How a Podcast Helped to Find Justice for Kristin Smart

In television or in interviews, you’ll sometimes hear a person ask another, “Do you have kids?” and I always thought that I understood the question. But now that I’m a mom myself, I’ve learned that you don’t understand the full scope of the question, not really, until you do, actually, have kids of your own. When someone asks, “Do you have kids?”, they want to know if you understand their need to ensure that their babies are safe and happy and cared for.

They want to know if you understand the lengths they’d go to protect their children. And they want to know if you’d understand the never-ending heartbreak they feel because they don’t know where their baby is.

We’ve learned about a lot of horrible parents on this channel, but today, we’re going to learn about the lengths one family went to protect their son, and another’s decades’ long search for their missing daughter.

The Smart Family

Stan and Denise Smart were both educators, and have taught at schools all over the eastern coast for decades. In February 1977, they were based at an American military base in Augsburg, Germany, and after months of struggling to fall pregnant, the couple were looking to adopt a German boy.

But then Denise did fall pregnant, and they welcomed a dark-eyed, blonde baby girl into the world, who they named Kristin Denise. After having spent three years in Germany, they returned to the US, and according to Stan —

“We had what everybody expects when you go to Germany – you come back with a Volkswagen, a cuckoo clock, and a child.”

Stan and Denise would later add two more children to their family – a son, Matthew, and another daughter named Lindsey. They were your typical middle-class, American family. They went hiking on the weekends, went to the beach during the holidays, went on family cruises, and travelled all over the US. They moved to Stockton, California, when Kristin was 11, and bought a house there.

The teenage Kristin did well academically, was a part of the swim team, played volleyball, and made friends easily. According to Stan, Kristin participated in sports for the fun of it and didn’t have the competitive spirit that her younger siblings had, but she still cheered them on from the sidelines. Kristin loved to swim, spent hours in her room designing floor plans for houses, and travelled whenever possible. She spent a holiday in London with friends, spent a summer as an exchange student in Venezuela because she wanted to improve her Spanish, and learned to make omelettes the way the chefs did on cruise ships.

According to Anna-Marie, one of her childhood friends, Kristin was smart and friendly, but quiet. She was also tall, measuring in at just over 6ft, and was self-conscious about it. As she grew older, Kristin adopted the Bohemian or ‘hippy’ look that was popular in the 90’s, added little braids to her hair, and loved listening to Bob Marley, Tom Petty, and rap music.

After graduating from Lincoln High School, Kristin worked as a lifeguard and a camp counsellor at Camp Mokule’ia (Moh-ku-lei-ee-a) in Ohahu, Hawaii. According to Rachel Bird, who shared a cabin with her for three months —

”…[Kristin] was tall, beautiful, blonde. A surfer girl, like really chill…She was a sweet girl. She loved being out in the water. Any time she could go and do Search and Rescue or anything like that, she wanted to be out there doing that.”

After spending three months working her ‘dream job’, Kristin moved to San Luis Obispo, California, in September 1995, and started attending the California Polytechnic State University – aka Cal Poly. According to Stan Smart —

“We thought that would be a good place for her. We thought it was a safe community, you know. And it is. It just didn’t work out that way for our family.”

Kristin had originally signed up for a four-year architecture degree, but she would later switch to communications in the hope that she could become a journalist and realise her dream of travelling the world.

Kristin wanted to be as financially independent as possible, so she signed up to work as a lifeguard to earn a little more cash and was required to swim for a certain amount of time every week to keep up her fitness levels. The only swimming slot available to a newbie was the 5am to 6am slot, so Kristin set her alarm for 4:20 every morning, swam for an hour, attended her classes, worked her lifeguard shifts, and then went back to her dorm room in Muir Hall in the evenings.

But after a few months, Kristin admitted to her parents that she wasn’t happy at Cal Poly. She complained that everyone on campus was ‘the same’, and she struggled to find her own identity. She dyed her naturally blonde hair brown, adopted various nicknames like Marysol, Roxie, Trixie, and Kianna, and signed her emails with the postscript:

“Live your life to be an EXCLAMATION, rather than an EXPLANATION.”

According to Denise Smart, Kristin had piled too much on her plate and was struggling to keep up academically. By January 1996, Kristin was burned out and she begged her parents to allow her to move to a different university – preferably the University of the Virgin Islands, or any of the universities in Puerto Rico, since she missed the happy-go-lucky life she’d had in Hawaii. According to Stan —

“She wasn’t always a happy camper… She wanted to go to another school. She wanted to travel more, she wanted to go to school overseas. She had all these grandiose ideas, at least they appeared to me that way at the time.”

In May 1996, Denise wrote Kristin a letter and explained to her daughter that she had all the opportunities she needed right at her fingertips. Freshman year was a hard on everybody, and Denise suggested that Kristin should get her priorities in order and quit her work as a lifeguard so that she could focus on her studies. Her parents were willing and able to support her financially, and Denise told Kristin that once she had her degree, she could work on earning ‘the big bucks.’

At the time, Kristin was worried that she would fail Biology since one of her tests had been mislaid, but once it was found, Kristin learned that she’d done well on the test and hadn’t failed the semester. She called her parents at around 5 p.m. on the 24th of May 1996, leaving a message on their answering machine and explaining that they’d found the test. She ended the call with a promise to call them that Sunday. Denise Smart recounts —

“She was very excited. She said, ‘Hi, good news, good news.’ That was her good news: She had gotten a call from professor whatever his name was. She had been trying for so long to get that resolved.”

It was a three-day Memorial Day weekend, and the rest of the Smart family spent it at a swim meet where Matthew and Lindsey were competing. They had a scheduled family call with Kristin every Sunday night at 8 p.m., but that night, Kristin didn’t call them like she’d promised. She also didn’t call the next day, or the day after that, and the Smart family found themselves at the threshold of a mystery that would haunt their family for the next 26 years.

