77. The Cliffside Hate Crime - Scott Johnson
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You're listening to an Ono Media Podcast. Hey everyone and welcome back to the Into the Dark Podcast. I am your host Peyton Moreland and I am so happy that you are here. If you are watching on YouTube, you guys, can you please give this video a thumbs up, maybe drop a comment below. It just

helps with the algorithm and if you are listening via podcast and could leave me a review that would be great okay i'm sorry i have to get that spill over with but it's done let's get into my 10 seconds today before we jump into the episode

So I've just been thinking a lot about the statement, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And, you know, like when you're going through something tough and someone says, oh, well, at least, you know, you're going to grow from this. You're going to come out on top. You want to just be like,

Shut up. Like this is so hard. And like I said, I have gone through some hard things, you know, just nothing crazy, but just in my life and especially with my mental health and going through all that, I had to learn coping strategies. I had to learn how to heal myself. I had to learn how to be okay. And I'm so, so grateful that I have that because then I

When you go through something else, you really do have a better grasp on how to heal, on how to be okay. And as sucky as it is, it is definitely true. I hate that we have to go through hard things in order to learn these lessons. But this is my little shout out to you. If you are going through a tough time mentally or you have battled something,

You are learning strategies, you are getting stronger, and it's only gonna benefit you in your future. So hold on and keep going. All right, you guys, let's get into the episode. All right, trigger warning, this episode includes discussions of suicide and hate crimes. So please listen with care.

Now, so often when I'm discussing a murder, the victim's family becomes an unsung hero of the story. Many people would never get justice if not for their loved ones advocating for them. And that is especially true in today's case. And that is of Scott Johnson.

Now, Scott was basically exactly the person you picture if you think of the word nerd. He was brilliant, but also pretty socially awkward. In fact, he had such a tough time connecting with people and reading social cues that some of his teachers in kindergarten thought he was developmentally disabled. But in reality, the opposite was true. Scott was brilliant, particularly when it came to math.

In the late 1970s, he was actually in high school at an age where most students are struggling to understand advanced mathematical concepts. But he had a very easy time grasping complex theories in the field. He actually got into Caltech, a very prestigious college, and

and then graduated at the top of his class in 1983. And now by this time, he was still as awkward as ever. At least in college, he was around other people who loved math and theory, so he knew how to connect with them. But outside of his classmates, he still had a pretty tough time really making friends. I mean, Scott was not exactly Mr. Popular.

Now, there was one other thing that made Scott stand out from a lot of the people around him. He was gay. And it was very difficult, even dangerous, to be an out gay man in the 80s. I mean, this was a few years into the HIV slash AIDS epidemic, and there was a lot of misinformation going around.

Plus, a lot of developed countries like Australia, for example, actually had laws on the book making gay sex illegal, not just gay marriage. If two men were caught having sex with one another in certain parts of Australia in the 80s, they could go to prison for up to 14 years. Now, Scott grew up in the United States, so he wasn't in danger from those specific laws.

But generally speaking, anti-gay bias was baked into the environment that Scott was living in. And it would be perfectly understandable if he'd decided to stay in the closet, but Scott was brave. He was out. His brother, Steve, knew he was gay and Scott even had a boyfriend who he started dating while he was studying for a PhD online.

over in the UK. Now Scott's new boyfriend was named Michael Noone and like Scott he also wasn't originally from the UK. He was an Australian man who was studying music at Cambridge. Well after he finished his schooling Michael had to go back home to Australia and Scott decided at this point to uproot his whole life and move there with Michael. So Scott and Michael are dating and

Scott decides I'm gonna follow you.

Now, it was not easy to just pick up and go to an entire new continent. Not only is it always stressful to start over in a new place where you don't know anybody, but the Australian immigration system specifically was tricky to navigate. Scott applied and got accepted into a PhD program at the Australian National University in Canberra. Then he got a student visa so he could actually come participate in that program.

And after that, he had to fill out even more forms and line up more paperwork to be able to settle there permanently. But by 1988, he finally had everything in line.

So Michael's sister, this is his boyfriend's sister, agreed to let Scott stay with her while he was living in the country. So she lived in Sydney, which was three hours away from Scott's campus. So he was making long drives to do his schoolwork and see his boyfriend, but he was making it work. He was ready to start his new life as an Australian. Things were really looking up for Scott.

But all of that changed on December 10th when a group of spear fishermen were meeting up on a beach just outside of Sydney. Now this particular beach was surrounded by these very tall 200 foot high cliffs and the fishermen saw something laying at the bottom of one of those cliffs. It was the dead body of an adult man and he was completely naked.

