Scott Johnson

On December 8, 1988, the body of twenty-seven-year-old Scott Johnson, an American doctoral student in mathematics at the Australian National University, was found at the base of the North Head cliffs near Manly in Sydney's northern beaches. His clothes were neatly folded at the top of the cliff.

Police initially ruled Scott's death a suicide, but his brother Steve Johnson, a technology entrepreneur in the United States, refused to accept this finding. Steve spent decades and millions of dollars investigating his brother's death, eventually proving it was one of many gay hate crimes committed at Sydney's cliff areas in the 1980s and 1990s.

The cliffs at North Head and other sites around Sydney were known gathering places for gay men, and during the late 1980s, gangs of youths targeted gay men at these locations, bashing and sometimes pushing victims off cliffs. A 2017 inquest found that Scott was a victim of a gay hate crime.

In 2020, Scott Phillip White, who had been a teenager at the time of the killing, was arrested and charged with murder after a $1 million reward offered by Steve Johnson led to new information. In 2023, White pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.