The Disappearance of Kristin Smart

Margarita Campos was one of Kristin’s neighbors in Muir Hall. She was busy studying for a biology test when Kristin waltzed into her room that Friday night and asked to borrow her cassette player. Kristin used Margarita’s double cassette player to create a mixtape for herself and eventually managed to convince Margarita that they HAD to go out and party that night.

Margarita eventually agreed, and they joined up with two more girls who lived down the hall and had been invited to a private party. When they left Muir Hall at 8:30 that night, Kristin was wearing a grey crop top, black Roxy-brand board shorts, and red Puma sneakers. She had nothing else on her and had lost her room key, so she depended on Margarita to let her back into Muir Hall.

The four girls waved down a friend of theirs, and he took them to the house party in his truck. According to Margarita, they each received a beer when they arrived, and then stood around and watched as a bunch of guys played video games. It wasn’t exactly the kind of party that they were looking for, and after finishing their beers, Margarita and Kristin left.

“That night was such a chill night. It was such a quiet night in San Luis Obispo. And it was just like a couple of us, driving around in a truck around town. And I’m pretty sure Kristin was the one who said, ‘just drop Margarita and I off here, ‘cause we’re just gonna keep walking around’.”

By 10 pm, they still hadn’t found a party, and Margarita was tired and needed to pee. So she told Kristin that she wanted to go home. After debating it a bit, Kristin was upset and finally told Margarita that she was going to continue looking for a party. Margarita handed Kristin her dorm key, said good night, and headed back to Muir Hall.

“I can still see her standing there after we dropped her off, a little mad I think that I wouldn’t go with her. Someone who wasn’t as independent as Kristin wouldn’t have gone to a party alone.”

“She kept saying, ‘You go with me.’ But I didn’t want to go. I told her, ‘You better be careful,’ and she said she would be fine. Then she said ‘Bye.’”

“I was a Girl Scout for many years and you’re supposed to use the buddy system and I was just tired that night…and she didn’t come back.”

Not too long after the two girls separated, Kristin made her way to 135 Crandall Way, otherwise known as The Crandall House, where a birthday party was being held for two seniors of the Kappa Kai house. Trevor Boelter was one of the 20 people who had been invited to the party, and when he arrived around 10:15 pm, there were maybe 15 people hanging out either inside the house or on the lawn out front. Later, there would be between 45 and 60 people at the party.

When Trevor walked into the house, there were a handful of guys playing pool, people stood talking next to the bar, a few were dancing, and it wasn’t long before a tall, dark-haired girl in a grey crop top and black board shorts drew Trevor’s attention. According to Trevor, she walked up to him and introduced herself as ‘Roxie’. She kissed him, dragged him into the bathroom, and then dropped his hand.

She explained that she had a crush on a basketball player who was also attending the party and Trevor realised that she was just using him to make the guy jealous. She fixed her makeup, asked Trevor if he thought she was ugly, and then asked him who he thought she should go for – the basketball player, or one of the other guys who lived in the house. When he offered his own services, Roxie laughed him off, and then told him to leave because she needed the bathroom.

Trevor admits that he’d felt disappointed that she wasn’t interested in him, but when he closed the bathroom door behind him, a guy with short blonde hair came up to Trevor and demanded to know what he and Roxie had been doing in the bathroom. Thinking that the guy might be Roxie’s boyfriend, Trevor insisted that nothing had happened, and the guy started laughing before telling Trevor that he thought Roxie was ‘sexy’, reassuring Trevor that the blonde guy was just some idiot.

A little over an hour later, Roxie walked up to Trevor again, and this time she seemed wasted. Apparently, she’d tried to flirt with the basketball player and he’d rejected her, and when she tried to kiss Trevor again, he also pushed her away. She was overly flirty and affectionate, and when the party ended at around 2 am on the 25th of May 1996, Roxie was sprawled out on the front lawn of 137 Crandle way, asleep.

Cheryl Anderson had been abandoned by her friends, and another student named Tim Davis offered to walk her to her dorm. When they passed by a sleeping Kristin, Tim told Kristin that she had to leave. She complained that she was cold, and Tim and Cheryl offered to take her home. Kristin was unable to walk on her own, so Tim placed an arm around her body and helped to keep her upright.

As they left the yard, a blonde student named Paul Flores came up to them and offered to help carry Kristin since she lived in the dormitory building next to his – about half a mile or 1 kilometre away in a group of buildings known as The Red Bricks. The four of them walked along the empty, brightly lit streets until Tim reached the parking lot where his car was parked. Cheryl and Paul reassured him that they could manage, and they continued onwards.

According to Cheryl, Kristin was shivering, and Paul had moved his hand so that he was now holding on to Kristin’s bare stomach – stopping just short of groping her and making Cheryl uncomfortable. Kristen would stop walking every few steps, and then Paul would jokingly try to convince Cheryl that she could go on without them – they would manage without her. Instead, Cheryl waited until the two of them caught up with her, and then kept on walking.

When they reached Cheryl’s dormitory building, she asked Paul if he would ensure that Kristin reached her dorm room.

“I said, ‘Will you walk her to her room?’ you know, ‘Will you take her back to her room?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said something about ‘Yes?’ — and I said, ‘If you won’t, I will do it. I will walk her to her room,’ you know … I didn’t want to have to do it. But, you know, if he didn’t want to do it I was — I was going to do it.”

Paul promised to walk Kristin to her room, then jokingly asked Cheryl if she’d give him a goodbye kiss. Cheryl refused, and then Paul asked for a hug, still holding the zoned-out Kristin to him. Creeped out, Cheryl hurried back to her dorm room and Paul continued to carry Kristin until he reached the entrance to Santa Lucia Hall. He then watched as Kristin walked the last 40 yards – or 36 meters – up a steep incline on her own, climbed a short flight of stairs, and entered Muir Hall before he turned and headed to his own room inside Santa Lucia Hall.