Clearly the deceased had been there for several days, he was beyond saving. So the fishermen called the police to report what they had found. And when the investigators arrived, they found everything was like what the fishermen had said. The badly beaten naked man was at the bottom of a cliff and his body was several days old. His clothes were actually at the top of the same cliff sitting in a neatly folded pile.

and some other personal possessions were near the clothes, everything except for the man's wallet. But his watch and other valuables were untouched, so it didn't look like a robbery, and it was almost pretty clear that the man must have stripped at the top of the cliff, and then somehow he either fell or he jumped, and the impact of the fall or jump was what killed him.

Now, if that wasn't clear from the placement of his clothes, it was also from the man's injuries. The autopsy revealed that there was blunt force trauma all over his body and head. Every inch of him basically had been beaten and bashed. But the worst damage was on the lower half of his body. It was around his legs and his feet.

It would take something very traumatic, like a 200 foot fall off a cliff, to leave him with those kinds of wounds. And since his legs got the worst of it, this told the police that he'd landed feet first, which was telling. If the man had say tripped and fallen off the cliff on accident, he had likely would have fallen head first. So to land on his legs, the deceased either must have been thrown off the cliff, like pushed, or he jumped.

Now, it didn't take the police long to identify the man and it's also probably not taking you long. When they found his clothes and other things, they also found his student ID and bank card, both of which had his name on them and it was Scott. And when the police did a little more digging into his background, they thought that they had a pretty clear picture of how he died.

See, they went to his boyfriend Michael to get some information about how Scott had spent his last days. And Michael said he last saw Scott on December 8th. So that was two days before the body was found. And it did fit with the rate of decomposition that Scott could have died that day. Michael also admitted that he and Scott had been going through some relationship problems around the time of Scott's death.

Apparently, Scott had cheated on him the past summer and he felt terrible afterward and came clean and Michael agreed to forgive him and take him back. But he couldn't forget how guilty and horrible Scott had felt after betraying him. He also explained to the police that at least once during their relationship, Scott had tried to take his own life.

So according to Michael, Scott had a history of self-harm and of feeling this overwhelming, all-consuming guilt when he felt like he'd done something wrong. So Michael speculated that it was possible that Scott might have cheated on him again.

And if so, maybe he just couldn't bring himself to come forward again and beg for forgiveness a second time. So it seemed very possible to Michael that Scott might have jumped off of that cliff during a moment of intense self-hatred. And I mean, the theory made sense to the police who ruled Scott's death a suicide pretty much then and there. Well, when Scott's family heard the news, they were shocked.

None of them had even considered the possibility that he'd wanted to take his own life. There had been no signs to them that he was depressed or unhappy. In particular, Scott's brother, Steve, just could not accept this narrative, especially because Steve knew that on December 8th, the exact day that the police are saying Scott had died, his PhD had been accepted. He'd just gotten the biggest, happiest news of his professional life.

So there was no reason for Scott to want to hurt himself that day, according to his brother. And all to say, Steve just was not buying the official story. And as soon as he heard about the police's theories, he hopped on an airplane and flew to Australia. Now he went straight to the home of Scott's boyfriend, Michael. Steve knocked on the door and asked all of these questions about how Scott had spent his final days.

Now, to be clear, Steve didn't actually believe that Michael had anything to do with Scott's death. He was only questioning him because he was the last person to really spend any time with Scott while he was alive. But Steve was so obviously agitated and upset during the conversation that Michael started to get defensive. And he told Steve and the rest of Scott's family that he did not want to speak to any of them ever again. And that was that.

Now, since the conversation with Michael had led to Michael getting defensive and shutting down and becoming uncooperative, Steve decides to go to the police and ask them for the evidence that they'd put together. Maybe something in their files would help him make sense of the tragedy. And well, the police revealed that...

They didn't really have an investigation at all. As soon as they learned that Scott had a previous suicide attempt, they figured that the case was closed. It didn't help that he was so quiet, shy, and awkward. In the detectives' minds, Scott was a loner with no support network to help him if he was suffering a mental health crisis. And from the sound of it, they were also letting some negative assumptions about gay people color their reasoning.

Like I mentioned before, life was very hard for gay men in the 1980s, and the crime scene investigators apparently realized this, and I guess they figured that no out gay person, I guess, could actually want to live. Like the fact that Scott was gay made him more likely to harm himself. So one police officer even asked Steve at one point, did you know that your brother was a homosexual?

