“This man who once told me he could never hurt someone even in self-defense died in terror.” White took Scott and he vanished,” Johnson’s brother Steve said in his victim impact statement in court. And White, a closeted 18-year-old living with a homophobic family, attacked.Īccording to The Daily Mail, investigators found that White punched Johnson in the head, causing him to fall from the cliff and to his death. Though it’s impossible to know exactly what transpired between Scott Johnson and Scott Phillip White, prosecutors suspect that the two men met at a bar before going to the cliffs, a known meeting place for gay men. From there, what happened to Scott Johnson became a bit more clear. Justice for Scott Johnson/Facebook Scott Johnson was just 27 when Scott Phillip White pushed him off a cliff in Sydney, Australia.Īccording to the Associated Press, Helen White reported her husband’s statement to Australian police in 2019. In 2017, a corner found that the mathematician “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.” Though police swiftly chalked up his death to suicide, Johnson’s family had their doubts and his brother Steve urged investigators to take a second look.Ĭoroners did, finding in 2012 that they could not determine Johnson’s cause of death. Johnson, a mathematician, was studying in Canberra when his body was found at the bottom of a cliff in Sydney Harbor on Dec. According to Vice, he was sentenced to a maximum of 12 years and seven months, though the judge noted that it was impossible to judge Johnson’s death as a hate crime “beyond reasonable doubt” and that White was possibly driven by “self-loathing.” White pleaded guilty to Johnson’s death and, at a pre-trial hearing in January 2022, repeatedly shouted that he was guilty of the crime. “I pushed a bloke,” White told police in 2020, ending a three-decade mystery about what had happened to the 27-year-old.
The second was that White, a father of six, was gay himself. The first was that he’d killed Scott Johnson, a 27-year-old gay American, by pushing him off a cliff in Sydney in 1988. Police photo Scott Phillip White was sentenced to up to 12 years in prison for the brutal 1988 murder.įor years, Australian Scott Phillip White had two secrets.