Or so he claimed.

Kristin was supposed to spend the night in Margarita’s room since Kristin’s roommate was visiting with friends. She never did. Margarita explains that she waited all of Saturday for Kristin to come and see her, but told herself that Kristin was probably hanging out with some of her other friends.

When Kristin’s roommate, Crystal, returned that afternoon, she found that Kristin’s bed was littered with her makeup and other belongings. When Kristin didn’t spend the night in her room, Crystal became worried and started asking the other residents of Muir Hall if they’d seen Kristin. When Kristin didn’t show up for her classes on Monday, Margarita, Crystal, and several other girls gathered in Jennifer Phipps’s room and listened in as Jennifer called the campus police to report that Kristin was missing.

The Cal Poly Police told Jennifer that Kristin was probably still on holiday, so Jennifer called the San Luis Obispo Police Department. They told her that she had to report Kristin’s disappearance to the Campus Police Department instead. When they called the Cal Poly police Department again, reported that no-one had seen Kristin since that Friday and that they were growing worried, one of their officers agreed to call the Smart family to find out if they knew where their daughter was.

Denise answered the phone and told the Cal Poly police that she hadn’t heard from her daughter since Friday. Instead of logging a missing person’s report, the Cal Poly Police officer noted that Kristin was probably out camping with friends. According to Margarita —

“I remember us telling them ‘She has been gone for over 24 hours! Why are you waiting longer?’ They just didn’t react quick enough. They let time go by. All of the evidence that was probably vital, that is where I think things went wrong.”

Cal Poly Police finally opened a missing person’s report on Tuesday, the 28th of May 1996, and started investigating Kristin’s disappearance. Crystal told Cal Poly Police that all of Kristin’s belongings were still in her room – her clothes, ID, money, cards, and red makeup bag. The next day, Trevor Boelter was visiting friends at the Kappa Kai Fraternity house when one of them asked him if he remembered Roxie from the party that Friday night.

They told him that the police had been asking questions, and asked that anyone who had any contact with her had to come forward. They also sent out questionnaires, and asked students who thought that they might know what had happened to Kristin to complete the forms and hand them in.

Cal Poly Police eventually managed to track down Cheryl Anderson, Tim Davis, and Paul Flores, and interviewed all three of them on the 30th of May 1996 – 5 days after Kristin was last seen. On the surface, they all told a similar story. Tim Davies, a senior, explained that before that night, he’d never met Kristin before.

Cheryl Anderson, a freshman, explained that she’d often see Kristin around campus, but that she didn’t know her. And Paul Flores, another freshman, explained that he didn’t know Kristin and that he didn’t find her attractive. All three of them told the police how they’d escorted Kristin home.

All three of them explained that Tim left first and that Cheryl then left Kristin alone with Paul. He admitted to being the last person to see her but insisted that he had nothing to do with her disappearance. Paul repeatedly told the police that he and Kristin had parted ways at the entrance to Santa Lucia Hall, and that —

“She walked that way, and I walked to my dorm.”

Paul claimed that after he and Kristin parted ways on Saturday morning, he went back to his dorm room and tried to sleep, but he threw up at around 4 in the morning. He then took a shower and went back to bed, and he was sure that someone saw him walking down the hallway, though he didn’t know who. He spent the day watching tv, and on Saturday night he and a few friends went to watch a movie, but he couldn’t provide the police with the full names or addresses of his friends who acted as his alibi’s. On Sunday, his father picked him up and he spent all day in his father’s garage working on his truck, before being arrested by the Arroyo Grande police on Sunday night for not appearing at a hearing for a DUI charge.

But Cheryl told the Cal Poly Police Officers that she’d already been familiar with Paul before that night. She’d often see him on campus and thought that he was ‘kind of creepy’. They often attended the same parties together, and when he was drunk, Paul would flirt with anyone in a skirt and make a nuisance of himself. He had a habit of forcing himself on girls and trying to kiss them, or groping them without their permission before laughing it off like it was a joke.

During one party they’d attended, Paul had tried to kiss one of her friends, and afterward, they referred to him as –

“Chester the Molester”

(Which begs the question – if she already KNEW what kind of guy he was, why did she leave Kristin with him???)

Tim Davies told the police that he’d seen Paul hanging around Kristin the night of the party. At one point, he’d heard a crash and saw that Kristin was lying on the floor in the hallway, and Paul was sprawled out on top of her, trying to kiss her. He didn’t know if she’d fallen or if Paul had pushed her, but it agreed with other eyewitness accounts which explained that Paul had been hovering around Kristin all night.

Trevor Boelter was also brought in for questioning, and he told the police about his interactions with Kristin that night. He also told them how a blonde guy had confronted him after he left Kristin in the bathroom, and had demanded to know what they’d been up to. When he was shown a photo of Paul, Trevor identified him as Blonde Dude.

An Australian exchange student had reported that he’d been heading home on his bicycle when he saw a man and a tall girl arguing in front of Sequoia Hall, which is situated next to Santa Lucia and Muir Halls. Cal Poly detectives interviewed one of Paul’s friends, and they told the police that on Saturday night, Paul had the black eye, several scratches on the back of his hands and rug burns on his knees, and when they asked him if more guys had tackled him at a party for being inappropriate with their girlfriends, Paul said that he couldn’t remember how he got it. He simply woke up with it.

When the Cal Poly detectives brought Paul in for questioning again on the 31st of May, he told them that he got the black eye while playing basketball with his friends on Monday. When he was questioned again on the 19th of June, they informed him that they have people who’d testify that he’d already had the black eye on Saturday. He denied it and told the detectives that he got the black eye when he changed the stereo on his truck 2 am on Sunday morning – not Sunday afternoon like he’d originally claimed. When the detectives called him out on the lie, he explained that –

“It’s not really a lie, it’s a fib. It’s so minute, you could probably call it a white lie.”

