A Las Vegas sex offender killed his roommate and lived with her decomposing body inside a barricaded closet for two months out of fear she would come back from the dead, police said.
George Anthony Bone, 31, was arrested Wednesday and charged with murder after the woman’s family found her corpse inside the shared home, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
The victim was identified as Beverly Ma, Bone’s longtime friend from high school who moved in with Bone last summer.
The accused killer allegedly told cops he knew that Ma had been dead for “a while” and that she had committed suicide, according to court documents obtained by 8 News Now.
Investigators were called to the grisly scene after Ma’s family had visited the home earlier in the day to hash out the cause of an unusually high air conditioning bill.
Bone allegedly told the female family member that Ma was “dead and gone” and had been in the closet for two months before offering to show her the body.
“She noticed a cooler against the bedroom closet door and the bottom of the door had a towel, which covered the gap,” the documents state.
“George told her that she can open it and see.”
Though the cause of Ma’s death is still under investigation, police determined she was a victim of a homicide and suspect she was strangled, the documents show.
Investigators also believe she was killed on May 4 — the same day she made a frantic 911 call in which a man and a woman can be heard screaming at one another with the call ending with a woman’s voice saying “Why.”
When police responded that day and knocked on the door, no one answered, police said.
“When asked why he didn’t call for help, Bone’s response was ‘I was afraid of going back to jail… for being found with a dead body,” according to court records.
Bone instead continued living in the house with Ma’s decomposing body and allegedly took advantage of his dead roommate’s finances.
He is accused of ordering more than 170 items that were charged to Ma’s Bone Amazon account and using her phone to text someone that she could not attend a July 4 party because she “wanted to be sober, not travel and not be around people,” police said.
He also set the air conditioning to 60 degrees because he thought it would limit the number of flies that were in the house, the Review-Journal reported.
“That was me being simultaneously superstitious and um, just distraught,” Bone said of the statement. “Just watching too many horror movies and ghost stories growing up.”
Bone is a level-three registered sex offender in Nevada after accepting a no-contest plea in 2013 to attempted lewdness with a child under 14. He was sentenced to two to eight years in state prison, court records show.
He was initially arrested before for allegedly sexually assaulting a girl two years earlier when she was 11.
