In May 1942 three women were strangled in Melbourne in a little over two weeks. Ivy Violet McLeod was found in a shop doorway in Albert Park on May 3. Pauline Buchan Thompson was found on the steps of her home in Spring Street, in the city, on May 9. Gladys Lilian Hosking was killed on the evening of May 18 near Royal Park and found the next morning. All three had been strangled by hand in streets that the wartime brownout left almost unlit.
The man responsible was Private Edward Joseph Leonski, known as Eddie, a 24-year-old American soldier of the 52nd Signal Battalion, stationed at Camp Pell in Royal Park. He was arrested on May 22, 1942, and confessed. The Australian government then took a step with no precedent: it changed the law so that an American serviceman arrested for a crime against Australian law could be handed to his own forces and tried under American military law. A US Army general court-martial sitting in Melbourne found Leonski sane and guilty of all three murders on July 17, 1942. He was hanged at Pentridge prison on November 9, 1942. The Law Society Journal has noted that this is the only time a foreign court has hanged a man on Australian soil.
Leonski was born on December 12, 1917, at Kenvil, New Jersey, the sixth child of John Leonski, a laborer, and his wife Amelia, born Harkavitz. Both parents had been born in Russia. When Edward was an infant the family moved to East 77th Street in New York City. The Australian Dictionary of Biography, in its entry by Peter Pierce, records a troubled family: his mother was mentally unstable, two of his brothers had prison records, and a third brother was in a psychiatric hospital. Evidence at his court-martial, as summarized by the Carlton Community History Group in 2023, described his mother as unstable and his father as an alcoholic.
He left junior high school in 1933. He then took a secretarial course and finished in the top tenth of his class, held several clerical jobs, and went to work for Gristede Bros, a New York grocery chain. Papers in his Victorian capital case file, described by Public Record Office Victoria, record that he had fallen in love with his brother's wife, and that joining the army was partly a way to get away from the couple.
Leonski was called up for military service on February 17, 1941, and posted to the 52nd Signal Battalion at San Antonio, Texas. There he began to drink heavily. Witnesses at his court-martial described drinks he mixed from whisky, beer, ketchup, ice cream and hot peppers, said he could put away large amounts of beer, and said he rarely remembered afterward what he had done while drunk. He was proud of his strength, liked to challenge other soldiers to fight, and performed feats of strength in bars.
In San Antonio in 1941 he tried to strangle a woman. She did not press charges, and the matter went no further. The Australian Dictionary of Biography observes that the American authorities did nothing about his problems before he was shipped overseas.
A fellow soldier, Private Anthony J. Gallo, later described how Leonski's voice changed when he was drunk: it became soft, Gallo said, and sounded like a girl's. Another American private, Mitchell Kappy, told the court-martial that Leonski talked to himself when drunk, according to the State Library of Victoria's account of the trial. Leonski's commanding officer described him as "perpetually in trouble." He was often absent without leave and drank more than most of the men around him. Early in his service, the court was told, he had been a fairly good soldier who grew steadily worse as his drinking increased. He once said he wanted to be kept in the guardhouse as long as possible, because it was the only way he could stay out of trouble.
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the war spread across the Pacific, American forces began to arrive in Australia. Leonski's battalion was moved from Fort Sam Houston, Texas, through San Francisco, and sailed in January 1942. It reached Melbourne in February 1942 and was quartered at Camp Pell, a large American camp in Royal Park, on the northern edge of the city center. Leonski worked in the camp kitchen.
By May 1942 about 15,000 American servicemen were in Melbourne. The city was anxious about a possible Japanese invasion. Since December 1941 Melbourne, like the other coastal capitals, had been under a brownout, a milder version of the British blackout. Only one street lamp in four was lit, and each was shaded so that it threw a dim light over a small area. Shops closed at 6 p.m., windows were covered at dusk, and tram headlights were hooded. The State Library of Victoria notes that traffic accidents rose under these conditions. The brownout lasted about 18 months and was lifted in July 1943.
In Melbourne Leonski went back to his drinking. He visited hotels most nights and sometimes did headstands on the bar. Drunkenness earned him thirty days in the stockade; when he was released he went on another binge. During this period, it was alleged, he tried to strangle and rape a young woman in her flat in St Kilda; she escaped. That woman has never been publicly identified in any source read for this account and is not named here.
Ivy Violet McLeod was 40 and married. She was the first victim of the brownout killings, and the one about whom the sources read for this account give the fewest personal details; a photograph of her printed by the Melbourne Truth in July 1942 is held by the State Library of Victoria.
