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Propst, who had led Ogletree there two days earlier, was on shift again and drew the assignment.
The door to Room 1046 was locked, with a "Do Not Disturb" sign hanging from the doorknob.
After several loud knocks, a voice from inside told him to enter; however he could not as the door had been locked.
The same voice told him, after another knock, to turn on the lights, but he still could not enter.
Finally, Propst just shouted through the door to hang the phone up, and left.
Propst told Ferguson that the guest in Room 1046 was probably drunk and she should wait another hour.
At 8:30 a.m., the phone had still not been hung up.
Another bellboy, Harold Pike, was sent to the 10th floor.
The "Do Not Disturb" sign was still on the door, and it was still locked, but Pike had a key and let himself in.
Inside he found Ogletree in the dark, lying on the bed naked, apparently drunk.
The light from the hallway showed some dark spots on the bedding, but rather than turn on the room light Pike went to the telephone stand, where he saw the phone had been knocked to the floor.
He put it back on the stand, replacing the handset.
Shortly after 10:30 a.m., another operator reported that the phone in Room 1046 was once again off the hook.
Again Propst was sent to the room to see what was going on; the "Do Not Disturb" sign remained on the knob.
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.
Propst went downstairs immediately for help.
He returned with the assistant manager, but when they did they could only open the door six inches (15 cm), as Ogletree had in the interim fallen on the floor.
Eventually Ogletree got up and when the two hotel employees were able to enter the room, he went and sat on the edge of the bathtub.
The assistant manager called the police; they were joined by Dr. Harold Flanders of Kansas City General Hospital.
Ogletree had been bound with cord around his neck, wrists, and ankles.
His neck had further bruising, suggesting someone had been attempting to strangle him.
He had been stabbed more than once in the chest above the heart; one of these wounds had punctured his lung.
Blows to his head had left him with a skull fracture on the right side.
In addition to the blood Propst had seen, there was some additional spatter on the ceiling.
Dr. Flanders cut the cords from Ogletree's wrist and asked him who had done this to him.
"Nobody", Ogletree answered.
Asked, then, what had caused these injuries, he said he had fallen and hit his head on the bathtub.
The doctor asked if he had been trying to kill himself.
After saying no, Ogletree lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital.
He was completely comatose by the time he arrived and died shortly after midnight on January 5.
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.
They detained her while she told them what she had heard the night before.
After her boyfriend came to the police station and corroborated her account, she was released and returned to Lee's Summit.
Doctors performed an autopsy on Ogletree and determined he had died from his wounds.
Dr. Flanders had examined not just the body but the bloodstains in the room.
Since much of it had dried by the time he had arrived, he estimated the wounds had been inflicted between 4 and 5 a.m. that day, consistent with what Pike had seen and before Propst's first visit.
Detectives searching Room 1046 took note as much of what they did "not" find as what they did.
Consistent with what Propst had observed, there were no clothes in the closets or drawers.
The only evidence of anything other than what Ogletree had been wearing was the tag of a necktie, indicating it had been made by a New Jersey company.
Also missing from the room were the soap, shampoo, and towels provided by the hotel to every room.
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.
One of the room's two glasses was found in the sink, missing a piece; the other was on the shelf.
Detectives found some other items that might have been evidence: a hairpin, safety pin, unsmoked cigarette, and a full bottle of diluted sulfuric acid.
Four fingerprints, small enough that detectives believed they had been a woman's, were found on the room's phone; they could not be matched to Ogletree or to any of the hotel employees who had been known to have entered the room.
The police sought help through the press.
Both of the city's evening newspapers carried the story on their front pages the next day.
"There is no doubt that someone else is mixed up in this", Detective Johnson told reporters, confirming that the case was considered a homicide.
It soon became apparent that "Roland T. Owen" was in all likelihood an alias.
Officers in Kansas City contacted the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to notify next of kin, but were informed that they could find no record that anyone under that name was living in the California city at the time.
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.
A woman called the Hotel President that night to ask what "Roland T. Owen" looked like.
She told the desk that he lived in Clinton, southeast of Kansas City.
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.
