It was a July evening when Elyse Pahler, 15, sneaked out her bedroom in the Central Coast town of Arroyo Grande, planning to get into some mischief. A boy from school had gotten her number from a friend and invited her to smoke weed in the woods near her family’s home.
The boy was Jacob Delashmutt, also 15, and he brought along two friends. Delashmutt and his schoolmates Royce Casey, 16, and Joseph Fiorella, 14, all shared a passion for death metal, and they formed their own band called Hatred.
One of their favorite groups was Slayer, a popular metal act that featured a song with lyrics about worshiping Satan and sacrificing a blonde, blue-eyed virgin.
Pahler fit that description as she walked to join the three metal heads that night in 1995. Three decades later, Delashmutt described what happened next to a state parole board.
Delashmutt, now 45, said that once they had smoked marijuana, he and the two other boys attacked Pahler when she was distracted by the sound of a passing car. He wrapped his belt around her neck, strangling her while Fiorella stabbed her and Casey held down her arms. Then they each took turns stabbing her with a 12-inch knife, according to his testimony, first in the neck then in the back and shoulders.
Casey told state parole officials this year that Pahler begged for her mother and Jesus before he stomped on the back of her neck. They had planned to violate her remains, Delashmutt testified to the parole board, but instead hid her body in the woods and fled the scene. She wasn’t found until eight months later, when Casey confessed to his pastor.
Royce Casey, Jacob Delashmutt and Joseph Fiorella pictured as teens after their arrest in March 1996. They were convicted of murdering Elyse Pahler, a teenage peer, in a satanic ritual. Casey and Delashmutt were released on parole recently, 30 years after the murder in Arroyo Grande, Calif.
(U.S. District Court for the Central District of California)
Today, two of the killers — including the admitted ringleader — are walking free after receiving parole. But the youngest of the group, Fiorella, remains behind bars despite claims that he is intellectually disabled and that his case was mishandled.
The releases of Casey and Delashmutt this year have come amid a surge of high-profile murder cases from the 1990s entering the parole process. Erik and Lyle Menendez, the Beverly Hills brothers convicted of killing their parents in 1989 as teens, were denied parole this month after a months-long resentencing effort.
Pahler’s murder occurred while the Menendez brothers were on trial, and the grisly killing of a young, white girl provoked a similar level of media frenzy. Prosecutors alleged the death-metal-obsessed teens had plotted to commit the murder as part of a “Satanic ritual.”
Pahler’s family has fought against letting out any of the men over the past decade, with her father, David, often bringing a picture of his daughter to show the parole board.
David Pahler told the board at a 2023 hearing that he believed Casey still lacked remorse, reading from a transcript of Casey’s journal taken when he was arrested in which the teen wrote about believing Satan had “taken my 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.
Casey and Delashmutt pleaded no contest to first-degree murder in 1997, each receiving 25 years to life in prison. Fiorella, also charged with being armed with a deadly weapon, got 26 years to life. Since they became eligible for parole, their paths through the system have led to vastly divergent outcomes.
Casey was denied twice by the board, then approved in 2021 and 2023, only to have Gov. Gavin Newsom reverse the decision. Newsom argued Casey needed to do more work to ensure he would make healthy relationships outside prison and learn the “internal processes” that led him to kill Pahler.
Delashmutt was also denied twice by the parole board in 2017 and 2022 and once by the governor’s reversal in 2023. The rejections often referenced his tendency to shirk responsibility onto his co-defendants for his role in the murder.
Although Delashmutt was the one who called Pahler and invited her into the woods, at the time of his arrest he blamed the other two for orchestrating the murder and recruiting him to carry it out.
This year, however, Delashmutt told the parole board he was the “ringleader” of the group.
“I know that I am the most responsible for this crime. I had every opportunity to put a stop to it, and I didn’t. I was involved in the planning from the beginning and I made this crime happen. Elyse Pahler was safe in her home that night when she received a phone call from me,” Delashmutt said.
