounters with him while he was on
this side of the veil, but none of them know
(20:52):
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, um, something else at place,
something beyond the mundane although horrific tragedy of of homicide
(21:13):
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 label for a necktie, a hairpin, cigarette, a safety pin,
and a small sealed bottle of sulfuric acid. What what
(21:39):
are you doing with that acid? Man? Well? Then, also,
don't they find a broken glass of some sort somewhere? Yeah,
in the sink with the jagged edge. And the only
prince they've found because they didn't have fingerprint technology in
the nineties. Uh came from the telephone stand. And the
police for some reason correct us if you're a friends dexpert.
(22:00):
But the police, for some reason say, well, these finger
prince of a woman. He is that profiling? But I
guess it would be if it's police officers trying to
I don't know. Maybe the person just had dainty hands.
Who knows. People could identify his bodies. Some knew him
as Roland, but other people knew him by different names.
(22:24):
You know, we don't have those names today. But I'm like, oh,
that's Alvin or Alfonso or Beauregard, I don't know. 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 and they knew him
as Eugene case Scott. Yeah, and they said he like
(22:47):
stayed there for one night and that was it and
didn't want windows facing the street. Yeah, m what is
he up to you? Oh? He also stayed the same
regions another nice hotel in the area. Um oh, in
this time. His name, now this is gonna be we
don't want to spoil too much, but his name here.
(23:09):
He called himself Duncan Ogle Tree at that hotel, and
he shared a room with another man who was known
as Donald Kelso. There's our Don Don? Is that our
don Don Donald Kelso? Uh. Then there was a wrestling
promoter who said that Owen, remember looked like a fighter,
(23:29):
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. Um,
my name is Cecil Warner. Cecil Warner. Interesting so all right,
now I'm getting a little more of a picture. I'm
(23:51):
assuming we're everyone listening. All of us have heard of these,
I guess a smaller wrestling matches or more localized wrestling matches.
They can range from like family friendly to the macabre. Essentially,
now I imagining all these like shallow cuts on him
and injuries to his head. He's a local wrestler that
(24:14):
maybe takes things too far, but we'll get into that later. Yeah,
this is not entirely related or tenentially related at best,
But have you guys ever seen those kind of local
wrestling matches? I saw it when I I saw one
where the blood was definitely real and these guys were
not We're not faking it all due respect to the
(24:38):
k FABE or whatever they call it w w E,
but these guys were actually beating the snot out of
each other. 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 and uh,
and that the good guy was like swathed in like
(24:58):
an American flag or something that, and there was sound,
real hooting and holler and from the stands. I was
out in on the country out in rural Georgia. It
was a body was a real experience were we were,
we friends and we met when you went it was
pretty recently, Okay, Yeah, because I feel like I remember
that story, I would still I would still go check
(25:20):
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 participating in a match.
But that's that's the thing. The police or at their
wits end due to the circumstances of the discovery and
(25:41):
the circumstances of this man's death, they say they need
to identify them 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 in display,
on display, and they put take out an ad to
got ads telling people to help and to show up
at this funeral home for the viewing. Hundreds of people go,
(26:04):
and as we said, a lot of them know this
guy under various different names, and far be it from
me to criticize anybody for traveling under different names. Well,
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, then you just would recognize that.
So people are following this story in the local papers
(26:27):
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 rolland t West and
Eugene and Cecil and so on in an unmarked grave
(26:47):
at a potter's field. And a potter's field is where
bodies will be interned if they have no survivors to
take care of them, or if they have no funds
or no no will, or they can't be identified. Now,
just okay, let's go back to when the news article
(27:09):
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 to
pay for a proper funeral for this person known as
Roland and um. When when the local paper inquires about, well, hey,
(27:33):
do you know what happened to him or why he
ended up in this state. She says, quote, he got
into a jam, got into a jam. Who is this
Dennis Reynolds? This is like a Dennis jammed up when
you get jammed up, buddy. Oh boy. But but seriously,
that's that's a strange thing to say, right And shortly afterwards,
(27:59):
another person calls it anonymously. This time it's a man,
and they called the funeral home and he confirms that
he'll be paying for the funeral of this um person
calling themselves Rolling t Oen, 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
(28:21):
very is my wish they be buried in this specific cemetery,
and then he says he'll be near my sister. The
man mentioned specifically Memorial Park cemetery, And if we were
to paraphrase, he tells the hotels law enforcement that Roland
(28:43):
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 Oh, and the caller says,
cheaders usually get what's coming to them. I'm not sure
why you're all southern, but it's just fun. I think
I think we're just feeling it, you know, And we
(29:05):
would we would need to put in some more research
to really give a Missouri accent. Kansas City. 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.
(29:28):
Multiple unidentified people send flowers to the funeral. One order
for flowers, five dollars worth of flowers, has a card
attached and it says love Forever, Louise l O U
I S E. And then time passes. It isn't until
(29:48):
six when a woman from Birmingham, Alabama reads an account
of this unsolved murder in the magazine American Weekly, and
he she thinks it's fairly apparent in the article that
this guy's name was not Roland t Owen, nor was
it any of the other names he used. Most likely,
(30:10):
so this lady says, this corpse might be the missing
child of my good friend. He left home in April
of nineteen four, but his name isn't Roland, and we'll
tell you what his name is. After award from our sponsor,
(30:39):
all right ready for this Artemis ogle Tree. You recall
ogle Tree from earlier Duncan ogle Tree. Yes, yes, interesting.
