Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (55 page)

The enormous influx of U.S. military personnel had a powerful impact on Australian society. While the exigencies of war made cooperation between the Allies a vital necessity, Australian troops quickly developed deep animosity toward their American counterparts, whose snazzy uniforms, superior pay, and general air of exotic glamour made them objects of desire for the local female population. “The Americans had the chocolates, the ice cream, the silk stockings and the dollars,” one soldier commented. “They were able to show the girls a good time and the Australians became very resentful.”

Thousands of young Australian women, intent on bagging an American boyfriend (or better yet, a husband) became branded with the label “Yank hunters.” In Melbourne, where a nightly brownout was imposed to protect against a Japanese aerial bombardment, the dimmed streets and darkened windows seemed to encourage promiscuous behavior. For their part, the GIs, though seen as a bulwark against a Japanese invasion, were themselves widely viewed as “overpaid and oversexed” invaders, undermining the morals of Australian womanhood. Tensions between Australian and U.S. troops eventually culminated in a two-day eruption of violence known as the “Battle of Brisbane” that left one soldier dead and hundreds injured.

With thousands of GIs prowling for pickups, hitting the bars, and engaging in nightly brawls with resentful Aussie servicemen, Americans were bound to land in trouble with the local authorities. Exactly who would deal with U.S. soldiers charged with breaking Australian civil law became another bone of contention between the two countries. These highly charged issues—the perceived exploitation of Australian women by U.S. soldiers and the jurisdictional dispute over the trial and punishment of American lawbreakers—would be distilled in the sensational case of Eddie Leonski.

U
PON HIS ARRIVAL
at Camp Pell in Melbourne, Leonski, like the rest of his buddies, lost no time in hitting the town. With decent money in his pockets and plenty of free time between drills, he became a habitué of the barrooms, where he quickly gained a reputation both for his prodigious consumption of milk-and-ketchup-spiked whiskey and his trademark stunt of leaping onto the counter and walking along it on his hands. Out on the streets, he would drunkenly grab passing girls or sneak up behind them and shout “Boo!” That public behavior, however—boorish as it was—was benign compared to the secret crimes that Leonski had already begun to commit.

Sometime in early March, he shadowed a young woman to her home in suburban St. Kilda and, as she entered her apartment, shoved her inside, slammed the door shut, and attempted to rape her. Her screams roused some neighbors, who came to her aid just as Leonski slipped out a back door and vanished into the night. Not long afterward, he made a clumsy attempt to pick up a girl at an ice-skating rink. When she rebuffed his advances, he followed her to a streetcar stop and, leaning close, whispered, “I’m thinking of choking a dame, and it might as well be you.” Before she could let out a scream, he grabbed her by the throat and throttled her into near-unconsciousness. Fortunately for her, a streetcar came along at just that moment and Leonski fled.

By the third week of March, less than a month after his arrival in Australia, Leonski’s drinking was so out of control that, after being AWOL for six days on a monumental bender, he was thrown into the brig. No sooner was he released on April 20 than he embarked on another binge of nonstop drinking. Still determined to “choke a dame,” he began to stalk women again. This time, his prey would not be as lucky as his first intended victims.

E
DDIE
L
EONSKI SPENT
most of Saturday, May 2, swilling booze with a buddy at the Bleak House Hotel, just across from Albert Park in Melbourne. At around 2:00 a.m., with the bar shutting down for the Sabbath, he decided to head back to camp. As he made his way up Victoria Street, he spotted a woman in the doorway of a dry cleaner’s shop. Her name, as newspaper readers were soon to learn, was Mrs. Ivy Violet McLeod. A forty-year-old domestic, she had just left the apartment of a male friend and was waiting for a streetcar.

According to Leonski’s later confession, Mrs. McLeod smiled at him as he strolled past. He paused and

A few hours later, a passerby discovered Mrs. McLeod’s brutalized, seminude corpse in the doorway of the shop, her “legs wide apart and feet tucked up under her thighs, with genitals exposed.” A postmortem revealed that her windpipe had been crushed by manual strangulation. Despite the obscene posture of her body, she had not been raped. A team of detectives was assigned to the case but—apart from the testimony of one witness who had seen an American soldier hurrying from the scene—there were no solid leads.

One week later, the serial murderer about to be known as “The Brownout Strangler” struck again.

W
IFE OF A
police constable and mother of two young children, Pauline Buchan Thompson, a pretty thirty-one-year-old brunette, juggled two jobs to help support her family: stenographer by day and radio station receptionist in the evenings. Blessed with a lovely singing voice, she also found time to contribute to the war effort by performing popular tunes for the troops at local concerts and dances.

On the evening of Friday, May 8, she was sitting by herself in a restaurant, waiting for her dinner to arrive, when a baby-faced American soldier came up to her table and asked if he could join her. The two traded pleasantries for a while before adjourning to the bar at the nearby Astoria Hotel, where they spent the next several hours chatting amiably while downing at least a half dozen gin squashes apiece.

It was nearing midnight when they left the bar. Mrs. Thompson’s boardinghouse was only a few hundred yards away. As she and her escort, Eddie Leonski, walked along the deserted, drizzly street, she began to sing. “She had a nice voice,” Leonski would recall in his confession. A few moments later they arrived at the front steps of the boardinghouse. Mrs. Thompson was still singing when he grabbed her around the neck.

