Some murders look so strange and unusual that they are more like the plot of a thriller and even after several decades they have not been solved, or even one step closer to solving the mystery.
The case from the Hotel President is one of those.
It was a cold winter afternoon on January 2, 1935, when a large and well-dressed man in a black coat walked from the street into the prestigious President Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri (USA).
At first glance, this person stood out from the bulk of the guests. He was tall and had an ugly scar on his cheek, and his ears were slightly rumpled, which betrayed a possible boxer in a man.
The man did not have any luggage with him and had booked a room for one night, specifically requesting a window not facing the street and paying in cash. In the book, he signed as "Roland T. Owen of Los Angeles."
The hallway man Randolph Propst escorted Owen to his room 1046 and saw the man go inside and began to put things from his pockets on the table: a comb, a toothbrush and toothpaste. He had nothing else with him.
Later that day, maid Mary Soptic entered room 1046 to clean the room and saw that Mr. Owen was sitting in a room with almost no light, only a small table lamp, and looked very worried.
Seeing the maid, the man got up from his chair and left the room, asking Mary not to close the door, as he was expecting a friend who should come later. He was very persistent and repeated this several times.
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Four hours later, Mary again came to this room to bring clean towels and again she was surprised by the behavior of the guest. Owen was lying on the bed, dressed over the covers and staring at the ceiling, in an incomprehensible state, as if lost deeply in his thoughts.
Mary managed to notice a note on the table with the words "Don, I'll be back in 15 minutes, wait for me." Deciding that she was in the way, Mary quickly left the room and did not come to it that evening.
Number 1046.
The next morning, January 3, Mary came to the room and saw that for some reason the door was locked from the outside. Using the key, the girl entered the room and saw that Mr. Owen was again sitting in the dark. The room's curtains were drawn, and only a table lamp shone faintly.
The man was talking to someone on the phone and Mary heard part of the conversation. "No, Don, I don't want to eat, I just had breakfast and I'm not hungry," Owen would tell someone. As in the evening, Mary quickly changed towels and left the room, not wanting to disturb the guest.
Towards evening, the maid came to the room again and then she heard two male voices inside. She didn't go inside.
On the night of January 4, at about one o'clock, the rooms next to room 1046 complained of loud noises of a quarrel. It looked like a man and a woman were arguing, but it is possible that there were more people there. Then the sounds of a struggle were heard.
At about 7 am, a hotel employee noticed that the telephone in room 1046 was constantly making sounds, as if the phone had not been hung up. A bellboy Propst was sent to the room, who collided with the locked door, and at his knock, a man's voice from inside told him to go in and turn off the light. In the end, however, no one opened the door.
Then the bellhop knocked on the door of the room several more times, but no one answered him again and there were no sounds. Propst left, and by 8.30 am it became clear that the telephone receiver in room 1046 had never been replaced. And again a bellboy was sent there. This time it was Harold Pike.
Pike knocked on the room unsuccessfully for several minutes, and then he took out a special master key for such occasions and finally entered the room. He found Mr. Owen lying completely naked on the bed, his phone lying on the floor.
Pike thought there was a party in the room and Owen was just drunk. He replaced the receiver and left. But an hour later it was again noticed that the phone in room 1046 had been cut off and now the corridor Prost was sent there.
He saw the Do Not Disturb sign on the handle of the license plate, but no one answered his knock, and then the bellhop opened the door with a lock pick, just like Pike. And only now it became clear that something ominous had happened in the room. Oane lay naked on the floor in a fetal position, his head clutched in both hands, and everything was covered with blood stains. There was blood on the bed, on the sofa, and on the walls.
When the police arrived, they found that Owen was badly injured and miraculously still alive. He was struck several times in the chest with a knife, and then struck on the head with a strong blow with a heavy object. It was also revealed that bruises covered his neck, as well as wrists and ankles. It looked like the man was being tied up and brutally tortured.
When the police arrived, Owen was still conscious and began to say that he himself fell in the bathroom and no one attacked him. But he soon fell into a coma, and later died in the hospital.
When the police began to investigate and examined the crime scene, the seemingly usual murder after a violent quarrel began to take on an almost mystical shade.
First, they didn't find any clothes, neither the one Owen came in, nor the one that the hotel provides, like a bathrobe. A very large amount of blood was found on the walls and the bed, blood was even on the lamp shade, as well as on the tiles in the bathroom.
Four different types of prints were found in the bathroom, so there were four people, including at least one woman, judging by the voice heard. However, this did not give anything, these prints were not in the database.
In the bathroom, two pairs of glasses were also found from evidence to protect the eyes from water, and some of the rubber was roughly torn out of one of the glasses. An untouched cigarette and a small bottle of diluted sulfuric acid were also found there.
No evidence was found in the room other than Owen's blood. Absolutely none, not even prints, as if there were no people at all.
It was soon discovered that the name Roland T. Owen was fake, since a similar person was seen several days before the incident in other hotels in the state, where he also rented a room for a day and in each hotel presented himself with a certain and also fake name.
An interesting testimony was also obtained from a driver named Robert Lane, who a few days before the incident at the President Hotel met "Owen" on the street at night and, according to him, the man was wearing only underpants and a T-shirt. But it was the end of December!
The man was looking for a taxi, and when Lane said he was not a taxi driver, "Owen" began asking him where he could find a taxi. Lane tried to get away from this strange man as soon as possible, but managed to notice that one of his arm was wounded and there was a severe cut.
Then came testimonies from bartenders who saw Oeun several times in the company of two men or a woman. Meanwhile, the police sent out portraits of the murdered man to all nearby districts and hung them on every pole, but they never found anyone who knew or saw him before.
When the body of the deceased was put on public display in the morgue, there were those who allegedly saw him earlier as a boxer, but none of the testimony led the police to break the impasse of the investigation.
When the deceased was buried, no one came to the funeral either, only someone anonymously left a bouquet of flowers with a note “Love forever. Louise . The police tried to find the mysterious Don, with whom the murdered had communicated before his death, but also in vain.
Two years later, it seemed that the case had been solved and the identity of the murdered man had been established. The police were contacted by a woman calling herself Eleanor Oglitrie from Birmingham, Alabama. She saw the portrait of Owen in the newspaper and was sure that it was her brother Artemus, who disappeared in 1934.
She said that her brother suddenly disappeared, and then sent several strange letters to his mother and called her once, but never showed up. When Owen's portrait was sent to Birmingham, they said that the missing Artemus did look like Owen, including he also had a scar on his face.
However, it turned out that Artemus's letters to his mother were written after Owen died. And the call was also at the time when he was dead. Or was it all some kind of fake too?
In 2003, librarian John Horner of Kansas City received a call from an anonymous source who said he had found a box containing a bunch of old newspaper clippings about the murder of Mr. Owen. However, all this also did not lead to any way out of the impasse. The owner of the box was not known, nor was he collecting these clippings for anything.
In general, the whole Owen murder case is surrounded by a whole network of large and small mysteries. Who killed him and why? Was he the victim of a brutal murder or was it an accident? Maybe he was involved in an underground prostitution network and met in hotel rooms with clients who liked to play hard games? Or was it an undercover agent who was dealt with when he did something wrong?