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In May 2016, when Olga Kasian was unable to reach her 30-year-old daughter, Iana Kasian, who was living in West Hollywood with her boyfriend, Blake Liebel. Her mother’s intuition told her that something was terribly wrong. Olga decided to contact police, who eventually gained access to the home & what they found inside was something the responding officers will never be able to erase from their minds.
According to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. William Cotter, in his nearly 30 years of being in law enforcement, he had never witnessed anything so heinous.
Iana was born in Estonia where her father worked in a navy yard & her mother was in healthcare. They relocated to Ukraine soon after Iana was born & sometime around 2014, she moved to L.A. She was a gorgeous young woman with dark eyes & jet black hair who was living within the sunny state of California, a stark contrast to the freezing winters of Kiev, Ukraine. Iana worked as a tax lawyer in her late 20s while she lived in Ukraine until she immigrated to the United States. Once in L.A., she was training to work as a translator & she dreamed of one day raising children of her own within the U.S.
Right around this time, Iana met a man named Blake Leibel, an aspiring Hollywood producer who was born into a very wealthy family in Toronto. Many people saw him as an eccentric, friendly guy who wanted people to laugh.
Blake’s family was wealthy on both sides of the family. His father, Lorne Liebel, was a former Olympic sailboat racer who tested positive in 1976 to a banned stimulant. When his career ended, he became a prominent Toronto developer who built tens of thousands of suburban homes across Canada.
Blake’s maternal grandfather started a plastics business, Alros Products, that eventually became an empire while his maternal grandmother, Leona, suffered from long bouts of severe mental illness, according to a report in Canada’s National Post.
When Blake & his brother Cody were children, their parents, Lorne & Eleanor, separated but remained married. Blake went on to live with his mother while Cody, who was older by one year, lived with their father in the most affluent area of the city. Meanwhile, Blake & Eleanor lived was said to be the second wealthiest area in the city.
Since Cody was the more athletic of the two siblings, Blake was tormented & struggled with jealousy from an early age, believing that his father paid special attention to his brother. According to a close family friend, Blake always seemed very scared of his father; he always tried to impress him & prove that he wasn’t a mistake.
After Blake attended the University of Western Ontario, he & Cody relocated to California in 2004 to escape the harsh Canadian winters while Blake planned to pursue a career in entertainment, film & graphic novels. They settled themselves in Los Angeles where their father gave them each a big house & an $18,000/month allowance.
Cody tried to establish himself as a Hollywood playboy & started a music company, a now defunct C-Note Records & then followed in his father’s footsteps with real estate. At 23, he was the world’s youngest owner of a $1.2 million Ferrari Enzo, one of only a few hundred that were made.
Meanwhile, Blake had different, more creative ambitions & directed a low-budget 2008 comedy called Bald, about a college student who is trying to raise money for his hair transplant by creating a website featuring sexy female students. He also contributed to the animated Spaceballs series which was an offshoot of the popular Mel Brooks movie.
Despite his dream to work as a producer, Blake’s most successful project was a graphic novel titled Syndrome, about a neuropathologist who launches a bold experiment in the Nevada desert to isolate the root of all evil within the human brain. He hoped that one day his novel would be turned into a TV show.
Some within his L.A. social circle saw him as a trust fund kid who was out spending Mommy & Daddy’s dollars, while others viewed him as a guy who was smart & hard working.
In 2006, before Iana Kasian moved to L.A, Blake met a model named Amanda Braun & the two ended up getting married in 2011. While Amanda was a highly social girl who loved to be out & about, attending parties, Blake was more of a low-key homebody who preferred to hang out at home & read his comics.
In 2011, the same year that Blake & Amanda got married, Blake’s mother Eleanor was sadly dying of brain cancer, a time when his friends started to notice changes in his behavior. They indicated that he was acting out & throwing tantrums if he didn’t get his way. He was in a cycle that involved yelling & verbal abuse where he would berate people & then apologize for his inappropriate outburst.
After his mother died in 2011, Blake was under the impression that because he was raised by his her while his brother was raised by his dad, that Eleanor intended to leave the bulk of her $12 million estate to him. However, he came to find that a significant portion of this money went to Lorne instead. Blake believed that his father may have manipulated his mother’s will at the last minute & in 2013, after he fought for the money in court, he was awarded less than half.
Blake & Amanda had a son together, but when Amanda was pregnant with their second child & nearing her due date, Blake packed up his things & abruptly left her in the summer of 2015. The divorce was filed in July & Amanda gave birth to their second son the following month. Some saw this as the start of his truly erratic behavior.
