He went over the edge," White said in recorded police interview in 2020 that was played in court. He faces a potential sentence of life in prison.
White will be sentenced by Justice Helen Wilson on Tuesday. Scott White, 51, appeared in the New South Wales state Supreme Court for a sentencing hearing after he pleaded guilty in January to the murder of the Los Angeles-born Canberra resident, whose death at the base of a North Head cliff was initially dismissed by police as suicide. The 51-year-old faces up to life in prison.A family photo provided by the New South Wales Police shows Scott Johnson, who in 1988 was pushed to his death from a clifftop in Sydney, Australia.Ĭanberra, Australia - A man told police he killed American mathematician Scott Johnson in 1988 by pushing the 27-year-old off a Sydney cliff in what prosecutors describe as a gay hate crime, a court heard on Monday. In 2017, a third ruled that he “fell from the clifftop as a result of actual or threatened violence by unidentified persons who attacked him because they perceived him to be homosexual”. In 1989, a coroner said Mr Johnson had died by suicide while a second coroner in 2012 could not explain how he died. “How could a community fail so spectacularly that they created boys capable of such horror?” she asked, referring to media reports of gay beatings in Sydney being described as a sport.
Rebecca Johnson, a younger sister, said the police report of suicide “made no sense”. Rosemarie Johnson described the initial police failure to investigate Scott Johnson’s death as “indefensible and inhumane”. Mr Johnson’s sisters, Terry and Rebecca Johnson, his partner Michael Noone and Steve Johnson’s wife Rosemarie Johnson also gave victim impact statements. “If he had grasped Scott’s hand and pulled him to safety, I would owe him everlasting gratitude,” he said. He said that he appreciated White’s guilty plea but would have “a little more sympathy” if he had turned himself in after committing the crime. “This man who once told me he could never hurt someone even in self-defense died in terror.” “With a vicious push, Mr White took Scott and he vanished,” he said. His brother Steve Johnson, who spent years pushing police to investigate his death further and put up his own reward of AUD $1m for information, told how his brother “died in terror”.
Mr Johnson’s siblings flew into Sydney from the US to deliver emotional victim impact statements at the sentencing hearing. It was Ms White who finally turned her husband into police, sending an anonymous letter to a detective in 2019. She said she replied that “it is if you chased him” and her husband didn’t respond.Īt the time of Mr Johnson’s death, gangs of homophobic men were roaming the streets of Sydney searching for gay men to assault, rob and sometimes kill, a coroner on the case said in 2017. She said she asked him if he had killed the gay man to which White allegedly responded that “the only good p*****r is a dead p*****r” before adding that “it’s not my fault the dumb c**t ran off the cliff”. She said she confronted him about Mr Johnson’s death again two decades later in September 2008 when the story resurfaced in the media. When she asked White if he was responsible for the killing, she said he replied “of that girly looking p*****r?” and they got into “a bit of an argument”. The first time was not long after the 27-year-old’s murder in 1988 when she read about his death in a newspaper. She said that she had asked him on two occasions if he had killed Mr Johnson. His ex-wife Helen also revealed to the court that White often “bragged” about attacking gay men in his youth over the years, even telling stories of the assaults to their children. White had previously been questioned by police over the killing but claimed he had tried to stop his victim from falling to death. On Monday, the court heard audio from White’s 2020 police confession where he admitted: “I pushed a bloke.