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She had been bound by zip ties and her eyes covered with duct tape, but Carole Hogan said she vowed to remember every terrorizing detail, every sound, every move, every threat the ski-mask-wearing intruder made to kill her and her husband, James.

"My goal was to remember as much of this as I could," she said, "in the event that we survived."

She did survive the nightmarish break-in to their four-bedroom house in Tanoan East, an exclusive gated community in the Northeast Heights that until that Aug. 24, 2004, night had seemed so secure they had never bothered to use the alarm system installed by the previous homeowners.

But James Hogan, the 57-year-old retired Sandia National Laboratory worker she said she "loved to pieces," did not survive.

Even after complying with the intruder's demands to give them all their valuables and the contents of their safe, James Hogan was bound and taped, his head wrapped in layers of plastic bags, then bludgeoned so savagely in the garage that the noise sounded to his wife like a club striking concrete.

Carole Hogan was the first to testify as the murder trial of the man accused of her husband's death began Tuesday in the Albuquerque courtroom of state District Judge Neil Candelaria.

Ernest Jose Gallegos, 46, whose lengthy criminal history includes robberies and a possible connection to a 1986 homicide, is charged with first-degree murder and six other counts in James Hogan's death.

Prosecutors were expected to continue their case today by calling forensics experts and two Albuquerque police officers who say they retained Gallegos that night even before learning that a homicide had been committed.

Two other officers told jurors late Tuesday they had been responding to a robbery in progress at the Hogan home about 10 that night when they spotted a dark-clad man sitting atop a Tanoan perimeter wall.

Also on the wall, they said, were two dark-colored bags filled with jewelry, bonds and other stolen items from the Hogan home, plus two handguns, rope, gloves, a ski mask, a bloody polo shirt and zip ties.

Parked nearby in a traffic lane of Academy Road Northeast was a white pickup truck registered to a Jose Gallegos, they said.

Jurors also were shown a driver's license belonging to Jose Gallegos, which was taken from the suspect that night.

Both officers testified that the man was sweating profusely and had a cut on his cheek. The man said he had been "working in the neighborhood or doing some kind of side job," one officer testified.

Just before he was handcuffed, however, the man yelled obscenities and fled, jumping through yards and eventually back into Tanoan before police lost his trail.

Gallegos remained on the lam until he was arrested in Juarez, Mexico, nine months later.

Prosecutors are also expected to present DNA evidence - a hair in the ski mask and substances under James Hogan's fingernails and on a pair of gloves - that tie Gallegos to the killing.

The most dramatic and articulate witness, however, has been Carole Hogan, who brought several jurors to tears as she explained how she hadn't known her husband was dead until an ambulance called to their home left without him.

"When they drove away, I knew he was dead," she said, her steady composure dissolving into sobs.

She said the intruder, whom she described as strong and talkative and needing to feel in control, had been watching them for weeks.

He told them he was "there to kill Jim for some awful thing that Jim had done to someone else," she testified.

But she said she could not imagine that the husband she described as sweet, laid-back, kind and considerate would have inspired such sadistic rage.

She recalled that he had once suspected his watch was stolen by a granite tile installer, one of many subcontractors working on their home remodeling.

Gallegos, prosecutors say, had also been in the Hogan home six weeks before the killing to install a mirror. But Carole Hogan testified that her husband had questioned Gallegos and his co-worker and felt confident the two had nothing to do with the watch.

Her husband later found the watch in a safe in the garage, she said.

Carole Hogan also testified that the intruder told her "everything that happened here tonight is because of that badge of your husband's," referring to an old district attorney's badge kept in the safe.

The badge had been hers, she said, a memento from years before when she was a prosecutor in Sacramento, Calif.

She told jurors that she and her husband had planned to live out their years in the Tanoan home they had just finished remodeling.

She sold the home in October.

"The house represented our future and I didn't have one," she said.

The trial is expected to continue through early next week.