Las Vegas Journalist Feared Confronting His 'Disgusting Slob' Roommate. Days Later, They Both Were Dead

A Las Vegas journalist’s fears about his roommate turned out to be tragically well-founded: He was found murdered inside a storage container — and the roommate, who was the suspect, died days later in a high-speed police chase.

Las Vegas Metro Police discovered the body of Matthew Kelemen, 56, decomposing and wrapped in a tarp inside a locked plastic bin near Fremont Street on May 20 after responding to reports of a foul odor, the department wrote in a press release.

Kelemen, a longtime writer who most recently worked for Las Vegas Magazine, likely died as a result of blunt force trauma, according to documents reviewed by KLAS and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The victim’s sister Mikki Zaferatos told the Review-Journal that investigators believe he was struck from behind with a hammer.

A witness told police the container had been dropped off four days earlier. Investigators quickly determined it had been rented using the Bounce storage app by Kelemen’s roommate, Joseph Del Rivo, per the documents obtained by KLAS and the Review-Journal.

The following day, Del Rivo was killed in Utah during a high-speed police pursuit, according to Utah Highway Patrol. Authorities say Del Rivo was clocked driving more than 90 mph behind a trooper’s vehicle on I-70. When the trooper activated his lights and sirens, Del Rivo fled — reaching speeds of up to 140 mph before hitting spike strips, losing control, and being ejected from the car.

In the days before his death, Kelemen had told his family he planned to move out, Zaferatos told the Review-Journal.

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“He’d only lived there for about six months, but he kept telling my brother what a strange guy [Del Rivo] was,” Zaferatos told the outlet. “He said he was really uneasy living there. ‘The guy was a disgusting slob,’ were his words.”

She said Kelemen had planned to confront his roommate — but told family he was “worried about how [Del Rivo’s] going to act.”

Police told Zaferatos that her brother was shoved into what they described as a large crate.

“We believe that might have been one of my brother’s amplifier boxes,” Zaferatos told the Review-Journal. “Matt played the guitar and he had amplifiers, and it was a big black box.”

Zaferatos said her family has had a “rough couple of days” after the discovery of her brother’s body, which she described as “horror movie stuff.” 

“I’m barely holding it together,” she told the outlet two days after Keleman’s body was found. “I could not process what was going through my brain.”

Keleman had worked as a reporter in the Las Vegas area since he moved there in 2003, and was a staff writer at now-defunct 944 and City Life magazines. At the time of his death, he also freelanced for Las Vegas Weekly and Vegas magazine. His last pieces published before his death were pieces about Janet Jackson and a preview of Memorial Day Weekend in Sin City, respectively.