Like if Steve knew about Scott's sexual orientation, it would be so obvious how they had just jumped to this conclusion. All to say, when Steve got to the police and talked to them, it didn't really seem like Scott's case was being handled fairly or taken seriously. But there was nothing else his family could do about it at the time. But things are soon going to change in Scott's investigation.

See, things changed very quickly for Steve after this. I need to tell you, he was very similar to his brother Scott in a couple of ways. Specifically, he also liked math, science, and technology a lot, and he was very good with computers. He invented a software that made it easier to send photos over the internet, which may not sound like a big deal now, but as a reminder, this was the 1980s. Dial-up connections were a lot slower and weaker than wireless is today. And

And it used to take a very long time just to get a small, simple photo to load on a website. And Steve's program fixed that. It was huge in the tech world. And in 1996, so this is eight years after Scott's death,

AOL approached Steve and said that they wanted to buy his software company for $100 million. Now, 1996, AOL, $100 million. This is a no-brainer. So Steve sold the company and he also accepted a job at AOL that came with a very generous salary. So in other words, by the mid-90s, he

was in the top 1% rolling in the dough. And it made Steve sad, thinking about how much Scott would have loved life in the 90s. All of the nerdy things that had made him an outsider in his youth were now kind of mainstream. And now that Steve had a lot of resources, he was actually able to use his money and influence to right the wrongs that he hadn't been able to address for his brother years ago.

Steve could finally afford to give Scott's death a proper investigation and see if the police's suicide theory was actually true.

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So he befriended some American politicians and they leaned on their Australian contacts to demand more of an investigation. And Steve also stayed in contact with Michael. This is Scott's former boyfriend. And with some time, he had gotten over the initial anger he felt about Steve's apparent accusations and questions.

In fact, over the years, he actually began collecting different newspaper articles from Australia and passing them along to Steve to aid in the investigation. It was his way of helping keep Steve in the loop from the other side of the world. So more years went by without any forward movement in terms of getting justice for Scott.

Steve kept reaching out to his contacts, he kept spending money and making friends in high places, and Michael kept sending him newspaper clippings. And then eventually, Michael shared some articles that contained a truly shocking statistic.

In a roughly 35-year period between 1976 and 2010, 88 separate gay men died in almost the exact same way that Scott had. They had all been found dead at the bottom of cliffs in the Sydney, Australia area.

And just like with Scott, the police had ruled almost all of these men had taken their own lives, that they'd jumped off the cliffs because they couldn't live with the stress of being gay. Now, eventually, after years had gone by, some watchdogs had noticed that this seemed very unlikely. They had been

been paying attention and pieced all of this together. Suicide by jumping off of a cliff is very rare. And statistically speaking, it was extremely odd that this was happening specifically with gay men and specifically in Sydney. You didn't see this same pattern happening everywhere else. So once this statistic came out, the police finally agreed to reopen some of those investigations.

And as it turned out, once they gave the cases the proper attention, they realized that these weren't all suicides after all. Apparently, during that time period, there were groups of teenagers who would go to areas that they knew to be gay hookup spots just to look for gay men to kill. And yeah, you heard me right.

And interestingly, the cliff that Scott fell from was a hotspot where gay men went to meet sexual partners. They would actually go there because it was safe. It was isolated. There were no witnesses around and the police almost never went there to bust anyone because again, gay sex was illegal in that part of Australia until 1984. That was just four years before Scott's death.

It came with a prison sentence of up to 14 years. And even once that law was repealed, it wasn't safe to just go to a gay bar or pick someone up off the street. There was too much risk of harassment, blackmail, and other unwanted attention. And that was even true in Sydney, which was considered a very progressive gay-friendly city. Some people have even compared it to San Francisco. But even there, gay men needed places to meet in secret for their own safety. It

The way it worked was that men looking for dates would go to the top of the cliff and they'd take off all their clothes and leave them in a pile on the ground. And then other men would walk along the path and if someone saw some clothes sitting on the dirt and if he liked the look of them, he would know that a potential partner was nearby.

So, if Scott's clothes were at the top of the cliff, that could mean that he was looking to meet up with someone that night. And it wasn't his boyfriend. Michael would have said something if they were supposed to hook up on that cliff. So instead, it does sound like Scott may have been cheating on the night he died. Which did fit the police's original theory that Scott may have killed himself because he felt guilty about an affair.

But it also was consistent with a murder too, because we know those violent gangs would go to these isolated spots as well. And they'd find gay men who were looking for dates and pretend to also be interested in anonymous sex. And then once the gang members had a target somewhere isolated away from any witnesses, they'd murder the gay men by throwing them off the cliffs or they'd beat them badly until the victim tried to get away, slipped and fell to his death.

