In January of 1935, a young man checked into a hotel in Kansas City under the pseudonym Roland T. Owen, with only a hairbrush, a comb, and a tube of toothpaste to his name. A couple of days later, he was found naked, bound and obviously tortured in his blood-splashed room. Who was this murdered man with the fake name? Why was he constantly sitting in the dark? Who was the mysterious “Don” he talked to on the phone? Why was he running down the street clad only in pants and an undershirt? Who anonymously paid for his funeral and a bouquet of roses? Who sent cryptic typed letters to his mother months after his death?

Everyone loves an unsolved murder, and the mystery of room 1046 is one of the eeriest unsolved crimes in American history. On this episode, Tom and Jenny give a timeline of the bizarre events leading up to the man’s death, and speculate as to what might have befallen the doomed occupant of the Hotel President.

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So the police of Kansas City. Mo., might have parodied the old adage on that morning,in 1935, when the curtain rose on one of the strangest murder mysteries in the annals of American crime.