September 5th, 2017. It was supposed to be the first day of a new school year at Wild Lake High School in Columbia, Maryland.
The hallways smelled of new textbooks and fresh paint. Students waited in Room 302 — the classroom of Laura Wallen, a 31-year-old social studies teacher known for her compassion, her humor, and her belief that every student had greatness inside them.

But that morning, Laura never arrived.
No call, no substitute, no explanation. Just an empty desk, an untouched coffee mug, and a silence that didn’t fit her personality.

By noon, her colleagues were calling her phone. It went straight to voicemail.
By nightfall, her family was in panic mode.

Laura wasn’t the kind of person who disappeared.
And yet, that’s exactly what happened.

Laura Wallen had grown up in Montgomery County, Maryland, surrounded by friends, family, and the kind of small-town warmth that built lifelong roots. She was close to her parents, Mark and Gwen, and her sister, Sarah.

To her students, she was more than a teacher — she was a mentor, the one who stayed late to help with essays or decorated the classroom before holidays.

That summer, she had shared the news she’d been waiting for:
She was four months pregnant. A baby boy. She’d already picked a name — Reid.

The father was her longtime boyfriend, Tyler Tessier, a man she’d been dating on and off for several years. They’d had their ups and downs, but lately, things seemed to be improving. She told her family she believed they were ready to build a life together.

Her father remembered Tyler as polite, reserved, and seemingly devoted. “He told me he was going to propose,” Mark later said.

What no one knew then — not Laura, not her family, not even Tyler’s closest friends — was that every word was a lie.

Tyler Tessier lived in Damascus, Maryland — a quiet, rural suburb about 30 miles from Washington, D.C. To Laura, he was her partner, the soon-to-be father of her child.

But to another woman, he was something else entirely: her fiancé.

For nearly a decade, Tyler had maintained two separate relationships, crafting lies detailed enough to fool both women, their families, and everyone around them.

When Laura became pregnant, that double life began to unravel. The timelines didn’t match. The excuses stopped making sense.

In late August 2017, Laura learned about the other woman. Instead of confronting Tyler immediately, she reached out privately — a calm, composed message to the fiancée, asking to talk “woman to woman.”

When the message surfaced, Tyler panicked. He texted his fiancée:

“I could literally kill her for what she’s done.”

Six days later, Laura vanished.

When Laura failed to show up for work on September 5th, her sister Sarah called police. Within hours, a missing person investigation began.

Flyers with Laura’s photograph blanketed Maryland. Volunteers searched parks, highways, and abandoned lots. Her father, Mark, spoke through tears on local TV, begging anyone with information to come forward.

The next day, police found her black Ford Escape parked at an apartment complex just across from her school. The front license plate was missing. Inside a nearby dumpster, detectives found her driver’s license and cell phone — thrown away deliberately.

And then there was Tyler.

He cooperated. He joined the searches. He even sat down for interviews with detectives. But something about his story kept changing — small details, timelines, even where he claimed he last saw her.

Each time he spoke, the inconsistencies grew.
Investigators began to suspect the man crying on camera might not be telling the truth.

September 11th, 2017. Six days after Laura was reported missing, police held a press conference.
Her parents and sister sat at a long table, surrounded by reporters, cameras flashing.

And sitting beside them, holding her mother’s hand, was Tyler Tessier.

His eyes were red. His voice broke as he spoke into the microphone.

“Laura, if you’re listening,” he said, “it doesn’t matter what’s happened. It doesn’t matter what kind of trouble. There’s nothing we can’t fix together.”

To the public, it looked like the desperate plea of a worried boyfriend.
But what the crowd didn’t know — what even Tyler’s own parents didn’t know — was that detectives had already marked him as their prime suspect.

In a highly unusual move, investigators had allowed him to attend the press conference deliberately — with the full approval of Laura’s family. They wanted to watch how he behaved.

The man the world saw begging for her safe return had already buried her.

Two days later, on September 13th, search teams followed a new lead: the photograph Laura had texted her sister days before she vanished — a shot of an open field and tree line.

