‘THERE’S GOING TO BE SOME RATTLING PHOTOS’
OFFICER TESTIFIES AT TRIAL OF CANADIAN CHARGED WITH GRUESOME L.A. MURDER
Adetective was about to testify Monday at the trial of a Canadian graphic novelist accused of killing his girlfriend in their Hollywood apartment. Before the testimony started, the prosecutor in the case leaned over and spoke softly to the victim’s mother, sitting in the front row.
“There’s going to be some rattling photos,” she said.
But the mother didn’t leave. Olga Kasian stayed sitting in the muggy Los Angeles courtroom while homicide Sgt. William Cotter described photo after photo of the apartment where Kasian’s 30-year-old daughter Iana was found dead, lying on a blood-stained mattress beneath a Mickey Mouse comforter.
Blake Leibel, the son of wealthy Toronto real estate developer Lorne Leibel, has pleaded not guilty of murder, mayhem and torture in Kasian’s death. She was his girlfriend and the mother of his newborn daughter.
In his testimony, Sgt. Cotter pointed out blood stains on drapes, on a headboard, on a lamp; a piece of flesh found in the bedding. Then, as directed by Deputy District Attorney Tannaz Mokayef, he described the photo of Iana’s lifeless, naked body, sprawled on the mattress in the master bedroom, with trauma to her head so severe it was unrecognizable.
“I stood there for a while,” Sgt. Cotter said of the first time he entered the bedroom where Kasian’s body was found.
It was the second day of the prosecution’s case, focusing on the brutal state Kasian was found in when police finally managed to get into the couple’s Holloway Drive condo, where Leibel had allegedly barricaded himself on May 26, 2016. Mokayef told jurors in her opening statement that she would prove Leibel planned and calculated Kasian’s murder, following a script he took from one of his own graphic novels.
“This case reads like a movie script,” she said, according to the Hollywood Reporter. And in many ways, it does seems like it’s a story made for Hollywood: A rich kid from Toronto living a lavish Hollywood life as a film producer and graphic novelist, accused of a brutal murder that, in some ways, mirrored his art. It garnered international attention. But on Tuesday, all the intrigue surrounding the case started to seem misplaced. There was nothing cinematic or lavish in the photos of Kasian, scalped and bruised, missing her eyebrows and her right ear.
Leibel didn’t look at any of the photo evidence shown at the front of the courtroom. He sat, slumped on his elbows, staring at the desk in front of him. He looked heavier after two years in custody, bulging through his dark suit, with thin hair combed straight and balding at the back — a stark difference from the messy curls he wore at the time of Kasian’s death.
In the afternoon, Los Angeles Chief Medical Examiner Jonathan Lucas — standing in for the now retired examiner who conducted the autopsy — described Kasian’s death in calm, clinical detail. The prosecution showed close-up photos of Kasian’s face with severe “tissue loss,” lying on a plastic-lined coroner’s table.
“Basically her scalp is missing from the top of her head,” Lucas said. It appears, he said, that he scalp had been cut by a sharp object and then torn from her head. “There’s absence of tissue, we’re looking directly at bone.”
Perhaps the most disturbing part of Lucas’s testimony was when he explained that Kasian may have been alive while she was mutilated. There were signs, he said, of bleeding — which means Kasian’s heart was beating as she sustained the injuries.
Kasian’s Ukrainian mother sat for almost all of it with eyes puffed around the edges, looking too exhausted to manage anything but a blank expression. As the prosecution presented the photos of Kasian’s head, you could still make out the face. The mother lurched forward, covering her eyes. But then she straightened herself and looked forward. She pressed on an earpiece, so she could her the translator whispering into a microphone in the row behind her.
When Dr. Lucas described “defensive wounds” on Kasian’s hands — another indicator she was alive during the ordeal — Olga Kasian stood, slid out of her aisle and walked out, hunching over.
The trial continues Tuesday and is expected to last until next week.