Blake moved out of the Beverly Hills home that his mother funded to allow Amanda to raise their sons there. Shortly after he moved out, he crossed paths with Iana Kasian & told her that his marriage was over & he was a single man. Their relationship was a whirlwind romance where they took lavish trips together, dined out & he purchased her a very expensive Mercedes. Their relationship also progressed quickly & they soon moved into a condo together on Holloway Drive. They lived in West Hollywood, a block south of the Sunset Strip in a swanky neighborhood & in a matter of months, Iana realized she was pregnant.
Olga was thrilled when she realized she was going to be a grandmother. It was her understanding that Blake was either divorced or in the process of divorcing his wife since that’s what Iana had been told.
As Iana’s due date was approaching, Olga flew to L.A. & met the man that promised to marry her daughter & to be there for her granddaughter’s birth. Blake set Olga up in a nearby apartment since she wanted to be able to help with the baby. Only days later, baby girl Diana was born on what just so happened to be Olga’s 60th birthday.
According to Olga, both Iana & Blake were so happy & Blake seemed content with his new family. She noticed that he showed her daughter attention & when he kissed her, he would say in Russian, my beloved.
However, this picture of a happy family of three was far different from what Blake was confiding in his friend about over text messages. Unlike his younger brother, Cody was a guy who lived a loud, fast lifestyle & loved to be in the center of the action going on in Hollywood. Blake feared that because his brother had large gambling debts, poker playing Russian mobsters were a threat to those he loved & he feared he would lose his family.
Cody played in an underground high-stakes poker ring known as Molly’s Game that was held in various mansions or hotels in Beverly Hills or Hollywood. Hands could go as high as $4 million & the organization was named after Molly Bloom, a former competitive skier who organized the high-stakes games that attracted A-list actors. Cody himself had at least once lost over $1 million during a night of playing. Blake was convinced that the people his brother was associated with posed a threat to he & his family.
Investigators also came to learn that Blake wasn’t a simple family man who was staying home, doting on his fiance & his new baby. When Diana was born, he was tangled among three different women & by early 2016, his personal life had gotten very complicated.
On top of going through a divorce with Amanda, who lived in Beverly Hills, he was in his relationship with Iana, living at their West Hollywood condo with their baby girl & meanwhile, he was also seeing a third woman, Constance Buccafurri, who lived in a ritzy little house that Blake owned only a couple of miles away. He was sharing his time between Iana & Constance, living multiple lives.
It seemed that after the birth of Diana, Blake’s behavior went from erratic to disruptive in a matter of days. While home, he kept the windows locked & the curtains drawn & blasted the A/C despite the fact they had a newborn baby in their house. When Iana complained, Blake told her that she could leave & go to her mother’s place. She would stay at her mom’s for a night or two & the cycle would continue. He chain-smoked pot, filling the condo with smoke & his mood seemed to grow darker by the day.
In mid-May 2016, only two weeks after Diana was born & less than a week before Olga Kasian contacted the LAPD about concerns for her daughter’s wellbeing, Constance accused Blake of sexually assaulting her in the home she was staying in that he was paying for. According to court documents, the assault occurred months earlier when she & Blake first started dating. She said that Blake assaulted her multiple times & infected her with an STD, but despite these attacks, she continued to forgive him. After he was arrested & held in jail, Iana had to help bail him out which officially revealed his affair. On his release, he was facing felony rape charges.
According to Olga, her daughter was terrified of losing her dream life in America & of losing Blake so she agreed to allow her baby girl to live in her mom’s nearby apartment. She agreed to this as a way to focus on & repair her relationship with Blake, who suddenly had no interest in his own daughter. Iana’s American dream was quickly becoming a nightmare.
Blake threatened that he could leave Iana at any moment for another woman as a way to constantly demand sex during a time when she was still recovering from a C-section. He took advantage of Iana’s vulnerable situation; he was controlling the fiances, she just had a baby & she was terrified of losing her life in the United States. Because of this, Olga indicated that Iana ended up doing anything he demanded of her.
Olga begged her daughter to leave the relationship & move on with her life & move herself & Diana in with her, but sadly, Iana wasn’t ready to give up.
On Monday, May 23, 2016, Iana went shopping with her mother & as the day continued on, she began receiving a barrage of text messages from Blake. His persistence eventually wore her down & in the midst of their outing, Iana told her mom, I’m going to him & she left.
The following day, when Olga tried to reach her daughter, each of her six calls went to voicemail & after the final missed call, she felt an intuition that she needed to go see Iana to check on her, but because she was caring for Diana, she contacted the police.
