George Bone (LVMPD) and the home where he allegedly killed and lived with Beverly Ma (KLAS screenshot)
A 31-year-old man in Nevada was arrested this week for allegedly killing his female roommate inside their shared home and spending more than two months living with her body stuffed in an upstairs bedroom closet which he barricaded shut out of fear she would rise from the makeshift grave.
George Anthony Bone was taken into custody on Wednesday and charged with one count of open murder in the slaying of Beverly Ma, records reviewed by Law&Crime show.
According to a press release from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, officers at about 2:27 p.m. on July 26 responded to a 911 call about a deceased adult female at a residence located in the 5300 block of Railroad River Avenue. Upon arriving at the scene, first responders located the victim, saying that she appeared to have been “deceased for an extended period of time.”
Due to what investigators referred to as “the suspicious nature of the death,” the department’s Homicide Section was dispatched to the scene.
“Through the course of the investigation detectives determined this was a homicide and identified the suspect as the victim’s roommate, 31-year-old George Anthony Bone,” the release states. “He was arrested and booked into the Clark County Detention Center for open murder.”
The victim was later identified as Ma by the Clark County Coroner’s Office.
More details about the scene were revealed in a copy of the probable cause affidavit obtained by Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS-TV.
According to the report, one of Ma’s family members placed the original call to 911 and told the emergency dispatcher that when they went to the home shared by Bone and Ma looking for Ma, Bone told them she was “in the closet and had been there for two months.” The family members were reportedly prompted to go to the home after not speaking to Ma for several weeks and receiving an unusually large air conditioning bill.
Bone and Ma had reportedly known each other since they were classmates in high school and had lived together for about a year.
A female family member reportedly told investigators that Bone told them Ma was “dead and gone,” then led them upstairs to the closet where Ma’s body was being kept when she saw something odd that caught her attention.
“She noticed a cooler against the bedroom closet door and the bottom of the door had a towel, which covered the gap,” the affidavit states, per KLAS. “George told her that she can open it and see.”
That’s when they found Ma’s decomposing body.
Bone reportedly told police that Ma had killed herself in early May, saying he opened the closet and found her with some kind of belt wrapped around her neck. However, Bone’s story of how he found Ma as well as the evidence at the scene reportedly undercut his claim.
“Bone went about living at the house with Beverly deceased in the upstairs closet for the next two months and began ordering several items on Beverly’s Amazon account using her funds for his own gain,” the affidavit reported states. “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.’ Bone admitted that his behavior since the death of Beverly Ma was ‘not normal.’ When asked why he placed a cooler in the master bedroom near the closest, Bone stated that he put it there so that he would be alerted if Beverly rose from the dead like the movie ‘The Grudge.””
Bone admitted to ordering nearly 200 items from Amazon on Ma’s account and also pretending to be her and sending her family members text messages from Ma’s phone, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. He reportedly told police that he kept the air conditioner on its lowest setting following her death because he believed it was the best way to slow the decomposing process and limit the number of flies in the home.
Bone is being held in Clark County Jail without bond and is scheduled to appear in court on Aug. 1.
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