Cambridge man on overturn for Australian in killing of brother: ‘It was quite a letdown.’ – The Boston Globe

November 19, 2022 News Editor

But on Friday, an Australian appeals court overturned the conviction of the 52-year-old White. Johnson was at his home in Cambridge when the court announced its decision.

“We were hoping to hear an outcome [Friday] that sounded like a conclusion to this 34-year journey we’ve been on,” he said in a phone interview on Friday. “The family didn’t hear that. It was quite a letdown.”

Three judges of the New South Wales state Court of Criminal Appeal in Sydney ruled that White should have been allowed to reverse his guilty plea, vacating his conviction and prison term. The ruling reopens the prosecution of White and raises the possibility that he could stand trial for the murder of 27-year-old Scott Johnson, who was gay and had moved to Australia in 1986 to live with his partner.

Scott Johnson’s death was initially called a suicide, but his older brother pressed for further investigation for years. In 2017, the incident was reclassified as a gay hate killing amid a painful reckoning over the violence endured by gay people in the Sydney area during the 1980s and 1990s and police indifference to such crimes.

At White’s sentencing hearing in May, the judge said he struck Scott Johnson, “causing him to stumble backwards and leave the cliff edge.”

White’s former wife, Helen White, also testified, saying that White claimed that Scott Johnson had run off the cliff. Scott White told police that he was himself gay and frightened that his homophobic brother would find out, the Associated Press has reported.

Over the years, Steve Johnson has traveled repeatedly to Australia to press for attention for the case and hired lawyers and investigators to look for answers. He financed the effort with the fortune he amassed in 1996 when a technology company he cofounded was sold to AOL for $100 million.

In March 2020, he traveled to Australia to help police announce he was doubling a reward to 2 million Australian dollars for information that could solve the murder. White was arrested two months later.

Steve Johnson on Friday thanked the Australian prosecutors pursuing White’s case and lauded them for treating the defendant fairly.

White is expected to plead not guilty at his next court appearance on Dec. 1.

“This gives new meaning to the term long haul, but we are in it for the long haul,” Steve Johnson said.

Scott Johnson, the youngest of three children who grew up in the Los Angeles area, was studying for a doctorate in mathematics at Australian National University when he died. He was awarded the degree posthumously. Earlier in his life, he studied at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge. If he had survived, he would be preparing to mark his 61st birthday on Nov. 27.

Earlier this month, the government of New South Wales, the most populous state in Australia, opened an inquiry into unsolved deaths resulting from gay hate crimes that occurred over four decades.

The Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes in New South Wales is the “first of its kind anywhere in the world,” a lawyer assisting the inquiry, Peter Gray, said on the first day of hearings in Sydney on Nov. 2. The commission plans to start hearing from witnesses on Monday, the start of a five-day session that is expected to address the social and cultural forces in which suspected gay hate killings occurred from 1970 to 2010, according to the organization’s website.

Violence against gay men in Sydney was particularly prevalent from the mid-1980s until the early 1990s due to increased hostility and fear stemming from the AIDS epidemic, a previous report by an HIV support group found. Almost half of the 88 anti-gay bias deaths in New South Wales between 1976 and 2000 occurred in that period, the report said.

Several of the deaths being examined by the commission occurred in the same area in the Sydney suburb of Manly, where a 13-year-old boy spear-fishing with his father and another man found Scott Johnson’s naked body at the base of a cliff in December 1988. Among them are the deaths of 18-year-old Mark Stewart, who died in 1976, Paul Rath, 27, who died in 1977, and Simon Blair Wark, who died in 1990.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @lauracrimaldi.