John Hughes was a gay Sydney man who was found dead with his hands and ankles tied and a belt around his neck, but police concluded the killer wasn't motivated by homophobia.
His murder in May 1989 is one of seven cases being scrutinised by a royal commission-style probe established at the urging of a NSW parliamentary inquiry into hate crimes from 1970 to 2010.
That inquiry came after NSW Police released a report in 2018 on its own past handling of crimes against LGBTQI people.
Strike Force Parrabell, a three-year review of 88 deaths from 1976 to 2000, concluded 23 deaths remained unsolved.
Seven cases from Parrabell's list are under examination at commission hearings on Tuesday and later this month to determine whether they were properly investigated.
The cases include those of Mr Hughes, Graham Paynter, Russell Payne, William Dutfield, David Lloyd-Williams, Andrew Currie and Brian Walker.
Three of them were regarded as unsolved by the strike force, while the rest were considered solved.
Counsel assisting the inquiry Kathleen Heath laid out why police reviewing the cold case of Mr Hughes and others missed key information when assessing whether bias crimes took place.
She said the gruesome murder of Mr Hughes, a low-level drug dealer, by a former flatmate and associate named Ian Jones, who has since died, was motivated by homophobia.
"The selection of Mr Hughes as a victim (was) on the basis of (Mr Jones's) belief about his sexuality and what that meant for whether he deserved to live or die," the inquiry chaired by commissioner John Sackar heard on Tuesday.
"Mr Hughes' status as a gay person made Mr Jones perceive him as a target that would be less protected by the police and by the court," Ms Heath said.
The "particularly brutal murder" was indicative of a societal acceptance of homophobia, particularly by institutions such as the police, she said.
Police at the time said the murder was motivated by the robbery of property, drugs and cash.
The same conclusion was reached in the Parabell review, in which police said there was insufficient evidence to find that Mr Jones' killing was motivated by gay hatred.
Police glossed over witness statements of Mr Jones boasting about the impunity he would be afforded if he killed Mr Hughes.
Evidence collected by police in 1989 was shoddy and exhibits around the body such as a bloodied T-shirt were bundled into one brown paper bag.
In her submission to the commission, Ms Heath noted "the sexualised elements of the crime scene" and the graphic manner in which Mr Huges was killed suggested a desire to inflict pain and humiliation, motivated by gay hate bias.
In the inquiry's first hearings, held last year, assistant commissioner Anthony Crandell admitted past police indifference to gay bashings had been coupled with a tacit social tolerance of violence towards gay men.
Sydney's wave of anti-gay hate crime peaked during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. NSW decriminalised homosexual conduct in 1984.
