A man who went “poofter bashing” with a gang as a 14-year-old boy has taken off his shirt in a courtroom 30 years later to reveal his Grim Reaper tattoo – but he denies it had anything to do with a 1980s Aids commercial or a hatred of gay men.
The witness is among a succession of confessed or alleged gay bashers from the Narrabeen area who have denied involvement in killing American man Scott Johnson to state coroner Michael Barnes. Johnson’s body was found at the base of a North Head cliff on Saturday, 10 December 1988 – and he is now the subject of an extraordinary third inquest.
These witnesses include a man who allegedly boasted about being with a Narrabeen skinhead when they bashed an “American faggot” they found masturbating at North Head or at a beach near Manly – on a Friday night in mid-December 1988. That same witness had also beheaded a cat and put it in the freezer, and placed his mother’s budgie in the microwave, the Glebe coroner’s court head on Monday.
All their names are suppressed, but one of them is a 45-year-old who still plays A-grade rugby league on the northern beaches and still bears the Grim Reaper tattoo he got as a teenager. He admitted he was ashamed that, when he was 14, he travelled with a group of friends into the city “to roll a poof”. He uttered the name of the victim they found in Moore Park and left with serious injuries.
John Agius, SC, for Scott Johnson’s family, asked him if he could show the court his tattoo. The man obliged, lifting his shirt over his head to reveal he scythe-wielding Reaper on his upper right arm. “Thirty dollars,” he said. “You’d pay $200 now.”
The man agreed the Reaper was the personification of death, but he insisted it had nothing to do with a desire to kill gay men and had no connection with television ads – which went to air in the same year – alerting Australians about the dangers of Aids. The ads have since been linked to a backlash against gays during the HIV crisis and an era of violent and often fatal attacks upon homosexuals.
It sounded “silly” now, admitted the Grim Reaper tattoo man, but he had only wanted to look tough and masculine as a kid.
He denied any knowledge of “gay bashing” at North Head. Asked if he realised the Johnson family was still waiting for answers to Scott’s death, he said he had his own children and: “I hope my family would do the same and be as dogged about the questions as his family seems to be.”
These witnesses all attended Narrabeen High. Several played rugby league for the Narrabeen Sharks. And they all knew a local skinhead who they agreed was a well-known “poofter basher” who operated from a gay-beat toilet block at the Narrabeen bus terminus, but also as far afield as Surry Hills.
This basher’s body was found in his front garden in the early 1990s and his older brother was accused, but acquitted, of the murder. His younger brother was with the basher – along with another witness who gave evidence on Monday – in 1987 when they too committed a gay attack in Moore Park. The two attacks by separate groups – although they knew each other – happened only a week apart.
The Grim Reaper ads certainly had an impact on this witness. He was a skinhead. He had a shaved his head and wore the outfit, including the Doc Marten boots. He was 16 when they bashed the man in Moore Park, and he admitted he had a “bad attitude” towards gays.
“It was probably because of the ads on TV,” he told the court.
The same man was asked about another local known for violence. Did he know he had cut off a cat’s head and put it in the freezer? “Didn’t hear that one,” the witness said. What did he hear? That the local had “stuck a budgerigar in the microwave – his mother’s budgerigar. And he used to smack his sister around, too. I don’t know about that but I heard that.”
The cat killer gave his evidence late on Friday. He is the man who, along with the late skinhead, had allegedly boasted about bashing the “American faggot” about the time of Scott Johnson’s death. But he told the court he had never bashed gays, was not a skinhead, had never been to North Head and did not know there was a gay beat there. “I wouldn’t know how to get there,” he said.
Agius asked him where he understood North Head was. “Near the Harbour Bridge?” the man suggested. Agius: “Are you the only person on the north shore who doesn’t know where North Head is?”
Agius warned yet another old Narrabeen boy on Monday that this was his chance to come clean about any involvement in a gay bashing. This anonymous witness had been a friend of the long-dead skinhead. Agius asked him if he had ever joined in an attack on a gay man? No, the witness said. Agius was specific. Had he not joined an attack in which he smashed a long-neck beer bottle and plunged it into the victim’s neck. “No, not at all,” the witness said.
Agius warned he could go to jail if he did not take this chance – with a guarantee that he could not incriminate himself before the coroner, so long as he did not perjure himself. The answer was still no.
The same witness described a football team barbecue in 1986, when he was 14, at which the skinhead had come to him “in quite a state. He was crying, trembling.” He had been led to believe that he had killed someone. Given the skinhead’s notoriety as a gay basher, the witness said he assumed it was an attack on a homosexual.
As it turned out, associates had apparently “played a joke on him”. The victim was not dead, after all.
Agius pressed the witness. How could he be sure this happened in 1986 and not in in 1988. Could that victim have been Scott Johnson? No, the witness insisted he was sure.
Police originally concluded Scott Johnson had leapt to his death, and their report to the state coroner still gives most weight to that theory. The inquest has heard from Scott Johnson’s partner, Michael Noone, who described his deep shame and depression following an infidelity in the months before his death.
Noone also said Scott had also talked about wanting to “do away with himself” by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1985, when he had wrongly believed he had contracted HIV. Noone originally did not believe Scott committed suicide but has come to accept it is possible that he jumped or fell from the cliff.
