There are two reports in this post - one from the Sydney Morning Herald from early August 2013, and the other from the Sydney Star Observer a week later covering much the same information, but providing more publicity to Sydney's and New South Wales' police force shame in not bothering to solve at least 30 of the gay murders during the 70s, 80s and 90s because of their ongoing homophobia and disinterest.
Report by Rick Feneley (Sydney Morning Herald)
Two boys play cards at the Keelong detention centre,
south of Wollongong, in April 1991.
"Tell me some good stories, you cunt," says one.
"About fag-bashing?" asks the other. And this 17-year-old inmate does
not disappoint. "It was heaps fun," he says. With sadistic relish, he
regales his fellow prisoner, and another at Sydney's
Minda Detention Centre a few months later, with his reminiscences.
He reckons he was 12 when he started. He talks about hunting in packs of as
many as 30 youths who would ambush homosexual men and punch and kick them and
stomp on their heads, from Alexandria
Park to Kings Cross and Centennial
Park to Bondi and Tamarama. They'd
go "cliff-jumping" and push gays over the edge. "Ah! Help,
help!" he mocks one victim. "Heaps funny. Used to love how they
scream, eh?"
The headlines are his trophies. "Got heaps of clippings at home, man,
from all the poofters that we bashed."
"You're a sick puppy, mate." says his new friend at Keelong.
"It's a sport in Redfern ... it's a fuckin' hobby, mate. 'What are you
doin' tonight, boys? Oh, just goin' fag-bashin.' "
He does not realise, but both his friends are wearing listening devices. He
is in custody because he killed a man. He and seven of his mates. They will
become known as the Alexandria Eight.
On January 15, 1990,
after a game of basketball, they lured 33-year-old Richard Johnson to a toilet
block in inner-city Alexandria Park.
It was one of Sydney's many gay
beats, a place for men to meet for casual and anonymous sex. Johnson had left
his phone number on the wall. The gang - aged 16 to 18, most of them students
or former students from nearby Cleveland Street High, a couple from a Catholic
school - called the number to "bait the poofter". Johnson took the
bait and they bashed him to death.
Behind bars, a couple of the youthful killers start naming names, suggesting
who among the Alexandria Eight - and who among their extended network of
schoolmates and associates - may have committed other gay bashings and murders.
One of the eight, Ronald Morgan, skites about an attack at Bondi. "I had
me new 'Boks from America
on that day, too.
I had all blood over 'em … He should have went off the cliff that night but
he didn't … We went down and put a cigarette butt out on his head."Also wearing
a listening device is Dean Barry Howard, another of the eight. He is helping
the cops now, but that doesn't stop him complaining. "I wish I would've
done more to that fuckin' Johnson bloke if I'm gunna get 10 years. Two kicks
and I'm gunna fuckin' get 10 years for it - five years for each kick."
Howard, in fact, is sentenced to eight years for murder, the reduction partly a
reward for assisting police. In his own callous arithmetic: four years for each
kick.
Detective sergeant Steve McCann had planted those
bugs while the eight teenagers awaited sentences for manslaughter and murder.
The homicide investigator was the first in the NSW police force to explore
potential links between this case and a succession of murders and savage
assaults of gay men, from the inner city to the Bondi cliff-tops. Some of his
colleagues called him "the gay avenger". It wasn't meant kindly.
McCann was straight, for the record, and simply determined to throw light on
some unsolved crimes. They included the bashing murder of martial arts expert
Raymond Keam, 43, in Randwick's Alison Park, also a gay beat, in January 1987;
the killing of 50-year-old schoolteacher William Allen in Alexandria Park on
December 28, 1988, a little over a year before the killing of Johnson in the same
location; and the death of Cleveland Street High teacher Wayne Tonks in his
Artarmon unit on May 19, 1990.
Working with McCann was Sue Thompson, a lawyer and former state ombudsman's
investigator who had joined the force in January 1990 to co-ordinate its
liaison with the gay and lesbian community. McCann and Thompson soon realised
this blood sport called poofter-bashing was consuming many more "sick
puppies" than the Alexandria Eight. They would encounter the Tamarama
Three and the Bondi Boys, a local gang of about 30 which, despite its name,
included girls, said to cheer on the head-kickers.
