Vegas journalist killed by roommate and stuffed into a box after confronting him for being a disgusting slob: cops

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 f...