SACRIFICED TO SATAN

SACRIFICED TO SATAN

CREEM POLICE FILES

An unholy trinity: Slayer, the murder of Elyse Pahler, and (maybe) Jennifer’s Body

J. Bennett

They buried her under a pentagram. That’s what the Los Angeles Times said, anyway. There are many details about this fucked-up series of events that remain unclear, but this much is true: Elyse Pahler was 15 years old when three teenage boys sacrificed her to Satan. Court documents called it “one of the most brutal and horrific murders in the history of San Luis Obispo County.”

It happened like this:

It’s the summer of 1995. Three teenage shitbirds have targeted Elyse: 15-year-old Jacob Delashmutt, 14-year-old Joseph Fiorella, and 16-year-old Royce Casey. They lure her to a eucalyptus grove with the promise of weed. They get high. At some point, Delashmutt walks behind her. He takes off his belt. He strangles her with it. As Elyse struggles, Casey tries to subdue her. Fiorella whips out a hunting knife and stabs her in the neck. Repeatedly.

Elyse falls to the ground. Casey and Delashmutt take turns stabbing her in the back. Elyse calls out for her mother. She prays to God. To absolutely no one’s surprise, God doesn’t lift a finger. Casey stomps on the back of her neck. They allegedly take turns raping her—either while she’s alive, after she’s dead, or both. Depending on which shitbird’s version you believe.

All of this happened in Arroyo Grande, California. It’s a suburb of San Luis Obispo, on Cali’s central coast. Elyse had recently finished her freshman year at Arroyo Grande High. She’s the oldest of four kids. She plays tennis. She makes dresses. She’s in the church choir. She’s a good kid who got caught smoking dope by her parents, David and Lisanne. He’s a contractor. She’s a tennis instructor. They send her to a drug counseling program. That’s where she meets Delashmutt.

On July 22, 1995, Elyse spends most of the day at her aunt’s house making dress patterns. She spends the evening at home with her family. They watch Paint Your Wagon, a 1969 Western starring Clint Eastwood, Jean Seberg, and Lee Marvin. It’s based on a Broadway musical. Eastwood fucking sings.

Around 10 p.m., Elyse gets a phone call. She tells her family she’s going to bed. She stuffs pillows under the covers and sneaks out. It’s easy: There’s French doors between her bedroom and the yard. She meets the shitbirds in the eucalyptus grove.

They’ve been planning this for months. Fiorella and Delashmutt tried to kill Elyse a month earlier with another boy named Travis Williams. Williams faked a fall into a ravine to lure Elyse down. Fiorella tossed him a knife. Fiorella and Delashmutt chanted, “Do it! Do it!”

It’s the same knife they would later use to stab her a dozen times.

But Williams froze up. The attempt fizzled. Elyse may have thought it was a joke. She never reported it. Three months later, Williams and another boy murder a 75-year-old woman in her home. Williams pleads guilty 17 months after the fact.

Back to the shitbirds: They play in a death metal band called Hatred. Their primary source of inspiration is Slayer. All three shitbirds say Slayer inspired them to kill Elyse. If they sacrificed a blonde, blue-eyed virgin, Satan would help them play better and faster. He’d help them go pro. Slayer’s lyrics assured them of this. That’s what they tell investigators after their arrest. Like some kind of Robert-Johnsonat-the-crossroads deal, but high as fuck and too stupid to live.

According to Delashmutt, Fiorella was the ringleader. Fiorella asked him if he’d “be down for sacrificing a virgin.” Delashmutt’s response? “Whatever." Along with Casey, they called themselves “Satan’s children.” Turns out Satan’s children were a confederacy of dunces.

It takes eight months to find Elyse’s body. Not that the cops are actually looking: The Arroyo Grande PD spends most of that time trying to convince Elyse’s parents that she’s a runaway. We know she smokes reefer, she’s a problem child, she’ll be back whenever she runs out of money. But Elyse is 15 years old. She doesn’t have any money. And if she ran away, why didn’t she take anything with her?

