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Page, spurred by letters from a grieving mother, reopened the case of Ross Warren, a 25-year-old television news anchor who disappeared in 1989. The idea that the killing was part of a pattern was not seriously pursued until years later. Three teenagers were arrested and convicted of murder.Īccording to a report by Sue Thompson, a former state-appointed liaison between the New South Wales police and gays, one of the assailants told the police, “The easiest thing with a cliff is just herding them over the edge.”
In 1990, a Thai man was attacked with a hammer at the top of a cliff and fell off the edge. Still, there were some arrests and prosecutions. “Any gay who was attacked would be seen as a foolish risk-taker if they reported that attack to police,” Professor Tomsen said. After the city’s first gay Mardi Gras parade was broken up by the police in 1978, some marchers were beaten in their jail cells. Most gay men were closeted, and many would have feared being assaulted by the police themselves. “They wouldn’t just hit one beat, they’d be aware of all of them.”įew victims would have gone to the police, Professor Tomsen said.
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“There was a series of gangs,” said Stephen Page, a former New South Wales detective who reopened some of the cases years later. The gang members called it “poofter bashing.” Researchers who have studied the matter say the gangs were loose alliances of young men, teenage boys and sometimes girls who looked for victims to harass and assault at Sydney’s so-called gay beats - places where gay men were known to meet, including secluded spots on the cliffs. “And they were doing it with the almost-certain knowledge that the police would not have gone after them. “We can now see that predators were attacking gay men,” said Ted Pickering, who was the police minister for New South Wales in the late 1980s.
Johnson’s death are casting light on a shocking chapter of Sydney’s history, one that some say has yet to be fully revealed. About a dozen victims were found dead at the bottom of cliffs or in the sea, the police say. Now the police in New South Wales, the state that includes Sydney, are reviewing the deaths of 88 men between 19 to determine whether they should be classified as anti-gay hate crimes.Ībout 30 of the cases remain unsolved, and the police have not said how many of the killings were tied to gangs. But the police, many of whom had a reputation for hostility toward gay men, often carried out perfunctory investigations that overlooked the possibility of homicide, former officials and police officers say. Johnson may not have been the only one.ĭuring the 1980s and 1990s, the Australian authorities now say, gangs of teenagers in Sydney hunted gay men for sport, sometimes forcing them off the cliffs to their deaths.