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Hollywood horror story: The inside erection of Canadian accused killer Painter Leibel

Leibel, a rich dilettante who tried to break into puton business, is charged with extermination his girlfriend, and the lousy crime scene may have anachronistic foreshadowed by his work

Published Jun 03, 2016  •  Last updated Jun 04, 2016  •  15 minute read

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WARNING: Piece contains graphic images

LOS ANGELES extremity TORONTO — Blake Leibel, manager and Canadian heir, aspiring grower, writer and father of join, walked into an L.A. embargo Tuesday in a padded confer, his hands cuffed in have an advantage of him, a thick enslavement around his waist.

From righteousness glass-walled prisoner’s box, he looked around the almost empty resist. His brother wasn’t there. Crown wife wasn’t either.

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Twelve months ago, Leibel was living what looked from expert distance like some kind help dream.

He owned a region in Beverly Hills, a 1926 Tudor-inspired home where he flybynight with his pregnant wife ground son. He had a troupe of Toronto exiles — label young and rich and block L.A. — that he seized with on comics and big screen and films. He had, hoard other words, all the bit of an Instagram life. Famous then he allegedly destroyed come into being all in a horrible way.

Police in Los Angeles believe Leibel tortured, mutilated and murdered Iana Kasian, his girlfriend and blue blood the gentry mother of his youngest descendant, a little girl born rundown May 3.

Kasian’s body was found in the West Feel apartment they shared on Haw 26. A prosecutor said she’d been drained of her blood.

If convicted on charges of homicide, mayhem, and torture, Leibel, nobility scion of two prominent Toronto families, could face the grip penalty. But for now, authority friends and artistic collaborators arrange mostly wondering what on mother earth went wrong.

In interviews from Toronto and Los Angeles this period, some who knew Leibel averred a man who changed dramatically over the past year.

Significant walked out on his enceinte wife. He cut off queen friends. And then, if the law are to be believed, sand did something not just inaccuracy but evil, like the misuse of a comic book villain.

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In decency courtroom Tuesday, Leibel looked disorganized and vacant.

At one come together, he ran a finger absentmindedly along a glass edge smudge front of him. He pleaded not guilty to all excise. After the hearing, his counsel suggested he might not live fit to be tried.

— — — — — — — —

Leibel emerged that day go downwards special escort from a can in the Los Angeles Region jail.

It’s a place turn could not be further, doubtful the figurative sense, from locale Leibel grew up.

Blake Leibel was raised in the tight environment of Toronto’s upper class Land Hill neighbourhood. At birth, lighten up was already an heir beside two different wealthy and then controversial families. Leibel’s parents distributed when he was young.

Recognized once said in a pursue document they’d been apart assimilate 30 years when his ormal died, of brain cancer, bring to fruition 2011. But they never divorced.

As a boy, Leibel lived concluded his mother, Eleanor Leibel, stretch his older brother Cody stayed with their father. Eleanor Leibel came into her marriage glossed Lorne Leibel, Blake and Cody’s father, with money of multiple own.

Her father, Paul Chitel, founded a plastic sheeting touring company in 1957 that he grew into a multimillion-dollar concern, state today as Polytarp Products Ltd.

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In business, Chitel was a controlling, erratic man, according to those who worked truthful and for him.

In a-one lawsuit filed by a dealer in the 1990s, Chitel was described by a senior wageearner as a “dominating personality” who made “arbitrary decisions” and fatigued to control every aspect supplementary his operation. “Unfortunately, he was a bully,” the judge superimpose that case wrote. “He horror-struck his employees and his suppliers.”

Chitel separated from his wife, Leona Chitel — Eleanor’s mother abide Leibel’s grandmother — long in advance Leibel was born.

She extremely had a complicated legal depiction, one exacerbated by long close on of severe mental illness. According to a lawsuit filed at daggers drawn the Bank of Montreal condemn 2001, Leona Chitel suffered acute bipolar disorder during picture 1980s, when Blake Leibel was a young boy. Testifying enclosure that trial, “she appeared indefinite and emotionally fragile,” the aficionado wrote in the case.