The teens were influenced by death metal music — specifically by Slayer — to channel their anger at the world into physical violence, Casey told the parole board.
“That music, especially Slayer, was all about suicide, murder, sacrifice. So, I started learning a specific way to express those things,” he said.
Pahler’s family unsuccessfully sued Slayer and its record company for its lyrics in 2001, claiming they incited her murder, but lost on 1st Amendment grounds.
Casey was released from Valley State Prison in early August to transitional housing in Los Angeles County, his lawyer told The Times. “Our legal system is not based on emotion,” his lawyer and prison advocate Charles Carbone said.
Despite what was “one of the most notorious crimes committed in San Luis Obispo County,” Carbone said, there has been an “enormous consensus” over the last few years among prison psychologists, the full parole board and the governor that Casey should go home.
Delashmutt, who was released in late July, didn’t believe he had a future when he was a teen, said parole hearing lawyer Patrick Sparks.
“His background was about a lot of poor decisions,” he said. “He started to change his life, and it gave him hope for the future again.”
Both apologized.
“I want to acknowledge all of the pain and the trauma that I’ve caused,” Delashmutt said. “It is impossible for me to understand the magnitude of the crime, the impact that it’s had on the Pahler family.”
Casey said he remembered how David Pahler often brought a picture of his daughter to the hearing.
“Something that I remember hearing over time when Elyse’s dad has come, is that she has a face. And I try to remember every day, whatever decision I’m making or whatever I do, that the ongoing impact of what I did is present all the time.”
Fiorella, unlike the other two men, has yet to participate openly in a parole hearing, according to hearing transcripts from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He waived attendance for a 2019 hearing, and, according to the transcripts, was advised by his lawyer, Dennis Cusick, not to speak or answer questions in his most recent hearing in 2023.
Cusick declined to comment on whether his client would attend or participate in an upcoming parole hearing scheduled for next year.
Court filings show Fiorella has long looked to overturn his conviction, arguing that a court-appointed defense attorney failed to give his due diligence prior to accepting the plea deal.
A complaint filed in the Central District of California in November 2023 argues that Fiorella’s first trial lawyer, David Hurst, waived a fitness hearing after receiving a neuropsychologist’s report that Fiorella was developmentally disabled and had an IQ score of 68, indicating a mild intellectual disability.
Hurst said in a 2020 deposition that he “felt that we would lose the fitness hearing and it would be a waste of time,” despite knowing about the report and other circumstances of Fiorella’s life, the complaint said.
Hurst was terminally ill at the time of his deposition, the complaint notes, and died by the end of the year before an evidentiary hearing.
Fiorella scored at just above an eighth-grade level on a basic education test, according to a transcript of his 2023 parole hearing. He earned a GED more than two decades prior, in 2002, but the parole board noted a report from a doctor who alleged he could not pass it and paid someone to take it for him.
Cusick argued to the parole board that Fiorella is still developmentally disabled and “is not the kind of person to take on a leadership role in anything.” The habeas corpus complaint repeatedly characterized a teenage Fiorella as a shy, quiet child who was teased by peers for being “slow.” It also challenged the idea that he orchestrated the murder, instead placing blame on Delashmutt.
Fiorella’s complaint has gone through several levels of state and federal courts, with most agreeing that the challenge to his conviction was years past the statute of limitations. Courts also said it was questionable whether the forgone fitness hearing, as his trial lawyer suggested, would have resulted in any action.
The complaint was dismissed and then appealed in March to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That case is awaiting an opening brief due in November.
Fiorella’s federal public defender, Raj Shah, did not respond to requests for comment.
In his 2023 hearing, a representative of the San Luis Obispo County district attorney’s office, Lisa Dunn, opposed Fiorella’s release, arguing he had not done the work necessary to prove he was ready for parole.
“Mr. Fiorella, frankly, is a dangerous individual,” Dunn said. “He’s been dangerous since he was 15, and there’s no evidence to support a finding that he’s less dangerous now.”