Late the night before she was found, she was waiting for a tram in Albert Park, a bayside suburb south of the city. Leonski had been drinking with other soldiers at the Bleak House Hotel nearby. In a statement later produced at the inquest, he said that while waiting for a tram he felt lonely and remembered an earlier attack on him by Australian civilians. He walked up the street, saw a woman smile at him from a doorway, remarked on her bag and followed her into a recess.
She was found before dawn on Sunday, May 3, in the doorway of a shop at 191 Victoria Avenue, next to the Bleak House Hotel. The man who found her was a barman, Harold Gibson, who had seen an American soldier at the doorway. She had been strangled and badly beaten. Her purse was still with her, and police did not believe robbery was the motive.
Pauline Buchan Thompson was 31. Her husband was a police constable in Bendigo, in central Victoria, and their two children were staying in Bendigo. In Melbourne she worked by day as a typist for the International Harvester Company and in the evenings on the switchboard at the radio station 3AW.
On the evening before she was found, she went out drinking. She was seen talking with an American soldier at the Astoria hotel, and that was the last time she was seen alive. In his statement Leonski said he met her in a restaurant and that they went to several hotels together. As they walked she sang. On a quiet street with long stone steps he grabbed her around the neck. He said he did not know why.
She was found on the front steps of her home in Spring Street, in the city, by a nightwatchman, Henry McGowan, on Saturday, May 9, six days after Ivy McLeod. She had been strangled. Investigators soon learned that she had spent the evening with an American soldier.
The marks on her body, the State Library of Victoria notes, suggested a killer with large hands and great strength, a description that fit Leonski.
Between the second and third killings Leonski told Private Gallo what he had done. Gallo gave evidence about it at the court-martial on July 16, 1942, and his testimony survives in the capital case file. According to Gallo, Leonski, apparently drunk, said to him, "I killed, Gallo, I killed." Gallo did not believe him. Later Leonski asked for a newspaper, and Gallo bought him one. Leonski read a report and said, "Doorstep, doorstep, that is the one."
Gallo said Leonski compared himself to a werewolf and to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and spoke of having two personalities. As more newspaper reports appeared, Gallo came to believe him. When Gallo voiced his fears, Leonski told him there were plenty of American soldiers and nothing to worry about. Gallo answered that Leonski had made him afraid of the dark, and Leonski smiled and put an arm around him. The State Library of Victoria records that the soldier Leonski confided in urged him to give himself up and plead temporary insanity, and that he refused.
Gladys Lilian Hosking was 40 and unmarried. She worked as an assistant and secretary in the chemistry department of the University of Melbourne; other accounts describe her as working in the department's library. She was a small woman, about five feet tall, with brown wavy hair and blue eyes. She lived in a guest house in Park Street, Parkville, close to Royal Park and to Camp Pell.
On the evening of Monday, May 18, 1942, she left work with a colleague, Dorothy Isobel Pettigrew, and walked on home alone along Royal Parade. She was last seen sharing her umbrella with an American soldier. In his statement Leonski said he had been drinking beer at the Parkville Hotel. He met a small woman carrying an umbrella, walked with her to her house, and then asked her to show him the way to the camp. He spoke of her voice: "I wanted that voice."
The next morning, Tuesday, May 19, a butcher, Albert Whiteway, found her body in yellow mud in a slit trench at the edge of Royal Park, in Gatehouse Street, Parkville, about two blocks, or some 350 meters, from her home. She had been strangled.
The three killings were investigated by the Victoria Police. Once an American serviceman was suspected, the US military police took part as well. Women were warned not to travel alone. Several women came forward to say they had escaped attacks by an American serviceman.
The third killing produced the decisive witnesses. That night an Australian soldier on guard duty near Camp Pell, named by the State Library of Victoria as Neil Seymour, was approached by an American soldier covered in mud and out of breath, who asked him the way back to the camp. A witness reported the same muddy American walking back toward the camp from the direction in which Gladys Hosking's body was found. Detectives searched Leonski's tent and found muddy clothing.
Witnesses, including women who had escaped attacks, picked Leonski out of a line-up of American servicemen. With the evidence of Gallo, the soldier he had confided in, this led to his arrest on Friday, May 22, 1942, three days after the third body was found.
