Sydney man admits pushing homosexual American off a cliff in 1988

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — A person told police he killed American mathematician Scott Johnson in 1988 by pushing the 27-year-old off a Sydney cliff in what prosecutors describe as a gay hate crime, a court heard on Monday.

Scott White, 51, appeared within the New South Wales state Supreme Court docket for a sentencing hearing after he pleaded guilty in January to the homicide of the Los Angeles-born Canberra resident, whose dying at the base of a North Head cliff was initially dismissed by police as suicide.

White shall be sentenced by Justice Helen Wilson on Tuesday. He faces a possible sentence of life in prison.

“I pushed a bloke. He went over the sting,” White said in recorded police interview in 2020 that was played in court docket.

White said within the interview he lied when he had earlier instructed police that he had tried to grab Johnson and forestall his fatal fall.

A coroner ruled in 2017 that Johnson “fell from the clifftop because of precise or threatened violence by unidentified individuals who attacked him as a result of they perceived him to be homosexual.”

The coroner additionally found that gangs of men roamed varied Sydney locations looking for gay men to assault, resulting in the deaths of some victims. Some people have been also robbed.

A coroner had dominated in 1989 that the overtly homosexual man had taken his personal life, whereas a second coroner in 2012 couldn't clarify how he died.

His Boston-based brother Steve Johnson maintained strain for further investigation and supplied his personal reward of 1 million Australian dollars ($704,000) for information. White was charged in 2020 and police say the reward will doubtless be collected.

White’s former spouse Helen White told the courtroom that her then-husband “bragged” to their youngsters of beating gay men at the clifftop well-known for homosexual meetups.

Helen White stated she learn a newspaper report in 2008 about Johnson’s death and requested her husband if he was responsible.

“It’s not my fault,” Scott White allegedly replied. “The dumb (expletive) ran off the cliff.”

“I mentioned, ‘It is if you chased him,’” Helen White told the courtroom. She said her husband did not reply.

Below cross-examination, Helen White denied she had been conscious of a AU$1 million reward for info on Johnson’s murder when she reported her former husband to police in 2019. She mentioned she only grew to become aware of a reward when the victim’s brother, Steve Johnson, doubled the sum in 2020.

Steve Johnson stated in his sufferer impact assertion that, “With a vicious push, Mr. White took Scott and he vanished.”

“This man (Scott Johnson) who once advised me he might by no means hurt someone even in self-defense died in terror,” the brother added.

Steve Johnson said he appreciated White’s guilty plea.

“If he had turned himself in after his violent motion, I would have had just a little extra sympathy. If he had grasped Scott’s hand and pulled him to security, I'd owe him eternal gratitude,” the brother mentioned, his voice choked with emotion.

Scott Johnson’s sisters Terry and Rebecca Johnson, his accomplice Michael Noone and Steve Johnson’s spouse Rosemarie Johnson also gave victim affect statements.

Rosemarie Johnson described the initial police failure to analyze Scott Johnson’s dying as “indefensible and inhumane.”

Rebecca Johnson, a younger sister, stated the police report of suicide “made no sense.”

“How might a community fail so spectacularly that they created boys able to such horror?” she asked, referring to media reports of homosexual beatings in Sydney being described as a sport.

Prosecutor Brett Hatfield stated the precise details of the murder were not known and that White’s accounts had varied.

White had met Johnson in a nearby bar in suburban Manly and Johnson had stripped bare on the clifftop earlier than he died, Hatfield stated. He stated the gravity of the murder was considerably elevated because it was motivated by the victim’s sexuality.

White’s lawyer Belinda Rigg said her shopper was homosexual and had been involved that his homophobic brother would discover out.

In January, White yelled repeatedly in courtroom throughout a pre-trial hearing that he was guilty, having beforehand denied the crime.

His attorneys will enchantment that plea in the Court docket of Prison Appeals and hope he might be acquitted at trial.

Scott Johnson was a doctoral student at Australian National College and lived in Canberra. He was staying at Noone’s parents’ Sydney home when he died.