‘Hey, look! A body!’ the sharp-eyed teenager shouted out as he and his father and his father’s friend, all clad in wetsuits and carrying spearguns, clambered over rocks on their way to sea pools to harpoon blue fish.
They were on a beach on the far side of Australia’s Sydney Harbour; above them loomed the menacing 200-ft high sheer face of North Head cliffs.
Lying on its side not far from the water’s edge that bright summer morning in December 1988 was a carcass, ripped apart and decomposing. Fragments of flesh and bone were strewn around. Seagulls were pecking at the remains.
At first they thought it was a dead animal but then could clearly see it was a naked human corpse lying there, the head smashed in, the back badly damaged.
Scott Johnson, an American PhD student, whose body was found in 1988
They reported their find and police arrived. A rescue paramedic estimated the body had been there for two days at least. A helicopter hovered overhead and dropped a cage in which the remains were carried away to the mortuary. Two cops made their way up a dirt trail to the top of the cliff, where they found a neatly folded pile of clothes – blue trousers, green underwear, shirt, tennis shoes – about ten yards from the edge.
There were no blood stains, no signs of a struggle. They drew what to them was the obvious conclusion: suicide. Equally obvious to them pretty quickly was why the man – identified from the ID card found in his clothes as 27-year-old Scott Johnson, an American PhD student– had jumped to his death.
Because, as they were soon to establish, he was gay.
And as one of the officers put it casually – in words that 40 years later, in a thankfully more enlightened era, are unthinkably bigoted – ‘That [suicide] is what homosexuals do. This is a well-known spot for them. They go up there and do their shenanigans, and often they’re the ones who jump.’
An autopsy concluded no foul play and within days the police file was closed with an ‘NFA’ – no further action.
But one person was not satisfied by this – Scott’s older brother, Steve, devastated when the news of Scott’s grisly demise reached him at home in California. ‘He was precious and rare, sweet and goofy. My world fell apart,’ he writes in a newly published book which traces the incredible journey he then embarked on. For the next three decades and more he moved heaven and earth to find the truth of how his brother died.
Obstructed at every turn along the way, he uncovered police corruption and the deliberate concealing of information. And he exposed a deeply homophobic, gay-bashing tendency in Australian macho culture, forcing the nation to change its attitudes. Only last year, 2023, did he finally have the satisfaction of seeing his brother’s killer behind bars and Scott’s ghost laid to rest.
North Head Cliffs in Sydney, Australia, where 27-year-old Scott’s body was found
Scott (right) with Steve who spent three decades trying to uncover how his brother died
Steve and Scott had grown up as close as brothers could be, forging a strong relationship to compensate for the hardship of their broken home.
They were both super-intelligent, but Scott had the edge, a mathematician of exceptional brilliance who at Caltech, Harvard, Berkeley and Cambridge universities had impressed top academics with his originality of thought.
He had moved to Australia in 1986 to be with his partner, a music professor, and continue his maths work at Macquarie University.
Steve had gone down a different route, studying economics while doing some computer programming – which he had learned from Scott – on the side and getting involved in technical innovation for the new world of the internet. (It would make him a multi-millionaire, but we will come to that later.)
Steve simply did not believe that Scott, who he knew was gay, had any reason to end his life. He’d just made a major breakthrough in his work, solving a complex maths theorem that had defeated every one else in the field; he was in a settled relationship; he was never known to be depressed. Nor did it seem likely that Scott, a seasoned climber and hiker in places like the Grand Canyon and the Matterhorn, would have slipped and fallen.
Steve flew to Australia for the funeral, met Scott’s lover (whom he thought a little evasive and inconsistent when talking about their relationship) and was shown the scene of the supposed ‘suicide’ by the police (which is when the ‘That is what they do’ comment was made). He was even more convinced that this had not been self-harm.
Back in America he talked over details with a British former senior detective, who was adamant that, in his years of experience, he’d never known a suicide to be naked, as Scott was.
Steve, pictured left with Scott and their sister Terry, was convinced that his brother hadn’t ended his own life
He has now written a book about his search for justice
Steve wrote to the police in Australia with his misgivings, a 50-page memo that was endorsed by local bigwig, Senator Ted Kennedy. He got barely an acknowledgement. Because it was a gay man who had died, the police didn’t want to know.
Which was very much a reflection of Australian attitudes at the time, with open hostility to gays and lesbians commonplace and polls showing that half the nation wanted to quarantine people with Aids. Sex between men had only fairly recently been decriminalised in some states – unlike in Britain, where it had been decriminalised more than 20 years before.
At an inquest in March 1989, the coroner returned a verdict of suicide even though he acknowledged there was no apparent reason for it, adding, in an echo of what the police officer had previously said, this was ‘the type of person’ who did kill themselves. Once again, it was case closed.
Steve was unconvinced but backed off and went back to California, where for the next few years he concentrated on his pioneering plans for a tech start-up. He devised a way of compressing images into data which would make it possible to send pictures at high-speed data through the fast growing technology of the internet.