A few hours later, a night watchman named Henry McGowan stumbled upon the ransacked purse in the alleyway. After examining it for a clue to its owner, he continued on his rounds. He had gone just a short distance when he came upon Pauline Thompson’s body, sprawled on the steps of her boardinghouse. Legs splayed, she was “naked down to the navel and up to the navel,” he later testified. “There was just a little clothing across the center of her stomach.” Like Ivy McLeod, she had been throttled to death by an assailant with unusually powerful hands. Also like McLeod, she had not been raped.

This second brutal murder set off the kind of panic that can easily seize a big city when a serial killer is at large: the kind that gripped Londoners during Jack the Ripper’s savage spree, San Franciscans during the Zodiac Killer’s reign of terror, New Yorkers when the Son of Sam was on the prowl. The “Brownout Strangler,” writes journalist Ivan Chapman, “was feared more than the Japanese”:

E
VEN AS
Australian detectives, assisted by American military authorities, intensified their hunt for the unknown killer, his identity had already been disclosed to one man, a soldier named Anthony Gallo.

On Saturday, May 9, the morning after the murder of Pauline Thompson, Leonski had awoken with a savage hangover. Desperate for a drink, he managed to find a bottle in a buddy’s locker. It wasn’t long before he had drunk himself into a state of blubbering self-pity. When Gallo, a friend since their basic training days, showed up at his tent in the early evening, a teary-eyed Leonski was perched on the edge of the bunk. When Gallo asked what was wrong, Leonski moaned, “I killed, Gallo, I killed.”

At first Gallo dismissed the remark as nothing more than drunken babble. For the rest of the evening, however, and over the course of the following days, Leonski kept reverting to the subject, insisting that he was responsible not only for the murder of Pauline Thompson but for another recent killing as well. At one point he compared himself to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “I’m just like him,” he exclaimed. “Two personalities.” At another, he described himself as a “werewolf.” He wondered aloud “why he had killed women older than himself,” and seemed bewildered by his bizarre motive for strangling Pauline Thompson. “I wanted her to keep on singing. I choked her. How could she keep on singing when I choked her?”

Gallo didn’t know what to make of these drunken confessions. At times he was terrified that Leonski was telling the truth; at others he was sure that his friend was simply “taunting him with some wild, sick joke.” Gripped by a paralyzing mixture of fear, confusion, and doubt, he decided to do nothing. As a result, another woman would die.

O
N THE EVENING
of May 12, in separate incidents, an American soldier attacked two Australian women as they entered their homes. Both managed to break free and send the assailant fleeing. Two nights later, he forced his way into the home of another woman, who let out a cry of alarm. Running to her aid, her uncle, a Mr. Jackson, got a good look at the intruder before the soldier disappeared out the door.

Four more nights would pass before Leonski struck again—this time with fatal results. The victim was Miss Gladys Hosking, a forty-one-year-old secretary at Melbourne University. At around 7:00 p.m. on May 18—a cheerless, rainy Monday—she was walking home from work when Leonski materialized beside her and asked if he could share her umbrella. When they arrived at her house, Leonski—who had spent that afternoon in a bar imbibing an estimated thirty beers and seven whiskeys—urged her to “walk on with me and show me the way to camp.” Like most women in Melbourne, Hosking—as she had made clear in a letter to her father—was keenly aware of the two recent murders and
fearful of being out at night with the strangler at large. It is a testament to Leonski’s boyishly innocent demeanor that she did not hesitate to accompany him along the lightless streets.

As with Pauline Thompson, it was Gladys Hosking’s voice that seemed to trigger Leonski’s madness. “We came to a very dark part of the street,” he later confessed.

A few minutes later, he arrived at camp, slathered in yellow mud “from his tie down to his feet.” Too fuddled and exhausted to clean himself, he stripped off his clothes and collapsed into bed. He was just waking up the next morning when, a short distance away, a butcher named Albert Whiteway discovered Gladys Hosking’s obscenely exposed body sprawled facedown in a patch of yellow mud.

That distinctive mud—precisely matching the stains found on Leonski’s uniform and inside his tent—would prove to be a key piece of evidence against him. So would the testimony of Mr. Jackson, the gentleman who had come to his niece’s rescue a week earlier and who was able to identify Leonski in a lineup held at Camp Pell on the morning of May 20. It was Anthony Gallo, however, who would later claim most credit for Leonski’s arrest. After two weeks of vacillation—an unconscionable delay that had cost Gladys Hosking her life—he finally came forward with the story of his friend’s chilling admissions. Taken into custody, Leonski quickly spilled out a full, highly detailed confession.

Despite the objections of powerful political figures who saw it as an affront to their national autonomy and dignity, the Australian government, after much heated internal debate, acceded to American demands. Though Leonski had violated Australian law, he would be tried by a U.S. military tribunal. At his five-day court-martial in June, his defense lawyer argued that Leonski was insane—a diagnosis seconded from afar by Dr. Fredric Wertham, the eminent New York psychiatrist whose patients had included Robert
Irwin and Albert Fish. “Leonski was without doubt mentally deranged,” Wertham declared.