Duran Bailey, stabbed and mutilated in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2001, might have been the victim of retaliation for a crime he committed a week earlier, defense attorneys for 23-year-old Kirstin Blaise Lobato told a jury Thursday.

During opening statements in Lobato's retrial, her attorneys told the jury Bailey, 44 and homeless, died because he raped Dianne Parker and that someone who knew of that crime went after Bailey to inflict similar wounds.

Bailey was stabbed on the same part of the neck where Parker told police Bailey held her at knife point while he tried to sodomize her, attorney Shari Lynn Greenberger said.

Bailey also suffered two black eyes. Parker told police Bailey had given her two black eyes when he attacked her.

But prosecutors told the jury Lobato was at the end of a three-day methamphetamine binge when she beat Bailey with a baseball bat before stabbing him with a butterfly knife. She then cut off his penis and stabbed him in the anus, prosecutors said.

Bailey's body was found in a parking lot near Flamingo and Wynn roads on July 8, 2001.

Prosecutor William Kephart said Lobato, then 18, returned to her hometown of Panaca and told friends and a teacher she cut off the penis of a "old smelly black man" in Las Vegas.

The teacher called police. When officers confronted Lobato in Panaca, "she puts her head down and she started to cry and she tells the police, 'I didn't think anybody would miss him,' " Kephart said.

In 2002, Lobato was convicted of Bailey's murder; but two years later, the Nevada Supreme Court reversed the decision because District Judge Valorie Vega excluded evidence that should have been admitted.

Lobato has maintained her innocence and has been using a Web site to solicit support.

According to her defense, Lobato was in Panaca on the day Bailey was killed, and Lobato never met Bailey.

Greenberger said all the physical evidence, including DNA and bloody shoe prints at the scene, excludes Lobato from being the killer. The man she stabbed in the groin area had tried to rape her during Memorial Day weekend in a Budget Suites parking lot on East Flamingo Road. Lobato, high on methamphetamine, stabbed the man in the groin and ran, Greenberger said.

The trial is expected to last three weeks. If found guilty, Lobato could face 20 to 50 years in prison, a life sentence with parole eligibility or a life sentence without parole.