Steve Johnson said he felt confident the new manslaughter conviction would be “the final word”,and thanked Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans and his team for their diligent police work that finally brought about White’s confession to manslaughter.

But Johnson,who has maintained a serene outlook despite his family’s tragedy and the years of costly work it has taken to obtain justice for his brother,said his gratitude for the recent work of diligent police and prosecutors sits beside anger about the actions of those who previously fought against his efforts to have the case treated as a homicide.

“This investigation could have been done day one,back in 1988… in all likelihood this could have been solved within weeks of the crime instead of 34 years later. That makes me more angry than anything else at this point.

“The police ignoring the case and then trying to blame my brother’s ‘suicide’ on me,for years,decades,is an atrocity in its own right,” he said,referring to “fabricated” suggestions by some police in the past that Scott could have been driven to suicide due to family estrangement.

Revelations from the current special commission of inquiry into LGBTIQ hate crimes had also left him angered,Johnson said.

The inquiryheard earlier this week that police assessed the solvability of Scott’s death as “zero” in 2012 and submitted to a 2017 inquest that he most likely took his own life.

The inquiry also heard this week that NSW Policeeffectively reversed a coroner’s findings in 2005 that two gay men who died or went missing around a known gay beat in Bondi in the 1980s had met with “foul play” and there was a “strong possibility” a third man died in the same way.

As White was being convicted of manslaughter on Thursday,the inquiry was hearing that NSW Police lost human hair found in the hand of John Russell,a gay man whose body was found on rocks below the Bondi to Tamarama walk in November 1989. Despite their knowledge of the hairs,police effectively rejected a coroner’s findings that he was murdered,the inquiry heard.

Detective Sergeant Steve Morgan,who supervised a reinvestigation of the three Bondi cases and insisted police “went in with an open mind”,conceded on Thursday that losing the hair was a “very significant flaw” and that police had ultimately put more effort into finding evidence that might indicate suicide or misadventure.

Johnson,speaking from Boston after watching the Supreme Court proceedings online,said he “sincerely hopes” the inquiry “sticks to the path that it’s on and tries to rectify … the way that police handle these cases of gay men who died,who still haven’t gotten any justice”.

He said he will return to Australia again in June when White is due to be sentenced.

With Rick Feneley

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