“I said, ‘It is if you chased him,'” Helen White told the court. “It’s not my fault,” Scott White allegedly replied. According to Helen White, her then-husband “bragged” to their children of beating gay men at the North Head cliffs. Helen White said she read a newspaper report in 2008 about Johnson’s death and asked her husband if he was responsible. White’s ex-wife Helen White told the court that her then-husband “bragged” to their children of beating gay men at the North Head cliffs - a popular gay meeting spot. White was charged in May 2020 and police say the reward will likely be collected. Steve Johnson (right) arrives with his family to witness the sentencing of his brother’s confessed killer at the Supreme Court in Sydney. His brother Steve Johnson, who lives in Boston, spent years seeking justice for Scott and offered his own reward of more than $700,000 for information leading to an arrest. The coroner also found that homophobic gangs of men roamed Sydney in search of gay men to assault or rob, resulting in some 80 deaths.Ī coroner had ruled in 1989 that Johnson, who was openly gay, had taken his own life, while a second coroner in 2012 could not explain how he died. White said in the interview he lied when he had earlier told police that he had tried to grab Johnson and prevent his fatal fall.Ī coroner ruled in 2017 that Johnson “fell from the clifftop as a result of actual or threatened violence by unidentified persons who attacked him because they perceived him to be homosexual.” Police search a headland in Sydney on May 12, 2020, following an arrest in relation to the death of a man in 1988. He went over the edge,” White said in a recorded police interview in 2020 that was played in court Monday. HANDOUT/NEW SOUTH WALES POLICE/AFP via Getty Images Scott White after his arrest for the 1988 murder of Scott Johnson. Scott Johnson was killed at a popular gay hookup site in 1988 by Scott White who initially claimed that he tried to prevent the man’s death. White faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced by Justice Helen Wilson on Tuesday. Johnson’s death by fall was initially dismissed by the Sydney police as suicide.
He said the gravity of the murder was significantly elevated because it was motivated by the victim’s sexuality. White had met Johnson in a bar in suburban Manly and Johnson had stripped naked at the clifftop before he died, Hatfield said. Prosecutor Brett Hatfield said the precise details of the murder were not known and that White’s accounts had varied. The victim was a Los Angeles native who was working on a doctorate in mathematics at Australian National University and living in Canberra at the time.
Scott White, 51, appeared in the New South Wales state Supreme Court for a sentencing hearing after he pleaded guilty in January to the murder of 27-year-old Scott Johnson in Sydney. Stranger randomly punches Asian woman in caught-on-camera NYC attackĪccused racist indicted on hate crime charges in NYC subway hammer attackĪn Australian man confessed to the police that he murdered a gay American mathematician in 1988 by pushing him off a cliff in what prosecutors described as a hate crime, a court heard Monday. ‘You look Russian’: Ukrainian man stabbed in Brooklyn bar brawl
Jerry Nadler is insulting his Asian-American constituents by supporting gerrymandering