Thompson would write research papers, attain international recognition and
be awarded the Police Medal in recognition of her 12 years in the pioneering
gay liaison role. Using police data, she found 46 gay-hate murders in NSW
between 1989 and 1999. Criminologist Stephen Tomsen backed those numbers with
his 2002 finding of about 50 gay-hate murders between 1985 and 1995.
Their startling figures, while noted by the experts, never captured the
public's attention. They were quite an understatement, in any case. They
accounted only for reported homicides. They did not include cases filed away as
suicides, deaths by misadventure or disappearances.
From bitter experience, Thompson now knows that at least some of those, and
possibly many, were murders. Today she can count about 80 deaths or
disappearances, mainly in Sydney but some in regional NSW, dating from the late
1970s to late 1990s - all potentially fitting this category of gay-hate crime.
Of those, 30 remain unsolved.
John Bedser
Antique dealer
stabbed in shop,
Parramatta Arcade
2 December 1980
***************
Gerald Cuthbert, 27
Stabbed 64 times,
Paddington unit
17 October 1981
*******************************
Wayne/ Wendy Brennan
Transvestite and sex worker,
shot at Kings Cross home
April 1985
****************************
Gilles Mattaini, 34
Disappeared around
Marks Park,
Bondi-Tamarama
5 September 1985
****************************
Raymond Keam
Martial arts expert, savagely bashed in Alison Park,
Randwick
13 January 1987
**********************
Rebecca Johnson, sister of Scott Johnson, with investigative journalist
Daniel Glick at the site of Scott's death at North Head.
Photo: James Brickwood
While a "wave" of gay-hate murders was
widely reported, Thompson says: "It was never just a wave. It is much more
accurate to describe it as an epidemic." (Curiously, Melbourne
police and media have never reported a culture of antigay violence of these
proportions.)
Thompson's list includes some much-publicised cases, notably that of the
brilliant young American mathematician Scott Johnson - no relation to Richard
Johnson - whose naked body was found at the base of a 50-metre cliff on the
Manly side of North Head, near Blue Fish Point, on December 9, 1988. A coroner soon agreed with police and
declared it a suicide.
Johnson's brother Steve never believed it. In 2007, from Boston,
he launched his own investigation. Unlike most families, he had the means.
Steve Johnson is an internet entrepreneur who made his fortune by creating an
algorithm that made it possible to deliver pictures over phone lines, the
earliest form of digital "streaming media". He hired Daniel Glick, a
former Newsweek investigative journalist, to travel to Sydney.
"Pretty much on day one," says Glick, "it became clear that the
place where Scott died was a gay beat." Police had told the coroner
otherwise. But gay men came here, took off their clothes, sunbaked and hoped to
get lucky.
"At least some police knew about this at the time," says Glick.
Scott Johnson, 27, was gay. He was about to be awarded his PhD at the Australian
National University
in Canberra. Glick again: "Gay
men don't go to gay beats to commit suicide. Period."
In June 2012, 23 years after Scott's death, deputy
state coroner Carmel Forbes threw out the suicide finding. She considered the
weight of the research amassed by Steve Johnson, with a team that included Sue
Thompson, and found it could have been a gay-hate murder or an accident. Police
announced a $100,000 reward in the case in February - the day after the ABC's
Australian Story featured the family's battle.
"At first, I was focused only on Scott's death," says Johnson.
"Then we started hearing from other families and other men who had
survived vicious assaults around the time Scott died. I was shocked to learn
how many gay men had died ... there were hundreds, possibly thousands, of assaults
against gay men during this era.
"There was a culture of gay-hate bashings ... It didn't stop at the Harbour
Bridge. We've heard stories of the
equivalent of the Alexandria Eight or the Bondi Boys who regularly gay-bashed
along the northern beaches."
The postcodes for the unpublicised cases stretch from Mosman to Collaroy on
the north side. There were the brothers from Narrabeen, aged 15 and 12, who
would travel to the city in the late 1980s to bash and rob gays and Asians in
Kings Cross and Moore Park.
