The Mathews County prosecutor who died of a gunshot wound outside her home Tuesday was remembered as a hard-nosed advocate who fought diligently for crime victims.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Tina Marie Walls, 58, was a hard worker who had a special place in her heart for juvenile victims — making them a central focus for much of her 25 years as a prosecutor, her colleagues said.
“She was just the most formidable attorney I’ve ever seen,” said Gloucester County Commonwealth’s Attorney John Dusewicz, her former boss. “Any defendant who had her as a prosecutor drew the short straw. She was unrivaled.”
Walls worked at the Suffolk prosecutor’s office for about 20 years under Commonwealth’s Attorney Phil Ferguson, rising to the position of chief deputy. When Ferguson was stepping down, she left to become chief deputy in Gloucester in 2021.
Many times in court, Dusewicz said, “some big shot defense attorneys” try to “cajole and intimidate” prosecutors.
“But she never wavered,” he said. “She knew exactly what she was going to do and how she was going to do it. She wasn’t intimidated by anybody.”
But she also related well to people — including jurors.
“She knew how to talk to people,” Dusewicz said. “She knew how to explain it. She had a very calm, conversational, motherly tone, and I think people trusted her.”
Mathews Commonwealth’s Attorney Tina Marie Walls, left, and Sheriff April Edwards, right.
Walls was found outside her Mathews County home Tuesday morning. She was on the ground outside her SUV with a single gunshot wound to the chest, according to a search warrant affidavit.
A revolver was found nearby, with four rounds and one spent cartridge case. She died at the scene.
The Virginia State Police — leading the investigation — have said they don’t believe anyone else was involved. The State Medical Examiner’s Office had not revealed a cause and manner of death as of Friday evening.
Mary Pettitte, the commonwealth’s attorney in Montgomery County in the Blacksburg area, grew up in Gloucester.
She met Walls in the mid-1990s, when the women attended meetings of the Greater Peninsula Women’s Bar Association. At the time, Pettitte said, she was in private practice and Walls was working for the Legal Aid Society.
They’ve maintained a friendship ever since.
Pettitte said she talked with Walls a few weeks ago, after Walls’ father died Jan. 5.
When Pettitte got an email Tuesday saying Walls was dead of a gunshot wound, the shock was immense.
“It popped up as an email and I thought, ‘I’m not reading this right,’” she said. “I was totally stunned.”
Pettitte said Walls never spoke badly about others — even when they frustrated her.
“I never heard her say anything ugly about a person,” Pettitte said.
“I might have been like, ‘He’s a real (expletive).’ I never heard Marie say anything like that. It would always be like, ‘Well, I just really wish that they would act more in this fashion.’ I really respected her for the level of professionalism that she tried to have.”
According to Walls’ campaign website, she grew up in Williamsburg, one of four siblings and the daughter of an Army sergeant. She attended the Williamsburg-James City Schools, playing basketball and softball and taking part in band and orchestra.
After graduating from North Dakota School of Law, Walls worked for Legal Aid offices on the Eastern Shore, Williamsburg and Hampton.
She later became a prosecutor in Suffolk while teaching at Christopher Newport University and at William & Mary. She also led the Child Abuse Program at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters, becoming an expert on interviewing abused and neglected children.
“She was an extremely competent and capable prosecutor, make no mistake about it,” said Ferguson, Walls’ boss in Suffolk for 20 years.
Her specialty, he said, was prosecuting child abuse and neglect cases.
“She was extraordinary good with the young children,” Ferguson said, adding that Walls often obtained lengthy prison sentences from judges and juries alike.
Hearing about her death, he said, was “like somebody hit you in the head with a two by four.”
Suffolk defense attorney Patrick Bales said Walls “cared a great deal about the victims in every case she handled.”
“I always enjoyed when she and I would talk about cases, because I knew I was dealing with a professional who gave a crap,” Bales said. “When it came to protecting children, there was nobody who was more involved and dedicated than Marie.”