After interviewing Lane, Johnson was not as certain as Lane was that the man had been Ogletree, since none of the hotel staff had reported seeing him leave or return during the night of January 3–4.
Police were able to establish one sighting of Ogletree outside the hotel, a report that he had been seen with two women at several "liquor places" on 12th Street.
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.
More leads on the man's identity came in as a result, and the KCPD had to devote considerable time to corresponding with police all over the country via mail and telegram to follow up on leads.
Eventually they were able to eliminate many.
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.
Officers recalled Propst's account that on his way there after he checked in, the man had said that he had left the nearby Muehlebach Hotel after one night due to their high rates, and checked with that hotel's staff.
No Roland T. Owen had checked in there, but staff recalled a man of Ogletree's appearance checking in under the name Eugene K. Scott, also giving Los Angeles as his address, and requesting a room on the interior of the building.
Again, after investigating, the LAPD reported that there was no one by that name in their city.
The mystery seemed solved when a man identified the body as his cousin, but then when the man's sister came to view the body, she confirmed that the cousin had in fact died five years earlier; the resemblance between the two had been very strong.
A week into the investigation, Toni Bernardi, a wrestling promoter from Little Rock, Arkansas, said after viewing the body that the man, identifying himself as Cecil Werner, had approached him around the beginning of December 1934 about wrestling some matches.
Bernardi had referred him to another promoter in Omaha, Nebraska, but that promoter did not recognize Ogletree.
Within a few days, two new homicides in the city drew detectives' attention away from the case, even as more were assigned to the homicide squad.
Leads were still followed, but less vigorously than they had been in the week after the case, and none of them yielded any significant information.
Newspaper coverage likewise dwindled.
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.
That day, the funeral home received a call from a man who asked that the funeral be delayed so they could send the funeral home the money for a grave and service at Memorial Park Cemetery in Kansas City, Kansas, so, the caller said, the dead man would be near his sister.
The funeral director warned the caller he would have to tell the police about the call; the caller said he knew and that did not bother him.
The caller was slightly more forthcoming when the funeral director asked why Ogletree had been killed.
According to the caller, Ogletree had had an affair with one woman while engaged to marry another.
The caller and the two women had apparently arranged the encounter with him at the President in order to exact revenge.
"Cheaters usually get what's coming to them!"
the caller said, and hung up.
The service was postponed per the anonymous caller's request.
On March 23, the funeral home received a delivery envelope, the address carefully lettered using a ruler with $25 ($ in current dollars) wrapped in newspaper; it was enough to cover the expenses.
The sender was unknown.
Two additional envelopes with $5 each were sent to a local florist for an arrangement of 13 American Beauty roses to go with the grave, after a similar call was made to them; both phone calls turned out to have been made from pay phones.
Included with this payment was a card, with disguised handwriting, reading "Love Forever – Louise".
The funeral was held shortly afterwards.
Besides the officiating minister, the only attendees were police detectives, some of whom served as pallbearers.
Other detectives, posing as gravediggers, staked out the grave for the next several days, but no one came to visit.
Several days after the funeral, a woman called the "Kansas City Journal-Post"s newsroom to inform them that their earlier story that the dead man from Room 1046 would be buried in a pauper's grave was incorrect, that he had in fact been given a formal funeral.
She said the funeral home and flower shop could verify this.
Asked to identify herself, she said "Never mind, I know what I'm talking about", Pressed for what that was, she responded, "He got into a jam", and ended the conversation.
Images of the dead man continued to be circulated nationwide in the hope of identifying him.
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, whom the family had not seen since he left to hitchhike to California in 1934, although he had kept up correspondence with them.
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.
While that question had been answered, Ruby's account raised more questions.
She had received several letters purportedly from her son "after" he had been killed.
The first, early in 1935, postmarked in Chicago, aroused her suspicions since it was typewritten, and Artemus as far as she knew did not know how to type.
It was also written in a highly colloquial style, with much slang, that was not consistent with his previous letters.
In May 1935, another letter purportedly from Artemus said he was going to Europe.
It was followed by a special-delivery letter saying that his ship was sailing that day.