Either way, it is a sad and true statement that many, many men were killed that way in Australia. And their deaths were often misclassified as suicides. So it really did seem like that might be exactly what had happened to Scott too.

So when he learned all of this, Steve pushed hard for the police to reopen their files and reclassify Scott's death as a homicide. Now, keep in mind, he had powerful friends in the U.S. government now and lots of money. So it was enough for the Australian government to agree to have an inquest. And after reviewing all of the evidence, they made their official ruling. They

They still believed that Scott had killed himself. And this was very frustrating for Steve, but he wasn't willing to accept defeat. So he spent more money, gathered more information and wrote to more politicians. And in some kind of miracle, even though this almost never happens, the Australian government agreed to do a second inquest in 2012.

And this time around, they still refused to admit that Scott had been murdered. So this was completely baffling to Steve. He felt like the evidence spoke for itself, that it just didn't make sense. Why didn't the police want to even consider the possibility that someone else had taken Scott's life? Well, somewhere along the way, he managed to get his hands on some private memos between the police officers who were assigned to Scott's case.

And apparently they really resented the fact that they had to look into this at all. It's hard to say where all of that hostility came from. Maybe they didn't want to take Scott's death seriously because of his sexuality. Maybe they just didn't like the fact that Steve was publicly pointing at them saying that they'd made a mistake. But at one point, a deputy police commissioner actually texted a detective chief inspector and said, quote,

I want all the hard work you have done to come out in court for what it is and show the Johnsons for what they are. He also sent another text saying that they couldn't let Steve win. Now, when the detective chief inspector replied, she said, quote, I will not let them win. It is not in my DNA.

And it really came across like the police saw themselves as being in some kind of competition with Scott's loved ones, like beating them in these inquests was more important than actually solving the case.

Now, the good news was that when these messages came to light, there was a very intense and public backlash against the police. And both of those officials were fired. And Scott's case was reassigned to new officers. And he got a third inquest, which was truly unheard of for the Australian legal system. But finally, the third time was the charm. This time around, his death was reclassified as a murder, specifically as a likely hate crime.

The Australian court system finally acknowledged that Scott was probably killed that night for being gay. But there was a downside to this ruling. It had been roughly 25 years since Scott had died. And in those 25 years, the police had been treating his death as a suicide that didn't require any further investigation. So they hadn't saved any of the physical evidence. There was almost nothing left that they could use to try and even find the killer.

Now, the cliff that Scott fell to his death from was not too far from an army base. So some police officers tracked down all the servicemen who'd been stationed there back in December of 1988. And they asked if anyone remembered anything unusual all these years later. But basically,

but that didn't generate any leads. And they also reached out to known gang members with a history of hate crimes against gay people. Maybe one of them would just be willing to come clean. And this was just as much of a dead end as the look at the army members had been. So when it seemed like they were never going to get answers, the Johnson family made one last ditch desperate attempt.

They work with the police who set up a $100,000 Australian reward for any tips about Scott's murder.

That was in 2013. This was right after the last inquest. So five years later, on the 30th anniversary of Scott's murder, they upped the reward to $1 million Australian dollars. And then another two years after that, it's now 2020, Steve announced that he would personally match that reward, meaning tipsters could collect a grand total of $2 million if they helped solve the decades-old corrupter.

cold case. And this was enough for a woman named Helen White to step forward and say that she believed her ex-husband was responsible. See, Helen had been married to a man named Scott White and to avoid confusion between Scott White and Scott Johnson, I'm going to call the former Mr. White and the latter will just still be Scott.

So, according to Helen, her husband, Mr. White, had always hated gay people and he used to brag about how he'd go out, flirt with gay men, and then beat them up and rob them the moment that they were alone. In particular, Mr. White liked to steal his victims' wallets and he didn't like to take other valuables like jewelry or watches. He was only interested in wallets specifically, like it was some kind of trophy.

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Let's get back into the episode. Now, it's also worth mentioning that Mr. White didn't just take wallets. He collected them. One time he showed his wife all of the wallets he'd stolen. And when she came forward to the police, she described them as well as she could. And she drew pictures of them. And one looked strikingly similar to Scott's. But that's not the only evidence that linked Mr. White to Scott's.

He'd told his wife about something that had happened when Mr. White was just 18 years old in 1988. That was the year that Scott was murdered. Now, as he told it, he met a young man on a cliff. He got into a tussle with him and then he threw him over the edge.

