Murder Case Grips Bakersfield

Years before he was accused of killing a top prosecutor, then-district attorney investigator Christopher Hillis won a $50,000 stress retirement that was five to 10 times the usual award in tightfisted Kern County.

When the decorated ex-cop was asked how he had pulled it off, Hillis told former colleague Kyle Beckman that he knew some “secrets” about the district attorney’s office: “ ‘I know where the skeletons are buried.’ ”

“He apparently wasn’t joking,” said Beckman, who is still fighting the county on his own mental stress claim.

Now, as Hillis sits in jail on charges of stabbing to death Assistant Dist. Atty. Stephen M. Tauzer, former co-workers and others in the legal community wonder what Hillis knows and how much of it might come out if the case goes to trial. He has pleaded not guilty.

“There’s a lot of nervous people,” said Gene Lorenz, a local defense attorney and courthouse observer. “A lot of things are going to come out when this goes to trial.”

Even the local paper, the Californian, has editorialized about “a cloud building over the Kern County district attorney’s office” since Tauzer’s murder.

Saying the “fairness of Kern County’s legal system” has been called into question by Tauzer’s involvement with Hillis’ drug-addicted son, the paper has called on Dist. Atty. Edward R. Jagels to provide a full disclosure of Tauzer’s actions.

Hillis’ attorney, Kyle Humphrey, declines to detail what, if any, special knowledge his client possesses about his days in the district attorney’s office. But he said he is operating on the theory that Tauzer was leading a double life.

On one hand, Humphrey said, Tauzer was a hard-working prosecutor trusted by Jagels to run the office. On the other, Tauzer, 57, was living with Hillis’ 22-year-old son, Lance, and crossing ethical lines to keep the young drug addict out of jail.

“Chris is going to get the best possible defense,” Humphrey said. “If in the process powerful people are embarrassed, so be it. If it requires delving into secrets people don’t want out, so be it.”

Tauzer, who friends say was gay, let Lance Hillis stay at his house and gave him money, a credit card and a clerking job in the district attorney’s office.

Although Christopher Hillis hoped his son would get a stiff jail sentence that might help break his addiction, Tauzer kept placing Lance in drug treatment programs, including one in El Dorado County. That is where Lance was killed in a car crash in early August, five weeks before Tauzer’s death.

Humphrey said he is considering a defense that centers on the notion that Christopher Hillis and Tauzer were engaged in a tug of war over Lance. If Tauzer used his position -- and the threat of jail -- to pressure Lance into a gay relationship, it could have fueled the father’s rage.

“If a parent discovers that his child is being taken advantage of in a predatory homosexual relationship, that parent would naturally be enraged,” Humphrey said.

Humphrey is also looking into the possibility that Tauzer may have been killed by someone he knew only briefly. He says the murder bears a “striking resemblance” to past cases involving prominent Bakersfield men who were living secret gay lives and were killed by young hustlers.

One such case that went to trial, the 1981 murder of county administrator Edwin Buck, included testimony alleging that Buck and a Kern County political consultant were having sex with teenage boys who lived in a group home.

If Humphrey wants to turn Hillis’ defense into a referendum on the district attorney’s office, he could raise questions about a number of public controversies over the years.

Jagels’ office was criticized by the state attorney general for the way it handled ritual child-abuse prosecutions in the 1980s. Those were some of the earliest cases in the wave of investigations that swept the nation -- such as the McMartin Pre-School case in Los Angeles -- that some legal experts compared to the Salem witch trials. Most of those convicted in Kern County were later freed due to prosecutorial errors or misconduct.

The office was also taken to task in the book, “Mean Justice,” which accused prosecutors of a pattern of questionable conduct in their zeal to send people to prison.

“How many D.A.’s offices in the country have best-selling books written about them?” said attorney Lorenz. “When the appellate courts keep issuing reversals and rebuking the D.A.’s office for hiding evidence, these are serious problems.”

In the days after his top deputy’s murder, Jagels said he didn’t see anything wrong with Tauzer’s intervention on behalf of Lance Hillis. But he has repeatedly declined to comment since and has instructed prosecutors in his office to keep silent as well.

