Slaying Victim Feared for His Life, Friends Say

BAKERSFIELD -- In the days before his murder gripped this oil and farm town, Stephen M. Tauzer walked in fear for his life. But Tauzer, the No. 2 man in the Kern County district attorney’s office, didn’t request police protection or even share his concerns with colleagues.

Instead, the 58-year-old prosecutor told a friend that he had received a phone call warning him that Chris Hillis, a former Bakersfield cop and district attorney investigator, was going to kill him. Tauzer and Hillis had been arguing over Hillis’ son.

“If you find me drowned in my pool or something,” the overweight prosecutor confided to Hillis’ former wife on Sept. 12, “you’ll know who did it.”

Three days later, Tauzer was found face down in a puddle of blood in the garage of his well-tended house in northwest Bakersfield. He had been dead for at least a day from stab wounds. One of the knives recovered from the scene was still protruding from his head.

On Tuesday, Hillis, 47, was arrested in the slaying after his DNA was found on one of the knives, sheriff’s officials said.

The rift between the prosecutor and the former D.A. investigator is a story of two men struggling over the fate of a 22-year-old drug addict, a young man who happened to be Hillis’ oldest son and Tauzer’s roommate.

Tauzer, who friends say was gay but kept it hidden, had risked his reputation as a prominent prosecutor to save Lance C. Hillis, a kid he had watched grow up in his neighborhood. Tauzer opened his pocketbook and home to the young drug addict. He even gave him a job as a clerk in the D.A.’s office.

But Tauzer’s involvement did not sit well with Hillis’ father. The two men had argued violently over Lance, officials said. Chris Hillis, a hard-nosed law and order type, thought the only way his son would get clean was by going to jail.

Tauzer, though, believed otherwise. After Lance was arrested in a second bust, Tauzer convinced the Kern County courts that Lance belonged not in jail but in a drug treatment center 300 miles north in El Dorado County.

Then in August, five weeks before Tauzer’s slaying, Lance Hillis was killed in a car crash on a lonely stretch of Highway 49, an addict on the run from rehab.

After Lance’s death, Tauzer feared Chris Hillis would hold him accountable.

As he drove to El Dorado County last month to survey the road where Lance had died in a head-on collision, Tauzer seemed troubled. He confided his fears in the presence of his three passengers: Lance Hillis’ mother, Connie Clagg, and Lance’s two sisters, Ricci and Kaycee Clagg.

Tauzer told Connie that if anything should happen to him, she should suspect her former husband, according to Ricci. Then Tauzer confided something else:

He said he had received a phone call from Donald Hillis, Lance’s grandfather who was also a former Bakersfield cop. According to Ricci, Tauzer said the grandfather had warned him that Chris Hillis, his son, had a plan to murder him.

“Promise me you won’t let him get away with it,” Tauzer said.

Connie Clagg confirmed that Tauzer discussed his fears “three to four times” during their trip, but she refused to go into details. Ricci Clagg said her mother has provided those details to sheriff’s investigators.

In a news conference announcing Hillis’ arrest Tuesday, Sheriff’s Cmdr. Martin Williamson said the motive appeared to be Chris Hillis’ continuing rage over Tauzer’s dealings with his son.

Hillis, who pleaded not guilty to one count of murder and is being held without bail, has denied any role in Tauzer’s death. His attorney questions the reliability of the DNA evidence and the alleged motive.

“Chris has given his life to the Lord,” said his attorney, Kyle J. Humphrey. “He doesn’t blame Steve [Tauzer] for Lance’s death.”

Beyond the murder, the case has raised questions of favoritism in the office of Kern County Dist. Atty. Ed Jagels. Despite Jagels’ reputation for aggressive, unyielding prosecutions, the way his office dealt with the drug crimes of Lance Hillis was anything but tough.

Because the case involves such public figures, each with ties to the prosecutor’s office, the murder has uncorked all sorts of serpentine conspiracy theories in this land of Pentecostal churches, country music parables and parades that celebrate private property rights.

Because Tauzer was a veteran who spent 30 years locking up violent criminals, his murder would seem to be a whodunit of infinite possibilities.

Some thought it could be tied to his decades-old handling of an alleged satanic molestation ring whose defendants have been freed from prison because of prosecutorial misconduct.

Others suggested it might be linked to his more recent investigation of civic corruption in the small town of Arvin, where he had indicted the police chief and a city councilman.

Or was it like the murders of other prominent men, who were forced by Bakersfield convention to lead double lives and meet younger men in parks along the Kern River?