While the police are running their disinformation campaign, Elyse’s grandmother Elyse Walter (after whom Elyse is named) writes a letter published in the local paper:

“My dearest Elyse, I miss you and I love you. Everyone is very worried and heartbroken because we don't know where you are, if you’re happy, warm, well-fed and healthy. I promise I don’t want to drag you home or anything even like that. I just want us to sit down and talk and hug. There is nothing you can’t tell me about how you feel, about who has been cruel or unkind to you. We can work it out, and you can stay here with me until you want to go elsewhere. Please, please just call me so we know you’re alive. My love always, Nana.”

As it turns out, Elyse’s body is buried a quarter mile from her own house. She’s in the ground for eight months before Royce Casey finds Jesus and spills the murder details to a local clergyman. The clergyman tells the cops. Casey is arrested. On March 14, 1996, he makes a full confession. He gives up Fiorella and Delashmutt. He says he’s convinced they’ll kill again. Casey fears that he is possibly their next victim.

This is when all the details come out, including the necrophilia. According to the March 9, 1997, edition of SFGate, Fiorella’s mother told investigators that her son said that Casey and Delashmutt allegedly returned to Elyse’s grave to have sex with her corpse. One of Delashmutt’s friends apparently testified that he had “bragged of returning to the corpse often to have sex with it.” The rape charges are eventually dropped in exchange for first-degree murder pleas. Despite what Fiorella’s mother and Delashmutt’s friend said, proof of rape was deemed inconclusive due to advanced composition of the body.

All three killers cite Slayer in their confessions. All three place the bulk of the blame on the other two. All three are tried as adults. All three plead no contest to first-degree murder charges. Hence: All three avoid a jury trial. All three are sentenced to 25 (Casey) or 26 years (Fiorella and Delashmutt) to life in prison.

David Pahler addresses Fiorella in court: “Joseph, it’s a parent’s worst fear and lifetime pain to outlive their child. It’s even worse knowing she was murdered and tortured as a virgin sacrifice on the altar of Satan so that you could earn a ticket to hell.”

“Nothing can undo the wrongness of this crime or the sadness it has caused for the families,” Judge Christopher Money says at the sentencing. “And it was committed for the stupidest reason.”

With the killers behind bars, the Fahlers sue Slayer. They also sue the band’s label, American Recordings, and its parent company, Sony. But they—or at least their lawyers—have learned the lessons of the Failed Heavy Metal Lawsuit: the Ozzy Osbourne case of 1986. The Judas Priest case of 1990. Both filed by grieving parents in the wake of teenage suicides. Both claiming that heavy metal records were responsible for their children’s deaths. Both cases dismissed.

The Pahlers decide to take a different route. Instead of going after Slayer’s lyrics—and, by extension, free speech—they zero in on the marketing. Specifically: knowingly marketing harmful material to minors. This legal strategy was successful against the tobacco industry, which was forced to alter its marketing practices. More important, there was a payout.

No coincidence: The law firm representing the Pahlers is Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach, which had successfully argued that tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds had used the “Joe Camel” character to sell cigarettes to kids.

The Pahlers’ lawsuit says this: “The distribution and marketing of this obscene and harmful material to adolescent males constituted aiding and abetting of the criminal acts described in this complaint. None of the vicious crimes committed against Elyse Marie Pahler would have occurred without the intentional marketing strategy of the death-metal band Slayer. ”

According to the Jan. 21, 2001, edition of the Los Angeles Times, the complaint cites the Slayer songs “Altar of Sacrifice,” “Tormentor,” “Necrophiliac,” “Postmortem,” and “Serenity in Murder,” among others.

IF THEY SACRIFICED A BLONE, BLUEEYED VIRGIN, SATAN WOULD HELP THEM PLAY BETTER AND FASTER.