A couple of cases involve men found naked at the base of cliffs, north and
south of the harbour, their clothes folded on the cliff-tops - as with Scott
Johnson.
Importantly, to qualify for this "gay-hate" category, the victims
need not have been homosexual. It was a question of the motive. Might the
killers have mistaken them for being gay? The bigger question is whether it is
really possible that Sydney
experienced a gay-hate murder epidemic and nobody much noticed. To answer that,
we need to consider the era.
Sydney's first Gay Mardi Gras
parade in 1978 coincided roughly with the first of the murders on Thompson's
list. And just as thousands of gays and lesbians were emboldened to come out,
the world's first case of AIDS was diagnosed in 1981. In those days, it was a
death sentence. Many saw gay men as walking vectors of a killer disease. Only
in 1984 did NSW decriminalise homosexuality.
"A lot of cops didn't get the memo," says Glick. He reports the
question a policeman asked Marguerite O'Connell, the sister of Scott Johnson's
boyfriend and the last person to see Scott alive: "Did you know your
brother was a poofter?" And then: "Do you still love him?"
Gays didn't trust police, so commonly failed to report assaults. The
prevailing police attitude, says Thompson, was "if they're gay or lesbian
and a victim of crime, they asked for it". There was no internet, no
Grindr or Gaymatchmaker - the social network could be a public toilet. In 1987
came the Grim Reaper commercial. In a bowling alley, the Reaper skittled tenpins
in the forms of men, women and children. The ad was hailed for its success in
terrifying Australians into safer sex, but it left an unintended, indelible
message for some: the Reaper was a "poofter".
"Those lads have a lot to answer for," argues Steve Page, the cop
who exposed the many failings of his colleagues on gay-hate crimes. Today, Page
heads security for a major corporation but he was a detective sergeant in
homicide when he took over Steve McCann's files in 2000 and launched Operation
Taradale. Page and McCann's work uncovered extensive networks of youths who
were either involved themselves or clearly knew who was. When they denied and
denied, however, it was not enough to meet the tests of admissible evidence and
reasonable doubt. The Alexandria Eight, who have long done their time - terms
of between four and a half years and 10 years - have been charged with no other
gay-hate crimes. In January 2002, Page re-interviewed the storyteller from
Keelong.
Now he reckoned he had been "skylarking" and boasting, while
admitting, "I'd say some of it happened" and adding "I'm sure we
never pushed anyone off a cliff that didn't get back up".
But the dozens of kids in those gangs have grown up. They are approaching
middle-age. Not all did the bashing but they have been living with these
secrets, and the guilt, ever since. "Someone's going to open their mouth
one day," says Ted Russell, whose 31-year-old son John was found at the
base of a Bondi cliff in November, 1989.
Scott Johnson, 27
Body found at base of cliff.
Blue Fish Point
North Head, Manly
9 December 1988
Police announced $100,000 reward in Feburary this year.
****************************
William Allen, 50
Bashed to death at gay beat
Alexandria Park
toilets
28 December 1988
*********************
Samantha Raye
Transexual. Body found
in cave at South Head,
beneath HMAS Watson
naval base
20 March 1989
****************************
John Gordon Hughes
Gagged and bound, throat slashed, bashed with
lamp and bowl
in his Greenknow Ave unit,
Potts Point
4 May 1989
**************************
Ross Warren, 24
WIN TV news presenter,
disappeared at Marks Park,
Bondi-Tamarama
22 July 1989
*****************************
Steve Page and Sue Thompson re-investigated many of the suspicious deaths
before leaving the police force.
Photo: James Brickwood
Sue Thompson accompanies Steve Page to Marks
Park on the headland that separates
Bondi and Tamarama, where the former colleagues give Good Weekend a tour of
this one-time killing field. In the 1980s and '90s it was widely known as a gay
beat where men met in the bushes and the honeycomb caverns surrounding the
coastal walkway. We stand at a cliff-top lookout on Mackenzies
Point, with views north to Bondi
Beach and south to Tamarama. Page
points towards Bondi, to a lower cliff edge. "John Russell was found on
the rocks below that point." Page turns towards Tamarama and points to a
ledge four metres away. "Kritchikorn went over there."
