“If he had turned himself in after his violent action, he would have had a little more sympathy. Steve Johnson said he appreciated White’s guilty plea. “This man who once told me that he could never hurt someone, even in self-defense, he died in terror,” the brother added. Steve Johnson seen with his family during the trial. Steve Johnson said in his victim impact statement: “With a strong shove, Mr. She said she only found out about the money when the victim’s brother doubled the sum in 2020. Under cross-examination, Helen White denied knowing about the reward for information on Johnson’s murder when she reported her ex-husband to police in 2019. She said that her husband did not respond.
“I said, ‘It is if you go after it,'” Helen White told the court. “It’s not my fault,” Scott White reportedly replied. According to Helen White, her then-husband “bragged” to their children about beating up gay men on the cliffs at North Head. 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 about beating up gay men on the cliffs at North Head, a popular gay hangout. White was charged in May 2020 and police say the reward is likely to be collected. Steve Johnson (right) arrives with his family to witness the sentencing of his brother’s confessed killer at Sydney High Court. 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 all-male gangs roamed Sydney looking for gay men to assault or rob, resulting in around 80 deaths.Ī coroner ruled in 1989 that Johnson, who was openly gay, had taken his own life, while a second coroner in 2012 was unable to explain how he died. White said in the interview that he lied when he told police that he had tried to grab Johnson and prevent his fatal fall.Ī coroner ruled in 2017 that Johnson “fell from the top of the cliff as a result of actual or threatened violence by unidentified individuals who targeted him because they perceived him to be homosexual.” Police search a headland in Sydney on May 12, 2020, following an arrest in connection with the 1988 death of a man. He went over the line,” White said in a 2020 taped police interview that was played in court Monday. HANDOUT/NSW POLICE/AFP via Getty Images Scott White after his arrest for the murder of Scott Johnson in 1988. Scott Johnson was murdered on a popular gay dating site in 1988 by Scott White, who initially claimed he tried to prevent the man’s death.
White faces life in prison when he is sentenced by Judge Helen Wilson on Tuesday. Sydney police initially ruled Johnson’s death from a fall as suicide. He said the severity of the murder was significantly elevated because it was motivated by the victim’s sexuality. White had met Johnson at a bar in suburban Manly and Johnson had stripped naked on top of the cliff 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. in mathematics at the Australian National University and was living in Canberra at the time. The victim was a Los Angeles native who was working on a Ph.D. Scott White, 51, appeared at 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.
An Australian man has confessed to police that he killed a gay American mathematician in 1988 by pushing him off a cliff in what prosecutors described as a hate crime, a court heard on Monday.