It was a revolutionary step forward and the reward for his ingenuity was to sell out to the giant software company, AOL, for $100million in 1996. He was hugely rich, one of the first of the Silicon Valley super-tycoons, but memories of Scott still plagued him.
Nine years later, out of the blue, he received a package from Australia, from Michael Noone, Scott’s boyfriend. A note said: ‘I thought you might be interested in the enclosed’ – recent newspaper clippings about the inquests of three gay men found dead at the foot of cliffs.
The articles referred to the clifftop from where they had fallen as a ‘beat’ – a place where gay men met for casual sex and where they were frequently preyed on by teenage gangs, either to steal from them or just for kicks. A coroner had concluded that they were the victims of homophobic attacks.
Steve, pictured with baby Scott and Terry, went on to become a multi-millionaire but remained plagued by questions about his brother’s death
A local newspaper article from 2007 questioning Scott’s death
Steve was stunned. ‘After 16 years of trying to put my agonising questions to rest and move on, the implication of these articles was profound,’ he writes.
‘Scott’s death was no longer an unexplained tragedy but a murder that had happened because he was gay.
‘I had always imagined Scott, elated after the breakthrough in his work, seeking dramatic sexual fun at this out-of-the-way scrubland above the Pacific, then rolling off the cliff accidentally in an amorous moment. But now there seemed every likelihood an attacker had pushed him deliberately.’
He was tortured by the thought of Scott ‘suddenly confronted, stepping backward, screaming as he plummeted over the cliff.’
It rankled with Steve that the possibility of foul play had been so readily dismissed by the police and everyone else involved. He was more determined than ever to solve the mystery, and, with time and money to pursue his own investigation, he brought in private detectives to do what the police had so clearly failed to.
In local newspaper archives there was a wealth of evidence of violence against gay men by teen gangs in Sydney, as well as the police cracking down on what a commissioner called ‘the scourge of homosexuality’.
Court records revealed how in 1987 a gang led by a man named Vojko Spadina had been charged with 43 counts of gay bashing at various ‘beats’ around Sydney. Individuals were tracked down who admitted systematic attacks on homosexuals.
All this was laid out in a 12-page dossier which Steve sent to the police’s unsolved homicide unit.
It was simply ignored, as was a subsequent Freedom of Information request for a response.
Steve feared that Scott, pictured, had been confronted by one of the teen gangs which were known to roam Sydney and target gay men
Steve, pictured last year, said he felt as if he was ‘up against something worse than laziness or incompetence’
Steve concluded: ‘I felt I was up against something worse then laziness or incompetence but an insidious arrogance to deflect any questioning of their police work.’ An internal police memo would later emerge in which officers were told to keep the Johnson family in the dark as much as possible.
For a further three years nothing happened. Then in January 2011, a veteran investigative journalist who had taken up the case discovered a Facebook post from a man who wrote: ‘I will publicly admit to killing Scott Johnson.’ The police dismissed it as a hoax and didn’t even follow it up.
But Steve’s pressing of the authorities did lead to a second inquest, in which the coroner overturned the suicide verdict, replacing it with an open one. She called for further police investigation of Scott’s death – a request that the police again stalled on, pushing it to the back of a very long queue of unsolved crimes.
The open verdict was, though, a breakthrough, a step forward, compounded by increasing publicity surrounding the case, including a TV documentary.
A whistleblower came forward who said as a teenager he was a ‘lure’ for the Spadina gang, roaming the local beats and robbing gay men.
Two of his mates, he said, were into martial arts and liked to use ‘the poofters’ for practice, though he couldn’t recall anyone actually being killed.
He added that the criminal Spadina family had paid substantial bribes to certain police officers to go easy on him, which supplied a possible motive for police to want to scuttle any investigation into Scott’s death – to avoid drawing suspicion on the gangs who were a lucrative source of backhanders for them.
No wonder then that the police continued to prevaricate, with a senior officer angrily confronting Steve and challenging him to come up with evidence ‘or shut up’.
Police search the headland in 2020, more than 30 years after Scott’s death
The police investigation had been stalled, even after a coroner overturned the suicide verdict years earlier
Steve was incensed. ‘It was an outrageous declaration, which seemed to insinuate that, in cases involving gay men, families needed to furnish the evidence or the police weren’t interested.’
His view now was that what had been obstruction or a whitewash on the part of the police had turned into out-and-out sabotage.
Not surprisingly, the police opposed a third inquest into Scott’s death in 2017, arguing that it was unnecessary, but the New South Wales coroner insisted on it going ahead.
At this it was quickly established from four middle-aged witnesses that the North Head headland was indeed a gay ‘beat’ where sometimes as many as 40 men would congregate, strip off and be available for sex.
They also testified to regular assaults by gangs, which the victims, knowing from experience the dismissive response they would get, never dared report to the police.
And, bit by bit, more incriminating details emerged. Another witness said that in December 1988 he’d met a couple of skinheads who told him they’d beaten up and chased a naked sunbather – ‘an American faggot’.