About 3am on July 21, 1990, Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn, a
34-year-old Thai national, found company at this lookout. As he and the
friendly stranger chatted, three teenagers approached.
Brothers David and Sean
McAuliffe and Matthew Davis had set out from Redfern, after a session of booze
and bongs, with a plan to "roll a poof". Sean McAuliffe came with a
claw hammer. They beat the other man unconscious and battered Kritchikorn. In
his bid to flee, Davis would say,
Kritchikorn stumbled backwards over the cliff. The Tamarama Three would be
sentenced to 20 years for his murder but have been found guilty of no other
gay-hate crime.
We stroll for less than two minutes towards Tamarama. Page points to a rock
shelf. "They found Ross Warren's car keys about there." Warren,
a gay 25-year-old television newsreader from Wollongong,
parked his car on the western fringe of Marks
Park early on the morning of July 22, 1989. He hasn't been seen
since.
In his short-sleeved business shirt, Page still looks like a burly cop. He
sounds less like the stereotype. "People walk around here for
entertainment. For me, it remains a place of evil. What angers me most is that
society allowed the circumstances in which these disgraceful things could
happen. This was compounded by the original crimes being poorly investigated by
police. We have to wonder whether society would have let that happen if the
victims had been school principals, politicians, football players."
Thirty years after Peter Sheil's death, his four
siblings have no answers. In April 1983, Sheil's body was found with
"multiple injuries" - but without trousers - at the base of a small
cliff at Gordons Bay,
then commonly known as Thompsons Bay,
north of Coogee. Sheil, 29, was not gay. He was schizophrenic and was on
medication, but on the night of his death he was in good spirits, says brother
Hugh. Peter had called his mother from the Coogee Bay Hotel at about 8.30pm to say he was heading home to a halfway
house in Clovelly. He chose the coastal walk. It passed known gay beats.
Sheil's mother was a devout Catholic. She could not countenance the
possibility of suicide and the policeman who handled the case was helpful,
perhaps too helpful. Christopher Sheil, then 27, witnessed the
"inquiry" into his brother's death - a discussion between his father
and the policeman. "It took all of about a minute. They got to the part on
the form where you fill out cause of death. I can't remember whether it was Dad
or the cop who suggested misadventure. I said, 'We don't know whether he jumped,
fell or was pushed.' Dad said, 'Ah, we're not gunna go into any of that.'
"
Their parents are now dead. Christopher, 58, says, "Peter definitely
wasn't gay. I wouldn't be embarrassed at all if he was. It's just not accurate.
However, his behaviour could be reckless and it is quite possible he was
mistaken for being gay, and attacked for that reason. It might also have been
suicide, although if you look at the point where he died, it's not a likely
choice. It's only a couple of storeys high. There were plenty of higher cliffs
along the way."
Hugh Sheil remembers Coogee's beats - and their poofter bashers. He can't
remember any by name but he does recall how blithely they would announce they
were going to "give the poofs a flogging".
In those times, somehow it
didn't sound so shocking.
In 1990, Steve McCann and Sue Thompson were curious enough to wonder about
Ross Warren. Bondi's Sergeant Ken Bowditch, who was in charge of that case, had
been less curious. After investigating for four days, Bowditch concluded - no
inquest required - that Warren had
fallen accidentally into the ocean, and that his body would soon surface. It
never did. McCann and Thompson wondered, too, about John Russell.
Russell, a former barman, had been due to leave Sydney
for the Hunter Valley,
where he intended to spend some of a $100,000 inheritance building a home on
his father's property. The police report into his death found that another gay
man at a gay beat had fallen accidentally - "no suspicious
circumstances". In fact, there were plenty, not least the clump of blond
hair clenched in his left hand.
Confronted with the Kritchikorn killing, McCann and Thompson decided to
treat Warren and Russell as probable murders. It would be another 10 years
before Steve Page launched Operation Taradale, a three-year investigation that
would focus on Warren and Russell but also cover other deaths. Page's Taradale
report would be tendered as the critical document in a 2003 inquest into the
death of Russell and the suspected deaths of both Warren and Gilles Mattaini, a
34-year-old Frenchman who vanished from Bondi in September 1985, in what was
possibly the first murder at Marks Park.