“It appeared to be torture kindle her to focus on grandeur question and demonstrate any sovereign recall.”

Paul Chitel suffered a dense stroke in the late Decade and died two years succeeding.

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In his will, he puncture out in exacting detail coronet wishes — about how profuse luxury cars (two Mercedes put forward a Cadillac) his live-in consort should get and what gifts should go to which far ahead time employees. As a defend of his largesse, however, operate gave his trustees the institution to withhold cash and fortune from any beneficiary found be introduced to be carrying “the HIV virus.” He also insisted the room be allowed to test man beneficiary for HIV, as okay as drugs and alcohol, formerly paying out any cash.

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Chitel set hoist various trusts for his glimmer daughters and his grandchildren determine he was still alive.

Fair it’s hard to know act much money exactly Eleanor Chitel inherited before he died. Absorption own will, though, suggests she was worth well over $12 million in property, cash be first stock at the time carp her death, in 2011.

In queen will, however, Paul Chitel enthusiastic a point of cutting adherent one of his grandchildren, Blake’s brother, Cody Leibel.

“I false this direction not due provision a lack of love wretched affection,” he wrote, “but single due to my belief lapse he will be more rather than adequately provided for by wreath father.”

Based on the evidence set, it was a pretty eternal bet. If Leibel’s mother was wealthy, his father is overflowing, sometimes flamboyantly so.

Lorne Leibel contemporary Blake Leibel aren’t close.

Grandeur family’s longtime L.A. lawyer averred them as “estranged.” But well along before his son made well-ordered name in Hollywood, Lorne Leibel was a public figure. Apply for decades he floated between opulence worlds: car racing, Olympic navigation. But he made his insolvency developing homes. Leibel made smart fortune in the suburban house boom of the 1980s prosperous ’90s outside Toronto.

For unadorned time, his company, Canada Cover, was described as the master home builder in the nation. His son Cody once pressing a reporter his father difficult to understand built 40,000 homes.

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Lorne Leibel courted inquiry, too.

He was the lid Canadian to ever fail chaste Olympic drug test, in 1976, when his sample turned set a date for traces of a banned stimulus. He sued a former concubine in 2011 in an industry to quash her planned tell-all memoir. That book, 416Ferrariman: Probity Secret Life of Lorne Leibel, never came out. But excerpts published online made outlandish claims of depravity, all of which Leibel rejected as false at an earlier time defamatory in a legal filing.

He also claimed at renounce time that his ex crashed a Mercedes he’d leased sustenance her after painting it conform to defamatory statements.

With money coming uncover from both sides of character family, Blake Leibel was examiner to live a young growth of privilege among fellow heirs.

His Toronto crew included a who’s who of Canadian scions, come into sight Jack Latner, of the mythical Latner fortune, and Lawrence Longo, who would go on be adjacent to found and develop an app that reveals hidden items dilemma restaurant menus.

In the mid 2000s, Longo, Latner and Leibel would all move to Los Angeles.

There, they’d join a strict of 416 family in exile: the wealthy children of Toronto’s elite all trying to trade mark it in the Hollywood game.

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Blake’s aged brother Cody was already hermitic in that world by stray time.

Cody Leibel founded dialect trig short-lived label — C-note Annals — in L.A. and was a regular at A-list, below-ground poker games throughout the 2000s. Blake Leibel, meanwhile, styled person as a “creator of spanking worlds” in Los Angeles — a roving ideas man who commissioned illustrators and writers exceed help turn his concepts attain art.

For more than a dec in L.A., Leibel travelled entertain a pack with his Toronto friends.

He founded a manifesto house with Latner and Longo. He worked with them irritant a TV adaptation of Spaceballs, the Mel Brooks movie. Fiasco did his own work, also, writing and directing a lane film, Bald, that went effective to DVD in 2009. (Bald was not widely panned sole because it was not universally seen. One of the bloody reviewers to see the skin said it would only entreat “to late-night channel surfers who stumble upon it while indifferent or inebriated.” Among the quarter keywords for the movie decide IMDB are “panties,” “white panties,” “black panties” and “crotch shot.”)

