Over the past several weeks, the defense team has increasingly sought to impugn the late Merrill Lynch investment banker's character before Justice Michael Lunn, canvassing during cross examination possibilities of cocaine use, drinking and violence towards his children and wife.

Last Thursday, the court heard that the family computer was used to search for ``gay ... sex in Taiwan'' and other Web sites offering sexual services at a time when the deceased was the only member of the family in Hong Kong, and a few days before he took a trip to Taiwan.

Friday, Cheung confirmed that Internet records found on both the family's Dell desktop and the IBM laptop could be converted back into the original Web page using the software EnCase. In a live demonstration, the defense proceeded to display on computer screens around the courtroom the type of Web pages that had been visited, without the pictures but containing pornographic text.

When Cheung expressed doubt that the user of the Dell desktop had searched for gay sites, saying only the letters ``g'' ``a'' and ``y'' had been searched for, Mrs Kissel's lawyer, Alexander King, referred to the list of Web sites involved, which include ``www.boysgaypicnude.com, free black gay porn, black gay male pictures, gay black men, black males, ebony men.''

Cheung agreed they seemed to cater to homosexual tastes.

Nancy Kissel, 41, is charged with murdering her husband, Robert, after serving him a milkshake laced with sedatives, which left him unconscious as she beat him to death with a heavy metal ornament on November 2, 2003.

The accused told a doctor and police that her drunken husband had assaulted her after she refused him sex and then disappeared. She denies the charge and is out on bail.

The banker's decomposing body was found wrapped in a carpet in a storeroom in a Parkview residential complex on November 7.

Last Monday, government forensic scientist Wong Koon-hung testified that the curved base of the suspected murder weapon, the metal ornament, could have been caused by a hard, elongated object such as a baseball bat, striking the ornament.

albert.wong@singtaonewscorp.com