“Tauzer’s murder reminds me of so many others in Bakersfield,” said Norm Prigge, a retired Cal State Bakersfield professor who is gay. “This is a place like a lot of places where gay or bisexual men in public office have to express themselves in the most clandestine ways.

“They do stupid things like go to parks or pick up male prostitutes, and they’re vulnerable to the worst kind of hustling and blackmail.”

For example, there was the 1998 stabbing death of 63-year-old Sid Sheffield, a well-known hospital administrator who hid his gay lifestyle from his wife, children and colleagues. Police believe the murder, which remains unsolved, was linked to one of Sheffield’s gay liaisons.

There was the 1984 stabbing death of 49-year-old Marshall Jacobson, a prominent attorney who, like Tauzer, was found dead in his garage. Jacobson concealed from family and friends his sexual relations with young males. Two youths, 14 and 19 years old, who told police that Jacobson was like a father to them, were convicted of the murder.

And there was the 1981 murder of Edwin Buck, a government administrator who did all the hiring and firing in Kern County. Buck, 55, was having an affair with a teenage male hustler he met at Beach Park, along the river. This was the same delinquent teen who had been sleeping with the then-publisher of the Bakersfield Californian, who later died of AIDS, and a well-known political consultant.

The illicit relationships with a minor, documented in court testimony, were known to authorities, but they took no legal action. Buck was later beaten to death with a hammer and his body cremated in the back of his car. The young hustler was convicted of murder.

It is Tauzer’s relationship with Hillis, the timing of the car crash and the murder that Tauzer’s family now focuses on. But they say Tauzer, who never married and worked long hours, took only a fatherly interest in young Hillis.

“After Lance became addicted to drugs, Steve thought he could help turn his life around,” said Tauzer’s sister, Patt Pavao. “It had nothing to do with him being gay or not.”

Pavao said she feared that Hillis’ father was still nursing a grudge after striking her brother two years earlier in an argument over Lance.

“We questioned Steve about it. We were concerned. But even if Steve saw the dangers, he wouldn’t necessarily change if he thought what he was doing was right.”

Among some in the tightknit legal community here, Tauzer was viewed as a tireless prosecutor and a private man who concealed his homosexuality.

“Everyone here is skirting the issue, using euphemisms to describe the relationship between Tauzer and [Lance] Hillis,” said Tim Lemucchi, a defense attorney who considered Tauzer a fine public servant.

“No one wants to come out and say that Tauzer was gay and involved in a ‘sugar daddy’ relationship with Hillis.”

Connie Clagg, Lance’s mother, said her son told her that Tauzer was gay. But she said Lance had plenty of girlfriends and doubted that he and Tauzer were involved in a sexual relationship. “Steve Tauzer was the most unselfish man I ever met,” she said. “There were no strings attached” to Tauzer’s generosity.

To know Lance Hillis as a boy, family members said, was to both love and fear for him. He could not squash a bug without mourning it.

“I knew from when he was young he would go all good or all to the bad,” said his grandmother Betty Clagg, sitting in her ranch house at the edge of the Mojave Desert. “He was too sensitive. He couldn’t cope with reality.”

Growing up, Lance split time between his divorced parents. His mother and stepfather, Connie and Rick Clagg, lived in Tehachapi. His father, a veteran cop, lived in an upscale section of northwest Bakersfield, just down the block from Tauzer.

Lance’s freshman picture at Centennial High shows a handsome boy with a broad smile and tousled brown hair. He joined the debate team and, with his gangly frame filling out, played football.

“Debate was difficult for him, but he got better,” said forensics teacher Bud Davis. “He was just a sweet kid, very considerate. And I never saw the earmarks of any alcohol or drug abuse.”

Lance found himself whipsawed at home. Connie and Rick Clagg were anything but disciplinarians, said Betty Clagg. Then Lance would stay with his father, a taskmaster, and find himself plunged into a world of rigid order. It is unclear just when drugs entered Lance’s life, but methamphetamine became his high of choice. He was arrested for grand theft in August 2000, court records show, and that same month, his father’s fears about his addiction were confirmed.

Chris Hillis had gone to his son’s apartment in east Bakersfield and pounded on the door. Inside, he found a small amount of meth and some syringes. He cuffed his son and called police. Lance enrolled in a drug treatment program, stayed clean for a while, then went on a binge and got kicked out.