Listening to them and others give evidence, a dismayed Steve concluded that ‘going fag-bashing’ was as natural for them as going to the cinema. Anybody could take a crack at a gay man without an eyebrow being raised.
This time the coroner’s verdict was forthright. ‘Mr Johnson fell from the cliff top as a result of actual or threatened violence by unidentified person or persons who attacked him because they perceived him to be homosexual.’
It was ‘a gay hate attack’.
Scott, pictured with Steve as a child, was believed to be the victim of a ‘gay hate attack’
Steve scatters Scott’s ashes from the Matterhorn summit, which keen climber Scott had visited
Steve had proved his point. But if it was a triumph, it didn’t feel like it. ‘I felt relief, outrage and despair all at once. We’d battled the police for decades and finally won. But I doubted I would ever find out precisely what had happened to Scott with the same police in charge.’
The point was reinforced when outside the court the senior detective on the case muttered ominously to him: ‘We’re not likely to do more for you.’ They’d finally conceded Scott was murdered but by whom, it seemed, they didn’t want to know, nor track down.
But then a new senior officer took over the case and took what turned out to be a crucial decision to put up a A$1million reward for information.
Leads flowed in but nothing definite to go on, so Steve put a further A$1million of his own into the pot, and a suspect emerged, a ‘very bad man’ with a long history of violence. He was divorced, with six children.
Undercover police wormed their way into his confidence and he began to talk. They took him to North Head cliffs and he pinpointed the exact spot where he’d been with Scott, then re-enacted his crime.
There’d been an altercation, he explained. He’d struck Scott, ‘we struggled, I pushed him and he went over’. To illustrate the point, he made a thrusting motion with both hands outstretched.
He’d then fled the scene without even bothering to see if his victim had survived the fall.
At last Steve had his answer, a clear picture of Scott’s last moments – ‘my kid brother enjoying the beat, sunbaking naked on a rock, his clothes tucked away from sight, waiting for a sexual approach. This man found him; Scott stood up naked and was easily disposed of.’
The man – coincidentally also named Scott, Scott White – was arrested and charged with murder. Now 50, shabby, overweight, he’d been 18 at the time of the killing and part of a gang of gay bashers.
In court, he pleaded guilty, repeating it no fewer than four times – which, in a curious twist, was challenged by his own lawyer as being ‘inconsistent with my instructions’. But the judge overruled this objection. White’s guilty plea stood.
And if there was any doubt of it, his ex-wife put paid to it, telling the court he’d always hated gay people. She recalled him telling her that ‘He deserved to die, that girly-looking poofter! The only good poofter is a dead poofter.’ When she asked him directly if he’d thrown him off the headland, he claimed it was not his fault: ‘The dumb **** ran off the cliff.’
The judge sentenced White to 12 years, 7 months in jail, without parole – a fairly lenient sentence in Steve’s view. His wife summed up the family’s disappointment: ‘He threw a punch while Scott stood naked against a cliff edge – it was murder. The sentence was way too light.’
But justice of a sort had at last been done, his brother’s death accounted for, a penalty exacted. The New South Wales crime commissioner told Steve: ‘It is outrageous that you had to wait so long for justice to be done. You are entitled to be proud and satisfied that your perseverance has led to the correct result at last.’
Or had it? Because there would now be another U-turn in this complex story. Six months later White’s lawyers appealed against his conviction, arguing that his guilty plea should not have been accepted by the trial judge.
Scott White who pleaded guilty to killing Scott and was sentenced last year
The Johnson family leave the New South Wales Supreme Court in 2022
To Steve’s horror, the appeal was granted and a retrial ordered. Having come so far, overcome so much, kept going over decades when it would have been easier to give up, ‘this was a low point in my odyssey’.
A compromise was offered by the court – a manslaughter plea. It was 2023, 34 years since Scott had plunged down that cliff to his death. Time to call it a day. Reluctantly, Steve agreed. White confessed to manslaughter and was jailed for nine years, a sentence he is now serving.
But to this day one matter remains unresolved – exactly what drove White to turn on Scott that summer’s day on North Head cliffs? ‘We may never know,’ writes Steve, ‘whether he killed my brother because he hated gays, or he hated himself for feeling longings toward men.’
Outside the courtroom, Steve counts his campaign a success, because of the changed attitudes in Australia. Gay marriage was legalised, thanks, he reckons, to the publicity around Scott’s case helping to humanise the plight of the gay community.
‘It told the public something was broken: Australia was radically behind the times in guaranteeing equality for all.’
There was also a Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ hate crimes, which effectively put the police on trial for their apathy and obstruction and called for reforms.
Steve concludes: ‘We kept going with honesty and integrity, and our effort produced tiny ripples, then swells, then waves of public ire that changed Australia. Humanity gained; prejudice lost. It was some consolation for Scott’s death.’
- A Thousand Miles From Care: The Hunt For My Brother’s Killer – A Thirty-Year Quest For Justice by Steve Johnson, will be published by William Collins on July 4 at £20. Copyright C Steve Johnson 2024. To order a copy for £18 go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Offer valid until 13.7.24, p&p is free on orders over £25.
