According to Vice, he was sentenced to a maximum of 12 years and seven months, though the judge noted that it was impossible to judge Johnson’s death as a hate crime “beyond reasonable doubt” and that White was possibly driven by “self-loathing.”
White pleaded guilty to Johnson’s death and, at a pre-trial hearing in January 2022, repeatedly shouted that he was guilty of the crime. “I pushed a bloke,” White told police in 2020, ending a three-decade mystery about what had happened to the 27-year-old. The second was that White, a father of six, was gay himself.
The first was that he’d killed Scott Johnson, a 27-year-old gay American, by pushing him off a cliff in Sydney in 1988. Police photo Scott Phillip White was sentenced to up to 12 years in prison for the brutal 1988 murder.įor years, Australian Scott Phillip White had two secrets.