Ossiana Tepfenhart
The Man In Room No.1046
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Imagine a mystery that just never made sense, unless you were dealing with a spy. That’s what this strange case entails. Early one day during the 1930s, a man named Roland T. Owen checked into the Hotel President in Kansas. He was a strange man, with a cauliflower ear, a scalp scar, and almost no luggage to speak of.
He went to his room, number 1046, and that’s when things got weird. A nearby maid claimed to see Owen appear scared and fidgety. Once she finished cleaning the room, he asked the maid to leave the door unlocked because he was expecting “company.”
On the desk, he left a note saying, “Don, I will be back in 15 minutes. Wait.”
Later on, the door was locked from the outside, but Owen was still inside. The maid, curious, pressed her ear on the wall. She overheard him tell someone that he didn’t want to eat. She thought nothing of it, and went on her merry way.
The next day, a man named Richard Lane picked up a man who checked into the hotel. The man, identified as Owen, told him he was going to kill someone later that night. However, it was Owen’s body that was discovered early the next morning by staff.
Believe it or not, Owen was still alive, though it was clear he was tortured. Despite pressing from police, he refused to say who did it to him or why. He insisted he fell in a bathtub. Within hours, he died.
An investigation ensued, and it was revealed that Roland T. Owen wasn’t a real name. No one knows who he was, where his family was, or why he was murdered. He remains a John Doe to this day.