So the woman who finds this article in American Weekly,
she reaches out to artemiss mother, Mrs ogle Tree, and
(31:01):
she goes on the mother to positively confirm the body
of rolling t Owen as that of her son, and
law enforcement says, all right, we believe you. We agree
with your claim. The timeline checks out. This is your son.
We have finally identified this victim. It is Artemis ogle Tree.
(31:22):
He had left home. He had left Alabama in April
of n ostensibly to travel to California. But it's weird
because for some time the family, the ogle Tree family,
thought he was completely fine. You see, sometime after ogle
(31:44):
Tree'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. Plans have changed. He's
now travel the world. Oh wow. So they did not
know he was dead, but he certainly didn't write these letters.
(32:07):
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. Uh. These typed out
writer letters were much more formal than what she was
used to receiving um, which definitely made them at least
set them apart and made her a bit suspicious about them. Then,
(32:30):
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's.
This is so weird. Yeah, and he claimed Jordan's Uh
claimed that Artemis was now living in Cairo, Egypt, had
become married to some at least unknown to the mother,
(32:54):
wealthy woman, and that everything was okay, and he was
just he was living out his life now in Cairo. Yeah,
it's very strange. So the authorities said, let's not push
our luck. We'll settle for identifying the body. You know this,
we may never identify the murderer or the murderers, but
(33:16):
it's amazing that we're able to bring closure to this grizzly,
grizzly story. So these letters, by the way, said various
different things. One said he was in Chicago, one said
he was sailing from New York to Europe. These it
appeared as though they were real time updates. And at
(33:39):
this point we can try to go a bit further
than the police went. We don't have to settle for
just identifying the body. You see, In the decades, almost
a century of time since the discovery of the the
(34:00):
murder and the death of Artemisoical Tree, hundreds of thousands
of people have been working the case, attempting to figure
out what actually happened to this poor, unfortunate young man.
And they've built some pretty interesting theories. Here. Was it
a jilted lover our situation? We've talked about those possibilities.
(34:23):
Did the unidentified male caller have a part in ogle
Tree's murder? Yeah, that's right. Was one of Was he
possibly one of Louise's siblings? A relative of some kind?
Was Memorial Park Cemetery a place where ogle Trees spurn
Lever could visit her grave? My question there, though, is
(34:44):
why why barry your enemy next to the person who
he wronged, who you did him in for. It feels
like a mob move. He feels like a mob move
or a kind of a twisted, uh, 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. It's
(35:05):
like Luis, you're my sister. I love you, but I
cannot let this disrespect go unpunished. Right there you go. Well,
let's get back into just the concept of the jilted
lovers theory here. So what we do know, or at
least what we have heard here throughout the story, is
that perhaps uh Ogletree was in the middle of some
(35:26):
kind of love triangle. And it's the question then, is
whether or not, like which side of the triangle he's on. Essentially,
was he betrothed to someone 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
(35:48):
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 that out. But
we do know that the 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
(36:08):
this person and the other Louise as a possibility, and
then you've got the fingerprints. I would say that's one
of the more promising theories, one of more promising Avenues. Yeah,
there's another thing that occurs in nine seven. There's a
guy named Joseph Ogden. That's the alias. He never says
(36:29):
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 a k A.
He's also been known to go under the moniker of
Donald Kelso, and his description matches the description of the
Donald Kelso who had stayed at the St Regis with
(36:52):
Artemis when he was going by the name Duncan Ogle
Tree dude. 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
(37:12):
guy have actually like that caller who called himself Jordan.
Could that have also been Kelso slash Ogden? Whoever that
guy was um? And was he just trying to cover
his tracks by saying, Oh, he's out in Cairo somewhere,
don't worry about him, and he's fine. But either way,
this person Jordan. This caller made himself very suspicious, right,
(37:33):
because all we know about this caller is that they
called themselves Jordan's. 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 Kelso
(37:54):
and Ogletree. We don't really know why they were using
these fake names, and that that, I think is is
a fascinating twist to this tail because that's something they did.
They don't want you to know. It was much easier
to travel under an assumed name at the time. This
has caused some people, and you can find these in
various like uh independent investigation threads or or the excellent
(38:18):
subredit Unresolved mysteries, various people have due to the secrecy
and in 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, which would
have been very controversial at that time. But in all fairness,
(38:39):
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. So that's clearly speculation. Absolutely,
it could It could be sure, but who knows. Um. Well,
the other big question is was there any kind of
drugs drug involvement one way or the other in use,
(39:00):
were in sales perhaps, Yeah, I don't see how. I mean,
I kind of almost lumped that in with any potential
mob connection, right because part and parcel of the same
kind of toxic relationship. You know, it seemed like he
was drinking very, very heavily, at least by the time
he got to a hotel. President. Yeah, I don't know
about the other stuff. Well, so okay, So using assumed
(39:22):
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. Um, I mean, I can I can
imagine that there's a Isn't it kind of known that
in Kansas City, Missouri, around the nineteen thirties, organized crime
was a thing. Oh yeah, this might this might be
(39:46):
surprising to some of us listening, but it's true. The
Kansas City Crime Family, also known as the Savella Crime Family,
as a mafia mafia outfit based in Kansas City, Missouri.
They've been there since nineteen twelve, when the founders, the
di Giovanni brothers, fled sicily and landed in Kansas City, Missouri.
(40:08):
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. I'm just gonna admit that I
don't think about Kansas City, Missouri enough, and I vow
to think about it more very to that. Vow very seriously, Matt.