One thread explored in Taradale potentially linked David McAuliffe, of the
Tamarama Three, to the Bondi Boys. On December
18, 1989, three youths approached a man near the Bondi Icebergs
club in Notts Avenue, the
road that adjoins the coastal walk to Marks
Park and beyond. "Are you
gay?" they asked before they punched and kicked him and struck him with a
skateboard. They broke six of his ribs. The victim identified two of them from
police photographs - David McAuliffe and a Bondi local called Sean Cushman.
Taradale contains extensive claims against Cushman, mentioned as "the
leader" of the Bondi Boys.
Three days after that attack near the Icebergs, another gay man, 24-year-old
David McMahon, took a late-night jog along the coastal path. Returning to
Bondi, he was metres from the steps to Notts Avenue
when he was tackled. Four or five youths did the beating, but McMahon recalls
there was gang of about 18 present, aged 15 to 20. Four of them were girls.
"They were cheering them on, encouraging the boys," McMahon tells
Good Weekend. Someone said, "Don't let him look at us. He knows me."
Indeed McMahon, who worked at a cafe on Campbell Parade, had recognised them.
They were already known for terrorising gays, he recalls. He says he will never
forget the face of the gang leader or what he said: "Let's throw him off
where we threw the other one off." They dragged him a few hundred metres,
close to the spot where John Russell drew his last breaths less than a month
earlier.
"I'm gonna throw you over the side," the leader had said. Somehow,
McMahon seized a moment and escaped towards Bondi. He outran the gang. He
scaled steps into Hunter Park and screamed to a middle-aged man on a balcony.
"I don't help poofters," came the reply.
After hesitating, McMahon chose Cushman from police photographs. A local
with a record of stealing and petty crime, Cushman denied it was him and there
was no corroborating evidence.
McCann's secret tapes of the Alexandria Eight, meanwhile, were explosive in
their apparently incriminating details. The 17-year-old storyteller mentioned a
weapon in the unsolved murder of William Allen in Alexandria
Park - a "screwie", or
screwdriver - which seemed to match a hand wound. The youth and fellow gang
member Ronald Morgan implicated three local associates. Dean Howard, their
co-accused in the Richard Johnson case, named the same three, but he also
suggested Morgan and another member of the Alexandria Eight. Police could place
little credence in Howard's recollections - Morgan may have been out of Sydney
at the time, the other gang member in New
Zealand.
Graham Paynter, 36
Found at base of 50-metre cliff, with jeans around knees and jumper over his
head,
at Tathra Beach
on the NSW south coast
14 October 1989
**************************
John Russell, 31
Murdered Marks Park,
Bondi-Tamarama
24 November 1989
*****************************
Wayne Tonks
Teacher at Cleveland
Street High,
found dead in his
Artarmon unit
19 May 1990
***************************
Kritchikorn Rattanajurathaporn, 34
Murdered Marks Park,
Bondi-Tamarama
22 July 1990
****************************
Richard Johnson, 33
New Zealander,
lured and bashed
at Alexandria Park,
died in hospital
24 October 1990
****************************
William Dutfield, 41
Former jockey, struggled before bashed to death with a metal tape dispenser
in his Mosman unit
19 November 1991
****************************
Cyril Olsen, 64
Bashed then drowned,
Rushcutters Bay
22 August 1992
************************
McCann left the force. His files collected dust until the day in September
2000 when Steve Page opened a letter from Kay Warren, mother of Ross, the
Wollongong TV newsreader. Her humble request for answers spawned Taradale. Page
called in Sue Thompson. He re-interrogated the Alexandria Eight and the Bondi
Boys - and girls - about the suspected murders of Warren and Russell and the
attempted murder of David McMahon. He bugged the phones of the Bondi crew who,
a decade older, seemed untouched by the enlightened new millennium's
politically correct language.
They still spoke of "poofters" and the
cops hassling about a "faggot" who "went off" Marks
Park. Cushman and a mate speculated
about which "psychos" might be killers, but nothing that would stick.
