Online, Leibel appeared to be thriving in the bright lights of Los Angeles. He directed several episodes of the cartoon adaption of the movie, Meatballs, and he wrote or  co-wrote a number of graphic novels and a “space opera comic series.” He also helped to run a publishing company that put out a comic in partnership with Wilmer Valderrama. He was married, had two young sons and the family lived in Beverley Hills. However, despite the fact that he seemed successful, Leibel had practically no income from his endeavors and depended on his father to pay his credit card bills. In 2015, he filed for divorce and shortly thereafter, his new girlfriend, Iana Kasian, fell pregnant.

In 2010, Leibel created the graphic novel “Syndrome.” The plot follows a doctor’s quest to isolate the root of evil in the brain and tries his experiment out on a serial killer. In a case of life imitating art, Leibel would later brutally murder Kasian in a crime which was said to “follow a script” from the graphic novel.

Kasian was born in Ukraine and lived in Kiev until her late 20s. She studied law in college and worked in tax inspection. In 2014, she moved to Los Angeles on a student visa. It was here that she met and started to date Leibel. Just the week before Kasian’s murder, Leibel had been  charged with felony rape but was out on $100,00 bail. His victim was not Kasian but when she found out, she moved out of their apartment and moved in with her mother, who was visiting from Ukraine to help with the couple’s new-born baby, Diana.

In May of 2016, Kasian returned to the apartment to speak with Leibel. When she didn’t come back to her mother’s apartment or call her to let her know she was staying with Leibel, her mother reported her missing, prompting police to pay a visit to the couple’s apartment in the 8500 block of Holloway Drive. As they arrived at the scene, Leibel barricaded himself in by placing bedding and furniture at the door. “Ultimately, he came out real peacefully and gave himself up,” said Lt. David Coleman.¹

Upon entering the dimly lit apartment, it was clear why Leibel hadn’t wanted them to come in. In a blood-spattered bedroom, police found the body of 30-year-old Kasian lying on a blood-stained mattress with a Mickey Mouse comforter. Diana was found beside her mother’s body, unharmed.

Kasian’s autopsy painted a terrifying picture of the pain and terror she had endured. Her blood had been completely drained, her head was scalped and her eyebrows and right ear had been cut off. There were several bite marks on her jaw. Ultimately, she died from blunt force trauma to the skull and exsanguination. The pathologist noted that Kasian had survived for at least 8 hours after receiving the scalp injury. “I have never see this before. And I doubt if hardly any forensic pathologists in this county or abroad have even seen this outside of, perhaps, wartime,” he said.

Leibel appeared in court several days later. He was wearing a sleeveless padded suicide jacket and pleaded not guilty. He was arraigned on charges of mayhem, aggravated mayhem, torture and murder. As defined by the California Criminal Code, mayhem includes disfigurement or dismemberment, while aggravated mayhem is defined as showing “extreme indifference to the physical or psychological well-being of another person” by causing “permanent disability or disfigurement.” His lawyer, Alaleh Kamran, questioned whether her was mentally competent to stand trial. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Keith Schwartz ordered Leibel to undergo psychological evaluation.²

Leibel would be ruled competent and the trial was scheduled for 2018.

During Leibel’s trial, graphic photographs of the crime scene were shown. In his testimony, Sgt. William Cotter pointed out blood stains on drapes, on a headboard, on a lamp. He also showed a piece of flesh on the bedding and Kasian’s lifeless and naked body. She was scalped, bruised and missing her eyebrows and right ear. The pathologist, Jonathan Lucas, said: “Basically her scalp is missing form the top of her head. There’s an absence of tissue, we’re looking directly at bone.” He also testified that Kasian was still alive while being mutilated.³

As for a motivation, the prosecution argued that Leibel was jealous of the attention that Kasian was paying to their new-born daughter. Kasian’s mother, Olda Kasian, read out an impact statement. “He took away the most precious thing that a baby could have. This monster ruined our lives, ruined the lives of his family, lives of his sons, of his new-born daughter – who looks like him, like a spitting copy.” At the time of the trial, Kasian’s daughter was living with her family back in Ukraine.⁴

Blake Leibel was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In imposing the life sentence, Judge Mark Windham said that the case was unusual due to the “savagery, the defendant’s profound brutality and his inconceivable cruelty.” The prosecution had opted not to seek the death penalty because Leibel didn’t have a prior criminal record but also because of the massive backlog of inmates waiting to be executed in California. “We seek death in, you know, relatively few cases. Given the fact that nobody’s been put to death in over a decade and there’s seven hundred and forty something on death row right now,” said Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman.

In February of 2019, a California judge ordered Leibel to pay the family of Kasian $42 million. “This murder didn’t just kill one person, it really did kill the family, it shattered the family. And the family has had a hard time crawling back from this,” said Jake Finkel, an attorney representing Kasian’s family.

