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?

The hairdresser

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

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

Mistriel

In many ways, Tommy Tarver was as unlike Steve Tauzer as he could be.

Tarver owned a fashionable hair salon on Bakersfield's F Street known as Mr. T Westchester. He'd been married twice but by the mid-1970s was living as a gay single man.

Among his supposed paramours, according to Californian reports at the time, was Robert Glen Mistriel, a 13-year-old male prostitute who'd been working the streets of Bakersfield and L.A. since age 11.

A gardener working in Tarver's yard the morning of Jan. 4, 1978, spotted blood seeping beneath the back door of the salon owner's Beech Street house. Police called to the scene found Tarver on the floor inside -- beaten, stabbed, nude and comatose.

He died five days later, having never regained consciousness.

By that time, suspicion had fallen on Mistriel. The youth had been stopped the day after the murder while driving Tarver's car, arrested and charged with burglarizing his home and salon. Mistriel admitted having had a key to the shop, according to The Californian.

A taxi driver testified he'd given Tarver, 49, and Mistriel a ride to the Rancho Bakersfield Motel coffee shop about 11:30 p.m. the night of the murder. An hour later, the cabbie said, he gave Tarver a ride home with a different man.

That man was a 24-year-old university student from Santa Rosa named William Kenneth Manly Jr. Manly had been passing through town and he'd registered at the Rancho Bakersfield Motel, falsely listing his profession as a representative for IBM.

Manly testified he'd met Tarver at the Rancho Bakersfield bar and agreed to go clubbing with him. But Tarver, the suspect said, first wanted to stop at his house and change clothes.

While they were there, Manly testified, two other men arrived and began arguing with Tarver. Manly went outside and sat on the front steps, and when he came back inside to get a jacket, according to The Californian's trial coverage, Tarver was participating in a sex act with the taller of the two men.

Manly, who'd previously taken the opportunity to pocket some of Tarver's silverware, decided that would be a good time to leave.

At 2 a.m., Manly knocked on the door of a house about two blocks from Tarver's and asked to use the phone to call a cab. The couple living there made him wait outside while they placed the call; the next morning they found a silver teaspoon on the ground outside. It matched Tarver's set.

On Jan. 18, Manly was arrested and charged with Tarver's murder.

The trial began May 5, with then-Deputy District Attorney Clarence Westra at the prosecutor's table.

Deputy Public Defender John Ulman was convinced Mistriel, who was never charged with murder, was somehow involved and thought planting that seed in the jury's mind might be the best way to get a favorable verdict for his client. He tried to get the 13-year-old on the stand by granting him immunity for his testimony.

Failing that, Ulman hoped Municipal Court Judge Robert Baca would permit Mistriel to invoke in open court his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, reasoning that either option would prompt jurors to start thinking about alternate scenarios.

But Westra, according to The Californian's coverage, insisted Mistriel had had no role in the killing, and he convinced Baca to deny Ulman.

Mistriel took the Fifth outside the presence of the jury and never faced questioning -- although Ulman got the cab driver to testify that the youth had threatened to "take care of" Tarver if he crossed him. Mistriel, Ulman proposed, had set up Tarver to be killed.

Manly was acquitted of murder but convicted of first-degree burglary. He was sentenced to three years in prison in July 1978 and paroled after 19 months. His family, which operates a prominent auto dealership in Santa Rosa, hasn't responded to numerous requests for information about Manly's whereabouts.

Mistriel, meanwhile, was sentenced to six months at the Kern Youth Facility for burglarizing Tarver's house and shop.

By the following autumn, he was back on the street.