Australian man pleads guilty to murdering American Scott Johnson in 1988 gay hate crime
An Australian man has pleaded guilty to murdering a US mathematician who fell from a Sydney cliff in 1988 in a homophobic hate crime that was dismissed by police at the time as suicide.
Scott White was charged in 2020 with murdering 27-year-old Los Angeles-born Scott Johnson, whose naked body was found at the base of North Head cliff on 8 December 1988.
White yelled repeatedly in court during a pre-trial hearing in Sydney on Monday that he was guilty, having previously denied the crime.
A New South Wales state supreme court judge on Thursday accepted the guilty plea, dismissing the objections of White’s lawyers. White is to be sentenced on 2 May.
He faces a possible sentence of life in prison.
Johnson’s older brother, Steve Johnson, told ABC radio on Friday that White “surprised everyone in the courtroom” by offering the plea at the start of a technical hearing on Monday.
“The police were sure they had the right person but you’re never sure until you hear those words from the person themselves and then suddenly I know who killed my brother,” he said.
The plea was not confirmed until Thursday when the court was satisfied White had made it intentionally and in his right mind.
“I was very impressed with the way the justice system worked here,” Steve Johnson said, adding that he was grateful to White for sparing his family the anguish of a trial.
Police had initially concluded that Johnson, who was a doctoral student at Australian National University and lived in Canberra, had taken his own life. This was despite the discovery that his wallet was missing from his clothes, which were neatly folded near the cliff top.
A coronial inquest – a court-like proceeding held after unusual deaths – ruled in 1989 that Johnson had taken his own life, while a second coroner in 2012 could not explain how he died.
Johnson’s family sought a third inquest, and state coroner Michael Barnes ruled in 2017 that Johnson “fell from the cliff top as a result of actual or threatened violence by unidentified persons who attacked him because they perceived him to be homosexual”.
Barnes found that gangs of men roamed various Sydney locations in search of gay men to assault, resulting in the deaths of some victims. Some people were also robbed.
A new police investigation offered a A$1m ($731,000) reward for information in 2018 and Steve Johnson, a Boston IT entrepreneur, matched that reward offer in 2020.
He told the ABC on Friday the outcome could give families of other gay men whose deaths were unresolved hope they too could get answers.
Steve Johnson said he felt he had no choice but to keep pushing for more investigations.
“I would hope that any brother would do this for his brother,” he said.
“I know that Scott would have done this for me if we were reversed here. I was sure from the beginning that
this couldn’t have been a suicide … so it never made sense to me that police wouldn’t investigate and I just kept pushing and pushing and so many people joined.”
Steve Johnson told reporters outside court on Thursday, after White’s guilty plea was accepted, that White “deserves what he has coming to him”.
“It’s a very sad, tragic thing that he did.”
White was arrested at his Sydney home two months after the reward was doubled. Police said at the time that the reward helped in their breakthrough and an unnamed informant would be eligible for the reward once White was convicted.