You can't vow lightly, sir. I'm gonna quiz you on
(40:30):
Kansas City in a week's time. I just know there
was a place I think in New York called Max's
Kansas City, and it was not in Kansas City. That's
all I know. A restaurant. I think it's like it
was a famous music venue. Okay, well, here's here's the
weird thing. Not only is the Mob a force to
(40:52):
be reckoned with in Kansas City, Missouri, but they had
a lot of parag governmental control, meaning that you know
you you've heard the stories. We also have a great story.
I've got to tell you guys off air to see
if we can get it on the show. But we've
asked some of your fellow listeners before to send in
(41:13):
stories about small town corruption. Kansas City in the while
it's not a small town in the turn of the century,
in the early nineteen hundreds, Uh, there is a lot
of rank corruption. Prohibition ended in three So just like
a few years before, Artemis Ogletree meets his untimely end
(41:37):
and the family made a lot of calling off prohibition.
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, uh, cooking the
books and the race for governor of Missouri and things
(42:00):
like that. So it is completely possible that when we
when we add up these dots, these bread crumbs, it's
completely possible that there's an argument for a criminal underground
or the mob. Can I add one extra thing on
top of this mob connection, because I can totally see
(42:20):
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 that's why he ended up getting taken
out m M. And then that's the mob connections that
(42:45):
are arranging his funeral or you know, paying for his funeral,
putting him by his sister. What if he was a rat? Maybe?
I mean, the only the cops did hold that funeral, right,
there was a funeral service, But the detect is on
the case. We're the only people who attended the funeral,
which also makes you think, you know what I mean,
(43:05):
because it's just a case. Why would you go to
the funeral to case the joint to see if anybody
shows up, right, to see if someone takes the bait,
or if he is a part of your team, or
if he's you know, if he's one of those undercover cops.
People work undercover at that at that kind of level
(43:26):
of intelligence. It's brutal life, and you know a lot
of times they're never in the spotlight. They can't compromise.
I'm thinking, why Ben, thanks, Matt, I was just gonna
keep saying each other's names in the statement, So breaking
(43:47):
up you two? So um, 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
with out 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
(44:09):
hands were tied. All right, So is that the end
of the story? Not? Not? Not? Really, 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, and like
(44:30):
a lot of residents from residents of Missouri or residents
of Kansas City, this researcher has has a hobby they
look into this these kind of cases, so they are
familiar with the case of Artemus ogle Tree. They receive
an anonymous phone call and the caller first starts asking questions,
have you heard of the Ogle Tree case? You heard
(44:51):
of the person calling themselves rolland t o En 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 died quite recently,
and they found a box. Within this box, there were
multiple newspaper clippings all about the same story, the so
(45:14):
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, and
then they hang up. These people have terrible phone etiquette.
(45:35):
It's like out in television and in film. No one
ever says goodbye on the phone, and there's immediately a
dial tone. As we know, it is not how phones were.
So that's where we're left at this point in twenty nineteen,
the old Artemis ogletree rowin to your story. That's that's
(45:56):
where we're left. Who was this mystery caller? Was it
a surviving relative of Ogle Trees murderer and a surviving
relative or friend of his former lover, his paramore? What
do you think, honestly? Do you think it was mob involvement?
Do you think it was just a I love triangle
(46:19):
gone wrong? Uh? What? Just tell us tell us your
best theory and support it please with arguments. Then then
we will combine all of those, and Ben and Oil
and I will sit around a desk somewhere and we'll
figure it out, just just to ourselves. We will tell you, guys,
about it. And also if you are listening to this
(46:42):
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 to us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter,
you can find us on Instagram, or conspiracy stuff and
or conspiracy stuff show in those places. If you don't
want to do that and you want to tell your
story in three minute bursts, you can call our number.
(47:05):
We are one eight three three st d w y
t K. Leave a message. I've got it up on
my phone again, so I'm I'm like going through them
and putting more stuff out. Did you guys hear the
really weird message we got? I haven't listened, all right,
we should listen to it. It's pretty fun, it's it's great.
(47:27):
Somebody out there has a great sense of humor. Uh well,
you'll hear it soon. It immediately made me want to
do another listener call an episode. We have a treasure trove.
We also have The three of us also have personal
instagrams if you want to follow our individual adventures. Yeah,
mine is at Embryonic Insider, I am at Ben Bullen
(47:50):
and mine is at sitting in the dark alone playing drums.
All just pictures of Matt sitting in the dark alone.
So in the dark. No lights look really dark. It's
just really you have to turn the sound on, right. Yeah,
that's it. You just hear me breathing. That's what the
kids call it. Weird flex. Yeah, yeah, there we go.
And if none of that quite bags your badgers. If
(48:14):
you're tired of social media, you hate being on the phone,
but you want to tell us, uh something about this
case or something fascinating from your neck of the global woods,
we are all ears or in this case eyes. You
can write to us directly. We are conspiracy at how
stuff works dot com.
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 know. M
(00:24):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Nolan. They call me Ben. We are joined
with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade. 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
(00:46):
an airbnb holiday and perhaps sure and perhaps or express
best Western or go classy, maybe a Western nights nights
in nights in something ritzy like the Ritz or Hilton. Yeah,
the hotel we're going to be speaking about today is
currently a Hilton property. Yerhaps nights in white satin. It's true. Yes,
(01:08):
you know that sounds actually not about nights at all.
