Did a Brother’s Quest for Justice Go Too Far?

“Yeah.”

Mitch kept asking about the clothes. “Come on, mate,” he said.

“Stop pushin’ me,” White replied.

The detectives had installed hidden cameras along the trail. White and the officers eventually reached an outcropping about thirty feet away from the correct site—close enough to be captured on video but, as aerial police photos of the cliff top that I obtained show, still not at the actual ledge from which Scott fell. Breda, who was watching a live feed with Yeomans from an unmarked car at the base of North Head, has touted this as the operation’s eureka moment. In the docuseries, he says, “When Scott White walked into view, we knew then we had the right person.”

According to a report later filed by Mitch, he prompted White to describe his alleged struggle with Scott. White again said that Scott had staggered backward off the edge, but the officers didn’t seem satisfied that he meant it. Harry asked, “Scotty, you’re not just sayin’ this to help me, are you?”

“Huh?”

“You’re not just—”

“No,” White replied. “I’m sayin’ it to help me, too.”

Two months later, Yeomans arrested White outside his home. The police recorded the perp walk and shared it with the press. Though the story that White had told the undercover officers didn’t suggest an intentional killing, he was charged with murder. His legal team planned to contest the admissibility of the undercover evidence, but at a hearing in January, 2022, just as a judge’s associate began reciting the charges against him, White interrupted.

“Guilty!” he exclaimed. “I’m guilty.”

Blindsided, White’s solicitor and barrister rushed him out of the courtroom to confer. According to notes from their conversation, White apologized and said, “I am better off in here. I’m safe in here. This is too much stress.” He had raised the idea of changing his plea before, but that morning his barrister, Belinda Rigg, had confirmed with him that he planned to plead not guilty. “I didn’t do it, but I’m saying I did it,” White now told her.

Rigg explained that they had a strong case to make that both his admissions and Helen’s accusations were unreliable. Helen claimed to have first asked White about Scott’s death in 1998, after reading a news article around the tenth anniversary of his fall. As Rigg noted elsewhere, though, the case didn’t become a subject of media interest until Steve’s campaign began years later, and database searches of two papers that Helen mentioned turned up no coverage from 1998. Helen also claimed that she’d written to Yeomans without knowledge of the police reward, but she’d come forward—having allegedly wondered about White’s involvement for years—just a few weeks after the first million dollars was announced. In the end, she received a portion of that money. (Through Breda, Helen declined to be interviewed, and she did not respond to my attempts to reach her by phone or e-mail.)

White agreed to continue contesting the charges, but the judge did not allow his guilty plea to be withdrawn. Several months later, he was convicted of murder. Although the case had been widely described as a hate crime, the judge noted explicitly in her ruling that White’s offense did not meet that standard, because he’d “made no admission” of acting out of “hatred towards a particular group.”

Soon after, Yeomans met with Steve to show him a selection of the evidence against White. In Steve’s book, portions of which he says were “fact-checked” by Yeomans, he describes a police interrogation of White following his arrest. Steve writes that White initially denied his guilt and claimed that he’d falsely confessed, but then “made a thrusting motion” and said, “I pushed him. He went over.” Steve adds, “At that point, the suspect seemed to realise he had said too much.” But this account takes White’s words out of context. In the full transcript of the interview, White is not confessing but, rather, narrating what he’d told the undercover officers, and he immediately adds, “Like I said, that was all full of shit because I just had to say somethin’ to get these guys off me back.”

The murder conviction didn’t last. White’s legal team challenged it, and in late 2022 an appeals court ruled that the judge had erred in not letting White withdraw his guilty plea. White could now apply to do so and then argue his innocence, but a barrister familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that White’s cognitive limitations and emotional “lability” complicated the prospect of a murder trial. “He sort of agrees with the last person he has spoken to, which is really problematic,” the barrister explained.

“You insist we’re ‘just friends,’ but then you invite me to stuff like this.”

Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein

That October, White was recorded talking to a niece by phone from prison, and she brought up a TV segment about his arrest that she’d seen. According to a transcript of their conversation, which someone close to the case read aloud to me, the niece recalled discussing the segment with a relative, saying, “It shows Uncle Scott, and he’s telling the police that he pushed—”

White interrupted her and, as if in his own defense, said, “He hit me, I hit him, and I went to grab him. That was all there was, so I don’t know where that push come from.”

White’s legal team was already in talks about a manslaughter plea, and Yeomans seized on the recorded exchange to clinch the deal. Accounting for the time that White had already served, the court sentenced him to nine years in prison.

Yeomans has given many interviews about the investigation. In the docuseries, drawing on Helen White’s testimony, he describes Scott White as a career criminal with an established method of “befriending gay men in pubs, in hotels, and then taking them to a secluded spot, assaulting them and robbing them.” Yeomans explains that, according to Helen, White collected his victims’ wallets. For the police, she sketched pictures of some of them from memory, and one, Yeomans says, was “very, very similar to the type of wallet Scott Johnson had.” He adds, of White’s alleged modus operandi, “So the old saying ‘A leopard doesn’t change their spots’ is very apt.”

Yeomans declined to speak with me, but Breda, his co-investigator, who is now retired, admitted that their team had been unable to recover any wallets or verify a single incident in White’s past which matched the pattern Helen described. Breda brought up two other sources, however, who had helped to implicate White. A prison informant alleged that White had told him about looking over the cliff’s edge and seeing Scott’s body, Breda said. And an old friend of White’s, who was thought to have associated with gay bashers in the Manly area, claimed to recall White saying, in December, 1988, that something “terrible” had happened at North Head. I asked to see these witnesses’ police statements, but Breda could not provide them, and both the prosecutor’s office and the court refused to share the prosecution’s filings on the ground that the materials had never been presented at trial. (My attempts to reach the friend were unsuccessful.) Breda did tell me that, along with Helen, both the friend and the prison informant received a share of the million-dollar reward.