WARNING: Story contains graphic images
LOS ANGELES and TORONTO — Blake Leibel, artist and Canadian heir, aspiring producer, writer and father of three, walked into an L.A. courtroom Tuesday in a padded vest, his hands cuffed in front of him, a thick chain around his waist. From the glass-walled prisoner’s box, he looked around the almost empty room. His brother wasn’t there. His wife wasn’t either.
Twelve months ago, Leibel was living what looked from a distance like some kind of dream. He owned a mansion in Beverly Hills, a 1926 Tudor-inspired home where he lived with his pregnant wife and son. He had a crew of Toronto exiles — all young and rich and loving L.A. — that he worked with on comics and movies and films. He had, in other words, all the elements of an Instagram life. And then he allegedly destroyed it all in a horrible way.
Police in Los Angeles believe Leibel tortured, mutilated and murdered Iana Kasian, his girlfriend and the mother of his youngest child, a little girl born on May 3. Kasian’s body was found in the West Hollywood apartment they shared on May 26. A prosecutor said she’d been drained of her blood.
If convicted on charges of murder, mayhem, and torture, Leibel, the scion of two prominent Toronto families, could face the death penalty. But for now, his friends and artistic collaborators are mostly wondering what on earth went wrong.
Bob Riha Jr. for PostmediaThe apartment on Holloway Drive in West Hollywood, where Canadian Blake Leibel lived with his girlfriend Iana Kasian.
In interviews from Toronto and Los Angeles this week, some who knew Leibel described a man who changed dramatically over the past year. He walked out on his pregnant wife. He cut off his friends. And then, if police are to be believed, he did something not just wrong but evil, like the act of a comic book villain.
In the courtroom Tuesday, Leibel looked dishevelled and vacant. At one point, he ran a finger absently along a glass edge in front of him. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. After the hearing, his lawyer suggested he might not be fit to be tried.
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Leibel emerged that day under special escort from a cell in the Los Angeles County jail. It’s a place that could not be further, in the figurative sense, from where Leibel grew up.
Blake Leibel was raised in the tight world of Toronto’s upper class Forest Hill neighbourhood. At birth, he was already an heir to two different wealthy and sometimes controversial families. Leibel’s parents separated when he was young. He once said in a court document they’d been apart for 30 years when his mother died, of brain cancer, in 2011. But they never divorced.
As a boy, Leibel lived with his mother, Eleanor Leibel, while his older brother Cody stayed with their father. Eleanor Leibel came into her marriage with Lorne Leibel, Blake and Cody’s father, with money of her own. Her father, Paul Chitel, founded a plastic sheeting company in 1957 that he grew into a multimillion-dollar concern, known today as Polytarp Products Ltd.
In business, Chitel was a controlling, erratic man, according to those who worked with and for him. In a lawsuit filed by a supplier in the 1990s, Chitel was described by a senior employee as a “dominating personality” who made “arbitrary decisions” and tried to control every aspect of his operation. “Unfortunately, he was a bully,” the judge in that case wrote. “He intimidated his employees and his suppliers.”
KTLA 5Blake Leibel
Chitel separated from his wife, Leona Chitel — Eleanor’s mother and Leibel’s grandmother — long before Leibel was born. She too had a complicated legal history, one exacerbated by long bouts of severe mental illness. According to a lawsuit filed against the Bank of Montreal in 2001, Leona Chitel suffered from acute bipolar disorder during the 1980s, when Blake Leibel was a young boy. Testifying in that trial, “she appeared vague and emotionally fragile,” the judge wrote in the case. “It appeared to be torture for her to focus on the question and demonstrate any independent recall.”
Paul Chitel suffered a massive stroke in the late 1990s and died two years later. In his will, he set out in exacting detail his wishes — about how many luxury cars (two Mercedes and a Cadillac) his live-in partner should get and what bonuses should go to which long time employees. As a condition of his largesse, however, he gave his trustees the right to withhold cash and property from any beneficiary found to be carrying “the HIV virus.” He also insisted the trustees be allowed to test any beneficiary for HIV, as well as drugs and alcohol, before paying out any cash.
Chitel set up various trusts for his two daughters and his grandchildren while he was still alive. So it’s hard to know how much money exactly Eleanor Chitel inherited before he died. Her own will, though, suggests she was worth well over $12 million in property, cash and stock at the time of her death, in 2011.
