Left inset: Margot Lewis (Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office). Right inset: Liara Tsai (Instagram). Background: The 700 block of E. 16th Street in Minneapolis, where Margot Lewis fatally stabbed Liara Tsai in her studio apartment (Google Maps).
A woman from Minnesota has been convicted of murder following a peculiar car accident. In this incident, two kind-hearted individuals stopped to help after she crashed her sedan. While offering assistance, they discovered the body of a woman in the backseat, concealed with bedding, a futon-like mattress, and a tarp—her head the only part visible. The accused woman was seated in a lawn chair on the median.
The victim was identified as Margot Lewis’ former girlfriend, Liara Tsai, 35, who had been stabbed fatally in the neck by Lewis, 33, prior to the 2024 incident.
As previously reported by Law&Crime, Hennepin County prosecutors charged Lewis with stabbing Tsai while they were inside Tsai’s Minneapolis studio apartment. A jury found Lewis guilty of second-degree murder on Monday and noted additional aggravating factors, enabling the presiding judge to consider sentencing beyond standard guidelines, as reported by MPR News.
According to court files, Lewis is described as behaving “unpredictably,” necessitating close monitoring while incarcerated. Prosecutors during the trial stated that Lewis stabbed Tsai, a prominent local DJ, in her bed and left her to bleed to death. Their relationship was characterized as “tense” and “painful,” according to MPR News.
A former romantic partner of Tsai’s told police that the relationship Tsai had with Lewis was “sordid and emotionally challenging.”
The crash that revealed Lewis’ actions took place on June 22, 2024, on Interstate 90 near Highway 42 in Eyota. Lewis had been driving Tsai’s car at the time.
“In checking to see if anyone else was in the vehicle, a deceased individual, a 35-year-old female, was located in the back seat,” police said in a statement on Facebook. “The condition of the deceased was suspicious, and it was immediately apparent that the death was not a result of the motor vehicle accident.”
According to a criminal complaint reviewed by Law&Crime, tire tracks indicated to police that Lewis was moving at a high rate of speed before the accident and when they searched her vehicle, officers found the body of Tsai in “suspicious” condition with dried blood on the blanket and mattress she was wrapped in. She was positioned in the back seat so that her head was aimed toward the passenger seat and her feet toward the driver’s seat.
KROC reported that the Minneapolis Police Department executed a search warrant of Tsai’s home and found a disturbing, bloody scene indicating violence. A bloody plastic and metal object was found on a bed; there was antifreeze and a small shovel in the home; and a knife was missing from a butcher’s block in Tsai’s kitchen.
The Star Tribune reported that Steven Seuling, who occasionally hired Tsai to work as a DJ for events he coordinated, said that before her death, Tsai mentioned a friend was coming to stay with her at her house.
The friend was someone Tsai had known for six years, he said, and the person was moving to Minneapolis from Iowa — Lewis is from Iowa.
Seuling told the Tribune that Tsai was a “community and trans activist” and she was “very, very much more than just a DJ.”
He said when she didn’t show up for a gig this past Sunday, he became worried because it was “very unlike her not to be there.”
Lewis is due to face additional charges in Olmsted County for concealing Tsai’s body. She is scheduled to appear in court for her sentencing on Nov. 18.