“This case isn’t about art,’’ David Fahler tells notable U.K. publication The Guardian in 2001. “It’s about marketing. Slayer and others in the industry have developed sophisticated strategies to sell death metal music to adolescent boys. They don’t care whether the violent, misogynistic message in these lyrics causes children to do harmful things. They couldn’t care less what their fans did to our daughter. All they care about is money.”

The 1/21/01 Times again: “Before pleading guilty to murdering Fahler, Fiorella told authorities that he and the other boys often stayed up several nights in a row taking drugs and listening repeatedly to Slayer. ‘It gets inside your head,’ Fiorella was quoted in a probation report. ‘It’s almost embarrassing that I was so influenced by the music. It started to influence the way I looked at things.’”

Slayer never issue a statement about the case. But in a July 1998 interview with Guitar World, Slayer drummer Paul Bostaph says this: “They’re trying to blame the whole thing on us. That’s such bullshit. If you’re gonna do something stupid like that, you should get in trouble for it.”

Bostaph goes on to say that the killers didn’t even correctly follow the sacrifice rituals detailed in Slayer’s lyrics. (Cue your favorite drummer joke...)

In October 2001, Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Burke dismisses the Slayer case. “Slayer lyrics are repulsive and profane,” he writes in his 14-page decision. “But they do not direct or instruct listeners to commit the acts that resulted in the vicious torturemurder of Elyse Fahler. ’’

Burke also rules that the music is not harmful to children. Which means it’s not illegal to sell or market Slayer records. Surprise, surprise: The band and the record labels are protected by the First Amendment. And then there’s this:

At some point during the Slayer case, Fiorella and Delashmutt tell Entertainment Weekly that Slayer’s music had nothing to do with the murder—and that Elyse’s death was not intended as a satanic sacrifice. In a 2001 interview with The Washington Post, Delashmutt says, “The music is destructive, but that’s not why Elyse was murdered. She was murdered because Joe [Fiorella] was obsessed with her and obsessed with killing her. ’’

In a bizarre sidenote, Fiorella’s older brother Anthony shot and killed a man outside a Boston Market in Grover Beach, California—right next to Arroyo Grande—in 1998. It was retribution for a drug rip-off. Anthony Fiorella absconded to Mexico, where he was captured a month later. In December 1998, he was convicted of first-degree murder and given 50 years to life.

Elyse Fahler’s murder is widely cited by horror film websites, true-crime podcasts, and others as the inspiration for the 2009 horror flick Jennifer’s Body. The movie’s premise: Megan Fox plays a teenager who is sacrificed to the devil by a shitty indie rock band in exchange—they hope—for fame and fortune. Instead, she comes back from the dead and starts eating dudes. While the satanic sacrifice bit sounds awfully similar to the circumstances surrounding Elyse’s murder, the film’s writer, Diablo Cody (Juno, Lisa Frankenstein, etc.), has never copped to it publicly.

Unlike Megan Fox’s character in the movie, Elyse never came back. At a parole hearing in 2021, then42-year-old Royce Casey said, “It breaks my heart to think how much she lost because of me. She never got to graduate from high school or go to her prom. She never got to go to college or fall in love and get married. She never got to be a mom.”

Casey was granted parole after almost 24 years in prison. California governor Gavin Newsom overturned the decision. Casey was granted parole again in 2023. Newsom overturned the decision a second time. Joseph Fiorella waived the right to his most recent parole hearing in 2022. Jacob Delashmutt’s next parole hearing is in December 2024.

Elyse’s father, David, was charged with misdemeanor battery and vandalism for a road-rage incident that took place in December 2013. He attributed his behavior to post-traumatic stress disorder from his daughter’s tragic death and accepted a plea deal in 2014 that included anger management classes.

Slayer continue to play shows, but according to guitarist Kerry King, they are not permanently reuniting, and fans should not expect otherwise.