Again, he recounted his version of the events of that night and insisted that he had nothing to do with Kristin’s disappearance, his stutter becoming more pronounced as he waffled between his different versions of what had happened that night.

The two detectives outright told him that they didn’t believe his story, and threatened to have him sit for a polygraph test. But Paul shrugged and explained that they could think whatever they wanted, but he had to go. He’d promised his mother that he’d help clean up some concrete rubble from her back yard that afternoon at 4pm, and it was getting late.

And despite numerous eyewitness accounts, despite Cheryl’s testimony, despite the fact that Paul was the last person to be seen with her, despite his black eye, despite his lack of a verifiable alibi, and despite the fact that Kristin was still missing, Cal Poly Police initially reported that the 19-year-old Kristin was a girl with loose morals who hadn’t been happy at Cal Poly. They concluded that she’d simply ran away and will reappear eventually. On the 31st of May, their first report read as follows:

“Victim attends party and does not return home afterwards. Does not contact friends or family, and skips school. During the course of my investigation, I have spoken with many people who have been associated with Smart. They have all told stories that agreed with each other. The stories have all included the following information:

“Smart does not have any close friends at Cal Poly. Smart appeared to be under the influence of alcohol on Friday night. Smart was talking with and socializing with several different males at the party. Smart lives her life in her own way, not conforming to typical teenage behaviour.

“These observations are in no way implying that her behaviour caused her disappearance, but they provide a picture of her conduct on the night of her disappearance.”

But by the end of June, they’d label Kristin as –

“An Adult Missing Under Unusual Circumstances.”

And elected to hand the case over to the Sheriff’s Office.

Convinced that the police weren’t serious about finding their daughter, the Smart family did what they could to find Kristin. Denise called everyone she could think of, including the Sheriff’s Office and the FBI, and camped out next to the telephone. Stan drove to San Luis Obispo every weekend and searched dump sites, sewage pipes, hiking trails, and abandoned houses for any sign of his missing daughter.

Denise spoke to every reporter, journalist, private investigator and psychic who was willing to help them look for Kristin. They kept a notebook by the phone in Kristin’s room and logged every lead and piece of information that came their way. They even hired a trained dog handler whose job it was to follow up on any and all leads that the Smarts received.

Years went by without any sign of their daughter, but Stan and Denise told their friends and family and the Stockton Record that they wouldn’t rest until they found Kristin —

“You live because you can’t give up. Because it’s not just a battle to find your daughter. It’s a battle to have the right thing done. It’s a battle to have people do their job.”

Active and Ongoing

On the 26th of June 1996, Kristin had already been missing for more than a month when the Cal Poly Police Department finally handed Kristin’s file over to the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office. At the time, Denise Smart likened their search for her missing daughter to an investigation into a ‘missing bike’, and unfortunately, she wasn’t far off.

The detectives went through the case file and noted that several important pieces of evidence were missing. Cal Poly Police hadn’t sealed off Kristin’s room following her disappearance. Paul’s room was never searched, and when he left campus for the summer, his room in Santa Lucia Hall was emptied out and thoroughly cleaned by the janitorial staff, effectively removing any trace evidence that might have been left behind. Cal Poly Police also didn’t obtain the call records for Paul’s room, and by the time the Sheriff’s Office put in a request for copies, they were told that the University had already wiped the records.

On the 29th of June 1996, Cal Poly was closed for the summer when the Sheriff’s Office, the California Rescue Dog Association – aka CARDA - and 400 volunteers from the community descended on the campus and conducted a search for any sign of Kristin or her remains.

Teams on horses tackled the hiking trails, people searched the bushes and sewage systems, dogs searched the empty fields, people searched the local rubbish dump, and teams of cadaver dogs were led into the Red Bricks to look for any sign of Kristin’s body. Their handlers were only told that they were looking for a missing girl, and they each entered the buildings separately, giving their dogs a distinctive order like “Bones” or “Look for Bones” to let them know that they were looking for a decomposing body.

Now seems like a good time to explain how these dogs are trained since cadaver dogs feature a lot in this case. According to Becky Pesicka, a certified dog trainer and Nose Work Instructor with Dogtastic Training, the human body starts emitting a distinctive gas within seconds of dying, and that gas can linger in the area for decades, with some of the oldest human graves found being over 60 years old. Some dogs can even find a decomposing body under over 40 feet of water, and even if a body is removed shortly after death and the area is cleaned with bleach, that distinctive smell will still remain up to 20 years later.

Cadaver dogs are trained specifically to find human remains and are trained to find teeth, human bones, blood, and the location where human remains had previously been found. One dog handler also explained that they use cotton swabs that had been placed on a body during an autopsy to train their dogs, and cadaver dogs can be led into a field containing several decomposing animal carcasses, and they’d still only alert to the presence of human remains.

On the day of the search, four cadaver dogs were led down the hallways of Muir Hall and cleared it. They repeated the process in Sequoia Hall, and once again in Santa Lucia Hall. Wayne Barrens entered the building first, and he led Sierra, a Labrador retriever, down each hallway. On the ground floor, Sierra made a U-turn when they passed room 128, and then sat down to let Wayne know that she’d scented a decomposing body.

They continued searching the rest of the building then left, and half an hour later, Adele Morris and her border collie, Cholla, were led inside. They also started on the ground floor, and shortly after passing room 128, Cholla alerted Adele that he scented a decomposing body. Adele led another border collie named Cirque inside, and he also alerted to room 128. When a fourth dog alerted to the same room, detectives were called to the scene.

The door was opened, and one by one, the dogs were led inside. The room was bare, and two empty beds stood on opposite sides of the room. Each dog headed straight for the bed on the left side of the room, coming to a stop at the foot of the bed and alerting to their handler that once upon a time, someone had died on the foot of that bed.

