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?

'There must be some bigger purpose'

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

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

Casey Christie / The Californian A portrait of Tauzer is framed by flowers and candles at his funeral.

In February 1999, four months after he was stricken, Tauzer -- newly bearded and 55 pounds lighter, returned to work.

"I have to find the reason I'm here," he said at the time. "It must be some reason besides working at the Kern County District Attorney's Office. There must be some bigger purpose."

Paul Van Metre knew Tauzer on both a professional and a personal level. Van Metre, now retired from IBM, helped Tauzer set up a child-support payment monitoring program that Van Metre says is now the basis for systems used widely throughout the state.

He also got the prosecutor involved in the Boy Scouts of America.

Tauzer, Van Metre said, was a "visionary" who attacked the child-support project with remarkable relentlessness, occasionally working on the program until 4 a.m., then going home to shower and change clothes. Then he'd be back at his desk before anyone else arrived at the office.

Tauzer rarely had time for anything other than work. Boy Scouts was an exception.

Van Metre, who has two sons in Scouting, including one in a troop for developmentally disabled Scouts, introduced the prosecutor to the program in the late '80s.

"If that (allegation of homosexuality) were true, I'd eat my hat," he said. "The fact that he was helping out a young man does not make him gay. I have sons, and if something happened to them, I know Steve would jump in anytime. He was that kind of person."

Others concur.

Margaret Tauzer, one of the prosecutor's 13 siblings, has maintained through this ordeal that her brother was not homosexual. A brother, Mark Tauzer, told the Associated Press the same thing last month.

"If he'd done anything for this kid (Lance Hillis), it's nothing more than he's done for his nieces and nephews," Mark Tauzer said. "Twelve hundred people don't go to a funeral for a sleazy guy."

Lance Hillis' mother, Connie Clagg, is in their corner, too. She knew Tauzer well, and insisted her son did not have a gay relationship with him.

But all the new revelations about Tauzer's interest in her son has her wondering.

"A lot of this is coming as a shock to me," Clagg said last week. "I thought Tauzer was great. But then I think about all this underlying stuff, and I think, 'Oh my god, could he have been this evil and me not know about it?' "