It's about like knights asn't 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
that happen in hotels. Similar to um spending time in
an airport, Spending time in a hotel is is occupying
(01:29):
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 occurred in a hotel. And we don't
mean extraordinary in the way it's often misused today. Usually
(01:51):
extraordinary is meant as a compliment, but actually extraordinary just
means something out of the ordinary, and that is the
the way we are using it today. So let's set
the scene on January the second five, A well dressed
young man calling himself Roland t Owen walks into the
(02:11):
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 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.
Quick cauliflower ear thing. You'll see this if you google
(02:34):
images of a lot of m M A fighters. You
can see what that looks like. And it's a it's
a very easy thing to spot, right, This man calling
himself rolland t Owen requests the single room with no
windows facing the street. He pays cash, which you could
do at that time, right, which was the normal way
(02:55):
to pay for things, and he checks into room ten
forty six. When the cleaning staff goes by his room,
you know, to change the sheets, change out the towels
and stuff, they find the man calling himself Rolling t
o and sitting in a dark room exhibiting signs of
(03:15):
profound fright. He tells the staff that he's expecting someone
to drop by. 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 an hotel.
But it's you know, it's it's mysterious, but it's not
(03:37):
all that insane, right, Yeah, it's a it's a little
blair witchy though it reminds me of like the dude
standing facing the corner and the blair with you know,
and on its surface, it's not that weird, but when
you know a little more about the backstory, it becomes
even weirder. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And to explore this story,
we're going to shift through various differ print perspectives, primarily
(04:02):
people who work at the hotel. So first, what do
you say, let's start with the Maid's Tail. If we
want to make this Canterbury Tale esque or Hulu original
maybe oh yes, yes, yes, the non Handmaids tale. That's right.
So at ten thirty in the morning on January three,
the day after our our protagonist, I guess Roland t
(04:26):
Owen checks into the President hotel man calling himself Rollanto,
that's right, member of the cleaning staff goes up to
the room ten forty six where he is. She notices
that the doors locked, and she you know, it's kind
of a normal thing. Doors are locked when the cleaning
staff comes by. They knock generally in say housekeeping. She
opens the door, and she because she assumes that Owen
(04:49):
is out, maybe at breakfast or having a meeting or something,
because she notices the lights are off too, exactly, lights
are off, doors 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
(05:11):
up a fact that I enjoy doing this a lot
actually to do that, I don't think it's that on you.
Right there with you, I spend hours each week actually
in locked in a bathroom in the dark with the
shower on, just sort of thinking nice. I definitely take
showers in the dark one I can. Am I the
(05:33):
outlier here? I think I'm the outlier here? Oh yeah?
Am I the only one that finds this strange? 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 to 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.
(05:56):
And I found it to be riveting. Now, I just
like to do things like that. Didn't you have a
similar set up with your drum kit in your last
house too? I did, but it was in a basement
with one window. 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. I
(06:16):
think that was just the factor of the basement itself
having the drum kit was just a nice little where
the walls covered in plastic. Sometimes, Okay, when you know,
when season was right, you were not digging yourself out
of this the whole of weirdness very well, I don't
know what you're talking about, Okay, So you so it
(06:37):
sounds like two thirds of us are on on board
with this. He might have also been dozing off or sleeping,
That's that's quite possible, right. But the made is standing there,
you know, she notices or senses somehow this person sitting
(06:58):
in this room, and she realizes the room is in
fact occupied. And then 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
(07:19):
the second time he said this. 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 Dawn, I will be back in fifteen minutes. Wait,
(07:42):
and that's Dawn spelled d O N. Yes. So who's
now we've got done. We've got another person in the mix.
Is that like Donald or the Dawn? Oh my god, man,
I never thought about this is gonna this is gonna
come back around. Yeah, this does come back around. And
that's a good question. Is is it kind of the thing?
It's kind of like saying sir, you know what I mean?
(08:03):
Or duke. Uh. Now we shift to the story of
the motorist later on the same night, January three, 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. So the man was dressed
(08:26):
only in pants and like an undershirt. Uh. 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. The man replied, UM,
(08:49):
I will kill that babe tomorrow. Uh. And when this
beap comes, we come honestly by this beat because the
reports about this in the newspaper at the time in
the area, they removed this word and it's not clear
what it actually was. And this guy, Robert Lane that
we're talking about, he he worked for the water department
(09:10):
in Kansas City, so it's not like he was just
some random guy out there. He was doing his job
when he interacted, right, And I have a proposition for
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. We
(09:31):
may not ever knew it. But I stumbled across this
great anachronistic and I think I said this to you know,
this great anachronistic insult. So what if instead of saying,
you know, and whatever, uh gutter tramp, I don't know,
whatever weird thing you want to put in there, what
(09:51):
if he said, I'll kill that sockdologizing old man trap
tomorrow s a pologizing old man trap. The old man trap,
the old man trap. I don't know why that tickles me,
but you're right, you're right. He he did work for
the water department. And then later when he's given the
(10:13):
opportunity to identify this hitchhiker who, as he said no,
was only in pants and an undershirt, looking like he
had been road hard and put away wet, he said, yeah,
that's the guy picked up and they said that guy
is Roland t Owen, or at least that's what he
calls himself. Now. On this same night, January three, just
(10:35):
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. Uh,
the timelines are a little bit weird, just just a
little bit, but they say he was on twelfth Street,
(10:56):
which you know, isn't isn't that far Because we're we're
our last person, our Robert Lane. He he actually interacted
with Roland t o n Along, which is about a
mile and a half from the hotel. So, uh, distance
is not that far from there, right, all right, So
(11:18):
it's 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 UM, they didn't get widely publicized,
if I'm correct, they were sort of hearsayers, some rumors.
