Two of the three men convicted as teens in the grisly 1995 death-metal-inspired murder of a 15-year-old San Luis Obispo County girl, including the self-proclaimed ringleader, are out of prison, according to multiple media reports.
The unimaginable violence unfolded in July that year when Elyse Pahler snuck out of her family’s Arroyo Grande home on an invitation from Jacob Delashmutt, then 17, to smoke some weed in the woods.
Pahler and Delashmutt were joined by Royce Casey, also 17, and then 15-year-old Joseph Fiorella, according to the San Luis Obispo Tribune.
The three boys had their own death metal band called Hatred, with one of their favorite groups being Slayer, a thrash metal band from Huntington Park, California famous for dark, occult-laced lyrics, including one song about sacrificing a blond, blue-eyed virgin and worshiping Satan.
At a parole board hearing 30 years later, Delashmutt, now 47, said after the group got high, he put a belt around Pahler’s neck, strangling her while Casey held her arms down and Fiorella stabbed her. The boys, he said, then took turns stabbing her with a 12-inch blade, first in the neck and then in her back and shoulders.
In his parole board hearing, Casey, now 47, noted that he delivered the final blow to Pahler, stomping on the back of her neck as she cried out for her mother and Jesus.
The trio had originally intended to further violate her body. They instead hid her remains in the woods where she was discovered eight months later, only after Casey confessed the brutal killing to his pastor who reported it to law enforcement.
During their trial, prosecutors argued that the boys, obsessed with death metal, plotted to kill Pahler as part of a ‘satanic ritual.’
Delashmutt and Casey pleaded no-contest to first degree murder and were sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison at the end of the 1997 trial. Fiorella, who had an added charge of being armed with a deadly weapon, got 26 years to life.
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Elyse Pahler, 15, a resident of Arroyo Grande, California was murdered by three teenage boys in 1995. (SLOCSO) -
Jacob Delashmutt, 47, pled no contest to the first-degree murder of Elyse Pahler in 1995. (CDCR) -
Royce Casey, 47, pled no contest to the first-degree murder of Elyse Pahler in 1995. (CDCR) -
Joseph Fiorella, 45, is the only person convicted of the 1995 slaying of Elyse Pahler, 15, who remains in prison. (CDCR)
According to the Los Angeles Times, Delashmutt, who was the one to invite Pahler out that night, blamed the other two, saying they orchestrated it and convinced him to participate. He had previously been denied parole by the board in 2017 and 2022. In 2023, Govenor Gavin Newsom reversed a decision to grant him parole.
Likewise, Casey was denied by the board two times and blocked from release in 2021 and 2023 after Newsom reversed those decisions.
Now, both men are out of prison.
Delashmutt was released in late July after admitting in his parole board hearing that he was the “ringleader” and “the most responsible for the crime,” The Times reported.
In early August, Casey was released to transitional housing in Los Angeles County from Valley State Prison in Chowchilla after acknowledging in his hearing “all the pain and trauma” he caused. He also said it was “impossible” for him to comprehend the amount of pain he has put the Pahler family through.
David Pahler, the 15-year-old girl’s father, has repeatedly fought against the release of his daughter’s killers, often bringing a photo of her to the hearings.
In Casey’s 2023 parole hearing, David Pahler quoted a transcript from Casey’s journal, taken as evidence during his arrest, in which the then teen wrote that he believed Satan had taken control of his “soul and replaced it with a new one to carry out his work on earth.”
“If you give up your soul to Satan, how do you get it back? How do you get it back? I — I don’t have an answer for that,” Pahler said, according to a transcript of the hearing obtained by The Times.
Fiorella, described by Lisa Dunn with the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office as a person who has “been dangerous since he was 15,” remains in prison despite claims that he is intellectually disabled and that his original lawyer, now deceased, mishandled his defense.
His current attorney, Dennis Cusick, filed a complaint in the Central District of California in Nov. 2023 about the allegations, which was dismissed and then appealed earlier this year to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. An opening brief in the case is scheduled for November.