His lawyer tried to have it withdrawn the next day under the guise of White being unfit to make the admission but the Supreme Court rejected the motion. He originally pleaded not-guilty but changed it on 10 January 2022 to guilty. On 13 January 2022, Scott White was found guilty of murdering Scott Johnson in 1988 after changing his plea to guilty. He said, 'I hope the family and friends of the other dozens of gay men who lost their lives find solace in what's happened today.' After being contacted about the arrest, Steve Johnson said: 'This is a very emotional day, he was my best friend and he really needed me to do this.' Steve Johnson also hopes that the arrest will open the doors for others to receive justice. On, a 49-year-old man was arrested ln Lane Cove and charged with the murder of Johnson. The New South Wales Police Force has since apologised for not investigating the murder of Johnson properly and failing to protect the gay community.

It is now estimated that as many as 80 gay men were murdered in Sydney in the late 1980s, many pushed off cliffs. The conclusion that Johnson's death was the result of a hate crime drew attention to other homophobic killings around Sydney beaches in the 1980s. His family raised the reward to A$2 million in March 2020. Police offered an A$1 million reward in 2018 for information. No action was taken until 2017 when a coroner found that Johnson had died as a result of a hate crime. Family campaigning had led to coroners investigations in 20 that recommended that police reopen the case.

Steve Johnson campaigned for decades for his brother's death to be re-investigated. Police initially claimed that his death was a case of suicide, which his brother, Steve Johnson, disputed. His clothes and belongings were found on top of the cliff. Johnson's naked body was found on rocks at the foot of cliffs at Blue Fish Point in North Head near Manly, New South Wales, on 10 December 1988. In 1986, Johnson left his doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley and moved to Canberra on a student visa to complete his PhD at the Australian National University and to be with Noone. At Cambridge, he met Michael Noone, a musicologist from Australia with whom he fell in love. In 1983, he moved to England to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Scott Russell Johnson was born on November 27, 1961, in Los Angeles County, California, United States. In May 2020, an Australian man was arrested and charged and in January 2022, convicted in the murder of Johnson, citing homophobia as his motivation. Initially treated by police as a suicide, a coroner's inquest in 2017 resulted in finding ' died as a result of a gay-hate attack'. Scott Russell Johnson (Novem– December 8, 1988) was an American university student who was killed in Australia in 1988.

For other people named Scott Johnson, see Scott Johnson.

Dragon's Ark by D. Scott Johnson