Two Hundred Feet Below

Scott Johnson was 27, an American mathematician about to finish a doctorate at the Australian National University. On December 10, 1988, his body was found on the rocks below Blue Fish Point, on North Head near Manly in Sydney. His clothes were folded at the top of the cliff. Police recorded the death as a suicide.

His brother, Steve Johnson, refused to accept that. Over nearly three decades he hired his own investigators, pushed for fresh inquests and put up family money alongside a police reward. In 2017 a third inquest found that Johnson had died in a gay hate attack, one of many assaults on gay men at Sydney beaches in the 1980s that police misread for years. In May 2020, detectives arrested Scott White, 18 and living in the area at the time.

White pleaded guilty to murder in January 2022 and was sentenced that May to 12 years and 7 months. The New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal quashed that conviction in February 2023, and he then pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In June 2023 he was given nine years with a six-year non-parole period. The sentencing judge would not find that the killing was a hate crime, a conclusion the 2017 inquest had reached on a lower standard. He became eligible for parole in May 2026 and withdrew his application days before the hearing.