A 51-year-old man from Australia admitted to police that he killed 27-year-old Scott Johnson, a mathematician from Los Angeles, in 1988 by pushing him off a cliff in Sydney, according to the Associated Press.
Scott White plead guilty in January and appeared in the New South Wales state Supreme Court for a sentencing hearing on Monday. He will be sentenced on Tuesday and could face life in prison.
Johnson was living in Canberra and was a doctoral student at Australian National University at the time of his death.
Police initially ruled his death a suicide, but prosecutors said that his death was a gay hate crime.
In 1989, the coroner ruled that he took his own life, although a different coroner in 2012 was unable to explain the cause of death. Then in 2017, a coroner said Johnson "fell from the clifftop as a result of actual or threatened violence by unidentified persons who attacked him because they perceived him to be homosexual."
White had previously lied to police about trying to save Johnson from falling over the cliff. He admitted to pushing him in a 2020 interview with police, and the recording was played in court.
"I pushed a bloke. He went over the edge," White said.
Helen White, his ex-wife, reported him to the police in 2019 after she read a 2008 story about Johnson's death. She questioned her husband if he was responsible, after he had previously "bragged" to their children about beating up gay men on the popular cliff.
"It’s not my fault," Scott White allegedly replied. "The dumb (expletive) ran off the cliff."
"I said, 'It is if you chased him,'" Helen White told the court, to which her husband did not answer.
Johnson's brother, Steve Johnson, offered a 1 million Australian dollars ($704,000) reward for information that could help the investigation. Helen White said that she was not aware of the reward when she told police in 2019, and only learned about it when it was doubled in 2020. Police said that the reward will likely be collected.
"If he had turned himself in after his violent action, I would have had a little more sympathy. If he had grasped Scott’s hand and pulled him to safety, I would owe him everlasting gratitude," Steve Johnson said, as he supported the guilty plea.
White's lawyers plan to appeal that plea in the Court of Criminal Appeals, and will hope that he is acquitted at the trial.
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