In his will, however, Paul Chitel made a point of cutting out one of his grandchildren, Blake’s brother, Cody Leibel. “I make this direction not due to a lack of love or affection,” he wrote, “but only due to my belief that he will be more than adequately provided for by his father.”
FileLorne Leibel
Based on the evidence available, it was a pretty solid bet. If Leibel’s mother was wealthy, his father is rich, sometimes flamboyantly so.
Lorne Leibel and Blake Leibel aren’t close. The family’s longtime L.A. lawyer described them as “estranged.” But long before his son made a name in Hollywood, Lorne Leibel was a public figure. For decades he floated between luxury worlds: car racing, Olympic sailing. But he made his money developing homes. Leibel made a fortune in the suburban building boom of the 1980s and ’90s outside Toronto. For a time, his company, Canada Homes, was described as the largest home builder in the country. His son Cody once told a reporter his father had built 40,000 homes.
Lorne Leibel courted controversy, too. He was the first Canadian to ever fail an Olympic drug test, in 1976, when his sample turned up traces of a banned stimulant. He sued a former lover in 2011 in an effort to quash her planned tell-all memoir. That book, 416Ferrariman: The Secret Life of Lorne Leibel, never came out. But excerpts published online made outlandish claims of depravity, all of which Leibel rejected as false and defamatory in a legal filing. He also claimed at that time that his ex crashed a Mercedes he’d leased for her after painting it with defamatory statements.
With money coming in from both sides of the family, Blake Leibel was able to live a young life of privilege among fellow heirs.
His Toronto crew included a who’s who of Canadian scions, like Jack Latner, of the storied Latner fortune, and Lawrence Longo, who would go on to found and develop an app that reveals hidden items on restaurant menus.
In the mid 2000s, Longo, Latner and Leibel would all move to Los Angeles. There, they’d join a kind of 416 family in exile: the wealthy children of Toronto’s elite all trying to make it in the Hollywood game.
Blake’s older brother Cody was already ensconced in that world by that time. Cody Leibel founded a short-lived label — C-note Records — in L.A. and was a regular at A-list, underground poker games throughout the 2000s. Blake Leibel, meanwhile, styled himself as a “creator of new worlds” in Los Angeles — a roving ideas man who commissioned illustrators and writers to help turn his concepts into art.
.An image from Syndrome, a graphic novel created by Blake Leibel and written by several comic book professionals.
For more than a decade in L.A., Leibel travelled in a pack with his Toronto friends. He founded a publishing house with Latner and Longo. He worked with them on a TV adaptation of Spaceballs, the Mel Brooks movie. He did his own work, too, writing and directing a feature film, Bald, that went straight to DVD in 2009. (Bald was not widely panned only because it was not widely seen. One of the few reviewers to see the film said it would only appeal “to late-night channel surfers who stumble upon it while bored or inebriated.” Among the plot keywords for the movie on IMDB are “panties,” “white panties,” “black panties” and “crotch shot.”)
To the extent that Leibel did make a name for himself in L.A. it was in comics and graphic novels. Fantasy Prone, the company he created with Latner and Longo, published a number of works, including Leibel’s own United Free Worlds, a science fiction series about a mysterious planet, and Gold Medal Rabbit, a children’s book produced in cooperation with the actor Wilmer Valderrama.
In his personal life, Leibel seemed to be thriving in those years. He married Amanda Braun, a former model, in March 2011, one month before she gave birth to their first son. The family lived together in a Beverly Hills mansion with a lemon tree on the front porch. Leibel also became a regular at the Soho House, a private club on Sunset Boulevard a short drive from his house.
But there were already signs in those years that not all was well with Leibel. One friend and colleague said he had a heavy pot habit and was pouring his and his parents’ money into lofty projects that sometimes went nowhere. Leibel would occasionally walk into a local comic shop and try to hand out his obscure graphic novels for free, said the friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Another former collaborator said this week that Leibel frequently missed meetings and seemed “obsessed with themes” of violence and brutality. He created the concept, for example, for the graphic novel Syndrome, which came out in 2010. The book follows Dr. Wolfe Chitel — a neuropathologist who shares Eleanor Leibel’s maiden name — on his quest to study a serial killer and find a cure to the disease that makes “men like him do terrible things.”
Blake … had a mid-life crisis, left his wife, immediately got another girl pregnant, abandoned all his friends.
