HIV status may have led to killing

A gay man found punched, kicked and stomped to death at a "lover's lane" in Sydney's Woolloomooloo almost two decades ago may have been killed because he mentioned he was HIV positive, the NSW Supreme Court has heard.

Felipe Flores, 27, from Ecuador, was found bloodied and near death on grassland near an electricity substation near the notorious area of Lincoln Crescent less than an hour after leaving an Oxford Street bar in the early hours of September 2, 1991.

Friends who saw him leave The Exchange Hotel with a very tall, dark, caucasian man later told police he had seemed excited "as though he had picked up".

About 3.40am that morning a security guard patrolling the Woolloomooloo area saw a man with "dark, bushy or curly hair" drive away from the area, known as "lover's lane", and found Mr Flores near death on the ground.

"He had been punched, kicked and stomped on. His face bore an impression of the sole of a shoe and although there were no wounds to his chest or back, so much force had been applied to his body that his liver ... was found to be almost split in two," crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen, SC, told a jury at the trial of the man accused of his murder.

"The crown case is ... (perhaps) something was said about (Mr Flores') HIV status ... which animated the accused to this violence which brought about the death of Mr Flores."

In 2008, modern DNA tests linked blood found under his fingernails and on his shirt to Paul Darcey Armstrong, 47, a self-confessed "promiscuous" gay man who lived and worked in the area at the time and was a regular at The Exchange Hotel.

Ms Cunneen said Armstrong's partner at the time - then Stephan James Webber, now Jacinta Dawn Webber - remembers Armstrong coming home with cuts and blood on his shirt that night.

Weeks later he would tell her, "I hurt a man very badly in the area on that night, but when I left the man was still alive".

Armstrong has admitted having sexual relations with Mr Flores but denies murdering him.

In his opening address, Armstrong's barrister Andrew Haesler, SC, said the crown's circumstantial case was reliant on "speculation ... and theorising".

He invited the jury to consider another scenario - that after the pair had sex and Armstrong left, Mr Flores was "set upon by one of the gangs of people in that area at the time who preyed on homosexual men".

The trial before Justice Terence Buddin is continuing.