True Crime Tuesdays: Never Let Him Go
Helen Archer | On 05, Mar 2024
In 1988, Steve Johnson received a phone call informing him that his 27-year-old brother, Scott, had died, his body found at the bottom of a cliff in Manly, a suburb of Sydney. Quickly labelled a suicide, his death left Scott’s family reeling. A gifted mathematician at the start of his career, Steve never accepted that Scott would take his own life – although he, his wife, and his sisters Terry and Becca were still left grappling with feelings of guilt over their perceived failures in not noticing his supposed unhappiness. This four-part series, directed by Jeff Dupre and Jacob Hickey, documents their decades-long battle to find the truth about Scott’s death. In doing so, it acts as an elegy for a brilliant life cut short, and a brief history of the brutal homophobia of late 20th century Australia.
While the first episode begins with the final judgement of the man who would ultimately plead guilty to Scott’s murder, the series then goes back to Scott’s childhood and is told in unfaltering chronological order from there on in. Scott was, by all accounts, almost cripplingly shy, but nevertheless managed to find his place in the world of academia, ultimately opting to teach in Canberra, having met his Australian partner while studying at Cambridge, and following him there.
It was, though, in Manly where his body would be found, naked, at the bottom of a cliff, his clothes folded in a neat pile from where he fell. Steve immediately got on what would be the first of many long-distance flights to Australia, and was taken to Scott’s place of death – somewhere he would visit numerous times in the years which followed. For 20 years, Scott’s death would be labelled as a suicide, while Steve developed something of an obsession with attempting to find out the truth.
That obsession would lead him to battles with intransigent and unsympathetic police officers, the hiring of an investigative journalist Dan Glick, various media campaigns and the utilisation of the various high-profile contacts he had made as he developed a successful and financially rewarding career. He uncovers a subculture of barbaric gay-bashing, which was rife in Sydney but never officially acknowledged, and a slew of dead gay men – five or six deaths a year for 10 years or more that were suspiciously similar to Scott’s.
Unlike Scott, the families of those men did not have the means to pursue justice in the way in which Steve did – for them, their loved one’s deaths will remain unsolved, their questions unanswered. Gay men were thought to be suicidal, easily disposable, and demonised, thanks to the public response to the AIDS epidemic. This documentary does not sidestep the fact that it was Steve’s wealth that made solving the crime possible, but faces it straight on. Justice, it is said, shouldn’t come with a price tag.
Yet it is remarkable, even with a well-funded campaign, that the truth was uncovered some three decades after Scott’s death. That truth brings a different kind of sadness to the family, affecting the next generation. Perhaps this documentary will help in their healing. For the viewer, it is an unforgettably tender tribute to Scott’s life, demonstrating how loved, valued and truly irreplaceable he was. But it is also a reminder of all those lost with him, and to the lifelong effect such a loss has on those who loved them.
