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A 33-year-old man from Maryland, who is expected to be tried for the murder of his pregnant girlfriend, died in his cell on Thursday morning after apparently hanged, security officials said.
Tyler Tessier was accused of shooting Laura Wallen, 31, in an isolated field in Damascus a year ago. The prosecutors had compiled what appeared to be a solid case against him.
The opening statements in his case were due to start on Thursday.
Tessier started the morning at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in Clarksburg when he was woken up at 4am. He had left his cell to shower and was preparing to be taken to the Rockville courthouse, said Robert Green, director of the Correction and Rehabilitation Department.
It's then that, according to the initial findings, he's hanged, Green said. Tessier had been placed in pre-trial detention, Green said. He had been detained since his arrest last September.
The round staff observed Tessier at 4:36 and the next round at 4:55 was found hanging in his cell using a bed sheet attached to the upper bunk, according to correctional services. A correctional officer, then a medical staff and a summoned EMS team attempted to resuscitate Tessier, but he could not be relaunched and rescue measures were stopped at 5:32 am, the department said.
Laura Wallen shortly before her death; an aerial image showing where his body was recovered. (Montgomery County Court Records)
Last year, Tessier was standing in front of a television camera bank, pleading for Wallen – who was then considered a missing person – to go home. A popular teacher, Wallen, had not been seen for more than a week.
"Laura, if you listen, it does not matter what happened," said Tessier, adding, "We can not arrange anything together."
By late Thursday morning, a Montgomery County jury was supposed to start learning what prosecutors were saying Tessier was desperately trying to hide from the cameras: he had killed Wallen in a remote field and buried him in a shallow grave. .
His trial was to last at least two weeks.
Tessier's family said, "The death of their son Tyler is sorry. They want to express their condolences to the Wallen family for the loss they suffered "and asked for confidentiality in a statement issued by Tessier's lawyer, Allen Wolf.
Laura Wallen's parents, on the right, hid their suspicions about Tyler Tessier at a press conference last year. (Michael Robinson Chavez / The Washington Post)
Wolf stated that his client was innocent of the charges. "Although he made mistakes in his personal life," Wolf said last year, "he cared deeply about Laura Wallen and would never have hurt her physically".
At the courthouse where they expected to be judged, the Wallen family stood Thursday in the lobby next to county state attorney John McCarthy. "We were deprived this morning of the opportunity to know the true nature and details of this alleged crime," he said.
McCarthy developed a motive already exposed in court documents: Tessier was engaged to another woman, but neither she nor Wallen knew Tessier's relationship and his double life was going to collapse. Relationships were part of what McCarthy claimed was a tendency to lie "about everything".
Duplicity, Prosecutors said Thursday, included Tessier at one point, showing Wallen's family an engagement ring while proposing to marry Laura Wallen to use the same ring later that same night.
Wallen's father, Mark, said Laura Wallen was "in love and light. We miss her absolutely. We stole the trial. We were also robbed of a lawsuit for our grandson, "referring to the child his daughter wore. "It's a difficult day for our family not to have this lawsuit."
Wallen's mother, Gwen, said she had anticipated and feared the start of the trial and decided not to be present when her daughter, Jennifer Conti, testified about the last days of her sister's life. "I felt that I had not been able to protect Laura and that I was not going to be able to protect Jennifer" in the audience room.
"As terrible as it is today, I feel at peace," Gwen Wallen said Thursday. calling Tessier a "diabolical human".
As part of the trial preparations, prosecutors wrote in the court documents that "the evidence will show that Ms. Wallen was shot in the back of her head at the brainstem. They stated that "the evidence will be admitted that the defendant knew exactly where to shoot that would lead to Mrs. Wallen's death".
Prosecutors said that "the state will present evidence that in the days leading up to the murder of Ms. Wallen, the accused knew that the two lives he was living were about to collide," they wrote. prosecutors McCarthy, Donna Fenton and Mary Herdman.
What the defense of Tessier would have presented to the jurors was less clear in the judicial files.
As the case progressed, Tessier's public appeal to Wallen, with its echoes – if prosecutors were right – of California's Scott Peterson in 2003 gave tearful interviews about his pregnant and missing wife, Laci. "She knows how much she loved, how much she missed," he told NBC11, as if sending a message to Laci. "And be strong, and we work to bring you home."
A year later, he was convicted of his murder.
Tessier's initial accounts of detectives, relayed in court files, indicate that he and Wallen were the victims of random attacks, a public account of Susan Smith of South Carolina or Charles Stuart of Boston.
Smith claimed in 1994 that her two young sons had been abducted by a carjacking suspect she described as African-American. "We just have to take them home," she told TV cameras.
She was found guilty of drowning boys in a pond.
Stuart claimed in 1989 that he and his pregnant wife had been shot by an African-American striker during an incident that resulted in the death of his wife and injured him.
Later, while the investigators stopped on Stuart, suspecting that he had shot himself in an insurance case, Stuart committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.
In 2017, while the investigators were concentrating on Tessier, he allegedly invoked surprise and deadly attacks, the cause of Wallen's death in the investigators' explanations having subsequently been dismissed as not credible.
"After the initial denials," wrote the Montgomery County Attorney, "the accused stated that she and Ms. Wallen had been abducted by several African-American men in Olney at Ms. Wallen's home and forced to go to the In Damascus, the vehicle where the men shot Mrs. Wallen, the accused stated that his life had been spared because he had pleaded with men.
Wallen was a popular teacher at Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, Maryland. She disappeared in early September of last year. Her family could not reach her by phone. They called the police.
Previous coverage: "Very unlikely" jurors will visit the site where the teacher was killed
The detectives conducted an intense search, while talking to Tessier, whom they described as his longtime boyfriend. The detectives heard about the second woman, they later said in court documents and became more and more suspicious about what they would call Tessier's new stories.
On September 11, 2017, police officials held a press conference to ask for help to find Wallen. They invited Tessier to attend, an offer in part to see what he could say in front of the reporters.
Previous coverage: How did the detectives build a case against Tessier
Tessier was sitting next to Wallen's parents before getting up to speak.
"It was all we could do to be considered a unified family with him," Wallen's father would later say. "And what was most difficult for my wife was to sit next to him and hold his hand. And she had to hold her hand with both hands because she was shaking so much.
Two days later, the detectives stopped Tessier the day they discovered Wallen's body.
Previous Cover: The Jury may not hear all the evidence compiled against Tessier
Tessier's lawyer, Wolf, said he would try to prevent prosecutors from showing jurors photos of Wallen's body after he was discovered in the grave, and would prevent them from staying on medical records highlighting his case. pregnancy.
"It's a very emotional case. It's the homicide of a young pregnant woman, "said the lawyer at a preliminary hearing. "I think that a major concern I know for myself and my client, and I think that's a major concern for the court, must be how to make sure that a jury decides this case fairly, based on facts and evidence. "
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