In April 1921, a young American woman named Lydia Molavi shot and killed her 26-year-old Iranian husband, Abdul Hussein Molavi, in their apartment in Washington, D.C. The sensational case drew media attention in the American capital and concerned U.S. and Iranian diplomats, particularly when Lydia Molavi was acquitted of second degree murder in January 1922. As late as early 1925, Iranian diplomats and Iran’s Majles (parliament) protested the case’s outcome. This paper is drawn from a larger study of American-Iranian relations during the first half of the 20th century, and it is based on U.S.-Iran diplomatic exchanges, newspaper articles, and other sources. It examines the Molavi murder case through an unorthodox combination of analytic lenses – diplomacy, gender and women, culture, religion, and race – to advance two arguments. First, when viewed from multiple angles, seemingly minor ground-level events like the Molavi case can actually reveal much about early American-Iranian relations, from directly impacting the two governments’ diplomatic relationship to illustrating the developing power imbalance between the two nations to illuminating how Americans and Iranians saw one another in the 1920s. Second, to provide a more complete picture of foreign relations between the U.S. and Iran – or between any two countries – historians must combine analytic lenses rather than rely primarily upon a single methodological approach and thus should analyze official state-to-state relations alongside the roles played by non-state actors, culture, and other factors. Indeed, marriage is the most intimate form of foreign relations. Marriages between Americans and Iranians were a microcosm of and contributed to the broader relationship between the two countries, and this paper makes the case that historians should devote more attention to close personal relationships that crossed national boundaries as an important facet of the history of U.S.-Iran relations.