It's the 10th of December 1988 near Blue Fish Point on the northern side of

North Head, Sydney, New South Wales. The body of Scott Johnson is found at the base of a cliff.

An inquest rules his death as suicide, but was it murder?

Hi, I'm your host Campbell.

Grab a beer and pull up a deck chair.

This is True Crime Island, another True Crime podcast. So tonight I will go over the death of Scott Russell Johnson and the three inquests that follows, that's right, three inquests that have followed his death.

So, who was Scott Johnson?

Scott was born on the 27th of November 1961 in Los Angeles to Grant and Barbara Johnson. He had an older sister Terry and an older brother

Stephen. They were all separated by about two years in age. The family moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1970 and soon

after Grant and Barbara separated. Barbara took the kids back to California and Grant

visited occasionally early on but it would be much later in life when he

initiated contact again. Stephen described the divorce as confusing rather

than distressing. In California they were poor and lived in what was described as a ghetto until about 1974,

when Barbara got an office job at a chemical company and a steady boyfriend named Dennis.

Being in hard times, Stephen recalled that this helped bond the children together. Once Stephen went to college, Dennis moved in and married Barbara. Stephen and

Scott did not like the Mucco Dennis and he treated Scott harshly as Scott was not particularly sports-minded.

At this time Scott became interested in hiking and would get Stephen to go on hikes with him. Scott was only

14 when he started hiking and over the next three or four years they would hike

all over Southern California. In one of the marathon hikes

they hike the Grand Canyon from Rim-Dam-Rim, the distance of about 50 miles or 80 kilometers.

In school Scott excelled in mathematics and his teachers would advance him in his studies

and eventually he was doing college mathematics even though he was a freshman in high school.

...