Two killers from shocking ‘satanic’ teen murder case paroled
Pat Pemberton
ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. — Eight months after 15-year-old Elyse Pahler mysteriously vanished from her Arroyo Grande home, another teenager, overwhelmed with guilt, told a pastor about the horrible things he and his two buddies had done.
After Royce Casey subsequently confessed to law enforcement and led detectives to Pahler’s decomposed body, news accounts of the crime would shock the community with details of barbaric violence, death metal music and alleged Satan worship.
“It’s perpetually described as one of the most notorious cases in the county,” said Charles Carbone, a prison rights attorney.
On Friday, 30 years after the gruesome murder, Casey walked out of the Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, set free by a parole board. A month earlier, a co-defendant, Jacob Delashmutt, was also quietly released from custody.
In 1997, Casey, then 17, Delashmutt,16, and Joseph Fiorella, 15, all pled no contest to murder, receiving sentences of 25 years to life in prison. Because the case never went to trial, many questions remained about their motivations and actions.
In March, Casey — who helped break the case — was granted parole for a third time. Governor Gavin Newsom then referred the matter to the entire parole board, which affirmed the decision July 23, 30 years and a day after the murder.
Carbone, who represented Casey, thinks the 47-year-old inmate has met the criteria the state requires for parole.
“He’s spent over three decades in prison,” Carbone said, noting that three psychiatric experts deemed Casey a low risk to re-offend. “It’s not just the time, it’s the quality of the time.”
Allen Hutkin, who has represented the Pahler family, said David Pahler, Elyse’s father, did not object to Casey’s parole, but everyone was shocked Delashmutt was released.
“Neither of the other two should ever get out,” Hutkin said, noting that, unlike Casey, the others had never shown contrition. “That makes no sense whatsoever.”
While Casey has spoken with the board directly, his case for freedom was also spelled out in a 46-page statement he wrote to parole board members in 2021, which Carbone later included in a habeas corpus filing. The statement revealed Casey’s rehabilitation efforts, feelings of remorse, beliefs on causation and shocking details of the crime and its aftermath.
According to Casey, he was an angry, isolated teen, who bonded with the other two over, among other things, their love of death metal music.
“These songs spoke of mass murderers, serial killers, war criminals, and executioners,” he wrote. “They spoke of suicide, murder, satanic ritual, and devil worship.”
The band Slayer in particular resonated with the teens, he wrote — the band’s lyrics made him personally feel powerful — and as the teens sought to emulate the lyrics, eventually Fiorella began describing an obsession with Pahler.
As Pahler’s friends described in a recent Investigation Discovery show, “A Killer Among Friends,” Pahler was a well-liked, pretty blonde-haired girl with dreams of being an entertainer.
By May of 1995, Casey wrote, the trio had had discussed sacrificing a person two dozen times — several times a week over the course of about two months. Eventually, they focused on Pahler as a target.
In July, Casey stopped at a market to buy drinks with a female friend when he randomly saw Fiorella and Delashmutt at a pay phone.
“We just got off the phone with Elyse,” Fiorella said. “You know what we’re going to do.”
Casey bid his friend farewell and departed with his accomplices, who discussed their plan as they walked toward Pahler’s home, even brandishing the belt and knife they planned to use on the attack.
“When I saw the belt and knife, I knew this was no longer a hypothetical discussion,” Casey wrote.
After meeting Pahler, who had sneaked out of her home, the group walked to a eucalyptus grove. And after talking and smoking pot, Delashmutt pretended he needed to use the restroom. Instead, he took off his belt and strangled Pahler. As she struggled, all three culprit took turns brutally stabbing her. And as she moaned and cried out for her mother and Jesus, Casey stomped on her head and neck, silencing her.
Casey acknowledged that he could have stopped the crime before or during the assault but did not.
“The knowledge that she was dying must have been horrifying, and she must have been in immense spiritual turmoil and pain, not having any proof what comes after this life,” he wrote.
After the murder, they covered Pahler’s body with sticks and leaves and began walking to Fiorella’s house. The three bragged about their crime and ran and hid each time a car drove by. They were eventually picked up by Delashmutt’s father, who happened to be looking for his son, unaware of what he had done.
