Many of us have ever spent the night in hotels, and we are aware that hotel rooms are meant to be provisional and objective. Individuals arrive, they are briefly staying and they go. There is a hotel room in the history of America, however, that turned into the center of a mystery so black and weird that people are still discussing it over eight decades since then. That is Room 1046 of the Hotel President, Kansas City, Missouri. And what occurred in that room in January 1935 is one of the most disturbing unresolved mysteries in the history of the United States.
The whole affair started on January 2 nd 1935 when a man registered himself in Hotel President and was assigned Room 1046. The man identified himself as Roland T Owen. Hotel employees described him as a young man who was well dressed, appeared to be quiet and slightly nervous. He had come in almost without luggage which was not the case. He carried very little money with him and he had the curtains of his room closed all the time. Since the moment of their arrival, there was something wrong about this guest to the hotel staff but no one had given it a second thought.
During the following days the employees of the hotel started to think that something was wrong about the man in Room 1046. When a bellboy purchased him certain things he discovered the room totally dark even in the daytime. Roland T Owen was sitting alone in the darkness. Another time when one of the maids had entered the room to clean it, she found him sitting in a chair staring at nothing. He did not appear to be concerned about quitting the room or dining decently. He got telephone calls and the conversations appeared to be strained and one-sided. During these calls, staff reported him saying such things as no I cannot do that and I don't want to. He appeared to be a man afraid of anything or somebody.
On January 4th, then, a telephone operator in the hotel took a call saying that he wanted to be connected to Room 1046. Towards the end of the same day a maid came in the room to clean, and discovered Roland T Owen lying on the floor of the bathroom. He had been beaten to pieces and stabbed with knives several times. He was still alive but barely. The ambulance was called to work and he was taken to hospital. Investigators searched the hotel room in search of evidence and what they discovered made the mystery even more mysterious. Someone had written on the mirror of the room in lipstick the letters lv, the number 207. No one could tell what this was.
Roland T Owen passed away in hospital on January 9th without ever having sufficiently recovered himself to tell what had befallen him or who had assaulted him. And here with the mystery really impressive. No one could make out his identity. Roland T Owen seemed a thoroughly counterfeit name. He had no identification papers, nobody came to recarrion him and also no one reported his absence. During some time he was buried as a pauper in Kansas City as an unidentified person in a grave.
A few months later there was a woman Louise rolle who came forward and identified the body as her son Don Lyle. But even this was identified with rather more questions than answers. Louise role was highly unwilling to divulge the information about her son and appeared terrified. She knew not, or could not tell why he had been living under a false name, why he had been in Kansas City, or who could have desired to harm him. The investigators made efforts to trace the case, but they continued to hit dead ends. The case was not solved officially.
There has been an emergence of various theories over the years regarding the events that occurred in Room 1046. Others assume Don Lyle was a member of an organized crime and he was murdered by individuals whom he had wronged or owed debts. They believe that he was in some form of espionage or underground operation. The anonymous phone calls, the pseudonym, the weird actions, the coded message on the mirror are all evidence of something far greater than a robbery or a random assault. I believe when an individual is too afraid to even identify under their actual name, then he or she is likely to be evading something of great importance.
What is so ghastening about this case is its own loneliness. A young man entered a hotel room using a fake name and virtually nothing to his name, got threatening phone calls, spent days alone in the city in the dark, and was found dead, with no one willing to work hard to establish what had really happened to him. Even his own mother appeared too much frightened to speak.
As it were, Room 1046 is not merely a mystery of a crime. It is an enigma concerning a man which appeared to vanish out of the world even before he had died. And that is probably the saddest and the most disturbing part of the entire story.