Had Scott Johnson not died violently in Sydney in 1988, his big brother Steve might have written a different book about their lives: the adventures of two American boys who grew up dirt-poor, “Dickensian urchins in the California sun”, who scaled mountains together and forged long and dazzling careers, the younger as a maths wunderkind, the elder building a multi-million-dollar fortune as a global pioneer among the super geeks.
All of that, except for Scott’s long career, does appear in the book that Steve Johnson is now releasing, A Thousand Miles From Care. Until reading it, I had thought there was little I didn’t know about the Johnsons, whose story I’ve been reporting since 2013.
Scott Johnson and his brother Steve.
The bitterly sad title is lifted from an old tourism slogan for Manly: “Seven miles from Sydney, a thousand miles from care.” The irony is that Steve, then 29, was at Harvard, more like 10,000 miles from any capacity to care for his “kid brother” when he received the news that Scott’s naked body had been found on the rocks beneath a 60-metre cliff at North Head, just south of Manly’s Shelly Beach.
Scott was 27 and gay. And brilliant. Within hours, police concluded he must have jumped from that cliff. “NFA,” an officer wrote on the occurrence pad – no further action. “That’s what they do, you know,” Steve Johnson recalls the constable telling him. “This is where they [homosexuals] go to jump.”
Rather, that particular clifftop area of North Head had been a place where gay men went for sex. It was a beat – and yet police explicitly advised Coroner Derrick Hand that it was not. Otherwise, the logic went, it would also have attracted gay bashers, and police claimed there were no reports of such violence there.
A few months after the death, the coroner agreed with police: it was suicide. Steve Johnson didn’t believe it, and many readers will be familiar with the tortuous plot that has followed in the 35-plus years since:
Steve Johnson, left, and Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans in 2018 on the cliff at North Head, the site of Scott Johnson’s death.Credit: Jessica Hromas
- Scott’s Australian partner, musicologist Michael Noone, contacted Steve in 2005 to alert him to a separate coronial finding that two gay men, and likely a third, had been murdered at another beat over the sea cliffs of Bondi-Tamarama.
- This triggered Steve’s self-funded investigation, leading to a second inquest into Scott’s death in 2012, which discarded the suicide ruling and replaced it with an open finding.
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