Steve Johnson would be forgiven for turning his back on Australia, the nation that took more than three decades to properly investigate the death of his brother, Scott Johnson, at North Head, Manly, in 1988. Yet he has an affinity with this country, a connection that appears to transcend crime and punishment.
The 65-year-old US IT entrepreneur is speaking to me via Zoom from California before he travels back to Australia for the 26th time, on this occasion not to attend a courtroom or plead for justice but to promote his memoir, A Thousand Miles from Care.
It’s been almost 36 years since his first visit under the worst of circumstances. Forced to scrape together the fare and leave his wife, Rosemarie, and their newborn to take the long flight to Sydney, he landed in a baffling mystery about the sudden death of his younger brother.
At Manly police station Johnson was told that his high-achieving, 27-year-old mathematician sibling had jumped naked from an escarpment at Blue Fish Point on Sydney Harbour, leaving his clothing in a neat pile on the clifftop.
“In 1988 you couldn’t look stuff up on the internet and I had no experience with police,” he says. “They said it was particularly common for homosexuals, as they put it, to suicide in this particular cliff. So I went back to America still kind of believing in the police, even though I was totally confused.”
He could not rest. In 1989 Johnson successfully lobbied for an inquest – but the New South Wales coroner agreed with police. Johnson’s consequent grief, frustration and need for justice kicked off a three-decade odyssey.
“We were in our 20s, with barely enough money to get to Australia to try to find out what happened to Scott,” he says, recounting those early days.
It’s not difficult to imagine the man on my screen as a devastated young father arriving at the police station in 1988. He recalls details with clarity.
This emotional precision is a hallmark of Johnson’s memoir, which strips away the prevarication of NSW’s justice system and recreates a time when gay men kept their private lives as invisible as possible when interacting with authorities. In death – all too common in the era of HIV/Aids and a gay-hate crime epidemic – institutions could get away with sweeping assumptions.
Now Johnson is driven to ensure lasting change by seeing the recommendations of Australia’s world-first commission of inquiry into LGBTQ+ hate crimes implemented.
‘Collective hush’
The title of Johnson’s book turns Manly’s old beachy slogan – Seven miles from the city, a thousand miles from care – on its head, opening a window on how naive Australia was about its gay-hate tradition. He argues that only a cross-section of northern beaches police, a network of criminal gangs and the beat-going gay community really knew what a risky place North Head could be in the 80s.
The book offers a chance to get to know Scott better, through recollections of the brothers’ upbringing in a struggling California family who nevertheless found space for inspiration.
Long the unwitting poster boy for gay-hate crime victims, Scott comes into focus as a quiet, intelligent child who achieved early success in mathematics, using calculus to model the surface of Venus by the age of 21. After coming out to Steve in 1984 he moved to Australia to undertake a PhD and live with his partner, the musicologist Michael Noone.
As his relatives, colleagues and partner all attested, Scott had everything to live for.
According to Johnson, Scott’s immediate family accepted his sexual orientation. There were concerns he might contract HIV/Aids but nobody imagined gay-hate violence.
“There was a collective hush among all of Scott’s friends when he died,” Johnson says. “I’ve learned since then that gay men would be reluctant to report attacks … because they didn’t trust the police.
“I think it’s one of the things that created beats, these out-of-the-way places you could go where you wouldn’t be seen going into a gay bar.
“Somebody once referred to the Manly beat as a ‘shy man’s beat’ because it was way off the beaten track and it was easy to be free there, with these dramatic cliffs and the waves crashing below.”
Pivotal to unlocking the mystery of Scott’s death was a 2005 letter Johnson received from Noone. It contained newspaper clippings about that year’s coronial ruling that gay-hate crimes had taken place at Bondi’s clifftops.
“That scenario had never been mentioned by the police or anyone else,” he says. “As soon as I read that, I knew that’s what happened to Scott.”
It took Johnson hiring his own sleuth in 2007 – and two more coronial inquests – for a homicide investigation into Scott’s death to be opened in 2018.
‘Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty’
The extraordinary apotheosis of Johnson’s quest came in 2022 when Scott White, the man finally accused of murdering Scott, unexpectedly stood up in court and repeated “guilty” five times as the charge was read, despite earlier denying responsibility.
“It was pretty clear that he was talking to me, and he had made up his mind what he was going to do,” Johnson recalls. “When he turned to look at me over his shoulder, it did seem like there was some humanity there.”
White was sentenced to 12 years in prison but the judge’s acceptance of his guilty plea was overturned on appeal. After a plea deal, White is serving nine years for manslaughter.
Johnson’s memoir reveals the difficult emotional terrain his family worked through to come to terms with the lesser sentence.
“He was behind bars, he had pleaded guilty, he had confessed, and he was willing to write some of the details into his agreed facts,” Johnson says.
He adds: “I certainly didn’t feel like I had any choice but to try to discover what happened to Scott – he would have done the same for me.
“Along the way many good people joined me, because they wanted to do the right thing and I think many of them also felt strongly about Scott. He was a beautiful man and, along the way, we learned about many other beautiful men.
“Part of the reason I wrote the book was to help other people who wonder whether it’s worth fighting.”
‘Hey, this ain’t right’
The memoir stresses that Scott’s death was never a “cold” case, it was an “old” case that grew older every day an investigation was delayed.
Despite his belief in there being good police officers, Johnson describes the NSW force’s “ferocious stubbornness”.
“The way that the police force seems to operate is that anyone criticising them needs to be shut down,” he says. “That goes for locals, it goes for outsiders like me, it goes for police officers who raise their voice and say, ‘Hey, this ain’t right.’”
But Johnson witnessed positive change at a talk to aspiring detectives given by Det Ch Insp Peter Yeomans, the officer who led the investigation that brought White into custody.
“I was there to speak for what it’s like to deal with the New South Wales police as a victim’s family and there are a few things that I recommended they think about,” he says. “I said there wasn’t anything that they could do that would be more effective than taking responsibility for their mistakes.
“As I started to walk back to my seat, I got a standing ovation.”
A Thousand Miles from Care: A Hunt for a Brother’s Killer, a Thirty-Year Quest for Justice by Steve Johnson is out now from HarperCollins
