LOWELL -- Responding to a report of a medical, Lowell Police Officer Phillip Valliant testified he entered a Walnut Street home and approached a man sitting on a couch sobbing.

"He raised his hands up and said, 'I killed my wife. I killed my wife," Valliant testified during The Ngoc Tran's murder trial in Lowell Superior Court on Tuesday.

Valliant said he heard his partner, who was in the bathroom, yell out, "Oh my God."

Valliant testified he saw the victim, Tran's 60-year-old wife, Son Tran, laying on the bathroom floor, covered in blood and lifeless on the night of April 28, 2011.

"It was a graphic, gruesome scene," Valliant testified.

Valliant testified that Son Tran was on the floor, "very bloody," with a large cut on her head and a cracked skull.

Police could see blood spatter on Tran's pants, face and hands.

He told officers, "Send me to Hell God and please kill me."

Tran, 63, is on trial in facing charges of first-degree murder and assault and battery on a person 60 or over.


Prosecutor Lisa McGovern told the jury during her opening that statement that when no one was in the house and his wife was in the bathroom, Tran went down to the basement and came up with a rubber mallet.

He repeatedly hit his wife in the head with the mallet.

As she cried out in pain, Tran stopped and stuffed toilet paper in her mouth to stifled her screams as he continued to beat her until the moaning stopped, McGovern said.

Son Tran suffered multiple fractures to her face and a fractured skull. She died of blunt force trauma.

Several of Tran's relatives testified that before the fatal assault, he called them to invite them over for a surprise.

Tran's plan, he admitted during a taped confession played to the jury on Tuesday, was to kill his wife and then electrocute himself.

Tran placed signs around his living room warning people not to touch him due to the shock they would receive.

But Tran botched the electrocution and survived with only a tiny burn mark on his finger.

During his youngest daughter Thi Tan's testimony, the 20-year-old college student, read her father's five-page suicide letter to the jury. In the letter, Tran apologized for having a mother who poisoned his children against him. "'I'm sorry, I did not chose a gentle and loving mother for you.

"The time has come to leave and take my wife with me."

Tran sobbed as his daughter read the letter.

Thi Tan testified that when her father picked her up for Easter he told her that his wife, her mother, didn't love him and his children didn't like or respect him.