MONROE, La. — One day after Judge Larry Jefferson acquitted Quinton Tellis of murder, a grand jury indicted him on a felony charge of intimidating a witness in the same case, court records show.
The witness is Eric Hill, the cousin of his ex-wife, the man who told police Tellis had told him the story of torturing an Asian woman to death for the PIN to her debit card.
Tellis was acquitted Thursday of second-degree murder in the 2015 killing of Ming-Chen “Mandy” Hsiao, a University of Louisiana at Monroe graduate student from Taiwan who was found dead, stabbed to death in her apartment after roughly 10 days.
He pleaded guilty in 2016 to unauthorized use of Hsiao’s access card.
Hill is the witness whose testimony Jefferson spent the most time picking apart in his written reasons for the verdict. The bill of indictment, filed with the Ouachita Parish clerk of court at 11:04 a.m. Friday, charges that Tellis intimidated or impeded Hill, or attempted to by threat of force, with intent to influence his testimony in Ouachita Parish docket 16-F1796-2. That is the docket number of the murder case in which Tellis was found not guilty the day before.
The single felony count, filed under Louisiana Revised Statute 14:129.1(A), alleges the intimidation occurred on or about July 30, 2020, while the murder charge was pending and years before it came to trial.
A warrant was issued on Friday, the same day as the indictment. Bond was set at no bail pending a hearing. The Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office booked Tellis, who was already in custody, on Friday.
The timing is stark. Tellis had been ordered discharged from the murder case Thursday and was to be returned to Mississippi to serve out a burglary sentence with a projected release date of Oct. 16, 2027.
Instead he was booked back into custody in Ouachita Parish on a new felony a day later.
The indictment gives documentary weight to something that surfaced at trial, and that Jefferson’s written reasons set aside.
Hill testified that he had given police several conflicting accounts. He first told investigators that Curtis Lemons told him he had committed the murder, an accusation he said Tellis forced on him through a three-way call from the jail. Hill was entirely unrelated to Hsiao’s case, and would have had no reason to contact police about the crime otherwise.
Tellis was in custody on the access card and marijuana charges after his August 19-20, 2015 interviews when the state asserts the call to Hill was made. Sgt. Duane Cookson testified he didn’t have probable cause for murder yet at that point. The ATM and phone evidence that built the murder case came afterward.
Law enforcement asked Hill to initial a photo lineup after he picked Lemons out, and he wouldn’t do it. This led them to press him harder, and he then broke down and said it was Tellis who told that story.
Hill told the court that after he was incarcerated on an unrelated charge and placed in the same housing pod as Tellis, he recanted his statement to protect himself and his cousin, who was Tellis’s wife at the time. He then signed an affidavit saying law enforcement coerced that account, then later testified Tellis had forced him to sign the affidavit.
Handwriting consistent with Tellis’s was on that affidavit along with Hill’s.
In his written reasons for the verdict, Jefferson said he found Hill was not credible. He noted that no record substantiated the three-way jail call, that Hill had not been 100% sure when questioned on whether the call definitely came from Tellis, and that he felt Hill’s demeanor on the stand did not inspire confidence.
Jefferson did not address the account of Tellis and Hill being housed together, or Hill’s stated fear for his family, in his analysis of why Hill’s testimony could not carry the state’s case.
The grand jury’s action addresses that same conduct directly. Where Jefferson’s verdict treated the alleged pressure on Hill as unproven, the indictment asserts it as a chargeable felony.
The murder case itself is closed and cannot be reopened. Under Louisiana law an acquittal is final and cannot be appealed. The witness intimidation charge is a separate prosecution with its own docket, 2026-CR-3767, and is not affected by the outcome of the murder trial. It is unclear from court documents who the presiding judge will be.
Tellis was tried twice in Mississippi in the 2014 burning death of Jessica Chambers of Courtland. Both trials ended in hung juries, and he remains the prime suspect in that case.