White faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced by Justice Helen Wilson on Tuesday. Johnson’s death by fall was initially dismissed by the Sydney police as suicide.

He said the gravity of the murder was significantly elevated because it was motivated by the victim’s sexuality. White had met Johnson in a bar in suburban Manly and Johnson had stripped naked at the clifftop before he died, Hatfield said. Prosecutor Brett Hatfield said the precise details of the murder were not known and that White’s accounts had varied. The victim was a Los Angeles native who was working on a doctorate in mathematics at Australian National University and living in Canberra at the time. Scott White, 51, appeared in the New South Wales state Supreme Court for a sentencing hearing after he pleaded guilty in January to the murder of 27-year-old Scott Johnson in Sydney. First funeral in Buffalo massacre held for slain deaconīen Crump vows to sue accomplices to Buffalo shootingĬhurch shooting suspect sent diary to newspaper, called himself ‘destroying angel’Īn Australian man confessed to the police that he murdered a gay American mathematician in 1988 by pushing him off a cliff in what prosecutors described as a hate crime, a court heard Monday.