IN AN L.A. COURT, GUILT AND SORROW

Heir to Toronto fortune killed wife, mother of his newborn

LOS ANGELES •Afterdeliberating for three hours, a Los Angeles jury on Wednesday found Blake Leibel guilty of murdering Iana Kasian, the mother of his newborn daughter.

Leibel — an aspiring graphic novelist and film producer transplanted to Hollywood on the largesse of his wealthy Toronto family — sat still, wearing a dark suit with white Velcro sneakers as the clerk read the jury’s verdict aloud. He was guilty on all counts: first-degree murder, torture and aggravated mayhem.

Olga Kasian, the victim’s mother, gripped the hand of her volunteer translator and cried quietly behind the prosecution. Across the courtroom, sitting in the same seat he’d occupied each day since the trial started, Leibel’s brother Cody shifted in his seat, gripping his chin then folding his hands in his lap. Leibel’s former wife came in minutes later as the judge was scheduling a sentencing hearing for next week. She whispered to Cody then sunk into herself slightly, elbow resting on her knee.

As prosecutor Tannaz Mokayef was leaving, Kasian’s sobbing mother locked her in a hug that lasted more than a minute. The two women left together, with Mokayef wiping tears from her eyes.

In late May 2016, Olga Kasian spent days looking for her daughter, sensing something was wrong. She begged police to search the West Hollywood apartment Iana shared with Leibel. When officers did force their way in, it was Sgt. William Cotter who had to keep Olga out. He held her back, away from the master bedroom where her 30-year-old daughter lay dead, missing her scalp and her right ear, bruised and bitten on a bloody mattress.

But Olga Kasian saw it all anyway. She sat through more than a week of trial this month, despite prosecutors’ warnings that the evidence was so disturbing it would warp the picture of her daughter she held in her memory. She came anyway because she wanted to feel what her daughter felt, she said through an interpreter after the verdict Wednesday.

“Watching the trial, she feels that her daughter is somewhere here, somewhere near her,” the interpreter said. “She can feel her.”

Outside court, Olga raised her arms and looked upward, as if talking directly to her daughter.

“Where are you?” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t save you. I’m sorry.”

Sgt. Cotter stood off to the side with his colleague, out of view of the cameras, watching Olga. He is a large man with broad shoulders and the sort of firm, unflinching demeanour that betrays his 30 years as a police officer. But as Olga spoke, he went red in the face. She crossed in front of the cameras and walked toward him, before the interpreter could explain what she was saying or what she was doing. She wrapped her arms around him. Cotter, more than a foot taller, crumpled into her and cried.

He thought of being at the apartment in 2016, blocking her from getting inside.

“Two years later,” he said, “I’m able to hold her for a good reason.”

“I’ve never had a case where, um, where it’s just been this brutal,” he said. “If you try put yourself in the victim’s shoes — what she must have endured, what she must have thought … I don’t know how you explain something like this.”

The prosecution tried to explain it at the close of trial. After Kasian gave birth to their daughter, Leibel was jealous that her attention centred on the baby, deputy district attorney Beth Silverman said.

Olga flew to Los Angeles from Ukraine for the birth, but Leibel kept her from the delivery room. A few days after, Iana started staying with her mother instead of Leibel. Feeling his control slipping, Leibel used a lime green paring knife to slice her scalp then ripped it off with his hands, the prosecution said.

“The amount of cutting and tearing, the violence involved — that’s a lot of anger,” Silverman said, “because she was no longer making him the No. 1 most important thing in her life.”

She also pointed to Leibel’s most prominent work, Syndrome — a 2010 graphic novel about curing a serial killer that he created with a team of writers and artists. “The question we all latched onto was, ‘How do you treat evil?’” R.J. Ryan, one of the writers, told jurors.

He testified that Leibel was fascinated with bloodletting and requested a scene involving victims drained of their blood, going so far as showing Ryan the best way to do it, flipping his fingers to mimic turning someone upside down. Nearly a decade later, Kasian died of blood loss, likely drained of her blood in a bathtub with her feet higher than her head.

In interviews with the National Post in 2016, friends cast Leibel as a man unravelling. After his mother died in 2011, his fought his father in court over her estate. He left his wife while she was eight months pregnant with their second son. He cut off his cadre of Toronto rich kids.

But none of it really adds up to the murder, photos of which were so upsetting that Judge Mark Windham gave special praise to the jury: “I can’t imagine a more difficult case.”

After the verdict, Silverman, the prosecutor, said she’d given up trying to understand it all. “Some people are just evil and that’s really all there is to it.”