The beds were removed, and this time the dogs indicated that the scent of a decomposing body also lingered on the trashcan and the room’s telephone. Then the trashcan and telephone were labeled and removed and placed among phones and trashcans from the other rooms. Again, the dogs alerted to the presence of the scent of a decomposing body on the trashcan and phone from room 128.

Detectives from the Sheriff’s office checked their records and confirmed that two students named Derrick Say and Paul Flores used to live in room 128 in Santa Lucia Hall. They questioned Derrick on the 12th of July 1996, and he told the detectives that he hadn’t been on campus during Memorial Day weekend. Paul had the room to himself. Derrick also explained that Paul had told him that he’d escorted Kristin to the main entrance of Muir Hall.

When Derrick had jokingly asked Paul what he’d done to Kristin, Paul joked and said –

“She’s at my house, eating lunch with my mom.”

In a ‘haha, I totally tapped that’ kind of way, and prompting the Sheriff’s Department to file a warrant to search the Flores family home.

On the 22nd of July 1996, the detectives from the Sheriff’s Department arrived at Ruben Flores’ White Court house in Arroyo Grande, which is a 30-minute drive south of San Luis Obispo. According to a spokesperson, their aim was to look for anything that could link Paul to Kristin, so they focused on the house itself. They didn’t bring cadaver dogs, they didn’t bring a forensics team, and they didn’t touch any of the vehicles on the property, which included Ruben’s white Nissan, and Paul’s green Ford Ranger.

During their search, they found an old police baton that belonged to Ruben Flores and confiscated it. They also found 3 newspaper articles on Kristin Smart’s disappearance in the house – one in the kitchen, one underneath Paul Flores’ bed, and another underneath Ruben Flores’ mattress. None of the items found were considered to be enough proof that Paul had anything to do with Kristin’s disappearance, and the detectives were left with no viable leads to follow. Paul was brought before a Grand Jury in October 1996, but they ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Paul of anything.

In late October 1996, a woman named Mary Lassiter called the San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s Office and told the officer on duty that she had a possible lead in the Kristin Smart case. She and her family had moved into a house on Branch Street in Arroyo Grande on the 1st of October 1996. The house is owned by Susan Flores, and after moving in, they started receiving a number of threatening postcards in the mail.

All of the postcards urged the reader to convince their son to come clean to the police and help the Smarts to find Kristin’s body. The Lassiter’s were new in town, but they soon found out that Paul Flores was a suspect in the disappearance of a 19-year-old girl named Kristin Smart, and their spidey senses tingled.

You see, Ruben Flores had kept a closed trash can in the driveway that first week and had asked them not to touch it before he eventually carted it away. A week later, Mary was washing her car when she found a woman’s earring in the driveway, close to where the trashcan had stood. It was cheap, silver-plated jewelry, and the earring was in the shape of a teardrop. It had a small turquoise stone in the middle, and what looked like a dried, bloody fingerprint on the back.

Later, Mary would explain that the earring seemed to match a necklace that Kristin wore in her senior photo that had been printed on the missing posters. Thinking that it had to have something to do with Kristin’s disappearance, they bagged it and called the police.

A burly detective came to see them and asked them questions about the earring. They handed the earring over, and Mary explained that apart from the earring and the threatening postcards, there was something else that the detective should know. Every morning at 4:20 a.m., Mary heard the incessant beeping of a watch alarm. She’d managed to trace it to a newly built planter box in the backyard, but since the entire yard was covered with concrete, she hadn’t been able to locate the watch itself.

They’d dug up the flower box but only managed to dig 6 inches before they hit another layer of concrete. They showed the detective the planter box, but he only nodded, took the earring, and left, and they never heard back from him.

Meanwhile, Paul Flores had dropped out of college and signed up to join the Navy. The Smarts had their attorney, John Murphy, file a wrongful death suit against Paul in an attempt to keep him in the country, and his application to join the Navy was denied. As part of the civil suit, John Murphy’s law office was allowed to subpoena witnesses and launch their own investigation into the disappearance of Kristin Smart.

At the end of January 1997, they spoke to Cheryl, some old co-workers of Paul’s, Mary Lassiter, and her husband. Mary Lassiter told John Murphy and the Smarts about the earring they’d found, but when the Smarts asked the Sheriff’s Office if they could be allowed to see the earing and determine if it did belong to Kristin, the Sheriff’s Office explained that the earring was a dead end since it looked like something a child would wear. Furthermore, it had never been logged into evidence and had been ‘misplaced’.

In March 1997, Susan Flores somehow found out that the Lassiter’s had been talking to the police and the Smarts, and told Mary that she and her family had 30 days to vacate the property. In a wonderfully spiteful move, Mary Lassiter confirmed that as long as she lived in the house, California rental law states that she could invite whomever she wanted to her house, so she called the Smarts and basically told them –

“Do you want to dig up the backyard?”

On the 3rd of March 1997, John Murphy arranged for CARDA cadaver dogs and a geologist armed with ground-penetrating radar or GPR to search the Branch Street house property. Once again, we have reached a valuable teaching moment, since ground-penetrating radar is also going to come up a lot in this episode.

According to Dr. Larry Lawrence, the guy who literally wrote the book on Ground Penetrating Radar, the ground is hard, and the longer it is left alone, the harder it is. Once you dig up a section of the ground you loosen the dirt, and if it is then left alone, it will harden again, but it won’t be as hard as the surrounding area. GPR sends waves into the earth and measures how hard the ground is.

Changes in the hardness of an area pops up on the GPR, and things like rocks or pieces of concrete will pop up as an anomaly. Bones and human remains can’t be found using GPR since bone is porous, but GPR can be used to identify a recent burial site.

