When beloved Wilde Lake High School teacher Laura Wallen did not show up for the first day of class in September of 2017, alarm bells went off for just about everyone who knew her.
“If Laura Wallen wasn’t physically there, something had to have happened to her. Something was desperately wrong,” Jessica Nichols, a former colleague, said on an episode of the newly released second season of Hulu’s true crime series, “How I Caught My Killer.”
Almost seven years after the tragic killing of the 31-year old teacher, news that captivated the nation, her story is back in the limelight.
The latest telling of Wallen’s story offers photos of the teacher with her friends, family and students, as well as police interrogation footage, security camera footage, text messages, and even the photo that police say led them to Wallen’s body.
Nichols said one aspect that sets this apart from other retellings is that the episode, titled “I Know What the Devil Looks Like,” is focused on Wallen.
“Some of the other shows that have come out about this horrific tragedy have really centered the man that killed her or the salacious love triangle aspect,” Nichols said in an interview with The Banner. “And I always felt like the human being that Laura Wallen was got lost.”
Through interviews with her former students, colleagues and detectives, the program captures how Wallen continues to affect her community, while also showing how Montgomery County Police pieced together the mystery that began when the Howard County social studies teacher didn’t arrive at the school.
At the time of her disappearance, Wallen, who lived in Olney, was four months pregnant, according to the show’s narrator.
The episode — through the narrator, two detectives, and the state prosecutor — explained that her boyfriend, Tyler Tessier, 31, the main suspect in Wallen’s disappearance, often changed details in his stories. The show used clips from the interrogations, showing Tessier arguing with police, fidgeting, stuttering and looking more nervous as the interrogations progressed.
The leading evidence police followed in the case were texts between Wallen and her sister. Wallen’s texts became abruptly strange when she mentioned her ex-boyfriend from years ago, which led police on a wild goose chase to find him.
But Wallen never sent those texts. Tessier did, in an attempt to make police think she was cheating on him.
Tessier, though, had a fiance who was out of town shopping for wedding dresses the weekend Wallen went missing.
Paul Reese, a detective with Montgomery County Police, said the eventual holes in the information Tessier told them led detectives believe he was lying.
After police discovered that Tessier was cheating on Wallen, Reese said they intentionally set up a press conference with him and Wallen’s family to see how Tessier would act.
Katie Leggett, the Montgomery County Police detective who put the press conference together, said in the show that, “If I ask Tyler to do a press conference and he says no, he’s going to assume that we think he’s guilty. If I ask him to do a press conference and he says yes, we’re going to get something good. It’s worth a shot.”
Seven days after Wallen disappeared, Tessier took questions from reporters, dodging every question.
Leggett said it was then clear that Tessier knew something about the murder.
What led police to find Wallen was a text exchange between her and her sister.
On Sunday of Labor Day weekend, days before the school year started, Wallen went out with her boyfriend to the countryside.
Filled with promises of where they might live one day, Wallen looked across the open field her boyfriend had brought her to.
“Tyler has me on an adventure in the country,” she texted her sister. “Don’t know why I’m here but it’s for something.”
“Really where are you?” her sister asked.
“I’m waiting in a field.”
“Take a picture,” her sister wrote back.
Wallen sent a photo from where she was standing, in a large, open field with a treeline in the distance.
Detectives matched the photo with a sprawling field next to the meat-processing facility where Tessier worked part-time. They found Wallen’s body in a shallow grave.
The search for Wallen had ended after eight days.
“I truly believe she thought he would have a surprise for her and that she was going to get engaged,” Donna Fenton, senior assistant state’s attorney, said. “I don’t believe she saw it coming.”
Tessier texted Wallen’s sister from her phone the day after he killed her.
Instead of confessing, Tessier made up a new tale, police said. He claimed he and Wallen were kidnapped by two masked men, and Wallen was shot in the back of the head, which he was forced to watch.
“There’s truth in every lie, because when he said they shot her in the back of the head, that’s exactly what he did,” Leggett said.
Tessier never stood trial. One year after Wallen’s death, he hanged himself the morning of the first day of trial in the Montgomery County Correctional Facility.
“I was so angry because Tyler stole Laura from us the first time, and he stole from us when he decided to end his life instead of facing up to what he did,” Nichols said.
Since Wallen’s death, her family worked “tirelessly in the Maryland legislature to enact Laura and Reid’s law. If the state can prove that the perpetrator knew that the woman was pregnant, an additional 10 years can be added to that sentence,” Fenton said.
At Murray Hill Middle School, where Wallen taught social studies for seven years before transferring to Wilde Lake High School, two teachers created the Laura Wallen Drama Scholarship in 2017 to honor her love of theater. The recipients of the scholarship get to join the Columbia Center for Theatrical Arts for their summer junior professional theater programs.
Wallen’s family also set up a scholarship fund in her name at Wilde Lake High School in 2018.
Nichols said she and Wallen — which is what they called each other — started as teachers on the exact same day at Wilde Lake.
Their classrooms shared a temporary wall, and Nichols said she always heard laughter erupting from the other side. From time to time, Wallen would throw candy into Nichols’ room, and Nichols and her students would retaliate by blowing bubbles into the other classroom.
“She also was a kick-butt teacher,” said Nichols, who now teaches at River Hill High School and won the 2024 Howard County teacher of the year award. “She really did a beautiful job in not just delivering curriculum, but in inspiring kids to believe that they could conquer the most difficult curriculum.”
When she was approached for the project, Nichols said she made sure people knew how amazing, inspirational, plucky and gorgeous of a spirit Wallen was.
“She was a brilliant light that was stolen from us,” Nichols said, adding that she thought the show “did a really good job, because people are talking about her — and that was the goal for me.”
