By Sarah McPhee and Michaela Whitbourn
The killing of Scott Johnson in Manly in 1988 was the beginning of what a judge has described as a “decades-long nightmare of grief and unanswered questions” for his family, who spent years at loggerheads with police who long maintained his death was most likely a suicide.
“They demonised my family by calling us obsessed, erratic, a list of other names ... in emails to each other and texts to each other,” Steve Johnson said outside the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney on Thursday, after his brother’s killer, Scott Phillip White, was jailed for a maximum of nine years.
Steve Johnson, brother of Scott Johnson, with his wife Rosemarie (left) and daughter Tessa (centre) after the sentencing of Scott White.Credit: Kate Geraghty
White, 52, was sentenced on the basis he committed an unlawful and dangerous act when he punched Johnson, 27, causing him to stumble and fall to his death from an unfenced cliff at Blue Fish Point in North Head in December, 1988.
Police found Johnson’s clothes about 10 metres from the cliff edge.
“He had everything to live for,” Justice Robert Beech-Jones said, noting the American mathematician was posthumously awarded his PhD.
White sat silently in the dock for his sentence, wearing a prison green bomber jacket.
Beech-Jones imposed a non-parole period of six years. With time already served, White is eligible for release from May 2026.
Scott Phillip White being interviewed by police in May 2020.
The judge said the answers to questions such as how and why Johnson, who was gay, died are not yet known, and some answers may never be provided. He noted the evidence did not support a finding beyond reasonable doubt that Johnson’s killing was a “gay hate crime”.
The Johnson case was examined as part of NSW’s landmark inquiry into LGBTIQ hate crimes, which is due to report by August 30.
In a scathing submission released publicly on Thursday, coinciding with White’s sentencing, counsel assisting the inquiry, led by Peter Gray, SC, pointed to serious flaws in the NSW Police investigation into Johnson’s death.
The inquiry heard the unsolved homicide team reviewed the Johnson case in 2012 and concluded it had “zero solvability”.
Outside court, Steve Johnson spoke of how he had been told “there was no crime committed”, and of police attempts to “shut the door”.
“The years went on, they closed the case,” he said.
Counsel assisting the inquiry said “no investigative or other steps appear to have been taken in 2012 in order to ascertain whether forensic evidence [was available].”
US mathematician Scott Johnson’s death was initially declared a suicide.
“This involves a circular logic, whereby a ‘cold case’ is assessed to be unsolvable (and further investigations are hence foreclosed) on the basis of existing gaps in the evidence, without any further attempts being made to ‘solve’ it by filling those gaps,” the submission said.
The inquiry heard evidence that police prepared a media strategy in relation to the possibility of a third inquest into Johnson’s death that involved an early briefing of some journalists, but excluding The Sydney Morning Herald.
“We do not intend to approach the SMH as their reporter, Rick Feneley, is biased in his reporting and not willing to consider any information provided to him by police,” the internal police media unit email said on April 7, 2015.
Counsel assisting referred in their submissions to a “series of powerful articles” in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald between March and August 2013, including Feneley’s groundbreaking Good Weekend reporting in July 2013, headlined “Up to 80 men murdered, 30 cases unsolved.”
Supreme Court Justice John Sackar is presiding over the hate crimes inquiry and is not obliged to accept counsel assisting’s submissions in making his findings, but they are likely to be persuasive.
Counsel assisting said that evidence before the inquiry supported a finding that senior police in 2015 including Mick Willing, then boss of the homicide squad and later deputy police commissioner, wanted to “defeat” the Johnson family “by opposing and preventing a finding of homicide” at a third inquest.
In a document tendered at the inquiry, dated April 24, 2015, Willing was recorded as saying the Johnson family were “obsessed” and he “had a conversation with Steve where he was erratic”.
Willing had told the inquiry that police and the Johnson family had an “adversarial” relationship, but he did not wish to defeat them. Willing has since left the force.
Johnson’s death was initially ruled a suicide after an inquest in 1989. A second inquest in 2012 returned an open finding that his death could have been suicide, an accident or murder.
Coroner Michael Barnes said in November 2017 he was persuaded Johnson had met with foul play.
Steve Johnson said White “lucked into an amazing ally” with the suicide myth, and police “abetted” the killer’s flight.
Counsel assisting said it was “plainly correct” that a reinvestigation of Johnson’s death would not have been established in 2013 without intense lobbying by members of the Johnson family.
“In late 2017 the [NSW Police Force] were still submitting to the Coroner that the death of Scott Johnson was likely to have been a suicide and that a finding of homicide ‘would not be open,’” the submission said.
After the third inquest, a specialist team began investigating the death under Strike Force Welsford.
Court documents suggest the area (marked in red) was where Scott Johnson was punched and fell.Credit:
Steve Johnson said he was introduced to Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans, the officer in charge of the investigation, by then NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller in a conference call.
“I asked Peter, ‘How do you think my brother died?’,” Johnson said on Thursday.
“I hadn’t heard a working police officer say he died by homicide. And Peter said, ‘Your brother died by homicide’.
“From that moment on, Strike Force Welsford assiduously, and with love, worked on my brother’s case to get it solved.”
Asked for his thoughts, Yeomans said: “Steve has fought for nearly 35 years. God, to only have a brother like that.”
A reward for information was increased to $1 million in December 2018, which Steve Johnson said he would match.
White was arrested and charged in May 2020 and has been in custody since.
He pleaded guilty to Johnson’s murder early last year, and despite immediately trying to withdraw his plea, was sentenced in May 2022. That sentence and conviction were quashed on appeal, and he pleaded guilty to Johnson’s manslaughter in February.
The judge said White, who was 18 at the time of the killing, had a cognitive impairment and an “utterly dysfunctional” life, including homelessness, alcohol abuse and being prone to violence.
”The offender was clearly a damaged, albeit physically powerful, young man. However, he was not broken as he is now,” Beech-Jones said. He was satisfied that White was unlikely to re-offend upon release and had good prospects of rehabilitation.
The judge did not accept it was beyond White to have made an anonymous call about the incident after he “scrambled” away from North Head.
“Dr Johnson’s death was the commencement of a decades-long nightmare of grief and unanswered questions for his family,” Beech-Jones said.
“The offender left Dr Johnson to die.”
He said it was not known for how long Johnson suffered, but “it is certain, for some time, he would’ve been terrified”.
The Johnson family recently re-visited the cliff at North Head, which Steve Johnson described as a “sombre and nice place” to think about his brother.
“I imagine I will be going to the cliff many more times in my life,” he said.
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