Depending who among them Page's team spoke to, the Bondi Boys had also used the
graffiti tags PSK - Park Side Killers - and PTK, for Prime Time Kings or Part
Time Killers.
In one intercepted call, Cushman's mother told him two detectives had
visited. A dead man "had a clump of blond hair and you're a suspect".
She wanted his assurance that he hadn't been "giving fags a hard
time". Cushman: "Nuh ... they can have my DNA ... I wouldn't lie to
you, Mum."
In 2003, Page delivered Taradale, all 2638 pages of it, to the then deputy
state coroner, Jacqueline Milledge. A tendered police document included a
recollection by the Tamarama Three's Matthew Davis about what David McAuliffe
had told him soon after they killed Kritchikorn - words to the effect:
"Don't worry, brother. This isn't the first time we've done this. You're
one of us now." It was only Davis's
word.
Sean Cushman told the court: "We grew up in Bondi. That's why we called
ourselves the Bondi Boys." But he said: "I was never in a gang or
crew. We didn't roll homosexuals." He has never been charged with a
gay-hate crime and did not respond to Good Weekend's requests for an interview,
though his mother said he wouldn't be interested. Cushman was given a good
behaviour bond in 1999 for being an accessory after the fact of a violent
assault three years earlier, when he had helped a friend who had viciously
attacked a British tourist. The tourist, Brian Hagland, fell into the path of a
bus during the fight and later died of his injuries at St Vincent's
Hospital.
Cushman, according to the Taradale report, also went to a house to collect a
drug debt in 1999 and warned his target's mother that he had killed a man at
Bondi and got away with it - and he would do so again because the "coppers
are too fuckin' stupid".
Sue Thompson retired, injured, in early 2003. Page would leave the force the
following year. But both returned to court in 2005 to hear Milledge's findings.
She called it a "first-class investigation".
Milledge concluded, like Page, that Warren and Russell had been murdered.
She described the original police investigation into Warren's
death as "grossly inadequate and shameful" and Russell's as
"lacklustre". John Russell had sustained multiple injuries "when
he was thrown from the cliff on to rocks", but police had lost the one
exhibit that might one day help identify his killer: the hair he had been
clutching in his hand. "Disgraceful," said Milledge. She found that
Gilles Mattaini had probably met a similar fate. But Milledge said there was
insufficient evidence to recommend that anyone be prosecuted.
Peter Russell, John Russell's brother, recalls a stare-off with one of the
eight "persons of interest" at the inquest. "I looked at him and
he looked at me, and I just know he was John's killer. I don't have proof, but
I know."
In Boston, Steve Johnson read
the news. Until now, he had no idea that gay bashing had been such a blood
sport in Sydney. He got to work.
Jean Dye didn't know it, but the police files listed
her son Crispin's murder as a possible gay-hate crime. She is not convinced
that was the motive. She does, however, want some answers, some 20 years after
he was bashed to death in Little Oxford Street, off Taylor
Square.
Crispin had been a long-time manager for rockers AC/DC who'd also worked
with Rose Tattoo and the Easybeats as well as being a singersongwriter. On the
night of December 22, 1993,
he and friends celebrated the success of his first CD, A Heart Like Mine. About
4.30 the next morning, a witness saw three men of Pacific Islander appearance
standing over Dye, 41, apparently going through his wallet. He died two days
later, on Christmas Day.
He had many girlfriends, his mother says, though he had told her:
"People say I'm gay, Mum, but I don't know what I am." Jean Dye
cannot exclude the possibility that his attackers thought he was gay, or that
they simply wanted his money. After a 1994 inquest, a policeman had told her
that a prisoner had been captured in a secret recording saying that he had
"knocked off" Dye. It came to nothing. She is unhappy to learn that a
police reward for information has long since lapsed. "Somebody out there
knows what happened," she says.
The case of 64-year-old Cyril Olsen seems much less ambiguous. Olsen, a
homosexual, was bashed in a Rushcutters
Bay gay beat on the night of August 22, 1992. Some time later,
Olsen tumbled from a wharf in the bay and drowned. Police immediately
identified it as a possible gay-hate crime. An anonymous caller would later
name a man who had been heard saying on the same date: "Let's roll a poof
tonight."