Leonski confessed to an Australian police detective, a legal history of the case records. His statements, excerpts of which are preserved in the Victorian inquest file, set out each meeting in turn: the tram stop in Albert Park, the evening of drinking and singing that ended in Spring Street, and the walk with the woman with the umbrella near Royal Park. He gave no real reason. He said he did not know why he had attacked Pauline Thompson, and of Gladys Hosking he said he had wanted her voice. The Senior newspaper, reporting in 2019, summarized his account as a claim that he killed the women to get at their voices. In a letter written from jail to a woman correspondent, he described himself as having "ran amuck."
He was charged with murder.
The arrest raised a question without precedent in Australia: who would try an American soldier for killing Australian civilians in Australia? Ordinarily he would have been tried in the Australian criminal courts. The American forces, however, had already asked the Australian government that their men be dealt with by their own military courts, and the government had held off on a formal answer while Britain and the United States discussed the same question.
The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that the Curtin government, mindful of the American alliance and after consulting Britain, decided, against strong opposition, that a United States court-martial could try him.
On May 27, 1942, five days after the arrest, Mr Spender, the member for Warringah, asked the Prime Minister in the House of Representatives what procedure would be followed for "an American soldier who is held in custody in connexion with the death of certain women." John Curtin answered that the National Security (Allied Forces) Regulations had been amended. Under the change an arrested American serviceman could, at the request of the American forces, be handed over to them, would cease to be subject to the criminal courts of Australia, and could be tried by an American naval or military court under American law. The American court could summon and compel witnesses, and refusing to comply would be an offense. Asked by Mr Blackburn whether "that law" meant American law, Curtin replied, "It means American law."
Mr Brennan, the member for Batman, asked whether the regulations represented the law of the country and had been gazetted; Curtin said they had. Brennan then asked whether representations had been made by the American forces about the trial of the accused man, and whether so great a departure from Australian law should have come before Parliament. Curtin said a formal submission had come from the American forces some time earlier and defended the change as consistent with the Defence (Visiting Forces) Act of 1939, which governed forces from other Commonwealth countries. He told the House that the American commander had assured him the proceedings would satisfy the Australian public. Newspapers in New Zealand reported the next day that American personnel arrested in Australia would now be tried by their own authorities.
The State Library of Victoria describes the result as the first time a person was tried in Australia by a military tribunal for a crime against civil law. The Australian National Maritime Museum adds that it was the first time a citizen of another country was tried in Australia under his own country's laws.
The general court-martial sat in Melbourne in July 1942 and heard evidence over five days. Leonski faced three charges of premeditated murder, each alleging that he had strangled a woman "with his hands." The court was made up of 11 officers. The Trial Judge Advocate, who conducted the prosecution, was Hayford Enwall, a lawyer serving as Chief Legal Officer of the US Army Services of Supply. Leonski's defense counsel is named in later press accounts as Colonel Spencer B. Eddy; Arthur Rothgerber, then a second lieutenant, told the Los Angeles Times in 1985 that he had been "ordered to defend" Leonski after the arrest. Article of War 92 allowed only two sentences for murder: death or life imprisonment.
Leonski did not give evidence. Police officers testified to the statements he had made to them. The Melbourne Truth reported the evidence of the doctors who had examined the bodies. Gallo described the confession made to him. Other soldiers described Leonski's drinking; one witness said that before the last killing he had drunk 25 to 30 glasses of beer and five one-ounce whiskeys. During the trial he made a grim joke about a "necktie party" and said he had wanted to die since he was sixteen.
The defense argued that he was not responsible for what he had done. A plea of mental derangement, based on his heavy drinking, was put to the court. In his closing address defense counsel told the court that every one of the killings showed a disordered mind, incapable of reasoning, planning or malice aforethought, and that no witness had definitely identified Leonski as the killer.
The question of his sanity was disputed before it was settled. Three medical specialists who examined him agreed that he was sane but had psychopathic tendencies. The court found him sane.
Enwall, in reply, said he was fully aware of his responsibility. He called the killings crimes that proved Leonski "a person unfit to continue to live," a constant danger to others and a terrible example to anyone who might follow him. In an address reported in the press, he called the case one of human tragedy and depravity with few parallels in American military justice, and said a court-martial of its kind had no precedent. He told the court that Australians and Americans shared the same ideas of justice and respect for life, that the crimes had caused revulsion in both countries, and that the proceedings were a test of American justice. He rejected the argument of emotional imbalance by pointing to other American killers whom juries had found sane.
