TV series unravels startling case of Calif. math genius killed abroad

On Dec. 10, 1988, the body of a man was found at the bottom of a cliff near Sydney, Australia. When the first investigator arrived, he discovered a strange scene: The man’s clothes, neatly folded, were at the top of the cliff. The man, who had died upon impact with the rocky ground below, was completely naked. His wallet was missing. 

When his family back home in Southern California was contacted by Australian police, they were told Scott Russell Johnson, just 27, had killed himself. 

Their doubts would ignite a 30-year battle for justice that crossed the world countless times and changed the Johnson family forever.

The story of Scott Johnson is told in “Never Let Him Go,” an ABC News docuseries recently released on Hulu. The four-episode series interviews many of the key players in the saga, including some of the Australian police officers who, in the eyes of the Johnson family, botched the investigation over the years.

Scott was a remarkable young man. Growing up in California, it was obvious from an early age that young Scott was different. His brother, Steve Johnson, recalls in “Never Let Him Go” that Scott’s kindergarten teacher thought he was developmentally disabled.

“He was quite a bit more brilliant than they had imagined,” Steve smiles.

By high school, Scott’s genius was truly showing. He had an analytical mind and a keen interest in the newly developing field of computer programming. He was accepted into CalTech, where he “found it easy,” Steve remembers. For a young man who was so painfully shy he had trouble ordering at restaurants, it was the first time in his life he was “idolized,” family members recall on the show.

After undergraduate studies, Scott went to Cambridge in 1983. There, he met a man who would change his life: Australian music student Michael Noone. Scott fell in love; when he returned home to California, he came out to his family. Three years later, while pursuing a mathematics doctorate at UC Berkeley, Scott decided to move to Australia to reunite with Noone. 

He was living and studying in Australia when he was found dead below an oceanside cliff in the Sydney suburb of Manley. The responding officer, Troy Hardie, quickly came to the conclusion that this was a suicide. The investigation, it was later discovered, made a number of mistakes, including not photographing the “neatly folded” clothes as they were found and failing to preserve any physical evidence from the scene. (“That was a cock-up, yes,” Hardie admits in the docuseries when asked about not properly photographing the scene.)

For Scott’s family, suicide just didn’t seem right. Scott was busy, he had future plans, and there was no note. Even stranger, why had he jumped naked off a cliff, and where was his wallet?

“It was inconceivable to me that Scott went somewhere and jumped off a cliff,” Steve would later tell the BBC. 

But the Johnsons had no proof, and they were half a world away. In the years after Scott’s death, Steve and a business partner would develop technology that helped lead to image compression, a process that turned the internet from glacially slow to instantaneously fast. He sold the company in 1996 to AOL, becoming a very wealthy man in the process.

In the early 2000s, Steve says Noone emailed him a story that ran in an Australian news outlet. The story reported on the deaths of a number of gay men in the 1980s and 1990s that appeared to be unsolved hate crimes; some of the men were pushed off cliffs. 

“It was an explanation that fit in a way that Scott killing himself never fit,” his sister Becca Johnson says in “Never Let Him Go.”

Now armed with deep coffers, Steve paid a former journalist to go to Australia and retrace Scott’s last steps. Locals told him that the spot where Scott died was a well-known gay “beat,” slang for a place where gay men would meet for anonymous hookups. There were also horror stories about life in Australia at the time. The Sydney Morning Herald detailed the area’s violent homophobia in an article titled “Up to 80 men murdered, 30 cases unsolved.” In it, the Herald chronicled how young men went “hunting in packs” to assault men they perceived to be gay; in some accounts, the assailants said they chased the men off cliffs to their death.

The Johnsons continued pressing Australian authorities to reopen the case, finally getting another coroner’s inquest in 2012. At that inquest, the coroner revised Scott’s manner of death from suicide to undetermined. Although the coroner ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to change the finding to homicide, the undetermined finding reopened the case.

The Johnsons’ relentless media blitz also paid off: In 2013, Australian public broadcasting station ABC aired an episode of “Australian Story” about the family’s quest for justice. The episode cast scrutiny on the police failure to treat Scott’s case as a possible homicide and fed a growing sense of outrage in the country over the number of unsolved anti-gay hate crimes.

Unbeknownst to investigators, the media campaign had found its way to the wife of Scott White, an Australian man who was 18 at the time of Scott Johnson’s death. White’s wife said she was struck by how similar the death sounded to other crimes White openly confessed to committing, including allegedly forcing another man to strip naked before violently assaulting him. In that case, White’s wife believed he had forced the man to “neatly” fold his clothes in a pile before the assault began. “That’s when I knew he was responsible” for killing Scott, she says in “Never Let Him Go.”

In 2019, White’s now ex-wife wrote an anonymous letter to police expressing her suspicions that White had killed Scott. She told police another key detail: White allegedly took wallets from his victims. When asked to draw some of the wallets he had kept, the woman drew one that looked similar to Scott’s missing billfold, police said.

When a task force led by Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans looked into White’s background, they realized earlier investigators had eyed White’s brother as a person of interest. Some time prior, White’s brother had allegedly beaten a gay man in a public restroom, resulting in his arrest. When Yeomans had the mugshot pulled up, he realized the man was not White’s brother: Yeomans said the mugshot showed Scott White himself. He had been under their nose for years.

“Never Let Him Go” shows a remarkable police video of what happened next. Undercover officers made contact with White, allegedly telling him that they wanted to scheme together to win the $2 million reward for information about Scott’s death. But in order to passably frame another person, the undercover officers told White they’d need to understand how Scott actually died. Convert cameras placed around the North Head cliffs show White leading the undercover officers to the exact spot where Scott died. According to police, White confessed to punching Scott, toppling the American over the edge to his death.

In 2020, White, then 49, was arrested on murder charges. At last, through decades of heartache and perseverance, the Johnson family felt they finally knew what had happened in Scott’s final moments. White pleaded guilty to murder charges at a pretrial hearing and was sentenced to 12 years of jail time in May 2022. A few months later, a judge overturned his conviction on the grounds White was mentally impaired, and White was resentenced earlier this summer to nine years, which he is currently serving.

“We’re one of the lucky families that has a killer behind bars,” Steve told media outside the courtroom.

During the sentencing — almost in direct opposition to earlier police theories that, as a gay man, Scott was likely suicidal — the judge described Scott’s vibrant life. He was nearly done with his Ph.D. He had a family he loved and that loved him. “He had everything to live for,” the judge said.

Perhaps the most poignant moment in “Never Let Him Go” comes when Steve climbs the Matterhorn in 2016. 

The brothers, who had grown up admiring the Matterhorn at Disneyland, made the trip together once as young men. In honor of Scott, Steve packed up his things and returned to the Swiss Alps. At the summit, 28 years after Scott’s death, Steve scatters his brother’s ashes. The misty day turns sunny as Scott’s remains float through the wind. “Look, the clouds are clearing,” Steve exclaims. “Amazing.”

“Steve has fought for nearly 35 years,” Yeomans said in June. “God, to only have a brother like that.”