In jail for another offence, that man allegedly told a cellmate he had
bashed a gay man who then died. He denied this when police questioned him. The
coroner ruled Olsen "drowned after accidentally falling". Olsen's
friend Brian Stewart attended the inquest and believes there was little
alternative on the available evidence.
Olsen had been drinking heavily that night. "A taxi driver saw him,
bare-chested and bleeding, and asked if he needed any help. He said, 'I'm
perfectly all right, thank you.' "
But Steve Page argues that it makes no sense to exclude the brutal assault
as being the cause of Olsen's fall. He runs his usual moral gauge over this
case: "We wouldn't stand for it if it was a woman or child who had been
bashed and then fell in the harbour."
The winter sun is making emeralds of the Pacific
below Blue Fish Point. This is Rebecca Johnson's third visit to the cliffs
where her brother died. "It's hard to be here," she says, "but
at the same time, it's so beautiful." She can imagine him happy here.
"I was 11 when he died. The narrative I grew up with was that Scott had
killed himself."
Now she is 36 and she and Daniel Glick have made another trip to Sydney
to check on the progress of the police investigation. "Of course, there is
no solace in the more likely truth that he was thrown, naked, from a cliff. But
I am glad he wasn't so unhappy that he wanted to take his own life. The murder,
it's horrific, but there is comfort in knowing that."
David McMahon knows just how horrific. He is the gay man who got away.
Working at his cafe soon after the attack, McMahon would see his attackers
passing by. Ever since, he has sought to protect his identity. "I went
into hiding, really. I was so shy and meek back then, I was the perfect
target." But now McMahon is braver, and he wants to reclaim his name and
put it to this story; not his photograph but his name.
"I am at the stage in my life when I can see that this terrible history
of gay hatred is part of what we are as a society. We have moved on a lot,
thankfully, and I have been part of that."
He hopes someone from the Bondi gang can find as much courage and finally
come forward with the truth. It is the girls he thinks about most. "I've
always wondered what sort of mothers they would make."
Some are, indeed, mothers - the Facebook page of one of them features a Holy
Communion photograph. The Operation Taradale interviews in 2002 give some
insight into the girls' thinking. "They all beat up their
girlfriends," one said of the boys. Another, asked about their attitude to
gays, said, "We probably didn't like them ... 'cause all the boys, you've
got to impress them when you're young."
Some of the killers are fathers. It is hard to find any who will talk at
all, let alone explain what possessed them then or what they think of their
crimes now. One of the Alexandria Eight, however, does take the call at his
workplace in the eastern suburbs. He has previously told police he was uneducated
and easily led when he committed the crime. Today he is brief, but very polite.
"Obviously this is something that I think about all the time. It's
something I deeply regret doing. I have kids of my own now, so I know how hard
it would be to lose someone. But because I have kids, I have tried to put those
days behind me."
His eldest is 16, the same age he was when he and his mates killed Richard
Johnson. At some point, he says, he will have to sit his kids down and explain
what he did.
*******************************
Sydney’s killer: the gay-hate
epidemic that claimed 80 men
Suburbs where gay men were beaten or thrown to their
deaths in a silent epidemic of homophobic violence over 20 years.
The horror they must have felt in their final
moments would have been close to unimaginable, but for the dozens of men
attacked and killed late at night at beachside cliff-tops and secluded
parks across Sydney from the 1970s to the early 1990s, justice may be
edging nearer for the loved ones they left behind as police and the local
community slowly front up to the reality of an epidemic of gay-hate killings.
As NSW Police this week confirmed for the
first time it was widening a review into the mysterious disappearances and
deaths of a number of gay men across the state, the family of American maths
genius Scott Johnson – now widely believed to have been the victim of a fatal
gay-hate attack near Manly Beach in December 1988 – told the Star Observer many
of the suspected crimes would have been solved if homophobic attitudes had not
been so prevalent in the police force in decades past.
“It is a sad likelihood that police then knew
or guessed what was going on but turned a blind eye because of their own
prejudice, or because these victims had no voice,” Johnson’s sister Rebecca
Johnson Arledge said. “Imagine if the victims had been almost any other group
– 80 or 90 women, or children, or even blue-collar workers who were
attacked and killed every few weeks. The public outcry would have been deafening;
the police would not have rested.”