Jagels referred a call for this story to the office of state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, which will be prosecuting the case to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, since both Hillis and Tauzer were employed by the district attorney.

Deputy Atty. Gen. David Druliner said it would be “inappropriate to comment” on the case, or on what the defense may or may not do.

It is unclear if Tauzer had a sexual relationship with Lance Hillis. What is clear is that Tauzer’s affection for the young meth addict led the prosecutor into increasingly bizarre behavior.

Christopher Hillis, who went back to school to become a drug counselor after leaving the prosecutor’s office, believed his son needed to bottom out in prison before he could get clean. But Tauzer kept getting involved. The prosecutor went to court with Lance Hillis and pleaded with judges to give him one more chance.

Besides infuriating Christopher Hillis, Tauzer’s treatment of Lance Hillis upset local defense attorneys.

“This is a county where if you catch a kid with drugs who has no connections, they send him to prison for umpteen million years,” Lorenz said.

Yet here was Lance Hillis walking around free. Not only walking around, but driving Tauzer’s Ford Explorer, living in Tauzer’s house and spending Tauzer’s money.

Then in August, Lance Hillis died in a car crash 300 miles to the north in El Dorado County. He was at the wheel of a car he had stolen after running away from the drug treatment program in Placerville.

On Sept. 12, five weeks after Lance Hillis’ death, Tauzer confided to friends that he was afraid Christopher Hillis would hold him responsible for the death and try to kill him. Three days later, the prosecutor was found dead in his garage.

Tauzer had been bludgeoned and stabbed numerous times. A knife had been thrust into his head.

Christopher Hillis was arrested a month later. Investigators said they made a DNA match between Hillis and a knife found near Tauzer’s body.

At one time, the accused and the victim were bound by the same oath and counted each other as close friends.

Hillis, a former Bakersfield Police Officer of the Year, was recruited by Jagels in 1985. He rose quickly to lieutenant in the D.A.’s office. Some of the men under him recall Hillis as smart, personable and hard-working, to the point that he dusted off two old murder cases and found the hidden evidence to solve them.

“Chris Hillis was a very talented investigator -- witty, friendly and very intelligent,” said Kevin Clerico, a former district attorney investigator who worked beside Hillis in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. “Jagels and Tauzer treated him as one of the favored guys.”

Hillis was one of the regulars at Jagels’ spacious Fairway Drive home for barbecues and political fund-raisers, co-workers said.

Things were going so well that Hillis told friends he had been promised the job of chief investigator by Tauzer and Jagels.

But Hillis never got the job. He and the chief investigator didn’t get along. According to Hillis’ disability records, he believed his boss had singled him out for unfair treatment, and in 1993 he went to Jagels for help. But his old friend rebuffed him.

After that, records show, Hillis developed a rash, suffered from insomnia and a mental breakdown. He told doctors that the pressures inside the office had gotten so bad that he was having thoughts about killing the chief of the unit.

The conflict with his boss, now retired, centered on Hillis’ role as chief of the undercover narcotics unit. At the time, it was also part of Hillis’ job to head up the district attorney’s asset forfeiture program. Seizing cars, boats and cash from drug dealers -- all of which the agency could keep under state law -- had become a source of cash at a time when the state’s economy was strapped.

Hillis’ unit was so adept at tracking drug dealers that Kern County became one of the most successful in the state in the value of assets seized, former investigators said.

The forfeiture money, which totaled $3 million for 1992-93, was used in part to pay the salaries of the district attorney’s investigators. At least once, former investigators said, Tauzer threatened to fire them if they didn’t continue seizing large assets.

“If they were not successful, they would be eliminated out of the budget,” S.A. Manohara, a psychiatrist, wrote in a report on Hillis, a declaration confirmed by two of Hillis’ co-workers.

In late 1993, Hillis left work and brought a disability claim against the county. In September 1995, the county settled, agreeing to pay him a lump sum of $49,362, in addition to giving him his $30,000 annual early retirement. At the time, the county was settling similar claims for lump sums of $3,000 to $4,000 and exceeding $10,000 in only a handful of cases, workers’ compensation records show.

Clark Schliabach, the county counsel’s claims manager, characterized the settlement as “very rare.”

Co-workers recall both Jagels and Tauzer signing off on the settlement.