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Crime

Canadian Horror Writer Found Guilty of Torturing and Killing His Girlfriend

The prosecution said Blake Leibel was jealous that his girlfriend was paying more attention to their baby than him.

Warning: this story contains graphic descriptions of a murder.

Canadian graphic novelist Blake Leibel has been found guilty of torturing and killing his girlfriend Iana Kasian in West Hollywood in May 2016.

A Los Angeles jury convicted Leibel, 37, of first-degree murder, torture, and aggravated mayhem on Wednesday, after deliberating for three hours, the National Post reports.

The trial exposed horrific details about Kasian’s death. An investigator who arrived at the couple’s apartment, which Leibel had barricaded himself inside, found Kasian laying naked on a mattress with severe trauma to her head, and surrounded by bloodstains. Her right ear and eyebrows had been cut off. A medical examiner testified that her scalp was missing from her head. The prosecution also said Kasian was alive in a bathtub while she bled out from her wounds.

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Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Tannaz Mokayef accused Leibel, a horror writer, of murdering the mother of his newborn baby in the style of one of his graphic novels, Syndrome, which is about a serial killer.

According to the Post, the prosecution argued Leibel killed Kasian because she was paying more attention to their baby daughter than him.

Leibel’s father is Olympic sailor and real estate developer Lorne Leibel and his mother Eleanor Chitel Leibel, who died in 2011, was heiress to plastics company Alros Products.

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