Family members say Chris Hillis, despite his sometimes strict child rearing, loved his son. To better understand Lance’s addiction, Hillis went back to school and became a drug treatment counselor. He believed Lance needed to “hit bottom” before he could change. And hitting bottom meant going to jail for a long enough time to scare him sober.

But Hillis watched in frustration as his son flunked one drug program only to be enrolled in another, thanks to the intervention of Tauzer. If Hillis was a proponent of tough love, Tauzer believed in a more indulgent approach.

Tauzer went to extraordinary lengths to help the younger Hillis. He kept track of Lance’s movements through the court system. He wasn’t shy about addressing judges on Lance’s behalf.

“Lance had a difficult and, I believe, abusive childhood,” Tauzer wrote in one letter to the court.

Tauzer’s interest raised ethical questions inside the prosecutor’s office. Through five terms in office, Jagels had taken a firm stance against drug abuse. Prison, not treatment, was his policy.

In an interview shortly after Tauzer’s death, Jagels said he thought the younger Hillis should have gone to jail, but he failed to get his top prosecutor to back off.

Jagels and Tauzer had been friends for 27 years and lived together for a time after Jagels divorced his first wife, according to former co-workers. Tauzer was known inside the office as Jagels’ “loyalty cop,” coming down hard on any employee who criticized the boss.

Tauzer’s ties to Lance forced Jagels to declare a conflict of interest and hand over the prosecution of Lance’s drug case to the California attorney general’s office.

But Tauzer continued to intervene to the point that the deputy attorney general handling the matter described his participation as “inappropriate” in a court document.

Tauzer took in Lance as a house guest and gave him his 1993 Ford Explorer. He let him use his $1,200 Ibanez guitar with inlaid mother-of-pearl, which Lance tried to pawn for $25.

More than once, Betty Clagg said, she expressed concern about her grandson’s involvement with Tauzer because of his sexual orientation. “He’s gay, and I don’t like him helping Lance,” she recalled telling family members. But every time she raised the matter, she said, she got nowhere.

Her daughter-in-law, Lance’s mother, Connie, remained in Tauzer’s corner. It didn’t matter to her if Tauzer was gay. He cared enough to shelter her son. Tauzer also was generous to her. Whenever Connie needed financial help, Lance went straight to Tauzer for the money, relatives said.

Court records show that Tauzer was concerned that Lance would never get well in his hometown. So he took him to Placerville, to a treatment facility called Progress House.

But Tauzer didn’t get permission from Lance’s probation officer to take him out of Kern County. Still, at Tauzer’s behest, Judge Lee Felice allowed Lance to seek treatment up north.

Eager to show how well Lance was doing, Tauzer wrote a June 29 letter to Felice after visiting Lance at Progress House. “I am happy to report that Lance looked healthy, happy and, more importantly, drug-free.”

If so, he wasn’t clean for long.

In mid-July, while driving under the influence in El Dorado County, Lance lost control and hit a telephone pole, barely escaping injury and totaling Tauzer’s car, according to a California Highway Patrol report.

Three weeks later, Lance stole a car from outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Placerville and sped off down Highway 49. As he crossed the American River, he swerved into oncoming traffic and struck another car head-on. The occupant of the other car escaped serious injury, but Lance was killed on impact.

A few weeks later, on Sept. 12, Tauzer drove to the crash site to figure out what happened. He was accompanied by Lance’s mother and his two half-sisters, Ricci and Kaycee. Together, they visited Lance’s friends at Progress House, and Tauzer offered to contribute money for a plaque to remember Lance.

It was during this trip that Tauzer confided his fears about Chris Hillis, Ricci recalled. He told Connie that he had received a phone call from Donald Hillis, Lance’s grandfather, warning him that Chris planned to kill him.

Donald Hillis, who declined to be interviewed, found Tauzer’s battered body in his garage the following Sunday.

Chris Hillis, in a brief interview with The Times last month, denied any role in the killing and insisted he had put aside any bad feelings toward Tauzer after his son’s death.

Still, family members recalled, Hillis put the word out that Tauzer was not to be allowed to attend his son’s funeral.

Tauzer’s funeral was as close to a state occasion as you will find in Bakersfield. St. Phillip’s Catholic Church was packed. Friends and family spoke about Tauzer’s fairness as a prosecutor and his decency as a man.

Until his arrest, Chris Hillis continued to help addicts try to beat drugs. In honor of Lance, he had renamed his drug rehabilitation center in east Bakersfield “Lance’s Haven.”

Hillis said he never gave up hope for his son and once made a promise to him. “[I’m] going to be here when you return from your horrific journey,” he said. “He never returned.”