On 16 April, 1996, 17-year-old Kelly Anne Bates was drowned in a bath tub, after suffering four weeks of constant torture at the hands of her 48-year-old “partner,” James Patterson Smith, who had started grooming the Manchester schoolgirl when she was just 14-years-old.

Bates had met Smith while she was babysitting for one of his friends. Playing the perfect gentleman, he walked her home that night to “keep her safe.”⁵ The grooming process was so secretive that Bates’ parents didn’t even meet Smith until two years later, when they were finally introduced to the much-older man. They had spoken to him on the phone but were completely oblivious to his age. They became concerned immediately after the first introduction. How could they not? Bates was just a teenage girl and Smith was a divorcee in his late 40s. “When I first met him, the hairs went up on the back of my neck,” recalled her mother, Margaret.⁶

While growing up, Bates was a strong girl that loved playing sports. She dreamed of becoming a teacher and she attended college while working for a graphics firm. She had future plans and she had ambitions. However, after meeting Smith, she completely changed. She stopped showering and would spend hours just curled up on the sofa in complete silence. “She came home and one side of her face was black. She said some girls had attacked her. I couldn’t bear the worry, but I knew if I dragged her away from him, I could lose her,” said Margaret.

Then one day, Bates came home and told her parents that she had a new job and that she wouldn’t be able to see them as much. She left the family home for good on the 30^th of November, 1995, and moved into Smith’s two-bedroom semi-detached house in Furnival Road, Gorton. Bates continued to speak to her parents on the phone but they never saw her alive again.

As soon as she moved in with him, Bates was methodically ostracised from her family and friends. When the phone calls back home became sporadic and the birthday and Christmas cards were signed by Smith and not Bates, her family became increasingly concerned for her well-being and contacted their doctor and the police. However, Bates was never checked up on by either due to the fact that she was now a legal adult. Her parents were apprehensive about going to the house and checking up on her as they were afraid that their interference could backfire and push their daughter even further away. This is a decision they regret every single day.

In the weeks before her death, Bates had suffered unimaginable torture.

On the 16^th of April, 1996, Smith walked to a local police station and said that Bates was dead. When police rushed to the scene, they found her naked and lifeless body on the bathroom floor. Smith claimed they had been “going at it” in the bath when she swallowed water and accidentally died.⁷ However, it was as clear as day that this was no accident.

An investigation showed that Bates’ blood was in every single room of the house; her autopsy concluded that there were over 150 separate injuries on her body. They were not the result of one sudden eruption of violence, either. Bates had been systematically tortured over a prolonged period.

In the four weeks leading to her grim death, Bates had been burnt with cigarettes and branded on the thigh with a hot iron. Boiling hot water had been poured over her feet and her buttocks. She had multiple stab wounds caused by knives, forks, and scissors. Stab wounds were even found on the inside of her mouth. A ligature mark on her neck indicated she had been strangled and she had been tied by her hair to a radiator. At some point during the four weeks, her hands and kneecaps had been crushed, rendering her unable to walk and therefore escape. She had been partially scalped. Her ears, nose, mouth, lips, and genitalia had been mutilated. Both of her eyes had been gauged out and her empty eye sockets had been stabbed. It was determined that Bates could have been blinded up to three weeks before finally perishing.

She had also been starved and hadn’t been given water for several days before she died. Before she drowned, she had been beaten over the head with the shower head. Her death “must have been merciful,” the jury would be told.

Bates’ father, Tommy, had the grim task of identifying his daughter’s body. “People called him an animal, but an animal wouldn’t do that to another animal. He is a very evil man. I think about how much pain she must have been in, how she must have thought we didn’t love her because we didn’t save her,” said her mother.

As it would soon be discovered, Smith had a history of violence towards women. In 1982, he had groomed 15-year-old Wendy Mottershead. During the trial, she told the court that he once held her head under water in the kitchen sink. “It frightened me, but you get to the point where you’re too frightened to do or say anything. You just took it.” Another woman, Tina Martin, who met Smith when she was 20, told the court that he used her as a human punchbag. She told the stunned court room how he kicked and punched her, even when she was pregnant with his child. “Once I was having a bath and he got me by the throat and tried to push me under the water.”⁸

During the trial, Smith claimed that Bates “would put me through hell winding me up.”  In an attempt to excuse his violent actions, he told the jury that Bates taunted him about his dead mother. When asked why he had inflicted so much torture on the teenager, he literally said she had asked him to. He suggested that she challenged him to hurt her and he was just complying to his wishes… He had earlier said in a statement that Bates had “a bad habit of hurting herself to make it look worse on me.”

The evidence presented at trial was so disturbing that every member of the jury accepted professional counselling afterwards.

The jury of seven men and five women took just one hour to find James Patterson Smith guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The judge recommended that Smith serve a minimum of 20 years. He turned to Smith and said: “You are an abuser of women and I intent, so far as it is in my power, that you will abuse no more.”