Jealousy drove Leibel to kill, L.A. prosecutor tells jury
But defence points to DNA of ‘unknown male’
LOS ANGELES• Blake Lei bel was so angry a this fiancée for paying more attention to their newborn daughter than him that he scalped her and drained her blood, a prosecutor in Leibel’s murder trial said Tuesday.
It was the first time the prosecutors had ventured to answer why Leibel, a 37-yearold graphic novelist from a wealthy Toronto family, would have killed 30-year-old Iana Kasian in 2016.
For the past six days, prosecutors presented jurors with a vivid image of Kasian’s final hours, lying immobile in the bathtub of their West Hollywood apartment as her blood flowed out of tears and gashes in her head.
“I’m sure you’ve asked yourself many times,” deputy district attorney Beth Silverman told jurors in her closing arguments Tuesday, “how could another human being do that to someone he supposedly loved?
“There has to be a level of frustration, thinking to yourself, ‘I just don’t understand how a human could do such a thing.’”
The answer, she said, is control and jealousy. Kasian’s mother had travelled to Los Angeles from her home in Ukraine for the baby’s birth. After, Kasian started spending more and more time with the baby at her mother’s apartment, not the apartment she shared with Leibel.
“What happens after the baby comes home? Within four days, she’s out. She can’t stay in the apartment with him,” Silverman said. “He’s jealous because now the baby’s in the picture and it’s taking away his attention.”
Leibel’s desire to control Kasian was so great Kasian’s mother wasn’t allowed to be at the birth even though it was one of the main reasons she made the journey from Ukraine, Silverman said.
“What is the ultimate act of power and control? It’s taking somebody’s life, right? Taking away their future. Taking away everything they dreamed they were going to be: a mother, a parent, a daughter, a wife,” Silverman said, adding Kasian was engaged to Leibel.
Until Tuesday, the closest the prosecution had come to explaining any sort of motive behind the killing had been Syndrome, a graphic novel Leibel created in 2010. Prosecutors drew parallels between Kasian’s killing and the book, which follows a doctor’s elaborate plot to cure a serial killer. Silverman said Leibel used Syndrome as the “blueprint” for the killing, pointing to illustrations of bloodletting and a dead woman lying in a bed that were similar to how Kasian was found.
But in her closing arguments, Leibel’s defence attorney, Haydeh Takasugi, accused the prosecution of using Syndrome to fill the hole in its case: his motive.
To telegraph the killing in a book years before would have taken a mastermind, she said. The prosecution’s portrayal of Leibel, however, was not of a mastermind. If he was, then why didn’t he flee when Kasian’s mother brought police to the apartment to investigate her daughter’s disappearance, Takasugi asked.
She also zeroed in on DNA evidence from trash bags containing pieces of Kasian — her severed ear, her scalp, her hair. While forensic analysts had found Leibel’s DNA throughout the crime scene, the DNA found on the bag was from an “unknown male,” she said.
In its rebuttal, the prosecution opened with a slide on red herrings, complete with a definition and a picture of a fish.
“When I talk about things that are red herrings, that’s why I phrase them that way because they lead you nowhere, except chasing your own tail,” Silverman said. “If the argument is to try and confuse you, to try and make you believe maybe there’s another killer out there … well then who’s the real killer?
“How do you explain all this mammoth amount (of ) evidence that all points to one person?”