I thought I knew the brilliant Johnson brothers, but Steve had more to reveal

Had Scott Johnson not died violently in Sydney in 1988, his big brother Steve might have written a different book about their lives: the adventures of two American boys who grew up dirt-poor, “Dickensian urchins in the California sun”, who scaled mountains together and forged long and dazzling careers, the younger as a maths wunderkind, the elder building a multi-million-dollar fortune as a global pioneer among the super geeks.

All of that, except for Scott’s long career, does appear in the book that Steve Johnson is now releasing, A Thousand Miles From Care. Until reading it, I had thought there was little I didn’t know about the Johnsons, whose story I’ve been reporting since 2013.

Scott Johnson and his brother Steve.

The bitterly sad title is lifted from an old tourism slogan for Manly: “Seven miles from Sydney, a thousand miles from care.” The irony is that Steve, then 29, was at Harvard, more like 10,000 miles from any capacity to care for his “kid brother” when he received the news that Scott’s naked body had been found on the rocks beneath a 60-metre cliff at North Head, just south of Manly’s Shelly Beach.

Scott was 27 and gay. And brilliant. Within hours, police concluded he must have jumped from that cliff. “NFA,” an officer wrote on the occurrence pad – no further action. “That’s what they do, you know,” Steve Johnson recalls the constable telling him. “This is where they [homosexuals] go to jump.”

Rather, that particular clifftop area of North Head had been a place where gay men went for sex. It was a beat – and yet police explicitly advised Coroner Derrick Hand that it was not. Otherwise, the logic went, it would also have attracted gay bashers, and police claimed there were no reports of such violence there.

A few months after the death, the coroner agreed with police: it was suicide. Steve Johnson didn’t believe it, and many readers will be familiar with the tortuous plot that has followed in the 35-plus years since:

Steve Johnson, left, and Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans in 2018 on the cliff at North Head, the site of Scott Johnson's death.Credit: Jessica Hromas

• Scott’s Australian partner, musicologist Michael Noone, contacted Steve in 2005 to alert him to a separate coronial finding that two gay men, and likely a third, had been murdered at another beat over the sea cliffs of Bondi-Tamarama.

• This triggered Steve’s self-funded investigation, leading to a second inquest into Scott’s death in 2012, which discarded the suicide ruling and replaced it with an open finding.

• Police, however, soon advised Johnson that the case had “zero solvability” – and so followed his long and public conflict with the force, during which “Team Scott” campaigned for action on potentially dozens of unsolved gay-hate killings;

• A third inquest found, in 2017, that Scott’s death was indeed foul play, rejecting the police advice that suicide remained a likely cause of death. (It also heard testimony from men who had frequented the North Head beat and witnessed the incursions of “poofter bashers”, whose presence police had attempted to refute.)

• A new police commissioner, Mick Fuller, removed the homicide squad from the case and replaced it with a “fresh eyes” investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans of the child abuse and sex crimes squad. In 2020 – more than 31 years after Scott Johnson’s death – Yeomans’ team arrested and charged his killer, Scott Phillip White.

“I was a tough customer to thaw,” Johnson writes, “but he [Yeomans] was a hard officer to dislike.” Certainly, Johnson had disliked other officers, and they weren’t so fond of him. They resented a rich American wielding influence, as they saw it, to have his brother’s case re-investigated ahead of 700 other unsolved homicides or potential homicides. They resented his speculation that corrupt police might somehow have been linked to Scott’s death. They resented the “Johnson bandwagon”.

Johnson, in turn, resented the police suggestion that Scott’s case had ever been “investigated” until Yeomans’ team was appointed. He resented their claim that he had struggled to accept Scott’s sexuality and their speculation in an internal police memo – marked “Not to be divulged to the Johnson family” – that his “lack of approval” could have led Scott to suicide. And he resented the discussion about not letting the Johnsons “win” – exposed in an internal text exchange – between then homicide squad commander Mick Willing and detective chief inspector Pamela Young, who replied: “Mick, I will not let them win – that is not in my DNA.”

When Steve Johnson flew to Sydney in 1988 to collect his brother’s body, he was far from rich. He was flat broke, a graduate student at Harvard. The first of his and wife Rosemarie’s three children was six weeks old.

Steve Johnson (left) and Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans after the sentencing of Scott White for Scott Johnson’s manslaughter.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Scott, having already studied at Cambridge in England, had been assured in the days before his death that his solutions to problems in category theory had secured his PhD in Australia. Scott was the prodigy. He had been in only his fourth year at high school when he won a full scholarship to the prestigious Caltech college. Physics and chemistry were among its entrance requirements, but Scott’s school had offered neither, so he borrowed library books, taught himself and passed both with near-perfect marks, along with his perfect maths score.

“It was as if he heard frequencies I couldn’t,” Steve Johnson writes. And yet the elder brother heard frequencies of his own. In 1993, he cracked the code that allowed images to be compressed and delivered at high resolution over the internet. In 1996, America Online (AOL) bought the algorithm from Johnson and his two business partners for $US100 million.

It stops you on the page to think how recently the world existed without that technology. So does another of Johnson’s snippets from a more backward world. When Scott came out to his brother in 1984, the US president was Ronald Reagan, whose communications director, Pat Buchanan, was able to write in the New York Post that AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men”. That was the same year NSW got around to decriminalising sex between men.

Johnson is grateful that his two daughters can enjoy openly queer lives (one of them is non-binary), although he is sorry that their uncle did not live to experience this greater freedom. He awaits the NSW government’s response to the Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes, which made damning findings against NSW Police, and which would never have convened if not for the relentless agitation of the “Johnson bandwagon”.

Many police will not enjoy his book, but Steve Johnson has developed a close bond with some in the force, none more so than Peter Yeomans, who he describes as a “prince … almost like a brother”.

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