A Thousand Miles From Care

A gripping and heartbreaking story, A Thousand Miles From Care tells the 30 year quest Steve Johnson undertook to uncover the truth about his brilliant brother’s brutal murder in Manly.

Winner of the 2025 Ned Kelly Award for Best True Crime

At the entrance of Sydney Harbor, the cliffs rise fourteen stories above the Pacific, like a gigantic skirt made of sandstone. North Head, one of the most memorable cliffs, is a gorgeous place to watch the sunrise. But it’s an unforgiving place to lose your footing. When Steve Johnson’s younger brother Scott went over the edge in 1988, he hit an outcrop on the way down and exploded on the rocks below.

The police deemed it a suicide. But Steve Johnson never believed his brother would take his own life, and over the course of three decades he embarked on an arduous quest to find out what really happened to Scott. This profoundly impactful book traces the steps Steve and his family and friends took to solve the mystery, including navigating an openly hostile police force and a maze of dead ends, unreliable informants, teenage gangs, a faked confession, and setbacks at every turn. And yet their quest ended with an extraordinary outcome: a stunning turnaround by police who apprehended a suspect, 32 years after Scott’s death.

‘Motivated by love and loss of his brother, this inspiring and heartbreaking true story provides a timely and powerful reminder to never take no for an answer in the pursuit of justice. Steve Johnson has ensured Scott Johnson’s legacy would be a safer world for gay men, and that legacy is now enduring.’ Alex Greenwich MP

‘An extraordinary memoir. By turns harrowing, infuriating, and inspiring, it is partly a requiem for a loved one and a lament for all of the brilliant, wonderful people the world was robbed of, simply because they were gay. The pitiless pointlessness of it all is breathtaking, but so too is the decency and love that permeates this book.’ Gareth Russell, The Palace

‘Brims with unputdownable detail and fine writing’ Good Weekend

Author Biography

Steve Johnson has been a technologist, entrepreneur, private investor, and philanthropist for thirty years, professionally specializing in building innovative technologies into successful enterprises, with a personal and philanthropic focus on education, climate change awareness, the arts, and gay rights equality. Since 2005, Steve has been spearheading efforts in New South Wales, Australia to honor and seek justice for hundreds of victims of gay hate crimes that ravaged the Australian gay community in the 1980s and 1990s, and took the lives of dozens of men, including Steve’s younger brother, Scott, in Sydney in 1988. This effort helped presage a national plebiscite for gay marriage legalization, which was finally passed in December 2017.