Because Olga didn’t speak English, she was placed on hold for a long time until they could find someone at the station who spoke Russian. Despite this conversation & the fact that she continued to call the station, she was unsure if they went to the condo to check on her daughter since she wasn’t hearing anything back.
On Wednesday morning, May 25, 2016, two days after she last saw Iana, Olga woke up feeling frantic that she was still unable to reach her daughter so she called a taxi & went to Iana & Blake’s condo with a friend. They desperately tried to get into the gated property & in the meantime, Olga went across the street from the building so she could try to look at the patio.
As Olga looked up toward her daughter’s third floor unit, she saw Blake standing in the window, but when she yelled out his name, he didn’t respond. Finally, another resident from the condo opened the gate & Olga & her friend were able to rush through.
Now at her daughter’s front door, Olga continued to knock & ring the doorbell to no avail so she contacted the police again. When officers arrived she explained the situation & the fact that she was fearful for her daughter’s safety. She knew that Blake was inside, but he wouldn’t answer the door as Olga begged the officers to break down the door. They explained that there was no proof of foul play so they had no right to enter without permission.
Police tried to call Blake, but there was no answer & after waiting outside for a few hours, they eventually left. Olga was left feeling utterly terrified & helpless, convinced that her daughter was on the other side of that door. Since Olga needed to get back to her 3-week-old granddaughter who was being cared for at the moment by a friend, she reluctantly left the complex.
The following morning on Thursday, May 26, Olga was back on the phone with the police begging for their help when the officers finally agreed that it was time to get into her condo. They worried that because Iana had only recently given birth that she might be suffering a medical emergency.
As the officers arrived, they told Olga that she had to wait near the main entrance of the building rather than follow them up to the third floor as she wanted to. When officers once again arrived at Iana’s front door, they announced their presence & continued to scream out Blake’s name, but as with the day before, there was no answer.
After they eventually got a key from the realtor, they unlocked the door, but when they tried to push it open they realized that the door was also secured with a swing-bar lock. This meant that someone was definitely inside the unit since this type of lock can only be secured from the inside.
When officers broke the door down & entered the unit, they noticed that the living room seemed disheveled while the hallway door that led to the bedrooms was locked & barricaded, forcing them to remove the door from the hinges.
As soon as officers looked into the guest bedroom, there were immediate signs of foul play as they noted blood on the headboard as well as the walls. They continued to call out Blake’s name, but they were met with only silence. After they made a sweep of the guest bedroom & found it empty, they moved toward the master bedroom which was also barricaded, in this instance, with a mattress.
As the officers continued to push against the mattress to gain entry into the room, they suddenly heard Blake’s voice yell out that he refused to come out of the room. He also claimed that Iana wasn’t there.
During this time, Blake called a friend who rushed to the condo & convinced him to open the door & come out of the bedroom. Wearing only boxer shorts, Blake finally emerged from the room. In the meantime, homicide detectives Cotter & Martindale were called to the scene.
According to Sgt. William Cotter, although he’s seen many homicide scenes in his career, nothing could have prepared him for what he walked into that day as he arrived at Iana & Blake’s condo.
As they moved onto the master bedroom, there was an obvious large blood stain on the wall that someone clearly attempted to clean up. This was when they came upon Iana who was covered in a Mickey Mouse blanket up to her chin. At first glance, she almost looked peaceful, but once her head was off the pillow, the gruesome violence that she’d been subjected to was apparent.
According to Sgt. Rob Martindale, the injuries that the 30-year-old had suffered were horrific & unspeakable. There were bite marks to her face, she had been scalped & the color of her skin was oddly pale. What had been done to her was utterly sadistic & sick. Not only did Iana have defensive wounds to her arms & wrists, but Blake had scratches & bruises on his face & a bite mark on his arm that proved Iana had tried in vain to fight back before she was viciously murdered.
As the condo was further examined, investigators found a pair of Blake’s pants that held his passport as well as $4,000 in cash which suggested he was likely planning to dispose of Iana’s body, clean up the crime scene & likely flee the country back to his home in Canada.
Olga watched as Blake was led out of the condo in handcuffs, but she could only look beyond him, hoping & praying that Iana would be brought out as she continued to scream, Where is my daughter? As she stood outside, leaning against a wall, Sgt. Martindale had the horrific task of breaking the unimaginable news that her daughter was dead.
Despite the fact that Olga tried her best to get past officers so she could go inside where her daughter was, they wouldn’t allow her.