During the search of the Branch Street house, the dogs cleared the house, the attic, and the crawlspace underneath the house, but when they entered the backyard, they alerted to the area where Ruben Flores had kept the trash can. The geologist then scanned the yard, but he also came up empty and explained to John Murphy and the Smarts that his equipment was thrown off by the concrete that filled the backyard. But he did note that a portion of the yard had been dug up recently and that a pile of dirt had been piled against one of the walls.

The neighbours also confirmed that shortly after Kristin’s disappearance, Ruben and Paul Flores had done some construction work in the yard. And the Lassiters confirmed that the suspicious planter box measured 6 feet by 3 feet, and that nothing would grow in it. In essence, they still had nothing but suspicions, and John Murphy submitted their reports to the Sherriff’s Office.

On the 23rd of May 1997, almost a year after Kristin had gone missing, Sherrif Ed Williams told the San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune that –

“We need Paul Flores to tell us what happened to Kristin Smart. The fact of the matter is, we have very qualified detectives who have conducted well over a hundred interviews, and everything leads to Mr. Flores. There are no other suspects, so absent something from Mr. Flores, I don’t see us completing this case.”

And Paul Flores took the Sheriff’s advice. On the 19th of November 1997 Paul, Ruben, and Susan Flores finally showed up for their depositions that had been arranged by John Murphy. Ruben and Susan answered all of the questions posed to them, but whenever Paul was asked a question, he responded with –

“On the advice of my attorney, I refuse to answer that question based on the 5th amendment of the United States’ constitution.”

Just over a year would pass before the DA’s office made another concerted effort to investigate Kristin’s disappearance, and called the FBI for assistance. In January 1999, the FBI re-interviewed Paul, his father Ruben, and a number of witnesses, and together with the Sheriff’s Office, they started working through Kristin’s case file again. During their investigation, they came across the reports submitted by John Murphy, and at 8 a.m. on the 19th of June 2000, they handed Susan Flores a search warrant that read -

“Reasonable cause exists to believe that Kristin Smart’s body is buried in the backyard of Susan Flores’ home on … Branch Street.”

They basically had permission to do whatever they wanted that day and brought their own GPR devices to scan the yard. A garage had been built where the trashcans once stood, and it was packed full of boxes and other rubbish. When the GPR expert tried to scan the area, he noted that the floor had been reinforced with iron rods, and that they played havoc with his equipment.

They didn’t find any signs of a grave in the backyard, and that evening, the detectives decided that they weren’t going to dig up the backyard. Later, it would be suggested that they didn’t want to be liable for fixing the yard up again. When they left the Branch Street house at 5 pm that afternoon, the search warrant expired, and the Sheriff’s office would never be able to search the property again.

On the 25th of May 2002, Kristin was legally declared dead, and the Smarts started raising funds to erect two billboards to raise awareness regarding her disappearance. One was placed in front of John Murphy’s law office, and the other was just down the road from Susan Flores’ house on Branch Street. When the billboards were erected in April 2004, Denise Smart told reporters that –

“We want to keep Kristin’s memory alive. Billboards are the only way we can remind people that she’s still missing after eight years. It’s the only gift we can give to her to make sure she’s not forgotten.”

In 2011, Ian Parkinson was elected as the new Sheriff for the San Luis Obispo County Sherrif’s Office, and from the get-go, he applied for permission to appoint detectives who’d be solely responsible for investigating cold cases, including Kristin’s. Detective Clint Cole was appointed as the Lead Investigator on the Kristin Smart case in or around 2016, and he tackled the daunting task of going through thousands of reports and familiarising himself with Kristin Smart’s case. He’d later explain that since Sheriff Parkinson took over in 2011, at least 18 new search warrants had been issued, 8 new locations had been searched, 140 new pieces of evidence were found, and 91 new witnesses were interviewed.

And yet, they still weren’t any closer to finding out what had happened to Kristin Smart.

The Podcast

In one of my previous episodes, Simon mentioned that he loved the cases where a dedicated police detective solves the case. Well, as the title of both the episode and this section suggests, today’s hero is a little more unorthodox.

On the 9th of May 2018, a singer-songwriter named Chris Lambert published his latest album, The Constant Education of Christopher Lambert, and at a talk hosted by the SLO (slow) Chamber of Commerce in February 2020, he joked that –

“I woke up the next morning like many creative people do, feeling empty and useless and like I might never create anything good again.”

Chris explains that he logged into his computer where he fell down a ‘Wikipedia rabbit hole’ and spent the day just exploring whatever popped into his mind. He’d grown up in Orcutt, California, just 30 minutes south of Arroyo Grande, and was 8 years old when Kristin Smart disappeared. He’d driven past the Kristin Smart billboard for 14 years at that point, and that day he was curious to find out if they’d ever found her.

“What I didn’t know was that there’d been a person of interest since day one of the investigation. I didn’t know why he was still out. I didn’t know what had happened, but by later that night I was completely obsessed with the case, and I was shocked that everybody wasn’t talking about it constantly. And I was shocked that no one had done a documentary about it.”

“There was just a brief, momentary flash that day where I thought, ‘Maybe I’m going to make that documentary.’ And then I pushed that away, like a lot of people do.”

“I’m a musician. I don’t do things like this. Not to mention I’m quiet, I’m awkward, and I’m not a professional anything at all.”

Chris became obsessed with the idea of finding justice for Kristen, and he spent the next year and a half learning everything he could about Kristin’s case. A friend told him that she’d gone to high school with Paul, and offered to introduce him to people who provided him with insight into who Paul Flores was. It gave him access to the resources he needed to really sink his teeth into Kristin’s story, and for the first time, Chris believed that he was in a position to help bring about justice for Kristin Smart.

“It’s a little different if you have access to some of the people and places involved. It’s different when someone goes missing in your own backyard.”