Addresses ended at 6 p.m. on Friday, July 17, 1942, and the court closed. When it reopened, the President asked whether there were any previous court-martial convictions against the accused; there were none. The court closed again and returned half an hour later. The President announced that, by secret written ballot with three-quarters of the members concurring, Leonski had been found guilty on all three charges, and that all members had agreed on a sentence that he be "hung until he is dead." A death sentence required the agreement of every member.
Leonski showed no emotion. He was taken from the room under a strong escort. Melbourne's newspapers reported that the 24-year-old soldier had been found guilty of the murders of Mrs Ivy McLeod, Mrs Pauline Buchan Thompson and Miss Gladys Hosking after a five-day trial.
Not everyone agreed that he should hang. A week after the verdict a leading Melbourne psychiatrist, unnamed in the report, told the press that executing Leonski would waste valuable material for study and that society would gain nothing from his death. He compared the case with that of Arnold Sodeman, hanged in Melbourne six years earlier for strangling four children, and noted similar family histories. He suggested that Leonski might have been influenced by the film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Hyde chokes a singing girl. In law, the psychiatrist said, Leonski was sane, because he knew the nature and quality of his acts. In psychological terms, he argued, Leonski knew what he was doing but could not help himself, and he called him a psychopathic personality.
A death sentence by an American court-martial could not be carried out until it had been reviewed and confirmed. In July 1942 Leonski was reported to be awaiting confirmation from Washington, which was expected to take about three months. The sentence had to pass up the chain of command, to General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters, to Washington and to the President.
Lieutenant Colonel John A. Stagg, in his Staff Judge Advocate's review, rejected the defense claim of mental derangement, as the court had. On October 26, 1942, the Board of Review of the Branch Office of The Judge Advocate General in Melbourne issued a 30-page opinion finding the record "legally sufficient to support the findings of guilty" and the sentence. The sentence was confirmed.
Rothgerber said in 1985 that MacArthur could have stopped the hanging, despite what he called evidence that Leonski was insane, and did not. The 1986 film about the case portrays MacArthur as wanting a quick court-martial to satisfy Australian opinion; that is the film's interpretation, and no source read for this account documents MacArthur's reasoning.
Leonski spent his months under sentence in the city watch house in Melbourne, under an armed American guard. Reports in July 1942 described him as calm. He was self-educated, painted, read a great deal and smoked heavily, and he slept soundly. After the sentence he put out a cigarette and told a guard he was giving up smoking because it was bad for his throat.
He studied Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol and became a communicant of the Catholic Church. He corresponded with a woman in Eltham, on the outskirts of Melbourne. A three-page letter he wrote to a correspondent he addressed as "Rene" on August 3, 1942, is now in the collection of the Australian National Maritime Museum. The Broken Hill newspaper the Barrier Miner reported that a young woman to whom he was greatly attached visited him regularly.
In the early hours of Monday, November 9, 1942, Leonski was taken from the City Watch House to Pentridge prison at Coburg, in Melbourne's northern suburbs, and hanged by an anonymous hangman. He was 24. A Sun-Herald feature in 1985 reported that in the condemned cell he said goodbye to one of the detectives on the case: "Well, so long Mr McGuffie."
He was the first and only foreign citizen tried and sentenced to death in Australia under his own country's law. The Pentridge gallows, which had been moved there from the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1932, were used for four more executions after his: those of Jean Lee, Robert David Clayton, Norman Andrews and Ronald Joseph Ryan.
His remains were buried first in Australia and later moved to a military cemetery in Hawaii. A legal history of American military executions places his case among those of seven executed soldiers whose remains lie in a separate plot at the Schofield Barracks Post Cemetery on Oahu.
Victoria's capital case file on Leonski, which is mostly the transcript of the court-martial, and the inquest file on the three women are held by Public Record Office Victoria, and a copy of the trial record is held by the National Archives of Australia. The capital case file was closed to protect personal privacy and was opened on January 1, 2019.
The case left its mark on relations between American and Australian troops in Melbourne. The Australian National Maritime Museum describes it as ending a "honeymoon" period for the American forces in Australia and adding to tensions over pay, rations, women and race.
It has been revisited many times. Albert Tucker painted Memory of Leonski in 1943, and Andrew Mallon wrote a novel about him in 1979. The journalist Ivan Chapman, who corresponded with the Victorian Law Department while researching the case, published Private Eddie Leonski: The Brownout Strangler (Hale and Iremonger, 1982). Reviewing it in the Australian Book Review in 1984, Vida Horn wrote that there seemed no doubt Leonski committed the crimes, but that whether he had a fair trial was another matter.
