Thirty-five years after promising mathematician Scott Johnson plunged to his death at a notorious gay beat in Sydney, his family say they finally feel that justice is about to happen.
Scott Phillip White will be sentenced on Thursday for the manslaughter of Mr Johnson, whose naked body was found at the base of cliffs in Manly in 1988.
But it's not the first time White has been sentenced for the crime – in May 2022 a judge handed down a 12-year prison sentence for murder, before White had the conviction quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal, arguing the judge should not have accepted his surprise guilty plea.
White then pleaded guilty in February 2023, to the lesser charge of manslaughter, after police taped a prison phone call where he admitted to a relative he'd punched Scott Johnson.
Mr Johnson's brother, Steve, told a sentencing submission hearing in the Supreme Court on Tuesday that White's legal wranglings had "cost his family another year of grief".
He said the family initially felt some gratitude to White for pleading guilty to murder, but "today I have no sympathy…. He undid any gratitude we had for sparing us a trial".
"Mr White deserves no leniency."
"Our struggle for justice has been long and torturous," he said, as he described his brother Scott as the "gentlest, most trusting soul imaginable".
For decades, the death of Mr Johnson was written off by police as suicide, but his family always believed it was a gay-hate crime.
Speaking outside court on Tuesday, Steve Johnson said he felt he'd had a chance to express his family's despair over his brother's death.
"Remarkably the person who killed my brother is in jail and will be sentenced on Thursday," he said.
"It feels like it might finally be the day that we find justice for my brother."
He said he was hoping for the maximum possible sentence, and was frustrated White never explained what happened in any detail.
"Understanding why he was up there [on the cliffs] with my brother is very important to me," he said.
Mr Johnson said he was determined to help other families whose relatives were victims of unsolved gay-hate crimes.
"We're the lucky ones who finally have a killer behind bars, and we really want to see that happen with the others."