Leibel wrote a cryptic, two-page introduction to that book, where he asked, “If you loved hurting things, what would you do?” But it’s not clear how much Leibel actually had to do with the final product. The comic industry veterans who wrote the book said in interviews in 2010 that Leibel only gave them a loose concept and they riffed from there.
It seems clear, though, that Leibel did want credit for the work. The book jacket on an early edition put his biography near the bottom, beneath those of the writers, illustrator and designer. In later editions, his name came first, along with his lengthy biography.
For the last four years, Leibel had been working with veteran Hollywood illustrator Trevor Goring on adapting what had started as a screenplay into a graphic novel.
“The thing in Hollywood is if you can’t sell your screenplay you make a comic book out of it,” Goring said this week.
Archaia.comBlake Leibel
The story was about Psychopomp, a violent vigilante fed up with the slow pace of modern diplomacy. Goring took it on as a passion project, working on it when he could at night and on weekends. He would send Leibel illustrations, and Leibel would respond with personal cheques for US$250 a page — a medium rate by industry standards.
The book was supposed to be done by the end of this year. Leibel used his Twitter account to send out mock-up pages from it throughout 2015. But over the last few months, Goring said, Leibel had dropped out of touch. “I’m kind of grateful,” Goring said, “that I never finished it.”
Different people in Leibel’s life pinpoint different moments when his troubles began. Some believe his lavish L.A. life started to unravel after his mother died, in 2011. “His mom was the person he was closest to, and that just really unhinged him,” said his friend. “She was really an anchor for him.”
Leibel received much of his mother’s estate after her death, including her $5.5 million Toronto home, and other assets worth millions more. But he did not attend her funeral. Two years after she died, meanwhile, he sued in an effort to have her will overturned.
In documents from that case, Leibel confessed to having almost no income of his own. After his mother died, he told the court, he had to rely on his father to pay his “card bills.” His father, meanwhile, told the court that he and Leibel’s mother had long supported his L.A. life, to the tune of some $1.8 million over seven years. Leibel lost that suit, in 2013, and late last year, the law firm that represented him in the case sued him, claiming he owed $400,000 in unpaid fees.
Last summer, Leibel walked out on Amanda Braun, his wife of four years. She was eight months pregnant when he filed for divorce in July. Leibel’s friend said he felt like Leibel was becoming increasingly paranoid around that time. He also cut off most of his Toronto-in-L. A. circle. “We all thought it was because he was embarrassed of what had happened with his wife,” his friend said.
FacebookIana Kasian
Not everyone thinks there was anything unusual about Leibel’s life change. Ronald Richards, who represented Leibel in the divorce case, said he noticed the same thing you’d expect with anyone going through a traumatic breakup. Leibel was still very close with his son, Richards said. And he hoped to settle the divorce amicably.
But Braun’s lawyer, Pedram Mansouri, said Amanda struggled to contact Leibel after he left. “(Amanda is) eight and a half months pregnant and one day, he’s gone,” Mansouri said. “He just completely changed, from what I understand.”
Once in those months, Leibel brought his young son over to Goring’s house to look at black and white sketches for Psychopomp. “We had lunch and it was perfectly fine,” Goring said. “The kid was well behaved. Totally normal.”
Another time, Leibel brought his new girlfriend to dinner with Goring. Her name was Iana Kasian, a native of Kyiv, Ukraine. Goring remembers her as a pleasant, attractive woman with a slight Eastern European accent. “They seemed happy together,” he said.
Last August, Braun gave birth to her second child with Leibel, another boy. Within months, Kasian would be pregnant, too. Braun only found out about Leibel’s new girlfriend when she bumped into him, “walking on the street,” said Mansouri. “Blake … had a mid-life crisis, left his wife, immediately got another girl pregnant, abandoned all his friends.”
On May 3, according to a family friend, Kasian gave birth to a daughter. Afterward, Leibel called Goring to let him know. It was the first time the two collaborators had spoken in 2016. “He sounded fine. He sounded happy,” Goring said. “I said, ‘I didn’t know she was pregnant. He said, ‘Sorry, I’ve been busy with (other) projects.”
The details of what happened over the following month remain sketchy in some ways. But the bare facts are clear. On May 20, at just after midnight, Los Angeles police from the Wilshire Division, south of Leibel’s West Hollywood home, arrested him on suspicion of sexual assault. He spent 15 hours in the system that day, according to jail records, before posting $100,000 bail.
