There was fury at the courthouse. Relatives of murdered, pregnant schoolteacher Laura Wallen screamed at the father of her accused killer, Tyler Tessier.
Prosecutors said Tessier and his lawyer have been stalling the trial on purpose, hoping witnesses will forget details. They played a secretly recorded tape from the jail, but the judge postponed the trial anyway.
The relatives sat in a courtroom for hours with the father of her one-time boyfriend. When the judge declined to stick with a trial date in April, they burst out into the hallway and started screaming at the father.
“That was your unborn grandson!” they yelled at him, before sheriff’s deputies ordered them to stop.
Tyler Tessier’s lawyer wanted to delay the trial for another seven months. Prosecutors wanted to start in April.
They played a recording of Tessier talking to his dad at the jail.
“Going slow is to everybody’s advantage,” the accused killer told his father. “People forget… things happen… like the shooting in Las Vegas… It puts me out of the public eye.”
Prosecutors argued that the public defender is giving Tessier ineffective counsel if he’s trying on purpose to delay the trial. But the judge ultimately rejected their argument, and scheduled the murder trial for September 4, almost a year to the day after Tessier allegedly led his pregnant girlfriend to the middle of a field in Damascus and shot her in the head.
Public defender Allen Wolf told the judge he was simply overwhelmed by all the evidence in this case and needed more time to prepare.
Prosecutors charged Tessier with murdering Wallen last year, but because her fetus was too young to survive outside the womb, under Maryland law they could not charge him with a second count of murder.
The Wilde Lake High School teacher never showed up on the first day of school, and the last time family members heard from her was in a text message on Labor Day.
Tessier gave a tearful speech at a news conference with Wallen's family while she was still missing. Police said the news conference was a calculated move to see how he would react.
Tessier said Wallen was four months pregnant and excited to have a baby. They had known each other for 10 years.
But soon after the news conference, the 31-year-old was found in a shallow grave.
Police said Tessier had asked a friend for help "to clean up a mess" after his girlfriend went missing.
The trial in September is expected to last two weeks.