Last week the Sydney Morning Herald
revealed that roughly 80 such deaths or disappearances from the late
1970s to the early 1990s that were originally ruled suicide or
misadventure, mainly in Sydney, are now
believed to have been murders. Sue Thompson, a lawyer and former state
ombudsman’s investigator who joined NSW Police in January 1990 to co-ordinate
its liaison with the LGBTI community, estimated 30 of those cases remain
unsolved. Although some cases resulted in young men arrested and charged soon
after the attacks, police officers at the time failed to link the string of
assaults as a pattern of violence against gay men and men perceived to be gay.
Many of the attacks that took place at
cliff-tops across Sydney’s eastern and northern suburbs, as well as several
inner-city parks well-known as gay beats, are now believed to have been
perpetrated by roving gangs of young men. With names both banal and
brazen, groups like the Alexandra Eight, the Bondi Boys, the Tamarama Three and
the Park Side Killers continue to cast a dark shadow over the city’s recent
past.
“We believe that those responsible for these
horrible crimes are still living free in our communities. Scott died only 25
years ago – if these were teenage gangs, the perpetrators are now in their
forties,” Scott’s brother Steve Johnson told the Star Observer.
“For those who have heard about the gay
bashings or witnessed them, it’s safer now to come forward. Times have changed
in the police department. The police are keen to hear what you have to say.”
Johnson was only 27 and about to be awarded
his PhD in mathematics from the Australian National University in Canberra when his body was found at the bottom of Blue Fish
Point lookout near Manly’s North Head.
Originally ruled as suicide both by local
police and the coroner, the Johnson family’s tenacious fight to get to the
truth of what happened to Scott saw them turn to celebrated Newsweek journalist
Daniel Glick almost a decade ago after being spurred on by the findings of NSW
coroner Jacqueline Milledge in 2005 in relation to a number of similar deaths.
Glick’s early investigations revealed that
Blue Fish Point lookout was a well-known gay beat while at least six men,
including WIN television newsreader Ross Warren, were believed to have died in
similar circumstances at gay beats near cliffs overlooking Bondi in Sydney’s
east between 1987 and 1990.
In June 2012 the NSW Coroner agreed to hold a
new inquest into Johnson’s death, overturning the finding of suicide and
bringing an open verdict with the matter now with the NSW Police Cold Case
Unit. Earlier this year, a $100,000 reward was offered for information that may
help solve Johnson’s death.
Tony Crandell, who was recently installed as
NSW Police force’s corporate spokesperson for LGBTI people, told the Star
Observer police were determined to solve what happened to Johnson as well as
several other mysterious deaths.
“The cause of Mr Johnson’s death is still not
determined, but detectives are committed to thoroughly re-examining all aspects
of the case, including whether Mr Johnson might have been targeted because he
was gay.
“Meanwhile, a review of Strike Force Taradale
– an investigation into the deaths of two gay men and the disappearance of two
others in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs from 1985 to 1990 – was commenced
by the Unsolved Homicide Team last year and is ongoing,” Crandell said.
“For investigative reasons, police had
previously not announced that this review was taking place, but can now confirm
that review is well advanced.”
The Star Observer understands the Homicide
Squad will also be considering a number of other deaths with possible links to
gay hate crimes in the 1980s and 90s for possible review.
Reflecting on the likelihood that Scott was
one victim of many, the Johnson family told the Star Observer it was painful to
think that so many other families were left with so many unanswered questions
for so long.
“Victims’ families didn’t realise it was
happening, so most didn’t object or believed they were alone with no recourse.
They grieved their loss, as we did, with no answers or community,” Rebecca and
Steve said.
“Times have certainly changed. Communities
are openly talking about this dark era.”
INFO: Anyone who can assist police can call Crime Stoppers
on 1800 333 000. Gay and Lesbian Liaison Officers (GLLOs) are also located at
metropolitan and regional police stations across the state and anyone can speak
directly to these specially-trained officers who deal with LGBTI issues.
