A 52-year-old Australian man who admitted, and then denied, pushing an American off a cliff because he was gay in 1988 has pleaded guilty—again—to the crime.
Scott Phillip White shocked his lawyers in early 2022 by pleading guilty in the death of then 27-year-old Scott Johnson after a reward by one of Johnson’s relatives led to his arrest. He retracted the plea, but the judge went on to sentence him before an appellate court intervened.
White was allegedly part of a gang of homophobic men who hunted gay haunts to taunt gay men during the 1980s. The body of Johnson, who was a PhD student at Australian National University at the time of his death, was found at the base of Blue Fish Point, near Manly’s North Head, which was a well-known meeting area for gay men, according to court documents.
Johnson’s death was first ruled a suicide, but pushback from his family and friends led to a more thorough investigation that led to White’s arrest in 2020. When White was arraigned in 2022, he pleaded guilty to murder during a pre-trial hearing, and 20 minutes later attempted to change his plea, citing “confusion,” which was not accepted. He was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in jail, but last November, a New South Wales appellate court reversed the conviction based on the method used to block White from reversing his guilty plea. The court decided that the case should have gone to trial in which manslaughter could have been introduced as a lesser crime than murder and sent it back to trial.
On Thursday morning, White again faced an arraignment hearing, in which he pleaded not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter in front of Justice Robert Beech-Jones. “You understand by pleading guilty to manslaughter you’re accepting legal responsibility for his death but not for murdering him, you understand that?” Beech-Jones asked, according to the Associated Press.
“Yeah I do,” White said.
Johnson’s brother Steve, who put up the reward that led to White’s arrest, said Thursday’s hearing was “the most emotional moment yet” in the long saga.
“The police work that continued during the appeal and after the appeal to get that one last piece of evidence that brought him to the table ... so that we could negotiate this, I’m incredibly thankful,” he told ABC News Australia. “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. And it makes me wonder whether he went to hunt my brother, or as he says in the confession, that they went there together.”
White had told two witnesses that he was closeted and that it was the biggest secret of his life, and that he went “poofter bashing” with other straight men anyway, according to court documents.
The New South Wales court has been investigating hate crimes against gay men in the 1980s and 1990s, many of which remain unsolved murders disguised as suicides. A Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes in New South Wales is expected to deliver its final report June 30, 2023, around the time White is expected to be sentenced.