Man confesses to clifftop fight that caused former Cal student’s fatal plunge

CANBERRA, Australia — An Australian pleaded guilty on Thursday to manslaughter in the death 35 years ago of a former Cal student who fell from a Sydney cliff that was known as a gay meeting place.

Scott White’s admission in New South Wales Supreme Court came three months after an appeals court overturned his conviction on charges of murdering Scott Johnson.

Johnson’s family fought for years to overturn an initial finding that the 27-year-old mathematician had taken his own life in 1988.

Johnson was born in Los Angeles and in 1986 was in a doctoral program in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, when he moved to Canberra to complete his studies at Australian National University. In December 1988, his body was found on a rocky beach below cliffs overlooking Sydney Harbour.

White, now 52, was arrested in 2020 after Scott Johnson’s brother Steve Johnson, a wealthy Boston entrepreneur, offered an award of $1 million Australian ($704,000 U.S.) for information about the death.

White took his lawyers by surprise in January last year by pleading guilty to murder during a pretrial hearing. About 20 minutes later, he said he had been “confused” and wanted to plead not guilty.

But the judge recorded the guilty plea, and White was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison.

Last October, as the imprisoned White was awaiting the results of his appeal, police reportedly intercepted a phone call in which he confessed to striking Johnson at the clifftop.

“In that phone call to the niece, he corroborated evidence that they (police) had previously gathered, and that brought his defense team to the table” to negotiate a guilty plea on the manslaughter charge, Steve Johnson told the Associated Press.

“Reading the black-and-white of his confession, in which he states that he threw the first punch, which I imagine was the only punch and my brother must have been very close to the cliff … makes me pretty angry,” Johnson said.

White was 18 and homeless when he met Scott Johnson at a bar in the beachside suburb Manly on Dec. 10, 1988. They went together to an overlook at the nearby North Head cliffs.

Johnson’s fatal fall from the cliff was initially ruled suicide in a 1989 coroner’s report. Two other inquests followed: that in 2012 said it could not determine the circumstances of the death, and in 2017 a coroner ruled that Johnson “fell from the clifftop as a result of actual or threatened violence” by unknown assailants who “attacked him because they perceived him to be homosexual.”

The coroner also found that gangs of men roamed various Sydney locations in search of gay men to assault, resulting in the deaths of some victims. Some people were also robbed.

Steve Johnson described the police investigation since the third inquest as “spectacular.” But he said his brother’s homicide could have been solved easily by police when he died.

“In fact, many of us believe that it was the police indifference to these killings and bashings of gay men back in the ’80s that helped cause them. The perpetrators always knew they would not get into trouble,” Johnson said.

In sentencing White on the now-overturned murder conviction, the judge said she did not find beyond reasonable doubt that the murder was a gay hate crime, which would have led to a longer prison term.

White is scheduled to be sentenced June 6 on the manslaughter conviction.