SYDNEY — An Australian man has pleaded guilty to murdering an American mathematician who fell from a Sydney cliff in 1988 in a gay hate crime that was dismissed by police at the time as suicide.

Scott White was charged in 2020 with murdering 27-year-old Los Angeles-born Scott Johnson, whose naked body was found at the base of North Head cliff on Dec. 8, 1988.

White yelled repeatedly in court during a pre-trial hearing in Sydney on Monday that he was guilty, having previously denied the crime...

...Johnson’s family sought a third inquest, and State Coroner Michael Barnes ruled in 2017 that Johnson “fell from the cliff top as a result of actual or threatened violence by unidentified persons who attacked him because they perceived him to be homosexual.”