And there were just too many similarities between his account and Scott's case for her to dismiss it as an exaggeration or a lie. In fact, as soon as Helen read an article about Scott's murder, she showed it to Mr. White and she asked him if Scott was the man that he'd pushed off the cliff. And Mr. White answered, the only good gay man is a dead gay man.

Except he didn't actually use the word gay man. He used a slur that I will not be repeating here. Needless to say, his answer was pretty disturbing for Helen and she felt like she couldn't keep quiet. So she had to tell the police what she suspected. And Helen's tip was enough for the detectives to now investigate Mr. White.

Basically, rather than pull him into an interrogation and let him know they were onto him, the police tricked Mr. White into giving a confession. They went to Mr. White's niece and she agreed to let them tap her phone. And then she called her uncle to see if she could convince him to confess on the line. Sure enough, during that call, Mr. White said he was the one who killed Scott, but he said it wasn't a hate crime.

Mr. White said he doesn't actually hate gay people in spite of what his ex-wife said. Yes, he did beat them up, rob them, and use those slurs, but apparently this was all his attempt to overcompensate for the fact that he was actually gay. Mr. White didn't want anyone to know he liked guys, so he acted like a huge homophobe to protect his secret.

And on the night of Scott's death, Mr. White had picked him up at a pub, not to hurt or rob him, but for sex. And they agreed to meet on top of that cliff so they wouldn't get caught. Now, once they got there, Scott took his clothes off and folded them on the ground. And that's why his outfit was so tidy at the top of the cliff and his body was found nude.

Now, before anything physical could happen between them, Mr. White and Scott actually got into an argument. Things escalated and Mr. White either shoved Scott or punched him hard enough to knock him backwards.

He told his niece that he didn't actually want to kill Scott. It wasn't his intention to send him off the cliff, but that was what had happened and it was just a accident. Now, of course, if you think that was really unintentional, Mr. White might have tried to call an ambulance or ask for help. It didn't seem likely that Scott could have survived the fall, but still, Mr. White could have at least tried.

But Mr. White justified his behavior by saying he wasn't thinking clearly at the time of the murder, he was unhoused due to some very serious mental health problems. In fact, by the time the police had actually identified Mr. White as a suspect and set up this sting, he'd been diagnosed with early onset dementia. He was only 52 years old and years of alcohol abuse had exasperated the condition.

Now, before his murder trial even began, Mr. White's lawyers said that they planned to have him plead not guilty, even though they said that in advance, it's always routine when the trial starts for the judge to ask the defendant how they plead. And when his hearing kicked off in January of 2022, Mr. White said, guilty, guilty, guilty. He was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison.

But Mr. White appealed the conviction, the one he pleaded guilty to, almost immediately, and he and his lawyers pointed to his mental health problems and argued that he didn't actually understand what he was doing when he said guilty. Mr. White also said that he'd only given that plea because he was afraid that if he said he was innocent, his ex-wife would hurt him.

Now, there's no real reason to think the former Mrs. White had any intention of harming him, but again, he was suffering from pretty severe mental problems at this point, and it seems likely that he really didn't fully understand what was going on. Now, after a lot of back and forth, his lawyers and the prosecutors worked out a deal that everyone was happy with.

Mr. White said he was guilty of a lesser charge, manslaughter, which made sense since, according to him, the death was an accident. This manslaughter charge came with a much shorter sentence, and Mr. White agreed to spend up to nine years in prison with a possibility of parole after six. Now...

Scott's family had very mixed feelings about all of this. When they gave victim impact statements at Mr. White's sentencing, they said they didn't feel any sympathy for him whatsoever. It must have been difficult for him to live in the closet for all those years, but that doesn't mean it was okay for him to kill another man. They also had a hard time accepting that the homicide really was an accident.

Even if it was, Mr. White still could have tried to help Scott. And the fact that he didn't meant to them that they were all too happy to see him go to prison for a long time. Now, on the other hand, they were satisfied with the sentence he eventually received. And it wasn't long, but Steve and the others still felt it was fair.

So that's the story of Scott Johnson. It took him a long time to get justice, 35 years. And that may not have happened if not for his family advocating throughout all of those decades. That was something they were only able to do because of all the money they had at their disposal. But I do want to remind you, at least 88 gay men were found dead at the bottom of cliffs, just like Scott Johnson was.

And many of those were ruled suicides. And who knows how many other hate crimes were misclassified in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Many of those men didn't have wealthy relatives to come in and fight for them. It's hard to imagine they'll all get justice too. But hopefully, Scott's story will inspire their loved ones not to give up, no matter how long it takes for the truth to come out.

That was our case for today. And you guys, I will see you next week as we dive further into the dark together. Goodbye.