Powerful gay men. Vulnerable teen-age boys. Murder. For years, some prominent local men who led secret lives were rumored to be protected. Whispers surrounding another important man's death prompt the question: Is there really a conspiracy?

Loving Lance: A battle that consumed three lives

By ROBERT PRICE, Californian staff writer
e-mail: rprice@bakersfield.com

Monday January 20, 2003, 03:40:00 PM

Felix Adamo / The Californian Chris Hills, awaiting trial for the murder of Stephen M. Tauzer, talks about his son Lance Hillis, who died in a car wreck in August, just five weeks before Tauzer was found murdered in his garage. Hillis, a former Bakersfield Police officer and District Attorney investigator, has been kept in solitary confinement at the Lerdo Pre-Trial Facility since his arrest in October.

Four years before 22-year-old Lance Hillis died on an El Dorado County highway, he was walking down a road in Tehachapi late one night with three friends.

They'd been drinking and may have smoked a joint or two as well. A Kern County sheriff's patrol car drove past and the four teens took off running.

According to the Sheriff's Department's incident report, the two deputies gave chase. A minute or so later they caught a glimpse of two of the teens behind a Mexican restaurant, beside a blue Dumpster. By the time the patrol car spun around, the two figures had vanished.

They hadn't gone far.

A deputy lifted the lid of the metal trash bin, and there they were -- a 17-year-old kid nicknamed Rocky and his 18-year-old friend, Lance Hillis.

In detaining the two teens, the deputies wrote a deceptively innocuous prologue to a tragic and complex story.

It is the story of Lance Hillis and the two men who loved him.

One was the father who desperately wanted to help his son escape a savage drug addiction, even if it meant sending his son to jail for a significant stretch of time.

The other was Assistant District Attorney Stephen M. Tauzer.

Tauzer's motives lie at the heart of the story -- and, based on scenarios being explored by attorneys for both the prosecution and defense -- at the heart of the murder trial of Chris Hillis that will take place sometime in mid- to late 2003.

This much seems certain: Tauzer's interest in Lance Hillis was greater, and significantly more complicated, than most people outside of local law enforcement could have fathomed on Sept. 15, the day Tauzer's body was discovered in the garage of his northwest Bakersfield home.