And we should also mention that the cleaning staff, the
(11:40):
member of the cleaning staff, her name was Mary Soptick.
As 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, who whose name
we don't have. So bell Boy one interacts around seven
(12:04):
am with our protagonist, Uh, it's January four, the phone
operator at Hotel President. Because you know there's an entire
system of phone lines going to all the different rooms,
there's actually a human being in that is operating these phones. Um.
This operator notices that the receiver, the telephone in ten
forty six where Roland is staying, is off the hook.
(12:27):
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 doors locked and there's a do not disturb sign
hanging from the knob. It probably says something like um
narre a disturbance or something like that. Uh, he knocks
and he hears somebody from the other side of the
(12:47):
room say come in, and again he's like, doors locked, Hello,
doors locked. Um Man inside the room just kind of
ignores that. He's letting him know that the door is locked.
But then the guy says, turn on the lights. Kind
of hard to do that when you can't get into
(13:08):
the room. Bell boy just keeps on knocking, but he
ends up just leaving. But right before he leaves, he
shots through the door. He said he wants him to
put his phone on the hook. Right, it's just the
book Damn Power on the hook Son, because that's because
it's Hank Hill. That's yeah, it's an approximation of what occurred.
(13:30):
But yes, he just like yells at him to put
the phone back on hook. And the bellboy just doesn't
have his pass 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. An hour's pass
let's go to the second bell boy, different member of
the hotel staff, goes up later that afternoon. So at
seven am January four, when he has the first guy
(13:51):
has that weird interaction. In the afternoon, this different guy
goes up uh and he does have his key on him,
so he let himself into the room and he finds
the man calling himself rolling t o and lying on
the bed in the dark, and from what he could tell,
this man was very much naked and very much drunk.
(14:14):
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 reaking a booze. He just
hangs up the phone, cuts his losses leaves the root
because at this point it's you know, it's been hours
and hours. The operator is like, somebody, hang up that phone.
(14:35):
I need order. I'm the operator here, hang up that phone.
So that bellboy just did it and got out. And
we have two more perspectives that are crucial to understanding
this mystery. Will get back to those after a word
from our sponsor. So we have our first returning a
(14:58):
recurring guest star he or in this strange tale. The
first bellboy comes back. Yeah, as well as the phone operator.
Oh that's right, Yeah, I should give her more credit.
Do you think she was a smooth operator? One would
hope you geed because she she runs a tight ship.
She doesn't like phones being off the hook Hotel. That's right,
(15:19):
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 for trying to not be disturbed?
That's a good question, agreed. It Also it also may
be a situation where, given phone technology at the time,
(15:39):
having one thing off the hook could mess up the
line for other other patrons. And you gotta 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.
And I don't know, I'm just wondering what what was
the urgency with sending a physical human to knock on
the door pretty aggressively if you ask me, Maybe she yeah,
heard this crazy noise on the on the all the switchboard,
(16:02):
and she was like, get this guy out of my
ear holes. But you don't want to say she didn't
want to say what she heard. She is the best
witness that we have yet too I like really even
discussed that we don't have information about we need someone
to go back to and interview the phone operator. Yes, yes,
if you have your time, don John t door right.
(16:26):
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. He
opens the door, he's got his key on him, and
(16:49):
then he finds the man calling himself rolling t o
and still naked, still nude, um but viciously brutalized. Someone
has eaten 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 festooning the walls,
(17:09):
the bed, the bathroom. Roland t 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 um making things painful rather than just
immediately killing the guy because he was stabbed. I believe
(17:32):
dozens of times very shallowly, which into 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. 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
(17:54):
immediately kill him. His skull was also fractured from what
appeared to be a series of tense impacts from a
blunt object. Somehow, old boy is still alive, at least
for a second. And goodness gracious, did he have a
strong desire to cover up who had done this to him.
He literally said I something along the lines of I
(18:17):
tripped and fell, you know, onto a knife repeatedly. Yea
very strange thing to say. He was trying to protect
something or from body else, or or you know what
he had done, Like if maybe perhaps if the police
knew who did this to him, they might know something
that he had done. So maybe he was self preservation,
(18:37):
or maybe he's protecting a third party, or maybe he
was involved in criminal activity. I mean, that's what you
would think if your law enforcements. Once I slipped and
fell and maybe he was just like, I'm not a rat.
You know, it could be it. He also could have
been completely insane from the pain in torture and just
you know, and it probably had a undergone some brain
(18:58):
damage from me and whatever kicked in the head. I mean,
if he had a serious fracture there, well that's almost
certain because the next thing that happens to Roland is
he slips into a coma and he doesn't make it
through the night. Yeah, he's not in the coma for long.
He dies that evening. So this brings us to today's question,
what happened to the man calling himself Roland t Owen.
(19:22):
Here's where it gets crazy. It turns out there is
no Roland t o and matching the description of this corpse.
There are several people with the name Roland Owen in
the world at 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
(19:46):
cannot be identified, and so law enforcement takes attacks that
may be surprising to some of us here in nineteen
I've never heard of this happening in the modern day.
