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The anniversary of the most infamous unsolved murder in American history was last week.
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Elizabeth Short — aka the Black Dahlia — was discovered cut cleanly in two at 39th and Norton in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 1947.
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Homicide detectives in the City of Angels told me they had never seen anything like the horrific morgue photos that revealed the agonizing torture the 22-year-old ingenue had endured.
That is, until the May 24, 2016 murder of 30-year-old Iana Kasiasn, a former model from Ukraine who moved to L.A. to work as a translator. One detective said the gory result of her torture murder “was on par with the Black Dahlia.”
The killer? Whiffy Toronto trustafarian Blake Leibel.
Now, Leibel — rotting away in the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi south of Bakersfield — is getting the true crime TV treatment and another shot at the fame that eluded him outside murder. His story airs Monday on Death By Fame on ID. And what a story it is.
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He had fantasized about becoming a big graphic novelist or movie producer. One friend noted that even in a somewhat weird racket, the rich kid took the gold medal in buffoonery.
“With movie and comic geeks, that world attracts a lot of weirdos,” one producer told the Toronto Sun. “But even in that world of bad hygiene and general weirdness, Blake was on the outer fringe.”
Leibel grew up with a proverbial silver spoon jammed into his spoiled gob: Raised in Forest Hill, he had lived with his mother Eleanor — heiress to a plastics fortune — while his brother lived with his father Lorne Leibel, a mega-developer, Olympic yachtsman and racing enthusiast.
Leibel followed his brother Cody to California in 2004. Resettlement wasn’t tough: Mommy and daddy sprung for a mansion and $18,000-a-month walkaround money.
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His career stumbled through several gigs until he released his graphic novel, Syndrome in 2010. The project — written and illustrated entirely by others — was later described by cops as the macabre blueprint for the horror show to come.
Liebel was briefly married to model Amanda Braun and the marriage produced children but by 2015, the union had cratered. That’s when the habitual pot smoker met Kasian.
She became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Diana.
For his part, Liebel — ever the spoiled rich kid — resented not having the Ukranian beauty’s undivided attention. Prosecutors would later say he was “jealous” of the baby.
On that terrible May weekend in 2016, he snapped. Liebel spent six hours torturing Kasian at their West Hollywood condo, scattering bits of her scalp, ear and face before draining her blood in a bathtub.
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Like Braun before her, Kasian realized that Blake Leibel was a deeply disturbed man. During the final days of her life, her mother, Olga, cared for the child while she tried to salvage the relationship.
When Olga didn’t hear from her daughter for several days, she became frantic and called the cops. Leibel later emerged from the master bedroom in boxer shorts and covered in cuts and bruises.
Horrified detectives found Kasian’s naked body laying on the bed covered with a red Mickey Mouse blanket that had been taken from their baby’s room. The room itself resembled a slaughterhouse.
“He threw away pieces of his fiancée like she was trash, the mother of his newborn baby,” an ADA said at Leibel’s trial. “‘This was depravity. Ms Kasian died a slow and painful death.”
He was sentenced to life in prison, no parole. He was also ordered to pay Kasian’s family nearly $50 million.
Leibel has the rest of his life to ponder his rich fantasy world.
@HunterTOSun
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