White told police that he was gay and was afraid that his gay brother would find out. She told the court on Monday that her husband had told her Johnson had run off the cliff. The brother of murder victim Scott Johnson, Steve Johnson (right), with his sisters, Terry (left) and Rebecca with his wife Rosemarie (second right). White’s ex-wife, Helen White, told police in 2019 that her then-husband bragged about beating up gay men and said the only good gay man was a dead gay man. White was 18 years old and was homeless when he met Los Angeles– gave birth to Mr Johnson, 27, at a bar in suburban Manly in December 1988 and accompanied him to a nearby cliff top in North Head. She also said she adopted more lenient forms of sentencing in New South Wales in the late 1980s. Judge Helen Wilson said she had no reasonable doubt that the murder was a homophobic hate crime, an aggravating factor that could lead to a longer sentence. Scott White, 51, pleaded guilty in January and was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison on Tuesday. In 2017, a coroner found several assaults, some fatal, where victims were targeted because they were believed to be gay. Mathematician Scott Johnson’s death was initially called a suicide, but his family pressed for further investigation. An Australian man has been jailed for the 1988 murder of an American who fell from a cliff in Sydney, known as a meeting place for gay men.