What do they what do they do. Okay, so, yes,
this is it's very strange and we've talked to We've
all talked about this off bike. How I don't think
any of us have ever heard of this exact technique
(20:08):
for identifying somebody, um, even for other John does I've
never heard of this. Yeah. They they literally propped him
up in a funeral home like window, which is one
of the most maccab 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. I certainly wouldn't be like, oh, look,
(20:30):
it's Steve. I'd be like, Jesus, what is that. Get
me out of here? Uh mom, you know. And it's
not a good thing, not a good look. But yeah,
they do this and it actually uh yields some hits, right. Yeah.
Several people around the area do recognize Roland t O
and from various encounters with him while he was on
this side of the veil, but none of them know
(20:52):
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, um, something else at place,
something beyond the mundane although horrific tragedy of of homicide
(21:13):
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 label for a necktie, a hairpin, cigarette, a safety pin,
and a small sealed bottle of sulfuric acid. What what
(21:39):
are you doing with that acid? Man? Well? Then, also,
don't they find a broken glass of some sort somewhere? Yeah,
in the sink with the jagged edge. And the only
prince they've found because they didn't have fingerprint technology in
the nineties. Uh came from the telephone stand. And the
police for some reason correct us if you're a friends dexpert.
(22:00):
But the police, for some reason say, well, these finger
prince of a woman. He is that profiling? But I
guess it would be if it's police officers trying to
I don't know. Maybe the person just had dainty hands.
Who knows. People could identify his bodies. Some knew him
as Roland, but other people knew him by different names.
(22:24):
You know, we don't have those names today. But I'm like, oh,
that's Alvin or Alfonso or Beauregard, I don't know. 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 and they knew him
as Eugene case Scott. Yeah, and they said he like
(22:47):
stayed there for one night and that was it and
didn't want windows facing the street. Yeah, m what is
he up to you? Oh? He also stayed the same
regions another nice hotel in the area. Um oh, in
this time. His name, now this is gonna be we
don't want to spoil too much, but his name here.
(23:09):
He called himself Duncan Ogle Tree at that hotel, and
he shared a room with another man who was known
as Donald Kelso. There's our Don Don? Is that our
don Don Donald Kelso? Uh. Then there was a wrestling
promoter who said that Owen, remember looked like a fighter,
(23:29):
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. Um,
my name is Cecil Warner. Cecil Warner. Interesting so all right,
now I'm getting a little more of a picture. I'm
(23:51):
assuming we're everyone listening. All of us have heard of these,
I guess a smaller wrestling matches or more localized wrestling matches.
They can range from like family friendly to the macabre. Essentially,
now I imagining all these like shallow cuts on him
and injuries to his head. He's a local wrestler that
(24:14):
maybe takes things too far, but we'll get into that later. Yeah,
this is not entirely related or tenentially related at best,
But have you guys ever seen those kind of local
wrestling matches? I saw it when I I saw one
where the blood was definitely real and these guys were
not We're not faking it all due respect to the
(24:38):
k FABE or whatever they call it w w E,
but these guys were actually beating the snot out of
each other. 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 and uh,
and that the good guy was like swathed in like
(24:58):
an American flag or something that, and there was sound,
real hooting and holler and from the stands. I was
out in on the country out in rural Georgia. It
was a body was a real experience were we were,
we friends and we met when you went it was
pretty recently, Okay, Yeah, because I feel like I remember
that story, I would still I would still go check
(25:20):
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 participating in a match.
But that's that's the thing. The police or at their
wits end due to the circumstances of the discovery and
(25:41):
the circumstances of this man's death, they say they need
to identify them 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 in display,
on display, and they put take out an ad to
got ads telling people to help and to show up
at this funeral home for the viewing. Hundreds of people go,
(26:04):
and as we said, a lot of them know this
guy under various different names, and far be it from
me to criticize anybody for traveling under different names. Well,
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, then you just would recognize that.
So people are following this story in the local papers
(26:27):
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 rolland t West and
Eugene and Cecil and so on in an unmarked grave
(26:47):
at a potter's field. And a potter's field is where
bodies will be interned if they have no survivors to
take care of them, or if they have no funds
or no no will, or they can't be identified. Now,
just okay, let's go back to when the news article
(27:09):
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 to
pay for a proper funeral for this person known as
Roland and um. When when the local paper inquires about, well, hey,
(27:33):
do you know what happened to him or why he
ended up in this state. She says, quote, he got
into a jam, got into a jam. Who is this
Dennis Reynolds? This is like a Dennis jammed up when
you get jammed up, buddy. Oh boy. But but seriously,
that's that's a strange thing to say, right And shortly afterwards,
(27:59):
another person calls it anonymously. This time it's a man,
and they called the funeral home and he confirms that
he'll be paying for the funeral of this um person
calling themselves Rolling t Oen, 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
(28:21):
very is my wish they be buried in this specific cemetery,
and then he says he'll be near my sister. The
man mentioned specifically Memorial Park cemetery, And if we were
to paraphrase, he tells the hotels law enforcement that Roland
(28:43):
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 Oh, and the caller says,
cheaders usually get what's coming to them. I'm not sure
why you're all southern, but it's just fun. I think
I think we're just feeling it, you know, And we
(29:05):
would we would need to put in some more research
to really give a Missouri accent. Kansas City. 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.
