In the early evening of July 22, 1995 Royce Casey, Jacob Delashmutt and Joseph Fiorella convinced 15-year-old Elyse Pahler to come hang out with them and party at a favorite spot of theirs in a eucalyptus grove on the Nipomo Mesa. Pahler had been well acquainted with the boys, who played in a local heavy metal band known as Hatred. She had no idea that they had spent months plotting her murder.
Jacob Delashmutt was the first to strike. He removed his belt from his waist and wrapped it around Elyse’s neck. Royce Casey held the girl down as Jacob Fiorella pulled a hunting knife from out of a sheath in his pocket and plunged the knife straight into her neck. Elyse prayed and cried for her mother to help her as the stabbings continued. An autopsy report later revealed that she had been stabbed a total of 12 times. All of the stab wounds determined to have been non-fatal, meaning that Elyse was forced to slowly and painfully bleed to death as the boys looked on.
After the boys determined that Elyse was finally dead they started raping her corpse. This continued on for the eight months that Elyse’s body had been hidden in the woods. Though her family had reported her as a missing person, investigators may have never found her body if not for a confession from Royce Casey.
Casey went to police after he claims that he had found God. He led investigators where Elyse’s body had been hidden and began telling investigators the shocking reasons for the killing.
Casey, who played guitar in his Slayer-inspired heavy metal band, said that he and the other band members had been reading up on Satanism. Casey believed that killing the girl as a virgin sacrifice would somehow give him otherworldly powers, including the ability to play guitar better. It was during band practice that Casey, Delashmutt and Fiorella began hatching their devious plot.
According to Casey, it wasn’t the first time the band mates attempted to take Pahler’s life. He said they specifically wanted to kill her because she was a blonde haired, blue eyed virgin and they believed that Satan would be most pleased with the sacrifice, ultimately bestowing the boys with the ability to play so well that they could finally get a record contract.
The teens lured the girl to another remote area where one of the boys pretended to slip down a steep ravine believing that she would follow him down. Fiorella tossed another teen a knife and the boys started chanting “Do it! Do it!” But the other boy just stood there. Casey believes that Elyse must have thought they were joking around, which is why she never reported the incident and had agreed to meet with the boys again.
Both Delashmutt and Fiorella denied any involvement in Satanism, but did admit that they had all played a part in the girl’s death and that they had been inspired by the music of Slayer – a quote that may have been taken out of context, but was a field day for attorneys representing the Pahler famly in civil lawsuit against the band.
The three boys plead no contest. A jury found them guilty and sentenced them all to serve 26 years to life in prison.
The story wasn’t over though. In 2001, the brutal murder of Elyse Pahler was once again in the headlines when her family took Slayer and Sony Music to court on grounds that their music was what had inspired the teens to murder their daughter.
Delashmutt says that though he and the other boys enjoyed Slayer’s music, it wasn’t Slayer that ultimately drove them to kill Elyse Pahler. Delashmutt says that Fiorella had long obsessed over the girl and had become even more obsessed with killing her. Predictably, the case was eventually thrown out based on the band’s First Amendment rights.
Defense attorney Scott Harrington told the press, “There’s not a legal position that could be taken that would make the band responsible. Where do you draw the line? You might as well start looking through the library at every book on the shelf.”
His words seemed to echo a judge’s ruling in another remarkably similar case when two families attempted to sue the band Judas Priest in 1985 for hiding subliminal messages in their songs and claimed to have ultimately inspired two teens to attempt suicide. One of the young men died, while another was able to survive the ordeal. Though bizarrely enough, the judge suggested that he believed subliminal messages had been masked on their records, the band was still protected under the First Amendment.