The thing in Hollywood is if you can’t sell your screenplay you make a comic book out of it.
When Kasian learned of the arrest, according to her family, she moved out of the apartment the two were sharing and in with her mother, who was visiting from Kyiv and had rented a unit down the road. On May 24, a Tuesday, Leibel reached out to Kasian. “He SA(id) sorry and that he can’t live without her,” said Denis Aronchik, a family friend. Kasian agreed to meet Leibel for a short visit. She’d never return.
Kasian’s mother, Olga, soon recognized that something was wrong. She went to Leibel’s apartment that night. She knocked. She yelled. But no one came to the door. That night, at 1 a.m. Los Angeles time, someone called Kasian’s sister, Evegenia, from Kasian’s phone. Evegenia missed the call. She tried phoning back but no one picked up.
The next day, in Hollywood, Olga went to an L.A. County Sheriff’s detachment near Leibel’s apartment. She convinced a deputy to go with her back to the unit. But once again, when they knocked and yelled, no one appeared. Olga wanted the police to break down the door, but the deputies didn’t think they had enough cause. “It wasn’t even a full day of her missing at that point,” said Det. Quilmes Rodriguez.
By that point, Olga was frantic. Her daughter, a brand new mother herself, was missing. She’d been away from her infant for almost 24 hours, with a man who had, days earlier, been arrested on suspicion of sexual assault. So the next morning, she went back to the police. This time, they went to the apartment and forced open the door. There was a bizarre scene inside: a makeshift barricade of bedding and furniture, according to police. Behind it, unco-operative and refusing to leave, was Leibel.
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Lt. Dave Coleman spoke to reporters from local TV station KTLA5 that day. He told them it took a while for police to get inside and even longer to get Leibel out. “They had to force their way through the first door, the kitchen,” Coleman said. Eventually they got to the bedroom. They found Kasian there, her lifeless body allegedly mangled, cut up and showing signs of torture.
Prosecutors eventually charged Leibel with murder and a host of other gruesome charges. In a press release, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case said Leibel tortured and mutilated Kasian with a knife before killing her and draining her blood.
The scene painted by police and prosecutors looks eerily like several in Syndrome, Leibel’s 2010 graphic novel. In that book, a serial killer hangs a couple by their feet, draining their blood. In another panel, a female corpse lies, headless on a bed, in a puddle of blood.
Media outlets, including the Washington Post and the Toronto Sun, have made much of the comparison. But there are reasons to be skeptical. For one thing, Leibel is only credited with creating the concept for that book, not writing it or drawing the art.
.A panel image from Syndrome, a graphic novel created by Blake Leibel and written by several comic book professionals.
On Tuesday, Leibel appeared in court for the first time. He arrived under special escort from the Twin Towers jail, unexpectedly while his brother Cody was out of the room. After a 10-minute conference with his lawyers, Leibel emerged into the prisoner’s box on the left side of the court. His curly hair dangled down in strands across his forehead. He looked downward, like a chastened boy. He didn’t speak at all.
“His lips are parched,” one of his attorneys, told the court at one point. “He tells me that he has not been given food and water.”
“If we have a sandwich here, maybe we can help him out?” Judge Keith Schwartz told the bailiff, who agreed to find one.
After the hearing, Schwartz ordered Leibel held for a psychiatric assessment. He is due back in court for a competency hearing on June 14.
The world flocked to Leibel’s story this week, to the gore and the money and the fame. It’s easy to understand why. It’s a Hollywood horror tale that literally took place in Hollywood: A rich dilettante gone bad; an artist with a history of violent themes; a gruesome crime with just enough details to seem tied to, and maybe, just maybe, foreshadowed by, his work.
But strip all that away and you’re left with this: a woman who was allegedly killed by a man, her partner, and the father of her new baby. For Kasian’s family, the past week has been a frantic horror of grief and planning. The daughter Leibel and Kasian shared is a U.S. citizen. And Kasian’s family all live in Ukraine. They want to bring the baby back to Kyiv but they don’t yet know how, or whether, they’ll be able to do that.
For now, at least, Kasian’s mother and sister are also haunted by an unknown. What would have happened, they wonder, if the police had entered the apartment that Wednesday? Would she still be alive? Or was it already too late? At this point, only the killer knows.
• Email: jedmiston@nationalpost.com | Twitter: jakeedmiston
• Email: rwarnica@nationalpost.com | Twitter: richardwarnica