Australian Story: August 31

Tonight’s Australian Story tells the inside story behind the campaign to resolve one of Australia’s most enduring crime mysteries.

“We called ourselves Team Scott, and gradually we started to get some attention on my brother’s case.” Steve Johnson

When the body of young American Scott Johnson was found at the bottom of a Sydney cliff in 1988, police quickly decided it was suicide.

Convinced it was actually a gay hate murder, his brother Steve spent the next 30 years campaigning for justice.

The multi-millionaire assembled his own crack team of investigators, including lawyers in Australia and the US, journalists, former police officers and a former coroner.

They called themselves “Team Scott.”

“Over time, the team grew to ten or twelve people in the United States and Australia,” Steve Johnson told Australian Story from his home in Boston.

“Fortunately the case attracted a lot of people who just wanted to help because they thought this was important.”

One of those helping behind the scenes was former NSW Deputy Coroner Jacqueline Milledge, who initially thought the case would never be solved.

“You had the complication of it being a cold case, and you had the unwillingness of the police to admit that perhaps they got it wrong,” she says.

After pressure from Team Scott, a second coronial inquest was held into the case in 2012, and then an unprecedented third inquest in 2017.

It found that Scott Johnson had been chased, frightened or pushed off the cliff because he was gay.

A fresh police team re-investigated the case, and in May of this year, a man, 49, was charged with murder.

Produced by Ben Cheshire.

8pm Monday on ABC.