Tauzer walked in fear for his life. But Tauzer, the No. Instead, the 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. 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.
The rift between the prosecutor and the former D. 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. 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 miles north in El Dorado County.
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. Tauzer told Connie that if anything should happen to him, she should suspect her former husband, according to Ricci. Then Tauzer confided something else:. According to Ricci, Tauzer said the grandfather had warned him that Chris Hillis, his son, had a plan to murder him.