Blake’s arrest photo depicts the face of a madman with obvious scratches & bruises on his face, a sick smile on his face, his eyes haunting & demented in appearance. He told officers that he had nothing to do with Iana’s gruesome murder or the horrific crime scene & when asked what happened, he said, Science is gonna tell you who did this. He continued to hold firm on the fact that he had no idea she was dead & when the detective point blank said, She’s dead in that bed, he coldly replied, Well, I guess you’ll find out who did it then.
When crime scene specialist with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, Leslie Thompson, entered the condo, she was immediately struck with the lack of blood she would otherwise expect to see in a murder this brutal. However, when something the investigators refer to as luminol 2.0, otherwise known as Bluestar Magnum, was sprayed on the surfaces of the condo, it was very clear that an immense amount of blood had been cleaned up around the unit.
The chemical compound in the Bluestar reveals where blood was & where a cleaning substance was used to clean it which creates a luminescence or light that allows you to see blood that was previously invisible to the naked eye. When investigators came into the master bedroom, they noticed small blood stains on the mattress, but when Bluestar was utilized, the room absolutely lit up. There was a tremendous amount of blood on the floor to the left side of the bed.
Despite the fact that the bathroom appeared to be free of any blood, when sprayed with Bluestar, like much of the condo, it all lit up which told investigators that what happened to Iana in the condo had been horrific. What led to her death didn’t just happen quickly in one room; blood evidence proved it had been a prolonged, torturous, brutal murder.
Investigators learned that Iana’s cause of death was what is medically known as exsanguination or the draining of all of the blood in the body. Most of the blood loss occurred because she had been scalped. This explained why her skin had looked so oddly pale when investigators found her body. The average human body contains about five liters of blood & Iana was found with less than a teaspoon. Once a person is deceased, they are unable to bleed out, which tragically meant that Iana had been alive for the duration & had likely suffered immensely. Detectives determined that it had taken between six & eight hours for her to die.
The last reported scalping in the U.S. had been in 2000 when a Cincinnati man shot his wife’s lover repeatedly in the chest & groin with a shotgun & then removed his scalp. Iana’s was a clean incision that seemed to have been made with a blade that curved around the base of her skull in a sharp line & back up around one ear.
Because use of Bluestar proved that the condo had been extensively cleaned, investigators were left to determine what had been done with all of the cleaning materials, bedding & clothing. This was when they noticed just how close the building’s trash chute was to Blake & Iana’s unit.
Cotter & his team collected 11 trash bags from the dumpsters that were filled with towels, clothing & bedding. A bedskirt found in the dumpster was imprinted with a bloody handprint that appeared to be missing part of the pinky finger of the person’s right hand. When investigators looked at Blake’s right hand, they saw that he was missing the top portion of his pinky finger. This proved what detectives believed in the first place, Blake Leibel was responsible for Iana Kasian’s murder.
A blood test proved that the attack against Iana was not drug-fueled as only a small amount of marijuana was found in his system. Investigators were left to wonder what his motive was; what would cause a man to do such unimaginable things to a woman he claimed to love, who was his fiance & the mother of his newborn baby?
During his interview, Blake made the comment that women don’t like him & he alluded to the idea that if wasn’t wealthy, women would have no interest in him. Because he held control of the money, he believed he had control over the women in his life. Investigators theorize that Iana said no to him which was something he couldn’t handle.
Investigators looked into Blake’s background, knowing that something this horrific doesn’t usually just happen out of nowhere. Those that knew Blake from Canada were stunned by the murder as there had been no indication that he was capable of such violence. They viewed him as eccentric, always charming, but also manipulative. He had many ups & downs were he would often get into a fight with someone & then come back to smooth things over
According to Dr. Kris Mohandie, a forensic psychologist who worked with the prosecution in this case, Blake is not crazy. Being found insane or incompetent in the eyes of the law is different from being someone who can do outrageous, heinous, terrible things to other people. Although he never met Blake, a court-ordered psychiatrist did find Blake competent to stand trial. According to Mohandie, this is because Blake knows right from wrong which is the legal standard.
Because of Blake’s background, Mohandie feels that what happened was shocking but not surprising. He grew up amongst wealth as a child while he was alienated from his father at a young age & as he grew, he developed a need for power & control over women. He always got what he wanted when he wanted & has an underlying violent fantasy life that he had been mentally rehearsing for years. When the rage came out, it took the form of those fantasies. These fantasies refer to the graphic novel, Syndrome, Blake was working on years before Iana’s murder.
