MONROE, Louisiana — Eric Hill barely looked in Quinton Tellis’s direction as he told a tale of homicide, lies and intimidation.
After hearing from Mandy Hsiao’s landlord and a friend who gave her a ride to the bank on the last day she was alive, ADA Holly Jones called Hill, who could be considered the prosecution’s star witness, to the stand in Ouachita Parish where Tellis is on trial in Hsiao’s 2015 stabbing death. Tellis, who is from Mississippi, is also the main suspect in the 2014 death of Jessica Chambers in Courtland.
Hill is the cousin of Tellis’s ex-wife, Chakita Jackson. Their wedding was held on the day Hsiao’s body was found.
A few days after the wedding, Hill testified, Tellis told Hill about how he had gone into “a Chinese lady’s” house and taken her into her bedroom and stabbed her until she gave him her Chase debit card pin number. He said he had met Hsiao while fishing, and told Hill he needed to find another Asian woman who could go withdraw the money using Hsiao’s ID. He allegedly told Hill to do it for him, but Hill refused. He said he knew that if he used a homicide victim’s card, the investigation would eventually come around to him.
Hill testified that he didn’t tell anyone about that conversation because he was afraid of what Tellis might do to him or to Jackson.
Throughout his testimony, Hill was calm and resolute. He showed no visible emotion as he admitted to his lies and implicated the man he said frightened him enough to tell them.
When Tellis was arrested after detectives linked him to the debit card, Hill testified, someone he is fairly certain was Tellis called him on a three-way call from jail. There is no recording of the call, and Jones said that three-way calls are often used along with other inmate’s access numbers to get around the system that tracks calls to and from a particular inmate.
On that call, Hill testified, Tellis allegedly told him, “You better put this on someone else or I’ll f— you up.”
“It made me feel threatened and scared for my life,” Hill said. “He already told me what he did to the lady. I was afraid for my life and Chakita’s.”
Hill said he called Monroe Police Department and told them a man named Curtis Lemons had committed the crime, and he told them how it was done. At that point, none of those details were available in the news.
Jones asked him how he decided on Lemons as his target. Hill said that he was “the last person I had a problem with.” In Hill’s original story, it was Lemons who had originally taken Hsiao’s ID and blue Chase bank card. But he also told them Lemons had given the card to Tellis.
“Why did you tell them Tellis had it?” Jones asked.
“I don’t know,” Hill said.
But soon the investigation did come back to him, Hill testified, when authorities found that Lemons had nothing to do with the crime. In March 2016, Hill was arrested and told he would be charged with accessory after the fact to murder. At that point, he confessed that the story he had told them before was true, but that the man who allegedly killed Hsiao had been Tellis, not Lemons.
Tellis went on to plead guilty to using Hsiao’s debit card. A few years later, both men were in the Department of Corrections and they were housed in the same pod, Hill testified. He said it was his understanding that they never should have had that living arrangement.
Hill said he wrote an affidavit during that time that recanted his testimony against Tellis. He said in the document that the only details he knew were the ones he’d seen in the news. On that affidavit were two sets of handwriting: Hill’s and Tellis’s.
“He told me I needed to sign the affidavit and make it right or he would do something to me,” Hill said. He testified that he didn’t even see any coverage from the time after the homicide until much later.
“Were you afraid for your safety?” Jones asked.
“Yes ma’am,” Hill testified.
“Are you concerned today about your safety?” she asked.
“Yes ma’am,” he said.
On cross examination, defense attorney Randall Donald hammered on the fact that Hill had made three previous statements, and two were lies. He walked up to the stand and had Hill read the affidavit with him, pointing out the phrase, “Under penalty of perjury” and others that were inserted to stress the importance of telling the truth.
Hill stood firm that he did, in fact, lie, but he did it because he was afraid of Tellis.
Donald asked him again about whether he was sure the phone call came from Tellis, and Hill said he was fairly certain. He said to Donald and on redirect that it sounded like Tellis. At that point, he testified, he had known Tellis for a year and a half and had more conversations than he could count with him.
When Donald pressed on the perjury issue again, Hill said, “Quinton Tellis told me if I didn’t sign it, something would happen to me. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and we were in a jail where nobody cared about my safety or anybody else’s.”
Hill was asked by the defense about his previous convictions, and he has some drug charges, a simple robbery and a simple burglary, which means no weapons were involved.
Before lunch, Detective Duane Cookson returned to the stand as the prosecution showed more of Tellis’s interview videos. They are the same ones that were shown on Monday to the judge. They were shown to him in their entirety, court officials said, in order to show him that Tellis was not in any way coerced or intimidated by the police.
Court resumes at 1:30 p.m.
