Photo: Las Vegas Metropolitan Police
A registered sex offender is accused of killing his roommate and living with her body hidden in a barricaded closet for two months out of fear she'd return from the dead, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a press release shared last Thursday (July 27).
George Anthony Bone, 31, a level-three registered sex offender in Nevada, was charged with murder after the decomposed body of the victim, identified as Beverly Ma, a high school friend of Bone, was found by her family inside the shared home. Bone told police that he knew Ma, who moved in with him last summer, had been dead for "a while," but claimed she had died by suicide, according to court documents obtained by 8 News Now.
Ma's family was present at the home one day prior in order to hash out the cause for an unusually high air conditioning bill, at which point he allegedly told a female relative that Ma was "dead and gone" and had been in the closet for 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 court documents state. “George told her that she can open it and see.”
Police determined that Ma was the victim of a homicide and suspect strangulation to be the cause, however, an investigation is ongoing. The department said Ma placed a frantic 911 call on May 4 in which a man and woman were heard screaming at one another before the woman's voice asks, "Why" before the call ends.
Officers went to the scene the following day and knocked on the door but no one answered.
“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,” the court records state.
Bone is also accused of ordering more than 170 items charged to Ma's Amazon account, as well as using her phone to text someone as her and claim she couldn't attend a Fourth of July party because she “wanted to be sober, not travel and not be around people,”according to police. Bone also reportedly set the apartment's air conditioning to 60 degrees as he believed it would limit flies from entering the house with Ma's decomposed body barricaded in the closet, the Review-Journal reported.
Bone accepted a no-contest plea in 2013 in relation to an incident in which he allegedly assaulted an 11-year-old girl two years prior, which resulted in registering as a level-three sex offender in Nevada, as well as being sentenced to two to eight years in state prison, according to court records.