Using location data, investigators traced the image to a remote farm property in Damascus.

Cadaver dogs began to pull toward a wooded clearing.
Fresh tire tracks led straight into the trees.

And then — a shallow depression in the ground. Disturbed soil. A piece of fabric visible through the dirt.

Within minutes, the team radioed in confirmation: they had found Laura Wallen.

The discovery shattered the community. What had been a missing-person case was now a homicide.
At 5:30 that evening, Tyler Tessier was arrested at his home.

He was charged with first-degree murder, evidence tampering, and false statements to police.

As detectives pieced together the timeline, the full extent of Tyler’s deception came into focus.

Surveillance footage showed Laura and Tyler shopping together the night she disappeared. Later that evening, she texted her sister:

“Tyler has me on an adventure in the country. Don’t know why I’m here, but it’s for something.”

That photo of the field was taken shortly before she died.

Investigators learned that after killing Laura, Tyler used her phone to send fake messages to family and friends — trying to make it look like she was still alive. He even drove her car to the apartment complex where it was later found and discarded her belongings.

He wasn’t improvising. He had planned.
Every action designed to buy him time.

To the outside world, he was a worried boyfriend.
To police, he was a man who had calculated every move.

For nearly a year, Tyler Tessier sat in jail awaiting trial.
Prosecutors built a meticulous case — physical evidence, cell data, text messages, witness statements, even his own admissions.

The trial was set for September 6th, 2018 — one year and one day after Laura’s body was found.

Her family prepared for three weeks of painful testimony. They wanted the truth spoken in open court.

But when the morning of the trial arrived, Tyler made one final, selfish decision.

At 4:55 a.m., during a routine check, guards found him unresponsive in his cell. He had taken his own life just hours before jury selection was to begin.

At 9:30 a.m., Judge Michael Mason entered the courtroom to address the jurors and Laura’s family.

“There’s no easy way to tell you this,” he said quietly.
“The defendant was found deceased in his cell this morning. Apparently a suicide. There will be no trial.”

Gasps filled the room.
The man who had stolen Laura’s life had also stolen justice.

For Laura’s family, the news was another blow — the end of a nightmare with no closure.

They had waited almost a year to face the man responsible.
Now, they never would.

That afternoon, State’s Attorney John McCarthy held a press conference of his own, revealing details of the case the public would have heard at trial — the text threats, the lies, the fake messages, the proposal ring meant for someone else.

McCarthy called Tessier “a psychopath who lied about everything.”
He confirmed that five suicide notes had been found, none acknowledging Laura’s death.

Laura’s brother-in-law, John Kee, spoke for the family:

“He stood our family up for the last time today.”

Even in death, Tessier offered no confession, no apology — only silence.

In the weeks that followed, Laura’s parents refused to let her story end in tragedy.
They began advocating for a change to Maryland law — a bill that would later be known as “Laura and Reid’s Law.”

The proposal sought to allow prosecutors to charge suspects with murder for the death of an unborn child, regardless of gestational age.

They wanted to make sure the system recognized both lives lost.

At Wild Lake High School, Laura’s classroom became a memorial — covered in flowers, photos, and notes from students whose lives she had touched.
Colleagues remembered her laughter, her patience, her love of teaching.

“Laura believed every kid deserved a second chance,” one student wrote. “She gave us hope when we didn’t believe in ourselves.”

Her father spoke softly at her funeral:

“Laura was a work in progress,” he said. “But she had the power to see the amazing potential in everyone she met.”

The story of Laura Wallen isn’t just a crime story.
It’s a story about trust, betrayal, and the resilience of a family who refused to let a lie define their daughter’s life.

She was more than a headline.
She was a teacher who believed in her students. A daughter who loved her parents deeply. A mother who never got to meet her son.

In the years since her death, her name has become a symbol — not of tragedy, but of truth.

Because even in her absence, Laura Wallen still teaches us something:
That appearances can deceive, that courage can outlive cruelty, and that love — real love — never stays buried.