“There may be some people who felt like she was tougher than she needed to be,” he said. “I’m just not one of them. She was definitely a zealous advocate, which is what we should all be aspiring to be.”
“She did her job, she did it well, and that was something that I always enjoyed.”
Dusewicz said that during Walls’ time in Gloucester, he and Walls bonded over many conversations about their kids. Walls has a son, now 14, who she would sometimes take into the office.
“He was a nice, well-mannered, cute kid,” Dusewicz said. “I would tell her about my boys, and she would tell me about her boy — how school’s going, vacations, just normal stuff. If we weren’t talking about work, we were talking about our kids.”
With the retirement of longtime Mathews Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom C. Bowen III in 2023, Walls decided to run for the seat that November. She garnered 63% of the vote to 37% for attorney A. Conrad Bareford III.
At the time of her death, Walls was just over halfway through that four-year term.
After her election to the Mathews seat, Walls still came back to help Ducewicz in a trial she had previously been working on in Gloucester — a murder case against a man charged with killing an 18-year-old woman and shooting a man during a home invasion.
They landed a first-degree murder conviction, and Walls’ help was crucial.
“After that, she walked on water as far as I was concerned,” Dusewicz said.
Black ribbons of mourning adorn the Mathews County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office on Buckley Hall Road, on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2025.
Nate Green, the top prosecutor for Williamsburg and James City County, said Walls’ work in a wide range of prosecutor’s offices was unique — chief deputy of a large office in Suffolk and a mid-sized one in Gloucester before taking the helm of the tiny Mathews office.
In fact, Walls was the sole prosecutor in the Mathews office, working alongside a small support staff.
“She excelled at what really ends up being three different jobs,” Green said. “We’re all working from the same code book, but how you operate changes dramatically depending on the type of office. And she excelled in all three of those different sizes.”
Since her election in Mathews, Green said, Walls became a “champion for the smaller offices,” and “worked hard to draw attention to all of the issues that one-person offices have.”
“It can be a lonely job, but she embraced it,” he said. “You can’t take a vacation, because when you take a vacation, there’s no commonwealth’s attorney. When she’s not working, the work’s not getting done.”
But when Walls went to the small Mathews County office, “she brought that level of experience and high expectations that came from larger offices,” Green said. “She never used the lack of resources as an excuse.”
Green and Walls served together on mock panels at William & Mary’s law school, where they would act as appeals court judges, then critique the law students’ arguments.
“My critiques would be a little bit more glowing, like ‘You’re great at this,’” he said. “Marie would say, ‘You were very good at this, but here’s what you need to improve on.’ She was kind of no-nonsense … She was someone who never rested on laurels at all.”
When Walls was in Gloucester, Green said, she handled a child sex crime case in which the victim had ties to his office.
“She got justice for an office family member of mine, and it meant the world to me,” Green said.
According to Dusewicz, Walls lost both parents in recent years — her mother in 2023 and her father in early January.
“She was a devout Catholic and a very devoted daughter,” Dusewicz said. “She was always taking care of her parents and making sure they were OK and had everything they needed.”
“She was making future plans,” the prosecutor added.
He was supposed to see her Friday for a board meeting of a local alcohol safety program after its executive director was slain on the job in December.
“I had agreed to cover a docket for her in April so she could take her son on a spring break vacation,” Dusewicz said. “What I’m saying is, she’s been the same old Marie.”
The chief deputy at the Gloucester prosecutor’s office is filling the Mathews office on an emergency basis until the Circuit Court judges select an interim for Walls’ seat. That person will hold the job until a special election this November, with a regular election slated for November 2027.
But everyone seems to agree that Walls won’t be easy to replace.
“There’s nobody that I have ever met who was so driven to do the job right,” Green said. “She had high expectations, and she worked very hard to meet them.”
Or, as Pettitte put it: “It’s a huge loss to the citizens of Mathews.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
