The Pallini Satanists Murders

Two victims in eastern Attica

The case Greek media still call "the Satanists of Pallini" concerns two killings in eastern Attica in the early 1990s. The first victim was Dora Syropoulou, a 14-year-old girl, who was killed in late August 1992; Greek reports give the date as 27 August. The second was Garyfallia Giourga, a 28-year-old mother of two, who was abducted near her home in Glyka Nera and killed in April 1993. Both killings took place in the same remote area near Koropi, known locally as Sesi.

The group

Three people were eventually convicted: Asimakis Katsoulas, Manos Dimitrokalis and Dimitra Margeti, who was 16. Sources disagree on the ages of the two men. Athens Voice gives them as 23 and 21 at the time of their arrest, while a 2025 overview by Proto Thema gives 20 and 18, which may reflect their ages when the crimes began. Katsoulas, who lived in Kantza in the Pallini area, was described in contemporary reporting as the dominant figure who imposed his will on the others, and co-defendants later portrayed him as the group's leader.

The trio presented their actions in occult terms, and the killings were reported to the public as satanic rituals. That framing turned the case into one of the most sensational crime stories in Greece in the 1990s, with Proto Thema noting reports that other teenagers had attended the group's gatherings even though only three people were ever sentenced.

Investigation and arrests

Police opened an investigation after the first body was found, and the inquiry intensified after Giourga's killing. According to Athens Voice, the investigation lasted almost two years, and the three were arrested shortly before Christmas 1993. Proto Thema reports that Dimitrokalis eventually confessed and described what the group had done, which opened the way to charges against all three. The same overview says the wider public learned the full story in the summer of 1995, when the case came to trial; the sources do not fully agree on how much was public before then.

The verdict

On 1 July 1995 the court delivered its verdicts. Katsoulas was sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment plus 12 years and 10 months. Dimitrokalis received two life terms plus 9 years and 10 months for jointly committing the two homicides. Margeti, who was a minor at the time, was convicted of simple complicity in the killings and of the abduction of a minor and received 17 years and 4 months; the court accepted her age as a mitigating factor.

Release from prison

Greek law allows prisoners to seek conditional release after serving part of their sentence, and all three were eventually freed. Lifo reported that Margeti was released in 2001. In March 2014 Lifo, citing Eleftheros Typos, reported that Dimitrokalis, then 40, had been released after serving three-fifths of his sentence under favourable provisions of the law. The same month, iefimerida reported that Katsoulas had applied for release after twenty years in custody at the agricultural prison of Agia in Chania, with the Chania judicial council to consider his conduct in prison. By 2020 Athens Voice reported that all three were free, and noted that while still at the Chania prison Katsoulas had been charged by the cybercrime unit over the harassment of minors. The victims' relatives disputed the expressions of remorse the three made when they were released.

Why the case matters

The Pallini case is regularly revisited in Greek media as one of the crimes that defined public anxiety about youth in the 1990s; Proto Thema included it in a 2025 survey of juvenile crimes that "marked Greek society." It is also a reminder of how a sensational label can overshadow the facts. The convictions rested on what the three were proven to have done to two victims, not on the occult trappings that dominated headlines. The early release of all three, including two men serving double life sentences, also showed how differently a life term can work in practice under Greek law from what the words of a sentence suggest, a point the victims' relatives raised publicly when the men left prison.