The trial began in June 2018, two years after Iana was killed when Blake was 36-years-old. Prosecutor Beth Silverman believed that Syndrome was a blueprint for this murder & Blake was acting out a fantasy from his graphic novel whose cover depicted a doll that was missing its scalp. The book discusses two victims hanging upside down in order to exsanguinate or drain the blood from their bodies.
Prosecutors made the case that after Diana had been born, Blake became jealous of the time & attention she took away from him. He was desperate for the attention his baby girl was receiving & when Iana was unable to provide what he wanted, he snapped. His motive was power & control.
Prosecutor Silverman argued that the ultimate act of power is taking someone’s life; taking away their future & everything they dreamed they were going to be.
The jury heard that in the midst of Blake’s torture of Iana, he took the time to order food delivery to the condo several times based on security footage. This would have given him ample time to stop & change his mind, but regardless, he chose to continue with these horrendous acts against Iana.
A 3D animation was created in order to recreate the brutal crime scene in a highly realistic way which incorporated all of the blood evidence that was revealed with the use of Bluestar. This allowed jurors to remotely walk through the crime scene to get a much better idea of what actually happened to Iana in that condo that led to her death.
Not only was the 3D animation utilized, but jurors as well as Olga viewed dozens of graphic photos of Iana. Although it was unimaginably painful to see, Olga felt that because she is Iana’s mom, someone who loved her needed to bear witness to all she had gone through.
While Blake’s father did not attend the trial, his brother, Cody, was in court every day. There were six days of testimony that involved 14 prosecution witnesses while the defense called none of its own. Defense attorney Haydeh Takasugi tried to create reasonable doubt arguing that Blake hadn’t actually written Syndrome, he hired writers.
According to coroner Jim Ribe, who completed Iana’s autopsy, the skin & hair had been fully removed from her skull down to the surface of the bone & a portion of the right side of her face, including her right ear, was gone. This was something he had never seen before & doubts if any forensic pathologist in this country or abroad has seen outside of, maybe, wartime.
Prosecutors told jurors that he used a sharp object to remove Iana’s scalp; possibly the green paring knife or bloodied razor that was found in the bathroom as well as his bare hands. Jurors heard that investigators found Iana’s right ear & portions of her scalp in garbage bags inside a dumpster just outside the condo. He threw away pieces of his fiance as if she were trash.
After three hours of deliberation, the jury reached a verdict, guilty of first-degree murder of Iana Kasian. As the verdict was read, Blake showed no emotion, but out in the hallway, Olga was overcome with emotion as she yelled out that she was sorry she hadn’t been able to save her daughter.
Despite the fact that Olga is grateful for the detectives, she is haunted by the fact that her instinct to call the police wasn’t enough to save her baby girl. In her heart, she believes that as she stood at the door of her daughter’s condo on Wednesday, one day before officers broke the door down, Iana would likely still be here today.
However, according to Sgt. Martindale, based on the timeline depicted by the pathologist, it’s likely she was already dead by that point.
Blake was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Although investigators hoped that the Liebel family would do something honorable to assist Olga & their granddaughter & Cody’s niece, Diana, not one cent has been paid to support her. She has not heard from anyone in the family. Sadly, Iana always dreamed of raising her daughter in America, but because of the lack of money, Diana is now living in Ukraine in the town where her mother was laid to rest.
Olga continues to feel her daughter’s presence each & every day & keeps her memory alive by talking about her often. The Kasian family eventually won a wrongful death civil suit against Blake Liebel & was awarded a settlement of $41.6 million, however, they have yet to receive any money.
According to Jake Finkel, an attorney representing Iana’s family, Diana will one day learn the truth of her past, a truth that is grotesque & barbaric. Olga has told him one thing over & over, Blake didn’t just kill her, he killed all of us. The most precious thing to take away from a little girl, from a woman, is her mother. [Diana’s] mother was taken away from her before she even got a real chance to learn about her, get to know her.
References:
- Goodreads: Syndrome
- CBS News: Was Hollywood producer’s graphic novel a blueprint for murder?
- CBS News: 3D animation used to recreate brutal crime scene
- The Hollywood Reporter: Murder, mayhem & torture off the Sunset Strip: The tragic story of the budding director & his dead girlfriend
- Toronto Sun: Toronto trust-funder Blake Leibel accused of torture killing
- Ati: Hollywood model Iana Kasian tortured, scalped & drained of blood by graphic novelist boyfriend Blake Leibel
- Ati: The horrific story of Blake Leibel, the real estate heir who tortured, murdered & drained the blood from his fiance
- Los Angeles Times: Graphic novelist ordered to pay nearly $42 million in fiance’s torture murder
- Wikipedia: Molly Bloom