At school, Pahler was initially thought to be a runaway, while the trio knew what had happened to her. And when they gathered to play music in their band, Hatred, they celebrated the murder.
“We talked about how each of us would be rewarded by the devil, for what we had done,” Casey wrote. “We talked about how Elyse had fit exactly the image of the perfect sacrifice described in the music we were obsessed with. We talked about Elyse being a trophy for the devil, a girlfriend to add to his winnings.”
Meanwhile, law enforcement suggested Pahler had simply run away from home.
“They never looked for her,” said Hutkin, the family attorney. “They never really made an effort to find her.”
As her parents relentlessly pursued leads from strangers, some with faraway sightings and far-out claims, Elyse Pahler lay deceased just a quarter of a mile from her home.
Three months after the crime, as he witnessed numerous missing flyers throughout the community, Casey began to feel guilt and shame. He wanted to tell his parents, he wrote, but he could not.
Instead, he found a pastor he befriended in January.
“I was trying to work up the courage to come forward,” he told the parole board during his 2021 hearing, “but I kept finding excuses why not to.”
Finally, on March 14, 1996, he told the clergyman what he had done.
“In time, as I tried to go on with my life, as I tried to force myself to change into a murderer in my very being, my guilt, shame, and emotional pain — my conscience — finally became too immense to ignore,” he wrote. “I had all this time to live my life as if nothing had happened, laughing, going to school, spending time with my friends and family — doing all the things Elyse could no longer do because of me.”
After the so-called “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s was exposed as a moral panic, with unsubstantiated claims of satanic ritual abuse, the Pahler murder garnered national and international attention, renewing fears of sensational devil worship and questions of the impact of death metal music with violent lyrics.
The Pahlers sued Slayer, producer Rick Rubin and music labels, saying the influential music was wrongly marketed toward youths, but they lost on First Amendment grounds in 2001. As the suit was pending, during an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Fiorella claimed the music didn’t motivate the murder, suggesting the public was desperate for a reason.
“It was a small town and a big murder,” he told the magazine. “They needed to know why it happened.”
Both Carbone and Hutkin believe the songs were impactful.
“I don’t blame the music, per se — I think there are a lot of causative factors beyond it,” Carbone said, noting the teens were profoundly troubled and using drugs. “The motive here was inspired by the music.”
Casey, who went into detail about the impact of music, also cited isolation, loneliness, drugs and a need to be accepted as contributing factors for the crime.
When determining eligibility for release, parole boards look to multiple factors, including expressions of remorse, understanding the cause of a crime and a plan for post-prison life. But releasing killers in well-publicized cases is also politically fraught. The governor can approve a board’s suitability decision, reject it or send it to the entire parole board for further review.
Newsom had previously rejected Casey’s parole on two occasions.
While David Pahler did not oppose Casey’s release, citing his confession as a factor, Elyse’s survivors were forever changed by Casey’s actions. Both parents have struggled with mental health issues for three decades. And in a 2017 court filing for restitution, David Pahler, a once-successful contractor, described how the couple lost their home and had to rely on food stamps when he could no longer work in the three years after the murder.
“Although they received prison sentences ranging from 25 years to life, it did little to ease the horror of what they’d done,” David Pahler wrote. “The pain of losing my daughter and knowing she suffered will never leave me.”
To this day, Hutkin said, David Pahler feels guilty for not checking on his daughter after she claimed she was going to bed that night.
While David Pahler tried to keep the crime in the public eye for decades, in prison, Casey wanted the opposite, knowing he could face retribution from other inmates if they knew what he had done.
“I have kept my crime — Elyse’s murder — a secret ... I have also kept it a secret that I confessed my crime and turned myself, Jacob, and Joe in to the authorities,” he wrote. “This is also very disfavored among prisoners.”
Fiorella, currently incarcerated at the High Desert State Prison in Susanville, is tentatively due for a parole hearing next June. Meanwhile, neither of his accomplices can return to San Luis Obispo County, nor can they reach out to any of Pahler’s family.
Carbone thinks Casey will be a good parolee and employee.
“It is going to be very slow,” Carbone said. “When you have missed the last 30 years, you don’t just dive back in.”
Editor's note: The author of this piece, Pat Pemberton, appears in the Investigation Discovery show, “A Killer Among Friends,” referenced herein.