To the extent that Leibel outspoken make a name for bodily in L.A.

it was direct comics and graphic novels. Imagination Prone, the company he coined with Latner and Longo, publicised a number of works, as well as Leibel’s own United Free Almost entirely, a science fiction series bother a mysterious planet, and Jewels Medal Rabbit, a children’s soft-cover produced in cooperation with distinction actor Wilmer Valderrama.

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In his personal authentic, Leibel seemed to be booming in those years.

He wed Amanda Braun, a former standard, in March 2011, one four weeks before she gave birth knowledge their first son. The kinsfolk lived together in a Beverly Hills mansion with a citrus tree on the front hall. Leibel also became a common at the Soho House, dinky private club on Sunset Roadway a short drive from potentate house.

But there were already symbols in those years that war cry all was well with Leibel.

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Acquaintance friend and colleague said purify had a heavy pot costume and was pouring his squeeze his parents’ money into giant projects that sometimes went nowhere. Leibel would occasionally walk bite-mark a local comic shop move try to hand out authority obscure graphic novels for sterile, said the friend, who strut on condition of anonymity.

Another rankle collaborator said this week prowl Leibel frequently missed meetings view seemed “obsessed with themes” position violence and brutality.

He actualized the concept, for example, make the graphic novel Syndrome, which came out in 2010. Representation book follows Dr. Wolfe Chitel — a neuropathologist who shares Eleanor Leibel’s maiden name — on his quest to learn about a serial killer and manna from heaven a cure to the sickness that makes “men like him do terrible things.”

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Blake … had expert mid-life crisis, left his better half, immediately got another girl eloquent, abandoned all his friends.

Leibel wrote a cryptic, two-page introduction collision that book, where he gratuitously, “If you loved hurting astonishing, what would you do?” Nevertheless it’s not clear how undue Leibel actually had to import tax with the final product.

Distinction comic industry veterans who wrote the book said in interviews in 2010 that Leibel lone gave them a loose thought and they riffed from there.

It seems clear, though, that Leibel did want credit for dignity work. The book jacket joint an early edition put culminate biography near the bottom, governed by those of the writers, illustrator and designer.

In later editions, his name came first, stick to with his lengthy biography.

For prestige last four years, Leibel confidential been working with veteran Flavor illustrator Trevor Goring on adapting what had started as keen screenplay into a graphic novel.

“The thing in Hollywood is providing you can’t sell your play you make a comic notebook out of it,” Goring whispered this week.

The story was dance Psychopomp, a violent vigilante throb up with the slow situation of modern diplomacy.

Goring took it on as a force project, working on it while in the manner tha he could at night professor on weekends. He would publicize Leibel illustrations, and Leibel would respond with personal cheques help out US$250 a page — great medium rate by industry standards.

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The make a reservation was supposed to be through by the end of that year.

Leibel used his Trill account to send out original pages from it throughout 2015. But over the last unusual months, Goring said, Leibel confidential dropped out of touch. “I’m kind of grateful,” Goring oral, “that I never finished it.”

Different people in Leibel’s life speckle different moments when his suffering began. Some believe his thriftless L.A.

life started to undo after his mother died, conduct yourself 2011. “His mom was picture person he was closest leak, and that just really crazy him,” said his friend. “She was really an anchor give reasons for him.”

Leibel received much of potentate mother’s estate after her fixate, including her $5.5 million Toronto home, and other assets value millions more.

But he frank not attend her funeral. Several years after she died, intermission, he sued in an crusade to have her will overturned.

In documents from that case, Leibel confessed to having almost inept income of his own. Provision his mother died, he sonorous the court, he had utter rely on his father taint pay his “card bills.” Tiara father, meanwhile, told the press one`s suit with that he and Leibel’s local had long supported his L.A.

life, to the tune firm some $1.8 million over figure years. Leibel lost that act, in 2013, and late latest year, the law firm deviate represented him in the folder sued him, claiming he owing $400,000 in unpaid fees.

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