The feature film Death of a Soldier (1986), directed by Philippe Mora and written by William Nagle, starred Reb Brown as Leonski and James Coburn as Major Dannenberg, an American officer who in the film both investigates the case and defends Leonski, with Bill Hunter and Maurie Fields as Melbourne detectives. It was made in Melbourne in 1985, under the working title The Leonski Incident, and argues that Leonski was mentally ill and was hanged quickly to ease tensions between the two armies. Ian W. Shaw's book Murder at Dusk: How US Soldier and Smiling Psychopath Eddie Leonski Terrorised Wartime Melbourne (Hachette Australia, 2018) retold the investigation.
Proven by the court-martial and final: the murders of Ivy Violet McLeod, Pauline Buchan Thompson and Gladys Lilian Hosking. Leonski confessed to all three.
Never tried: the attempted strangling of a woman in San Antonio in 1941, which she chose not to pursue, and the alleged attack on a young woman in St Kilda in 1942. Neither was charged.
His mental state: three medical specialists found him sane, and the court and reviewers rejected the plea of mental derangement. His defense, a Melbourne psychiatrist in 1942, his lawyer Arthur Rothgerber in 1985 and the 1986 film all argued, in different ways, that he was mentally ill. Leonski's own talk of two personalities, and of an alter ego, as reported by fellow soldiers, was evidence at the trial, not a finding.
Fairness of the trial: questioned by the book reviewer Vida Horn in 1984 and by the film. The Sun-Herald in 1985 described the hanging as carried out with unusual haste. These are opinions, and no court has revisited the case.
Details that vary between sources: the hanging date (November 9, 1942, in almost every source; November 3 in one museum blog post); Gladys Hosking's middle name (Lilian in the Public Record Office Victoria account; often spelled Lillian elsewhere); Pauline Thompson's middle name (Buchan in the 1942 verdict report and the PROV account; Coral in a 2018 Law Society Journal review); Ivy McLeod's middle name (Violet in most sources; May in one museum blog post); the name of the Australian guard (Neil Seymour, per the State Library of Victoria); and the date Gladys Hosking was found (most sources say the morning of May 19; some say May 18, the date she was killed). His age at the time is given as 24 in 1942 reports and as 22 in one 1985 report; his birth date makes him 24. The title of Ivan Chapman's book appears as Private Eddie Leonski: The Brownout Strangler in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and as Leonski: The Brownout Strangler in the Australian Book Review.
December 12, 1917: Edward Joseph Leonski is born at Kenvil, New Jersey; the family soon moves to East 77th Street, New York.
1933: leaves junior high school; later takes a secretarial course and works as a clerk and for a grocery chain.
February 17, 1941: called up; posted to the 52nd Signal Battalion at San Antonio, Texas.
1941: tries to strangle a woman in San Antonio; she does not press charges.
December 1941: brownout imposed on Melbourne and the other coastal capitals.
January 1942: sails for Australia.
February 1942: arrives in Melbourne; quartered at Camp Pell, Royal Park.
Early 1942: thirty days in the stockade for drunkenness; alleged attack on a young woman in St Kilda.
May 3, 1942: Ivy Violet McLeod, 40, found strangled in a doorway in Victoria Avenue, Albert Park.
May 9, 1942: Pauline Buchan Thompson, 31, found strangled on the steps of her home in Spring Street.
May 1942: Leonski tells Private Anthony Gallo, "I killed, Gallo, I killed."
May 18, 1942: Gladys Lilian Hosking, 40, killed near Royal Park; found the next morning.
May 22, 1942: Leonski arrested at Camp Pell; he confesses.
May 27, 1942: John Curtin tells the House of Representatives that the Allied Forces regulations have been amended so that American servicemen can be tried by their own courts.
July 1942: five-day general court-martial in Melbourne.
July 16, 1942: Gallo gives evidence.
July 17, 1942: Leonski found sane and guilty on three counts of murder; sentenced to death.
August 3, 1942: writes a three-page letter from custody, now held by the Australian National Maritime Museum.
October 26, 1942: Board of Review in Melbourne finds the record legally sufficient.
November 9, 1942: hanged at Pentridge prison, aged 24.
1943: Albert Tucker paints Memory of Leonski.
July 1943: Melbourne brownout lifted.
1979: Andrew Mallon's novel.
1982: Ivan Chapman's book published.
1986: Death of a Soldier released.
2018: Ian W. Shaw's Murder at Dusk published.
January 1, 2019: Victorian capital case file opened to the public.