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?

Questions dog Jagels

Letter requesting information from Jagels

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

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

Felix Adamo / The Californian District Attorney Ed Jagels watches the arraignment of Chris Hillis, accused of murdering Stephen M. Tauzer, who was Jagels' top assistant. Some have questioned whether Jagels should have reined in Tauzer from his involvement in the legal proceedings of Lance Hillis, Chris Hillis' son and a sometime housemate of Tauzer's.

If it's true that Stephen Tauzer's relationship with a young drug addict led to his own brutal murder last September, uncomfortable questions could be asked of Kern County's district attorney.

By all accounts, Tauzer went to bat in an unprecedented way for Lance Hillis, giving him money, cars and lodging, and writing letters to judges on Lance's behalf.

Standing watch through it all was Tauzer's boss and longtime friend, Ed Jagels.

How much Jagels knew of Tauzer's relationship with, and efforts on behalf of, Lance Hillis may be of great interest when the murder trial of Lance's father, Chris Hillis, gets under way sometime this year -- perhaps in August, perhaps even later.

That Jagels might sanction such leniency is at direct odds with the image he has carefully cultivated over the years -- a tough-on-crime lawman who gives even petty criminals no quarter.

During his tenure as district attorney, Kern County has had the highest per-capita prison commitment rate of any major California county, a fact Jagels --former president and director of the California District Attorney's Association -- notes on his department's Web site.

Jagels' department has successfully obtained a significant number of "three-strikes" sentences as well: 372 since the frequent-offender law was enacted in 1994, according to D.A.'s data through 2001. That is the largest per-capita rate of any of the state's 15 most populous counties.

But the D.A.'s office has also taken its public-relations lumps, none more brutal than those delivered in Edward Humes' controversial 1999 book, "Mean Justice," which alleges a longstanding pattern of overzealous prosecution in Kern.

The expose by Humes, who won a 1989 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on military affairs, focused on the 1992 arrest and trial of Patrick Dunn, a retired high school principal accused of murdering his wife. Humes suggests prosecutors withheld evidence, among other misdeeds, leading to a wrongful conviction.

And the Dunn case, Humes alleges, is just one of several questionable prosecutions by the District Attorney's office. Most notable among those dubious cases, according to Humes, are the high-profile Bakersfield child molestation convictions of the 1980s, most of which have been overturned.

Those cases, Humes claims, stand in stark contrast to the Tommy Tarver and Ed Buck murder cases of 1978 and 1981. (The Tarver case was prosecuted under then-D.A. Al Leddy.) Specifically, Humes questions the office's apparent lack of interest in pursuing an investigation against several prominent gay men exposed in trial testimony as possibly having had sex with a minor.