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If convicted on charges of murder, mayhem, and torture, Leibel, the scion of two prominent Toronto families, could face the death penalty. But for now, his friends and artistic collaborators are mostly wondering what on earth went wrong.

In interviews from Toronto and Los Angeles this week, some who knew Leibel described a man who changed dramatically over the past year. He walked out on his pregnant wife. He cut off his friends. And then, if police are to be believed, he did something not just wrong but evil, like the act of a comic book villain.

In the courtroom Tuesday, Leibel looked dishevelled and vacant. At one point, he ran a finger absently along a glass edge in front of him. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. After the hearing, his lawyer suggested he might not be fit to be tried.

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Leibel emerged that day under special escort from a cell in the Los Angeles County jail. It’s a place that could not be further, in the figurative sense, from where Leibel grew up.

Blake Leibel was raised in the tight world of Toronto’s upper class Forest Hill neighbourhood. At birth, he was already an heir to two different wealthy and sometimes controversial families. Leibel’s parents separated when he was young. He once said in a court document they’d been apart for 30 years when his mother died, of brain cancer, in 2011. But they never divorced.

As a boy, Leibel lived with his mother, Eleanor Leibel, while his older brother Cody stayed with their father. Eleanor Leibel came into her marriage with Lorne Leibel, Blake and Cody’s father, with money of her own. Her father, Paul Chitel, founded a plastic sheeting company in 1957 that he grew into a multimillion-dollar concern, known today as Polytarp Products Ltd.