Investigative journalist
19 January 2022
It really didn’t have to be this hard. More than three decades after a brilliant young man’s life was taken from us in a fit of homophobic rage, the killer stunned a closed courtroom with an admission: “Guilty. I am guilty. Guilty.”>
Yes, Scott White admitted to killing Scott Russell Johnson in December 1988. His conviction affirms the incredible 33-year-long odyssey of Scott’s brother Steve, who always believed that foul play took his brother’s life, not self-harm. But it also raises questions about why it took so long, and how many other gay bashers, killers, and their police enablers still roam free.
Through a mutual friend, Steve Johnson contacted me in early 2007 and asked me to go to Sydney to investigate his brother’s death. Even though a 2005 coronial inquest had detailed multiple brutal attacks on gay men in the Bondi area, police steadfastly stuck to their belief that homophobic violence miraculously stopped at the Harbour Bridge.
When I met Steve and first poured over the scant materials he had obtained from the original 1989 inquest finding that Scott had committed suicide, I frankly thought the cause of death was a toss-up. The picture painted in the inquest documents was vague, but it seemed possible that the 27-year-old maths genius was too sensitive for this world. His partner had stated that Scott had thought about suicide once before (which turns out to be an elaborately misleading if not completely false story). Being gay in 1988 was particularly difficult at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the era of the Grim Reaper ads. On the other hand, Scott was an incredibly high-achieving, kind, “out” and apparently happy young man who had moved to Australia to be with his lover and complete his PhD.
I agreed to go to Sydney in May 2007. Before leaving, Steve put me in touch with Stephen Page, a former NSW Police detective sergeant who had investigated the Bondi gay killings. Page had retired and didn’t want to get officially involved, but suggested I focus on two things: was the place where Scott died an active beat at the time; and had there been incidents of anti-gay violence on the Northern Beaches?
During that first trip to Sydney in May 2007, the balance of probabilities shifted so fast it was breathtaking. Within a few hours of arriving, I talked to a (presumably) straight man who had worked at the sewerage plant since the 1980s and who said that gay men met up at the headlands near Blue Fish Point area “all the time, mate”. I met a gay man who had been stabbed up there. I found names of more than a dozen men who were known gay bashers on the Northern Beaches around the time of Scott’s death, from Narrabeen to North Sydney. This all took place in one week. After an article appeared in The Manly Daily about Steve Johnson’s search for his brother’s killer with my email address on it, I received a deluge of leads from citizens, gay and straight.>/p>
Man pleads guilty to Scott Johnson's cold case murder
A man has pleaded guilty to the cold case gay hate murder of Scott Johnson in 1988.
What I couldn’t figure out, and still can’t understand, is why police at the time pretended not to know any of this or make any possible connection to Scott’s death.
Over the ensuing years, this second piece — police culpability — became almost as much a question as “who killed Scott?” The intransigence of the police towards Steve in 1988 continued through 2006, even after the Taradale findings into the Bondi cases, which is why Steve hired me.
When presented with our initial findings in 2007, which clearly raised questions about the initial suicide verdict, we were met with stone silence. That continued for years, even as we amassed more evidence that Scott had been murdered and we had compiled a credible list of people who might have done it or knew about it.
After public pressure on the police when ABC’s Australia Story aired an episode about Scott’s case in 2013, we thought we had turned a corner when the Unsolved Homicide Unit formed a taskforce to investigate Scott’s death. Unfortunately, that turned into one of the most monumental wastes of taxpayer dollars I have witnessed in my 30 years as a journalist. That team roundly ignored evidence and doggedly pursued its own theory that Scott had killed himself.
Steve Johnson persevered and petitioned for a third inquest, which returned a homicide finding – and a gay-hate motivated one at that. It was only after the third inquest that new police leadership took this investigation seriously and by all accounts did an amazing job.
What I still want to know is this: Where is the accountability for all of the past mistakes that individual police officers made, for the anguish they perpetrated not just on Scott Johnson’s family but for the dozens if not hundreds of other people who were murdered, beaten, marginalised, and otherwise ignored as this epidemic of homophobic violence swept through NSW? We know who the police officers were. We know many of the perpetrators of this violence, unlike Scott White, are still walking the streets, their crimes unsolved and solvable.
.Most touchingly, we know that hundreds if not thousands of gay men and their loved ones have lived with nightmares from their bashings and the fear of going to the police to report it. I hope that in some small way, they will also find vindication in this guilty verdict in Scott Johnson’s case. I also still hold out hope that the responsible parties — police and perpetrators — face some sort of reckoning.
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