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. His death was preceded by a two-day stay in Room 1046 at the Hotel President in what is now the city's Power & Light District marked by communication with someone named "Don", and unusual behavior and incidents noted by the hotel's staff, before he was found wounded in his room the morning of his death. 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 "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. She said he had left Birmingham in 1934 at the age of 17 to hitchhike to California. Later she received two letters purportedly from him, some from as far away as Egypt. In August 1935, a caller claiming to be from Memphis, Tennessee told her that Artemus was in Cairo. The letters had also been sent after Artemus' death. Records kept by shipping companies found no records that Ogletree had gone to Egypt. No other suspect has ever been identified. 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". The FBI later investigated but was unable to produce any new leads. In 2012, a historian at the Kansas City Public Library wrote two posts on the library's blog about the case. At the end of the last one he revealed that in 2003 or 2004, he had taken a call from someone out of state related to the case. The caller said that they had been helping to inventory the belongings of a recently deceased elderly person when they found a box with newspaper clippings about the Ogletree case and an item mentioned repeatedly in the stories, but they refused to say what that item was. The Kansas City police continue to investigate.
Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Murder of Artemus Ogletree (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).Murder of Artemus Ogletree
West 14th Street, Downtown Kansas City
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| Latitude | Longitude |
|---|---|
| N 39.0975 ° | E -94.5843 ° |
Address
Hilton President Kansas City
West 14th Street 1329
64105 Downtown Kansas City
Missouri, United States
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