Australian gay murder investigation

The subject line from the email jumped off my screen:  “Scott Johnson Murder CONFESSOR!”  While on holiday with my son in January, the last thing I expected was a confession to a murder I had investigated in Sydney four years previously….

So begins “Close to the Edge,” an article I wrote that just appeared in The Weekend Australian Magazine, about one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve ever been involved in.  At he behest of the brother of a man whose body was found at the bottom of a cliff in a Sydney suburb in 1988, I delved into a hidden world of gay hate crimes that swept through Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  The police ruled Scott Johnson’s death a suicide at the time, but new evidence suggests that his death was more likely an unsolved murder that fit a pattern of homophobic violence that was ignored — and possibly even abetted — by police indifference.  PDF