Army & Navy: Mother's Boy

• Share

"Did you ever hear of a werewolf? Did you ever hear of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? I'm like him—two personalities."

That was the only way that Private Edward Leonski, 24-year-old New York grocery-boy-draftee with the U.S. Signal Corps in Australia, knew how to defend himself. It was not enough to convince a medical board of two Army physicians and an Australian alienist. They declared that Leonski was sane and always had been. Last week an Army tribunal, sitting in Melbourne, sentenced him to be hanged.

The Army verdict was that Leonski was a "fiend," whose barehanded strangulation of three Melbourne women "cast a foul blot on the service." But there were two other theories about Leonski, one of which may still save him from the gallows.

Theory A. To alibi his murders, Leonski talked to tentmates of his split personality. When he had a few drinks he even walked wolflike on his hands and knees to build up his own theory that there was another Eddie Leonski, a being apart, who was responsible for the horrors he committed. This theory the medical board quickly exploded. Leonski was not a schizophrenic.

Theory B. The second theory was advanced by Dr. Frederic Wertham, New York criminal psychiatrist, on new research presumably not available yet in Australia. In Dr. Wertham's psychiatric terminology, the Leonski case was that of catathymic crisis resulting from the same mother fixation which plagued Shakespeare's Hamlet, which for centuries has driven certain types of thwarted men to kill the thing they love the most. Leonski, according to Dr. Wertham, was a lonely, heartsick tenement boy suddenly deprived of all sense of comfort and personal love. Under these circumstances the inhibitions piled up from the time he was a little boy, when his sister said, "He was so good he used to scare me," drove him to one of the rarest and least understood forms of murder—symbolic matricide. Without being aware of it, he wanted to kill his mother. With his mother 10,000 miles away, Leonski turned to substitutes.

Victim No. 1. Leonski met Mrs. Ivy McLeod, 40, on May 3. This is the story he told investigators:

"I started to walk up the street and saw a girl in the doorway. She had a bag. She said something and smiled, and I said something about her bag. I walked over and felt of it. It was very soft.

"She stepped back in the doorway and I followed her, and grabbed her by the neck . . . and I choked her.

"She fell and I fell on top of her. I started to rip her clothes. I ripped them and ripped them. But I couldn't rip her belt, so I left it and came back to it.

Then I went mad, and I thought 'I've got to rip it.' I ripped it and ripped it."

Victim No. 2 was Mrs. Pauline Thompson, 31, whom Leonski met on May 9. "I remember a woman singing in my ear," Leonski said. "She had a nice voice. We came to a long flight of stone steps, and I grabbed her by the throat. I wanted her to keep on singing. I choked her. How could she keep on singing when I choked her?" Later he said: "Fancy my being a murderer! I guess that Thompson girl was the hardest. She was strong and, oh boy, could she drink gin squashes! She told me I had a baby face, but I am wicked underneath."