- It seemed like a perfect match when Iana, a young tax lawyer, met real estate heir and writer Blake
- When Iana became pregnant, the couple were delighted, helping Iana’s mum to move nearby
- Soon after their baby daughter’s birth though, Blake began to act very strangely…
The couple seemed tailor-made for Hollywood.
Blake Leibel, 35, was a real estate heir and an aspiring producer from a wealthy family, and Iana Kasian, 30, was a tax lawyer from the Ukraine who was breaking into modelling and climbing the social ladder.
The couple began a relationship in 2015, despite Blake’s wife Amanda Braun, who he’d split from, being pregnant with his second child.
READ MORE TRUE CRIME: Deadly love triangle: He killed his mate to win back his ex
Blake, who also wrote graphic novels, and Iana moved in together, getting engaged a short time later.
But that wasn’t all.
Just weeks after the birth of Blake’s child with Amanda, Iana discovered she was pregnant too.
The pair were overjoyed, and as her due date approached, Iana flew her mother, Olga, over for support during the birth, setting her mum up in a nearby apartment.
Iana gave birth to a baby girl, Diana, in April 2016.
Blake was no help with the baby, and began behaving strangely.
Within days, it was clear he was jealous of his newborn daughter. She was now the centre of her mother’s world, not him.
When Iana discovered Blake had been having an affair, her dreams of a perfect family life were shattered.
Yet it seemed Blake still had Iana under his spell.
‘He was controlling her like a hawk’
‘He was controlling her like a hawk,’ Olga later recalled to CBS News.
Determined to make things work for the sake of her baby, Iana complied with whatever Blake wanted, including his demands for intimacy as she recovered from a caesarean.
On May 23, 2016, when Diana was three weeks old, Iana was shopping with her mum when Blake asked her to come home.
‘I’m going to him,’ Iana told her mother, leaving Diana with her grandma.
Time passed, and Olga began to wonder when her daughter would return. She texted and called but received no response.
‘I had this feeling something was wrong,’ she told CBS, adding that it was ‘mother’s intuition’.
Olga called the police and asked them to carry out a welfare check.
When officers arrived at the apartment, they encountered one of the worst crime scenes they’d ever witnessed.
There was blood all through the house, leading to the master bedroom.
When police tried to enter, they found it locked and barricaded. After a tense stand off, Blake came out.
Police encountered one of the worst crimes they’d ever witnessed
In the bedroom, police were met with a scene so confronting, it seemed it belonged in a horror film.
On the bed, Iana lay dead.
The beautiful young mum had been savagely attacked.
There was no blood left in her body, and she was covered in bite marks and bruises.
Blake Leibel was arrested and charged with murder, mayhem, aggravated mayhem and torture.
In the basement, cops found 11 rubbish bags containing bloodied sheets.
An autopsy revealed Iana’s cause of death was exsanguination – or draining a person of blood – and blunt force trauma to the head.
Detectives believed it may have taken up to eight hours for her to die.
At his trial in June 2018, Leibel pleaded not guilty to all charges.
LA County’s prosecuting lawyer Tannaz Mokayef told the jury Leibel’s motive for murder was jealousy of his newborn baby, who was getting more attention than her father was.
The lawyer said Leibel had used a storyline from one of his graphic novels as ‘the blueprint’ for the murder.
His book, Syndrome, tells the story of a serial killer who drains blood from victims.
The sickening cover gave a glimpse into Leibel’s dark mind, showing a baby doll with its scalp removed.
Mokayef told the jury, ‘It’s a tale of a gruesome and sadistic crime, a tale of a planned and calculated murder.’
In summing up, another lawyer, Beth Silverman told the jury, ‘Ms Kasian died a slow and painful death. Her daughter will never know her.
‘The violence involved – that’s a lot of anger because she is no longer making him the number one most important thing in her life.’
Poor Iana was murdered for being a mum.
It took the jury just three hours to find Blake Leibel, then 37, guilty of all charges.
Prior to sentencing, Olga’s victim impact statement was shared with the court.
There are no words to express the pain and despair that is in my heart… This monster ruined our lives, it read.
‘This monster ruined our lives’
Highlighting Leibel’s ‘savagery’ and ‘cruelty’, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mark Windham sentenced him to life in prison.
In February 2019, Iana’s family won a wrongful death civil suit, in which Leibel was ordered to pay over $61 million in damages.
The following April, Leibel appealed his criminal conviction, claiming the judge abused his discretion by admitting evidence of his graphic novel.
The appeal was denied.
Baby Diana was placed in the custody of her loving grandma Olga.
‘I feel her presence every day, every minute,’ Olga said of her late daughter.
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