Harold Gibson, a barman in the Melbourne suburb of Albert Park, walked to the hotel where he worked so he could clean it before opening for the day.

Thousands of US soldiers were stationed in the city and the pubs were doing a roaring trade.

Crossing the road to the hotel just before dawn, he looked to his right and saw an American soldier straighten up in an alcove between two buildings.

The soldier quickly strode away in the opposite direction. Curious, Gibson headed to the alcove.

What he found there was the body of Ivy McLeod – she had been strangled to death.

The gruesome discovery would mark the start of 16 days of fear and suspicion, as the city of Melbourne was terrorised by a killer who would come to be known as the Brownout Strangler.

The name stemmed from the brownout – a wartime measure where lights were turned off or covered to protect the city from aerial attack.

Six days after McLeod’s body was found, nightwatchman Henry McGowan shone his torch of what looked like a bundle of clothes on the front steps of a house in Spring Street, on the eastern edge of the Melbourne CBD.

It was the body of Pauline Thompson – and investigations would quickly uncover the fact she’d been seen in the company of a US soldier the night she was murdered.

This sowed a feeling of mistrust of the US servicemen in Melbourne. While the male population had already resented the visitors for the way women swooned over them, many of those women now came to be wary of a soldier wearing an American uniform.

The Brownout Strangler would strike one more time – and it would ultimately lead to his capture.

On the morning of Tuesday, May 19, butcher Albert Whiteway was delivering a load of meat when he spotted the body of Gladys Hosking lying on a pile of yellow mud on the edge of Royal Park, north of the Melbourne CBD.

That park was also where the US soldiers were housed – the strangler had committed his last murder right on his own doorstep.

Three days later, Melbourne detectives would arrest Private Edward Leonski who would happily confess to all three murders.

Put before a US court martial – rather than the Melbourne courts – Leonski would be found guilty and then sentenced to hang on the gallows at Pentridge Prison.

The story – which is unknown to many Australians – is the subject of a new book by Ian W Shaw.

Called Murder at Dusk, it grew out of his family experiences – both parents were in the military and stationed in Melbourne at the time.

“I can remember growing up and hearing stories around the kitchen table about how terrible it was,” Shaw says.

“It was a story I was vaguely familiar with and one I wanted to explore a bit more fully.”

When Melbourne was swamped by 15,000 US soldiers, Shaw says the women were overwhelmed. Here were young, good-looking men in sharp uniforms, lots of money to spend and access to luxuries like silk stockings.

“It was at a time where the understanding of what America was and who Americans were was pretty much out of Hollywood,” Shaw says.

“There was a honeymoon period of a couple of months where everyone loved Americans, especially Australian women. It was starting to get a bit tarnished when Eddie came along because Australian men, especially Australian men in uniform, were increasingly annoyed at the response to US soldiers. There were a few incidents, like fistfights.

“But it suddenly changed when Pauline Thompson was found and it was realised an