A funeral and a memorial service are scheduled this weekend in South Carolina and Maine for Valerie Tieman, who authorities say was killed by her husband last month in Fairfield.
Tieman, 34, was shot twice in the head Aug. 25, allegedly by her husband, Luc Tieman, 32, and partially buried in the woods near his parents’ home on Norridgewock Road, where the couple had been living. Police recovered her body Sept. 20, about two weeks after she was reported missing by her parents, Allen and Sarajean Harmon, who live in South Carolina.
Luc Tieman was arrested Sept. 21 and charged with murder, and made his initial court appearance on Friday. He remains in the Kennebec County jail in Augusta, awaiting a bail hearing.
Valerie Tieman’s funeral will be held at noon Saturday at Faith Baptist Church in Taylors, South Carolina. Visiting hours will be 10 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. that day. The state medical examiner’s office confirmed Tuesday that arrangements had been made for Tieman’s body to be taken to South Carolina.
Meanwhile, some of Valerie Tieman’s friends – Emily Rowden Fournier; her mother, Lyn Rowden; and her brother, Aaron Rowden – are organizing a memorial service scheduled for 6 p.m. Sunday at Fairfield United Methodist Church on U.S. Route 201. The service is open to the public.
“I’ve been in touch with Valerie’s father and asked him if it would be OK if we had this ceremony,” Emily Fournier said Tuesday. “He was very grateful that we want to do this.”
Valerie Tieman’s aunt, Charlene Sampson, said Tuesday in a phone interview from her home in Pennsylvania that her niece, who attended cosmetology school at Bob Jones University, was “a very sweet, happy Christian girl.”
“She believed in the Lord. All I can say is, she’s in heaven now,” Sampson said.
Sampson and her husband, Walter, Sarajean Harmon’s brother, plan to attend the funeral Saturday in South Carolina, she said.
Fournier, who acted on stage with Valerie Tieman in the Rowden family’s Recycled Shakespeare Co. and shared dinner parties with the family, said several people will speak at the Fairfield memorial service.
“We will open it up to anyone who would like to say something to come up and speak and share stories about Valerie – even people who didn’t know her but were touched by her,” Fournier said.
The service will be recorded and sent to Valerie’s family in South Carolina, she said.
Those attending may make donations to the Harmon family to help pay for multiple costs associated with her death, according to Fournier.
“We will have envelopes for people to put their donations in and will send them all down to South Carolina,” she said. “There are a lot of expenses associated with this and we want to help the family any way we can.”
Fournier said she hopes the service will provide comfort for people who have been directly and indirectly affected by Valerie’s death, including those who did not know her. “That’s my hope out of this – that people find closure and some sort of peace can come out of this – and it’s an opportunity for people to share her story as a group and share that love she had for everyone,” she said.
The Harmons told authorities they heard from Luc Tieman on Sept. 8 that Valerie “had left him and that he had not seen her for some time,” according to a Maine State Police affidavit. They contacted Fairfield police and reported their daughter missing the next day after officers were told by Luc’s parents – Alan and Laurelle Tieman – that the couple no longer were living at their home on Norridgewock Road.
Luc Tieman later told police he had last seen his wife Aug. 30, saying they went to Wal-Mart in Skowhegan. He told police he went into the store and Valerie stayed behind in his red Chevrolet Silverado truck, but she was gone when he returned from the store. A police review of Wal-Mart surveillance footage showed no sign of the Tiemans or the truck.
Allen Harmon, Valerie’s father, has not responded to messages seeking comment, but he wrote on his Facebook page Sunday. On the evening of Sept. 9, the day he filed the missing-person report with Fairfield police after learning Valerie had been missing for nearly two weeks, his wife, Sarajean, shared with him a Bible verse she had read in her personal devotions, according to his Facebook post.
“We both had a feeling deep down that something was terribly wrong with this whole story since our daughter just doesn’t walk away,” Harmon wrote. “The verse was Psalm 97:10 ‘Ye that love the Lord hate evil: he preserveth the souls of his saints; he delivereth them out of the hand of the wicked.’ I looked at my wife and said sometimes He delivers them by taking them Home right? She nodded solemnly and said that’s right. From then on we trusted Valerie to the Lord just as we had done with all three of our children before they were even born. Now looking back we know Valerie was already Home safe, never to be harmed or heartbroken again, before we ever learned she was missing.”
Tuesday afternoon, at Luc Tieman’s parents’ home on Norridgewock Road in Fairfield, a “No Trespassing” sign was posted at the entrance to the driveway that leads to the home.
The log home is partially obscured from the road by evergreen and hardwood trees, as well as an American flag that towers above the trees. Luc Tieman is a U.S. Army veteran who friends said suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder and has brain damage from a head injury he suffered overseas.
In interviews with the Morning Sentinel, friends said that Luc Tieman was unfaithful to Valerie and sought companionship with other women, telling them his marriage was ending around the time that she disappeared.
The Morning Sentinel reported Friday that Luc Tieman’s lone criminal conviction in Maine stemmed from an incident in September 2014 – about three months after he and Valerie had married – in which he used a hatchet to damage the trailer of a Winslow gun shop late at night. Tieman, who had been drinking alcohol and initially evaded capture, later told police he had an argument with his wife and was out “because he was upset.”
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