He read thousands of articles on Kristin’s disappearance, obtained copies of her case file that had been released to the public, got into contact with the Smart family and John Murphy, and interviewed them. He read through the testimonies of the witnesses, watched the testimonies of both Paul and Ruben, and started tracking down Kristin’s friends, people who’d been at the party that night, and people who’d once worked with Paul Flores. He walked the route that Kristin, Cheryl, Tim, and Paul had taken that night, he spoke with the students who lived in room 128 in Santa Lucia Hall, and he watched on with a chilling realization as they showed him how they stored their surfboards in their room by easily lifting them through the dorm room window.

He also learned more about the Flores family. He learned that Ruben Flores used to be in the Navy and that after he was honorably discharged in 1963, he worked as a police reservist for the Redondo Police for a few years. At the time of Kristin’s disappearance, Ruben worked as a Phone Technician for General Telephone or GTE, and would drive all over Arroyo Grande fixing payphones and collecting money.

The 30-year-old Ruben married his second wife, Susan, when she was 20, and the couple had a daughter named Ermelinda together in March 1974. On the 22nd of October 1976, Paul was born, and they moved to Arroyo Grande in June 1992. According to Susan’s old coworkers, their marriage wasn’t a happy one, and Susan would often show up at work with new bruises or broken ribs.

When they asked her about it, she’d shrug and claim that she fell or walked into a door or stumbled over a porch bench. She allegedly started an affair with one of her coworkers, Mike McConville, and Susan later filed for a divorce. She and Ruben were officially divorced in April 1996, but on the night when Kristin disappeared, Susan was spending the night at Ruben’s house and would move back in for a few months after leasing out her Branch Street house to the Lassiters.

Chris also found out that Paul Flores’ life had essentially been ruined after Kristin Smart disappeared. After being rejected by the Navy, he’d worked a series of low-paying jobs in the fast-food industry, or worked as an attendant at full-service gas stations where he washed people’s car windows and filled their gas tanks. Once his employers or co-workers found out that he was a suspect in the disappearance of Kristin Smart, he’d be let go and had to move to a new town and start over.

He eventually settled down in San Pedro, lived in a house that his parents had bought for him, and still relied on them to support him financially. Many of his neighbors thought that he was just a quiet guy, but noted that strange people would take pictures of his house, leave threatening messages for him, and that journalists often came by asking questions about him.

Chris also learned that after Sheriff Ed Williams outed Paul Flores as a suspect in the disappearance of Kristin Smart, both Susan and Ruben were HOUNDED by the media and supporters of the Smart family for over two decades. They protested in the streets outside their homes, took photos of them, held candlelit vigils in Kristin’s honor on their front lawns, and, of course, erected a billboard with Kristin’s face on it next to Susan’s house. Even though both Ermelinda and Paul had done their best to escape their community’s scrutiny, Susan and Ruben both chose to stay behind in Arroyo Grande. According to Chris –

“Their lives have been anything but peaceful here. With a population of just over 15 000, most people in town know who they are, where they live, and what they’ve been accused of.”

“If you’re in your 70’s, your nearest family member is 200 miles away, and the residents of your neighborhood is constantly eyeing you with suspicion, why would you not move somewhere else? Anywhere else?”

”…I can only come up with two reasonable [explanations]. The first is that they love Arroyo Grande. I mean, REALLY love it.”

“That, or they’re afraid to leave. Because they’re protecting something.”

On the 30th of September 2019, Chris released the first episode of his new podcast titled Your Own Backyard. The first episode, “A Face on a Billboard”, was published on the 7th of October, and it was followed by “The Only Suspect”. Every week a new episode was released – “Their Own Backyard”, “Son of Susan”, “The P”, and the sixth and last planned episode was posted on the 11th of November, titled “Ongoing and Active”.

And in these episodes, Chris sheds a light on a side of Paul’s personality that few people had been aware of.

He Was Always Staring

Paul Flores started attending Saint James Catholic School in Torrance, California, in 1982. He played soccer for West Torrence’s American Youth Soccer Organisation, and according to his old teammates, he had an anger problem and made a habit of stabbing the soccer balls with sharp objects and starting fights with the other children.

Susan ran a daycare from her home at the time, and according to one of the mothers, the other parents had called her one afternoon in a panic, telling her that the 11-year-old Paul had tried to drown her daughter in their swimming pool.

“[sic] He really was fixated on [my daughter], and…on some of the pictures of the birthday parties, it’s like he’s always right there, like almost hovering over her. And I don’t think she even noticed it because she didn’t pay attention to him, she was just always avoiding him.”

“All the kids were in the pool, and Paul was in the pool, and he was trying to get [her] attention, and she just kept going to the other side of the pool to stay away from him, and apparently that upset him. He pushed her under the water and then was on top of her and wouldn’t let her up. And then all the kids started yelling at him to ‘Let her up! Let her up!’ And he wouldn’t. He was very angry.”

“[My daughter] remembered that somebody came out and dragged him out of the pool, and goes ‘I don’t remember if it was Susan or if it was another adult that was there’.”

The mother collected her daughter, and when she confronted Susan, she simply shrugged it off and explained that Paul was just playing with her daughter and that they were making a big deal out of nothing.

By the time Paul started middle school, the other kids started describing him as being “creepy” and “weird”. According to a woman who played Little League with him –

“There was a [team directory] that went around that had everybody’s phone numbers and everything in it. And for a long period of time I was getting prank calls on a nightly basis and whoever it was, was asking for me and breathing, and it was scary. And little by little, word got out that it was Paul who was calling. And it was not just me he was calling… My brother had to have a conversation with him…and let him know…to knock it off.”

As he got older, Paul turned into a bully, and would often pick fights with other kids for no reason. In 1992, a 16-year-old Paul was involved in a fight with a 13-year-old boy named Nick Spreitzer at his school. According to Nick, Paul used to bully him constantly, and that day, Nick decided to stand up for himself.

