Alyssa Bustamante, the woman I wrote about in True Crime Case Histories – Volume 2who in 2009 lured nine-year-old Elizabeth Olten into the woods near St. Martins, Missouri, and stabbed her to death simply to know what it felt like to kill someone, was denied parole in July 2024, following a hearing on the 8th of that month — fifteen years into a life-plus-thirty-year sentence that everyone involved had once believed would keep her behind bars for decades longer.
The hearing happened at all because of a 2021 Missouri law, Senate Bill 26, which made most juvenile offenders eligible for parole after serving fifteen years. The bill carved out an exception for first-degree murder, but not for second-degree murder — the charge Bustamante had pleaded down to in 2012 to avoid a mandatory life-without-parole sentence. Even the bill's own sponsor, State Representative Mark Sharp, later said his legislation was never intended to help cases like hers, and that he would personally oppose her parole.
Elizabeth's family found out about the hearing through an automated phone call. On Mother's Day. Her mother, Patty Preiss, told reporters she would attend anyway. "I will relive my pain for them if it means it could make any difference at all," she said. "There is very little I can do for my daughter now but show up."
She and her husband, Gary Bemboom, did show up. They sat through it. And what they sat through, according to Bemboom, was Bustamante describing — in her own words, in front of them — exactly how and why she killed Elizabeth. He said she included details that had never been allowed in at the original plea hearing in 2012. That detail is worth pausing on: because Bustamante took a deal and there was never a trial, the family had been spared most of the gruesome specifics for twelve years. The plea hearing focused on the legal mechanics and the diary entries, not on a step-by-step account from Bustamante herself. At the parole hearing, with no judge and no rules of evidence to filter anything out, they finally got that account. From the woman who had killed their daughter. Who was now asking to be let out.
Bemboom called it "another day of grieving." "All of the hurt and pain was thrown back in the family's face," he said afterward. "It was a devastating day for all that were there." The Missouri Department of Corrections has not disclosed what Bustamante actually said, and the family has chosen not to share specifics publicly. The hearing was closed.
Elizabeth's family had also been lobbying the Missouri legislature for a fix. They got one — Senate Bill 754, which closes the loophole and makes juveniles convicted of second-degree murder ineligible for the early parole hearing. The family had asked that it be called "Elizabeth's Law." Governor Mike Parson signed it on July 9, 2024. Exactly one day after Bustamante's hearing. One day too late.
Bustamante's next parole hearing is currently scheduled for 2029, though Cole County prosecutor Locke Thompson has said he hopes the implementation of SB 754 pushes any future hearing well past that date. Even if she's eventually granted parole on the life sentence, she still has to serve her consecutive thirty-year term for armed criminal action, which would put her earliest possible release somewhere around 2059, when she'd be sixty-five.
Bustamante remains at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in northwest Missouri. She's now thirty-two. Elizabeth Olten would have turned twenty-six this past December.