A Las Vegas journalist’s worst fears about confronting his “disgusting slob” of a roommate came to pass when he was allegedly murdered by the man who then concealed his corpse in a storage unit, according to police and reports.
Before he was found dead, Matthew Scott Kelemen, a gifted and well-respected reporter in Sin City, had told his family and friends that his relationship with his roommate, Joseph Del Rivo, 63, had been disintegrating, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Kelemen, 56, had planned to confront his Del Rivo, but admitted to his family he was “worried about how [Del Rivo’s] going to act,” his sister Mikki Zaferatos told the outlet.
“He’d only lived there for about six months, but he kept telling [our] brother what a strange guy this was,” Zaferatos said Kelemen said of his roommate. “He said he was really uneasy living there. ‘The guy was a disgusting slob,’ were his words.”
When he finally did, at some point during the confrontation, Del Rivo bashed Kelemen’s head in and then stuffed his body in what his family thinks was a metal amplifier box, cops said, according to the Review-Journal.
On May 19, Rivo dropped off the box containing Kelemen’s corpse at a storage facility and told them that he or someone else would be back to pick up the box in about a week. The following day, employees at the storage facility called cops after smelling a foul odor emanating from the box, the publication reported.
Officers arrived and discovered Kelemen’s decomposing body. Homicide detectives were then called in due to the “suspicious nature” of the case, police said.
Zaferatos said she learned about her brother’s murder when she received a call from the medical examiner’s office.
“They asked me my relationship to Matthew Kelemen, and I said, ‘That’s my brother.’ I thought maybe he got in a car accident or something,” Zaferatos said. “And they told me, ‘They found his remains in a box.’ That was how I found out.”
“I’m barely holding it together,” she told the Review-Journal two days after Keleman’s body was found. “I could not process what was going through my brain.”
Cops circled in on Del Rivo as the prime suspect after speaking with storage facility employees.
But they didn’t get a chance to question him.
On May 20, Del Rivo was involved in an unrelated high-speed police chase in Utah and died when he crashed his car and was thrown from the vehicle while trying to evade officers, according to police.
A Utah Highway Patrol trooper witnessed his car speeding on Interstate 70 near milepost 30 at about 5:45 p.m., according to police. He reached speeds of 140 mph and higher, the police said in the release.
Cops laid out road spikes and when Del Rivo hit them, he continued driving east on I-70 for approximately three miles. They threw down more spikes and Del Rivo swerved to avoid them when he crashed and was ejected.
He was pronounced dead at the scene.