(29:28):
Multiple unidentified people send flowers to the funeral. One order
for flowers, five dollars worth of flowers, has a card
attached and it says love Forever, Louise l O U
I S E. And then time passes. It isn't until
(29:48):
six when a woman from Birmingham, Alabama reads an account
of this unsolved murder in the magazine American Weekly, and
he she thinks it's fairly apparent in the article that
this guy's name was not Roland t Owen, nor was
it any of the other names he used. Most likely,
(30:10):
so this lady says, this corpse might be the missing
child of my good friend. He left home in April
of nineteen four, but his name isn't Roland, and we'll
tell you what his name is. After award from our sponsor,
(30:39):
all right ready for this Artemis ogle Tree. You recall
ogle Tree from earlier Duncan ogle Tree. Yes, yes, interesting.
So the woman who finds this article in American Weekly,
she reaches out to artemiss mother, Mrs ogle Tree, and
(31:01):
she goes on the mother to positively confirm the body
of rolling t Owen as that of her son, and
law enforcement says, all right, we believe you. We agree
with your claim. The timeline checks out. This is your son.
We have finally identified this victim. It is Artemis ogle Tree.
(31:22):
He had left home. He had left Alabama in April
of n ostensibly to travel to California. But it's weird
because for some time the family, the ogle Tree family,
thought he was completely fine. You see, sometime after ogle
(31:44):
Tree'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. Plans have changed. He's
now travel the world. Oh wow. So they did not
know he was dead, but he certainly didn't write these letters.
(32:07):
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. Uh. These typed out
writer letters were much more formal than what she was
used to receiving um, which definitely made them at least
set them apart and made her a bit suspicious about them. Then,
(32:30):
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's.
This is so weird. Yeah, and he claimed Jordan's Uh
claimed that Artemis was now living in Cairo, Egypt, had
become married to some at least unknown to the mother,
(32:54):
wealthy woman, and that everything was okay, and he was
just he was living out his life now in Cairo. Yeah,
it's very strange. So the authorities said, let's not push
our luck. We'll settle for identifying the body. You know this,
we may never identify the murderer or the murderers, but
(33:16):
it's amazing that we're able to bring closure to this grizzly,
grizzly story. So these letters, by the way, said various
different things. One said he was in Chicago, one said
he was sailing from New York to Europe. These it
appeared as though they were real time updates. And at
(33:39):
this point we can try to go a bit further
than the police went. We don't have to settle for
just identifying the body. You see, In the decades, almost
a century of time since the discovery of the the
(34:00):
murder and the death of Artemisoical Tree, hundreds of thousands
of people have been working the case, attempting to figure
out what actually happened to this poor, unfortunate young man.
And they've built some pretty interesting theories. Here. Was it
a jilted lover our situation? We've talked about those possibilities.
(34:23):
Did the unidentified male caller have a part in ogle
Tree's murder? Yeah, that's right. Was one of Was he
possibly one of Louise's siblings? A relative of some kind?
Was Memorial Park Cemetery a place where ogle Trees spurn
Lever could visit her grave? My question there, though, is
(34:44):
why why barry your enemy next to the person who
he wronged, who you did him in for. It feels
like a mob move. He feels like a mob move
or a kind of a twisted, uh, 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. It's
(35:05):
like Luis, you're my sister. I love you, but I
cannot let this disrespect go unpunished. Right there you go. Well,
let's get back into just the concept of the jilted
lovers theory here. So what we do know, or at
least what we have heard here throughout the story, is
that perhaps uh Ogletree was in the middle of some
(35:26):
kind of love triangle. And it's the question then, is
whether or not, like which side of the triangle he's on. Essentially,
was he betrothed to someone 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
(35:48):
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 that out. But
we do know that the 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
(36:08):
this person and the other Louise as a possibility, and
then you've got the fingerprints. I would say that's one
of the more promising theories, one of more promising Avenues. Yeah,
there's another thing that occurs in nine seven. There's a
guy named Joseph Ogden. That's the alias. He never says
(36:29):
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 a k A.
He's also been known to go under the moniker of
Donald Kelso, and his description matches the description of the
Donald Kelso who had stayed at the St Regis with
(36:52):
Artemis when he was going by the name Duncan Ogle
Tree dude. 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
(37:12):
guy have actually like that caller who called himself Jordan.
Could that have also been Kelso slash Ogden? Whoever that
guy was um? And was he just trying to cover
his tracks by saying, Oh, he's out in Cairo somewhere,
don't worry about him, and he's fine. But either way,
this person Jordan. This caller made himself very suspicious, right,
(37:33):
because all we know about this caller is that they
called themselves Jordan's. 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 Kelso
(37:54):
and Ogletree. We don't really know why they were using
these fake names, and that that, I think is is
a fascinating twist to this tail because that's something they did.
They don't want you to know. It was much easier
to travel under an assumed name at the time. This
has caused some people, and you can find these in
various like uh independent investigation threads or or the excellent
(38:18):
subredit Unresolved mysteries, various people have due to the secrecy
and in 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, which would
have been very controversial at that time. But in all fairness,
(38:39):
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. So that's clearly speculation. Absolutely,
it could It could be sure, but who knows. Um. Well,
the other big question is was there any kind of
drugs drug involvement one way or the other in use,
(39:00):
were in sales perhaps, Yeah, I don't see how. I mean,
I kind of almost lumped that in with any potential
mob connection, right because part and parcel of the same
kind of toxic relationship. You know, it seemed like he
was drinking very, very heavily, at least by the time
he got to a hotel. President. Yeah, I don't know
about the other stuff. Well, so okay, So using assumed
(39:22):
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. Um, I mean, I can I can
imagine that there's a Isn't it kind of known that
in Kansas City, Missouri, around the nineteen thirties, organized crime
was a thing. Oh yeah, this might this might be
(39:46):
surprising to some of us listening, but it's true. The
Kansas City Crime Family, also known as the Savella Crime Family,
as a mafia mafia outfit based in Kansas City, Missouri.
