For over 30 years, Steve Johnson of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has sought justice in the 1988 anti-gay hate-crime death of his brother Scott, then 27-years-old and traveling in Australia.
As Boston Spirit writer Mark Krone reported for us back in 2015 on Steve Johnson’s dogged, decades-long pursuit of justice for his brother:
Since the late 1970s, up to 80 men have died or disappeared in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, mostly in the coastal suburbs of Sydney. Groups of roving male teenagers (and some girls) made “poofter bashing” a rite of passage for several decades, especially in the beach towns of Manly, Tamarama, and Bondi. These were not youthful pranks. After robbing and beating them, some of the men begged for their lives before being sent over the cliffs to their deaths on craggy rocks.
On December 10, 1988, Scott Johnson’s body was found at the bottom of a cliff in Manly, his clothes neatly folded nearby, his wallet missing, reported Krone.
Last week, the Boston Globe reported that a 49-year-old Australian man, Scott Phillip White, was arrested in a Sydney suburb for Scott Johnson’s murder. And yesterday, CBS News reported, “White did not apply for bail at a court hearing Wednesday and was remanded in custody. His next court appearance is scheduled for July.”
“I couldn’t have been more shocked and happy and really relieved that the case didn’t escape them because of the pandemic,” Johnson, 61, told the Globe, which went on to report:
The arrest marked a dramatic turning point in Johnson’s decades-long quest for answers in the death of his only brother, who was studying for a doctorate in mathematics at Australian National University when he fell 140 feet to his death.
Scott Johnson, 27, who was gay, had been visiting a scenic spot and gathering place for gay people before his death. Investigators initially considered the death a suicide, but Steve Johnson steadfastly rejected that conclusion.
Three years ago, however, the death was reclassified as a gay hate killing amid a painful reckoning in Australia over the violence gay people there endured during the 1980s and 1990s, and police indifference to such crimes.
“Scott had come to symbolize the many dozens of other gay men who lost their lives in the 1980s and ’90s in a world full of anti-gay prejudice and hatred,” Steve Johnson said in a video filmed in his front yard in Cambridge and released by the New South Wales police.
They held a news conference Wednesday morning in Australia, but didn’t reveal details about the suspect or the circumstances that led to his arrest. The man’s name has not been made public, though police released several videos of the arrest in Lane Cove, a Sydney suburb.
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