A gay American was killed in Australia in 1988. Someone finally confessed.
metroweekly.comA man has finally confessed to killing a gay American college student in Australia, ending an almost 35-year mystery over his death.Scott White, 50, admitted to the murder of Scott Johnson, whose body was found at the bottom of a cliff in Sydney in 1988.
The 27-year-old gay mathematician was studying for his PhD at Australian National University after moving to Australia to live with his partner.Johnson’s clothes and belongings were found at the top of the cliff above his body, and he was in an area known to be frequented by gay men, which led investigators at the time to write his death off as suicide.His brother, Steve Johnson, was unconvinced with that verdict and pushed for the investigation to be reopened after learning at an inquest in 2005 that three other men had died in similar circumstances, the New York Times reports.“It was inconceivable to me that Scott went somewhere and jumped off a cliff,” Steve Johnson told the BBC in 2018.“The coroner quickly determined suicide, which is what the police told them,” Johnson said. “There was no investigation whatsoever and that was in 1989.
It was the end of the story.”After police refused to reinvestigate his brother’s death, Johnson hired a private investigator who learned that as many as 80 gay men were murdered in the 1980s by homophobic gangs, with many of them pushed over cliffs.“The gangs would attack these cruising areas because they knew the police wouldn’t come after them,” Johnson told the BBC.“They also knew that the gay community were afraid of the police, so they wouldn’t come and report the crimes.
