Accused of a murder that eerily mirrors his art
Graphic novels written by Toronto developer’s son foreshadow the brutal death of his girlfriend,
Blake Leibel was fascinated by evil.
His graphic novel centred on the search for the bad seed lurking in the brains of serial killers. He wrote a screenplay about a madman on a murder spree. His work, he wrote online, “grappled with the questions surrounding what provokes a person to commit evil acts.”
Now Leibel stands accused of taking that fascination too far by reenacting his bloody imagination in real life.
On Tuesday, the 35-year-old appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom to face charges of torturing, mutilating and killing his girlfriend.
Leibel was arrested in West Hollywood last week when authorities discovered his girlfriend’s body inside their barricaded apartment, according to The Associated Press.
Iana Kasian, 30, had just given birth to their first child three weeks earlier.
In a detail seemingly pulled from Leibel’s own graphic novel, prosecutors said her body had been “drained” of its blood, among other shockingly grisly indignities.
Leibel has pleaded not guilty. If convicted of first-degree murder, he could face the death penalty, The Associated Press reported.
Such a sentence would be a bizarre and ironic twist for the graphic novelist, whose best known work begins with the execution of a serial killer on death row.
It would also mark a sudden and precipitous fall for Leibel, the son of a wealthy Toronto developer and former Olympian.
Just two weeks ago, Leibel seemed to have it all: a beautiful girlfriend, a baby boy, a family fortune and a foothold in Hollywood.
Blake grew up in Toronto in one of the city’s wealthier families.
His father, Lorne, is a successful businessman and bon vivant. He competed on Canada’s sailing team in the1976 Olympics before making a fortune building suburban homes in the 1980s and 1990s.
At one point, his company, Canada Homes, was the country’s largest homebuilder. He describes himself as a “well-known Ferrari man and famous racer.”
Blake’s mother brought her own money to the marriage as the heiress to a plastics fortune.
She and Lorne had two sons: Blake and Cody.
With his round cheeks and angular chin, Blake was the spitting image of his debonair dad.
Both Leibel boys eventually moved to Los Angeles, with Blake arriving in 2004, according to the Los Angeles Times. There, however, they took very different paths.
Cody followed into their father’s footsteps by becoming a real estate developer, according to the Times.
But Blake had less-lucrative interests.
Instead of building houses, he enjoyed blowing stuff up in video games. And he was good at it.
Leibel “won world championships” in the first-person shooter game Half-Life, according to his Tumblr, which also describes him as “an avid gamer with the ultimate goal of creating his own massively multiplayer online (MMO) game.”
Propped up by a nearly $18,000 per month allowance from his parents, Leibel gradually moved from gaming into other branches of the entertainment industry.
In 2008, he worked on an animated series version of the Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs, according to Leibel’s IMDB page.
That same year he got involved in “a comic book space opera” series called United Free Worlds, complete with aliens, dinosaurs, interstellar warfare and a Conan the Barbarian-like hero clad in a loincloth. He also wrote and directed a comedy called Bald. Its poster features a hairless man flanked by four blonds in bikinis. Its subtitle: “No Money. No Hair. No Shame.”
The closest Leibel came to critical acclaim was two years later when he published Syndrome.
Leibel described it as “a lengthy graphic novel that grappled with the questions surrounding what provokes a person to commit evil acts.”
Its opening scene is, in hindsight, chilling: a television news reporter stands outside a prison on the eve of a serial killer’s execution. “Why are you here, standing against the lawful sentence of this monster who preyed on women and church-going families?” the reporter asks a woman protesting the execu- tion.
“Hold it right there,” the protester answers. “How can he be a monster if he’s made in the image of god?”
The graphic novel then cuts to images of the serial killer hanging a naked couple from their ankles and slashing their throats — draining them of blood.
Early on in the graphic novel, the serial killer describes the sexual gratification he derived from killing.
“You should try it,” he tells the doctor.
Evil and psychopathy were recurring themes for Leibel. Shortly after the publication of Syndrome, he wrote a screenplay called Psychopomp about “a profanity spewing madman who travels in and out of international hot spots looking to kill anyone who goes against his personal code of conduct,” according to MovieWeb.
Prosecutors have charged Leibel with one count each of murder, mayhem, aggravated mayhem and torture.
On Tuesday, the graphic novelist, whose works so eerily foreshadowed the crimes of which he is now accused, appeared in court in handcuffs and a padded suicide-prevention jacket.
Leibel’s lawyer, Alaleh Kamran, raised questions about her client’s mental competence, prompting Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Keith Schwartz to order a psychological evaluation.
Leibel entered a plea of not guilty on all counts. He is being held without bail.
Prosecutors said they will decide at alater date whether to seek the death penalty.