Murder of Artemus Ogletree

On January 5, 1935, a man who had given his name as Roland T. Owen, later identified as Artemus Ogletree, died at a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, United States from beating and stabbing injuries.When no next of kin could be located, leading to suspicions that his name was an alias, his body was stored in a local funeral parlor for almost two months.A planned burial in the city's potter's field was averted when an anonymous donor provided funds for a funeral and a floral arrangement signed by the name "Louise."The man's true identity remained unknown for a year and a half until Ruby Ogletree, an Alabama woman who had seen a photo of a distinctive scar on his head in the news, identified him as her son Artemus.The letters later were used to link the killing to a 1937 murder in New York, but no charges were filed against the man arrested in that case, one of whose aliases had been "Donald Kelso."[3] Early on the afternoon of January 2, 1935, Ogletree walked into the Hotel President, in what is now the Power & Light District of Kansas City, Missouri, and asked for an interior room several floors up, giving his name as Roland T. Owen, with a Los Angeles address.Elevator operator Charles Blocher, who began his shift at midnight, reported later that he was fairly busy until 1:30 a.m. After that time, most of the hotel quieted down for the night, except for a loud party in Room 1055.Five minutes later, the elevator was summoned there again; it turned out to be the same woman, who expressed puzzlement that her client was not in Room 1046 since, she said, he had called her and on previous visits with him he had always been present.At 11 p.m. Robert Lane, a city worker driving on 13th Street near Lydia Avenue, saw a man dressed in only an undershirt, pants and shoes run into his path and flag him down.[4] At the nearby intersection of 12th Street and Troost Avenue, where taxi drivers often waited for fares during the overnight hours, Lane stopped and let the man out.This time he had a key, and after his knocks drew no response, he opened the door and found Ogletree on his knees and elbows two feet (60 cm) away, his head bloodied.Propst turned the light on, put the phone back on the hook, and then noticed blood on the walls of both the main room and bathroom, as well as on the bed itself.[7] The Kansas City Police Department (KCPD) began investigating immediately by interviewing Jean Owen, whose identical last name and proximity to the dead man overnight struck them as interesting.[7] There were no knives, which led to the dismissal of suicide as a cause of Ogletree's death since the stab wounds in his chest could not be accounted for; the cords tying him up also suggested the involvement of others.Detectives found some other items that might have been evidence: a hairpin, safety pin, unsmoked cigarette, and a full bottle of diluted sulfuric acid.The dead man's fingerprints were sent to what was at the time the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) to find a possible match in their collection.On January 6, the Sunday newspapers reported that the man in Room 1046 had died under an assumed name, and tips began coming in.Members of the public went to the local funeral home where he had been laid out, leading Lane to tell police of his encounter with the man.[7] Wire services began picking up the story, and it ran in newspapers and on radio around the country, with requests to send photographs to Kansas City.[7] In Kansas City, an early lead proved false when a bloodied towel found at the hotel turned out to have been used to clean up Room 1046 after the police had left.[7] The case returned to the newspapers on March 3, when the funeral home where the body had been kept announced it would be burying the man in the city's potter's field the next day.On March 23, the funeral home received a delivery envelope, the address carefully lettered using a ruler with $25 ($600 in current dollars[5]) wrapped in newspaper; it was enough to cover the expenses.One of these finally did, when a friend of Ruby Ogletree in Birmingham, Alabama, showed her an issue of The American Weekly, a Sunday newspaper supplement published by the Hearst Corporation, with an article about the case.The unidentified man looked a great deal like her son Artemus,[7] whom the family had not seen since he left to hitchhike to California in 1934, although he had kept up correspondence with them.[3] Ruby contacted the KCPD, and was able to provide enough information about the previous pseudonymous corpse, including a description of his head scar, which she explained was the result of a childhood accident in which some hot grease had spilled there.In November, another issue of the supplement carried a story identifying the man as Artemus Ogletree and explaining how his identity had been determined.The man identified himself as Godfrey Jordan, but Ruby told police that she believed he was actually Joe Simpson—a friend who Artemus left home with.[2] Information developed through the police's conversations with Ruby Ogletree helped them establish a third hotel in Kansas City—the St. Regis—where Artemus had stayed.[7] In 2003 or 2004, John Horner, a local historian at the Kansas City Public Library, fielded a call from someone out of state who said they had been helping to inventory the belongings of an elderly person who had recently died.[6] Lastly, it has been suggested that "Don", whoever he was, killed Ogletree for some personal reason, either with the help of the "commercial woman" Blocher saw in the hotel late that night or by himself.