Murder Trial For Tyler Tessier Postponed: Report

ROCKVILLE, MD — The Damascus man accused of killing his pregnant girlfriend, Laura Wallen, has more time to prepare for trial. A Montgomery County judge granted him a postponement Friday in the proceedings.

Tyler Tessier, 33, of Damascus, was to stand trial on a first-degree murder charge on April 9.

At a pretrial hearing on Friday, the judge reportedly granted his request to postpone the trial until Sept. 4.

Attorneys for Tessier said the mountain of evidence submitted by prosecutors was the reason for delaying the trial, according to WTOP, which reported they said they needed more time to prepare their case.

Prosecutors begged to differ. They said that Tessier wanted to postpone the proceedings to allow more time to pass since the crime, which occurred over Labor Day weekend 2017.

Prosecutors played a call in Montgomery County Circuit Court Friday in which Tessier was recorded on a jailhouse phone telling his father that a delay in the case "looks better for me," according to WJZ.

"People forget. Things happen...when something more important happens, it puts me out of the public eye," Tessier reportedly said, mentioning the Las Vegas massacre.

The disappearance of 31-year-old Wallen, who lived in a condo on Rolling Meadows Way in Olney, prompted a search that was widely publicized last September. She was reported missing on Sept. 4, 2017.

A week later, her parents joined Tessier at a press conference coordinated by the Montgomery County Police Department to help find her. Her family offered a reward for information.

Police later said the decision to include Tessier in the press conference, while he was considered a person of interest, was strategic and done in concert with the family, to see what Tessier would say.

For the week that Wallen was missing, police said Tessier paid several visits to a Damascus property in the 12400 block of Prices Distillery Road where a farm was surrounded by acres of woods and open fields.

When police searched the area, tire tracks led them to nearby location where they found the body on Sept. 13, 2017.

Authorities said Wallen had been shot in the back of the head, and they charged Tessier with first-degree murder.

His attorneys say that Tessier is innocent and would never harm Wallen, WTOP reported.

According to police, Tessier told authorities he had been in a relationship with another woman, whose home was one of three places he stayed the week after Wallen was reported missing.

"I can't talk about motive because I don't know what the motive was," Montgomery County Police Chief Tom Manger said upon Tessier's arrest in September. "...people have speculated [about] the fact that he was in another relationship, people have talked about the fact that the victim is pregnant. That's all speculation."

Tessier is being held without bail at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility pending trial.

Now, Wallen's parents are advocating for a change in Maryland law that would protect all unborn children if the mother is murdered, regardless of how far along she is in the pregnancy.

"A monster with one bullet killed two generations of our family," her father, Mark Wallen, said at a press conference at the end of January in Annapolis.

A new bill, which is called "Laura and Reid's Law" to recognize the teacher and the name she had selected for her unborn child, would amend the definition of homicide when it comes to killing a fetus so that it includes "a fetus at any stage of development that is carried in the womb."

Homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women, according to a study from the Maryland Department of Health, which found it usually occurs in the first three months of pregnancy, with firearms the most common method.

Photos of Tyler Tessier and Laura Wallen courtesy of the Montgomery County Police Department.