They've been there since nineteen twelve, when the founders, the
di Giovanni brothers, fled sicily and landed in Kansas City, Missouri.
(40:08):
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. I'm just gonna admit that I
don't think about Kansas City, Missouri enough, and I vow
to think about it more very to that. Vow very seriously, Matt.
You can't vow lightly, sir. I'm gonna quiz you on
(40:30):
Kansas City in a week's time. I just know there
was a place I think in New York called Max's
Kansas City, and it was not in Kansas City. That's
all I know. A restaurant. I think it's like it
was a famous music venue. Okay, well, here's here's the
weird thing. Not only is the Mob a force to
(40:52):
be reckoned with in Kansas City, Missouri, but they had
a lot of parag governmental control, meaning that you know
you you've heard the stories. We also have a great story.
I've got to tell you guys off air to see
if we can get it on the show. But we've
asked some of your fellow listeners before to send in
(41:13):
stories about small town corruption. Kansas City in the while
it's not a small town in the turn of the century,
in the early nineteen hundreds, Uh, there is a lot
of rank corruption. Prohibition ended in three So just like
a few years before, Artemis Ogletree meets his untimely end
(41:37):
and the family made a lot of calling off prohibition.
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, uh, cooking the
books and the race for governor of Missouri and things
(42:00):
like that. So it is completely possible that when we
when we add up these dots, these bread crumbs, it's
completely possible that there's an argument for a criminal underground
or the mob. Can I add one extra thing on
top of this mob connection, because I can totally see
(42:20):
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 that's why he ended up getting taken
out m M. And then that's the mob connections that
(42:45):
are arranging his funeral or you know, paying for his funeral,
putting him by his sister. What if he was a rat? Maybe?
I mean, the only the cops did hold that funeral, right,
there was a funeral service, But the detect is on
the case. We're the only people who attended the funeral,
which also makes you think, you know what I mean,
(43:05):
because it's just a case. Why would you go to
the funeral to case the joint to see if anybody
shows up, right, to see if someone takes the bait,
or if he is a part of your team, or
if he's you know, if he's one of those undercover cops.
People work undercover at that at that kind of level
(43:26):
of intelligence. It's brutal life, and you know a lot
of times they're never in the spotlight. They can't compromise.
I'm thinking, why Ben, thanks, Matt, I was just gonna
keep saying each other's names in the statement, So breaking
(43:47):
up you two? So um, 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
with out 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
(44:09):
hands were tied. All right, So is that the end
of the story? Not? Not? Not? Really, 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, and like
(44:30):
a lot of residents from residents of Missouri or residents
of Kansas City, this researcher has has a hobby they
look into this these kind of cases, so they are
familiar with the case of Artemus ogle Tree. They receive
an anonymous phone call and the caller first starts asking questions,
have you heard of the Ogle Tree case? You heard
(44:51):
of the person calling themselves rolland t o En 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 died quite recently,
and they found a box. Within this box, there were
multiple newspaper clippings all about the same story, the so
(45:14):
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, and
then they hang up. These people have terrible phone etiquette.
(45:35):
It's like out in television and in film. No one
ever says goodbye on the phone, and there's immediately a
dial tone. As we know, it is not how phones were.
So that's where we're left at this point in twenty nineteen,
the old Artemis ogletree rowin to your story. That's that's
(45:56):
where we're left. Who was this mystery caller? Was it
a surviving relative of Ogle Trees murderer and a surviving
relative or friend of his former lover, his paramore? What
do you think, honestly? Do you think it was mob involvement?
Do you think it was just a I love triangle
(46:19):
gone wrong? Uh? What? Just tell us tell us your
best theory and support it please with arguments. Then then
we will combine all of those, and Ben and Oil
and I will sit around a desk somewhere and we'll
figure it out, just just to ourselves. We will tell you, guys,
about it. And also if you are listening to this
(46:42):
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 to us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter,
you can find us on Instagram, or conspiracy stuff and
or conspiracy stuff show in those places. If you don't
want to do that and you want to tell your
story in three minute bursts, you can call our number.
(47:05):
We are one eight three three st d w y
t K. Leave a message. I've got it up on
my phone again, so I'm I'm like going through them
and putting more stuff out. Did you guys hear the
really weird message we got? I haven't listened, all right,
we should listen to it. It's pretty fun, it's it's great.
(47:27):
Somebody out there has a great sense of humor. Uh well,
you'll hear it soon. It immediately made me want to
do another listener call an episode. We have a treasure trove.
We also have The three of us also have personal
instagrams if you want to follow our individual adventures. Yeah,
mine is at Embryonic Insider, I am at Ben Bullen
(47:50):
and mine is at sitting in the dark alone playing drums.
All just pictures of Matt sitting in the dark alone.
So in the dark. No lights look really dark. It's
just really you have to turn the sound on, right. Yeah,
that's it. You just hear me breathing. That's what the
kids call it. Weird flex. Yeah, yeah, there we go.
And if none of that quite bags your badgers. If
(48:14):
you're tired of social media, you hate being on the phone,
but you want to tell us, uh something about this
case or something fascinating from your neck of the global woods,
we are all ears or in this case eyes. You
can write to us directly. We are conspiracy at how
stuff works dot com.
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.