Three teenagers committed the “Satan” murder case. Why is there only one still in prison?

It was a July evening when 15-year-old Elyse Pahler sneaked out of the bedroom of Arroyo Grande, a small central coast town, planning to fall into some prank. A school boy got her phone number from a friend and invited her to smoke marijuana in the woods near her family’s house.

The boy is Jacob Delashmutt, also 15 years old, who brought two friends. Delashmutt and his classmates, Royce Casey, 16, and Joseph Fiorella, 14, both had passion for death metal, forming their own band called hatred.

One of their favorite groups is Slayer, a popular metal show that contains a song about the lyrics about the worship of Satan and sacrifices the blonde blue-eyed virgin.

Pahler fits this description when he added three metal heads that night in 1995. Thirty years later, Delashmutt describes what happened next to the state parole board.

Delashmutt, 45, said he and two other boys attacked Paler when they were distracted by the sound of passing cars once smoking marijuana. He wrapped the belt around her neck and strangled her, while Fiora stabbed her and Casey held her by the arm. Then, each of them stabbed her with a 12-inch knife, first on the neck, then on the back and shoulders, according to his testimony.

Casey told state parole officials this year that Pahler begged her mother and Jesus and then stepped on the back of her neck. They plan to violate her body, Delashmutt testified to the parole board, but hid her body in the woods and fled the scene. It was not until eight months later that Casey admitted to his pastor that she discovered it.

Today, two killers, including the recognized leader, walk freely after being parole. But despite his claim to be intellectually disabled and his case is inappropriate, the smallest group in the organization remains in prison.

The issuance of Casey and Delashmutt has surged in high-profile murders entering the parole process in the 1990s. Erik and Lyle Menendez, brothers convicted of killing their parents in 1989, were denied parole this month after months of attitude efforts.

Pahler’s murder took place on trial at the Menendez Brothers, and the harsh killing of a young white girl stirred up a similar level of media madness. Prosecutors accused death metal obsessed teenagers of murder as part of a “satanic ritual.”

Pahler’s family fought with her father, David, who often showed photos of his daughter’s Dare Board, unwilling to release anyone for the past decade.

David Pahler told the board at a 2023 hearing that he believes Casey still lacks remorse, reading from Casey’s diary about his arrest, the teenager wrote that he believed that Satan “bringed my soul to my soul and replaced his work with a new soul to do his work on earth.”

Paler said: “If you give up your soul to Satan, how do you take it back? How are you back? I-I don’t have an answer.”

Casey and Delashmutt were sentenced to 25 years in prison each time without fighting for first-degree murder in 1997. Fiorella is also accused of arming a deadly weapon and has been alive for 26 years. Since they are eligible for parole, their path through the system has resulted in a huge disagreement result.

Casey was rejected twice by the board and then approved in 2021 and 2023, only allowing Gov. Gavin Newsom to overturn the decision. Newsom believes Casey needs to do more work to ensure he will build a healthy relationship outside of prison and learn the “internal procedures” that led him to kill Pahler.

Delashmutt was denied twice by the parole committee in 2017 and 2022, and was denied in 2023 once reversed by the governor. The rejection rate usually tends to refer him to his co-defendant for the role of his co-defendant in the murder case.

Although Delashmutt was the one who called Pahler and invited her into the woods, when he was arrested, he blamed the other two for planning a murder and recruiting him for the murder.

However, Drashmut told the parole board this year that he was the “head of the group.”

“I know I’m the most responsible person for this crime. I had the chance to stop, but I didn’t. I was involved in the program from the beginning and I made the crime happen. That night, when she got my call, Elyse Pahler was safe at home,” Delashmutt said.

Casey told the parole board that teenagers were influenced by death metal music, especially killers, to direct their anger toward physical violence.

“That kind of music, especially killers, is all about suicide, murder, sacrifice. So I started to learn a specific way to express these things.”

Pahler’s family failed to sue Slayer and its record label in 2001, claiming they incited her murder but lost on First Amendment grounds.

Casey was released from the Valley State Prison to transitional housing from Los Angeles County in early August, his attorney told The Times. “Our legal system is not based on emotion,” said Charles Carbone, his lawyer and prison advocate.

Despite being “one of the most notorious crimes committed in San Luis Obispo County,” Carborn said that in the past few years, prison psychologists, the entire parole board and the governor should go home, a “huge consensus” has been reached in the past few years.

Delashmutt was released in late July and he did not believe he had a future as a teenager.

“His background was a lot of inappropriate decisions,” he said. “He started to change his life and it gave him hope for the future.”

Apologizes both.

“I want to acknowledge all the pain and trauma I have caused,” Delashmutt said. “It is impossible for me to understand the size of the crime, the impact on the Paler family.”

Casey said he remembered how David Pahler often brought hearings to his daughter.

“I remember as time went by, Elyse’s father came and she had a face.

Fiorella, unlike the other two men, has not been publicly attending a parole hearing, according to hearing records from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He gave up attendance at the 2019 hearing, and according to the transcript, his attorney, Dennis Cusick, suggested speaking or answering questions at the latest hearing in 2023.

Cusick declined to comment on whether his clients will attend or attend the upcoming parole hearing next year.

Court documents show Fiorella has long wanted to overturn his belief that the court-appointed defense attorney failed to conduct due diligence before accepting the plea agreement.

In November 2023, a complaint filed in central California argued that Fiorella’s first trial attorney, David Hurst, gave up on the fitness hearing after receiving a report from a neuropsychologist, that Fiorella is a developing disabled person with an IQ score of 68, indicating intellectual disability.

Hearst said in his 2020 testimony that he “thinks we will lose the fitness hearing, which will be a waste of time” despite knowing about the report and other circumstances of Fiorella’s life.

The complaint states that Hurst suffered a terminal illness during the deposition and died at the end of the year of the evidence hearing.

According to his transcript of his 2023 parole hearing, Fiora scored just above eighth grade in the basic education test. In 2002, he received a GED for more than two decades, but the parole board noted that a doctor’s report said he could not pass it and paid someone to bring it to him.

Kusik argued to the parole board that Fiorella is still developing with disabilities and is “not the kind of person who plays a leadership role in anything.” Complaints in the habeas industry repeatedly describe teenage Fiorella as a shy, quiet child who is ridiculed by his peers for being “slow.” It also challenges his idea of ​​planning a murder instead of placing the blame on Drashmut.

Fiorella’s complaint has gone through several state and federal courts, and most agree that his conviction challenge is years beyond the statute of limitations. The court also said it is questionable whether a forgotten fitness hearing would lead to any lawsuit, as his trial lawyer suggested.

The complaint was dismissed and then appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal in March. The case is awaiting a summary of the opening ceremony in November.

Fiorella’s federal public defender Raj Shah did not respond to a request for comment.

At the 2023 hearing, Lisa Dunn, a representative of the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office, opposed Fiorella’s release, believing that he had not done the necessary work to prove that he was ready for parole.

“Frankly, Mr. Fiora is a dangerous man,” Dunn said. “He has been dangerous since he was 15 and there is no evidence to support his current dangerous and less dangerous discovery.”