“I started to fight back, and I think it turned into a shoving match. At some point, that turned into a wrestling match and we were on the ground and he was stronger than me, so he fairly quickly dominated me.”

Nick managed to kick Paul in the face, and Paul rolled away. Nick rolled over to get up, and –

“…while I was still on my shoulder, he jumped up and stomped on my head.”

By the time Paul was pulled away, Nick was rapidly losing his vision. His father rushed him to their paediatrician and –

“Our paediatrician apparently told my parents that she watched me deteriorate in front of her eyes.”

They rushed him to the hospital, and by that time, Nick didn’t know who he was, couldn’t speak, had no control over his body, and blacked out.

“I was in and out of consciousness for several days. I was in the hospital for a total of five days. It was 72 hours before I could answer basic questions about what year it was or what day it was.”

Nick’s family sued the Flores family, and a judge ordered that the Flores family had to pay Nick’s family $5000 to cover their medical expenses. Paul was also ordered to attend anger management classes. He never did, and for years, Ruben and Susan made excuses for their son’s behaviour, telling John Murphy in 1997 that Nick and two others had been the ones to bully Paul and insisting that he had been the real victim.

Either way, the Flores family moved to Arroyo Grande and purchased the house on White Court in June 1992. Paul was enrolled in Arroyo Grande High School, and Susan bought him a brand new ‘iridescent green’ Ford Ranger pickup truck in 1993. The truck was his pride and joy, and he used it to rack up several traffic violations for speeding, tailgating, reckless driving, and disturbing the peace.

The teenaged Paul wasn’t unattractive. He had fair skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and started to build muscle once he joined the football team. He was loud and boisterous, and his stutter only made an appearance when he was nervous or unsure of himself. But he struggled to make friends, and the other teenagers would refer to him as “Creepy Paul” or “Scary Paul” or “Psycho Paul”.

Chris spoke to some of the women who went to school with Paul, and they explained that he would stalk the girls, leave flowers on their doorsteps, or phone their homes and breathe heavily before putting the receiver down. And all of them told Chris a variation of the phrase –

“He was always staring.”

Or

“He always stood there, watching.”

Paul was never invited to parties, and yet he always showed up ready to have fun. He’d get drunk and then aggressively flirt with the girls at the party. When they rebuffed him or ignored him, he’d get angry and attack them, and he often ended up in a fight with more than one pissed-off boyfriend.

One girl recounted how after she told him she wasn’t interested in him, Paul had called her a “cock-blocker” before he picked her up and body-slammed her on the floor. She had the wind knocked out of her, another girl rushed over to help her, and then a group of guys tackled Paul, knocked him around a bit, and made sure to let him know that it was NOT okay to treat a girl like that. He knocked another girl from a deck into a garden, resulting in him being forcefully escorted from the party, and another girl recounted how they’d found him feeling up one of their classmates after she’d passed out in one of the bedrooms.

In 1995, Paul barely made it into Cal Poly and signed up for a food sciences degree. He failed all of his classes except for a Bowling elective but excelled at trolling campus parties. Another woman – let’s call her Lisa – later contacted Chris and told him that she was convinced that Paul Flores had drugged her friend.

“Sometime in March or April of 1996, I was going to Hancock college and my boyfriend at the time played football at Cal Poly…and so I had frequented parties in San Luis with him and his teammates.”

At one of these parties, Lisa made friends with a Cal Poly student that she often saw at these parties – let’s call her Caty. Lisa and Caty hung out at the party, and at one point, Lisa lost track of her. An hour or so later she heard a blonde guy yell from a bathroom –

“Somebody get in here and help this girl!”

Lisa walked over and saw that Caty was lying on the bathroom floor. She was pale and foaming at the mouth, wasn’t wearing any pants, her underwear was shoved down her legs, she had soiled herself, and she was vomiting on the floor of the bathroom. Lisa shoved the blonde guy out of the bathroom and started to help Caty clean herself up. While she was giving Caty a cold bath to wake her up, the blonde guy walked back into the bathroom.

Lisa yelled at him to get out, and he claimed that he had to take out the trash. He had a marked stutter as he explained that he was a friend of Caty’s and that he only wanted to help. Lisa yelled at him to get out, so he took the trashcan and left.

Lisa wrapped Caty in a towel and had one of her friends escort her home, and when she asked the other partygoers if anyone recognized the blonde guy, they all told her that they had no idea who he was. He’d just shown up uninvited.

“It was not until I saw him on one of the news programs, stuttering, and I saw his face, and that’s when I knew that that was the person that was in the bathroom with her initially, and also the person that came back into the bathroom to take the trash out.”

“Going through life and going to college and all those parties, I’m thinking ‘No guy cares about taking the trash out in the bathroom at the party?’”

Lisa, Chris, and some of Paul’s old co-workers all suspect that Paul used eye drops to drug women at both Cal Poly and later in life.

According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, eye drops typically contain a chemical called tetra-hydro-zoline or THZ, and when ingested, it can result in drowsiness, slow breathing, a slow heartbeat, and even a coma. According to a case study published in Science Direct in September 2012, if you mix a few drops of THZ with alcohol and drink it, it can cause you to appear “heavily intoxicated”. According to the Mount Sinai Healthcare System’s website, too much of it can result in profuse vomiting, diarrhea, muscle weakness, low body temperature, seizures, a coma, and even death.

Worst still, Chris interviewed a number of Jane Does who contacted him and told him that between 1998 and 2018, Paul Flores had drugged them, taken them to his house, and then sexually assaulted them. One woman who went to his house willingly had been drugged after she asked him for a glass of water. She then woke up to Paul shoving a red ball gag in her mouth and repeatedly assaulting her as she passed in and out of consciousness. She claims that when she left his house the next morning, she angrily told him –

“When a girl says no, she means no!”

And when Chris asked them if they thought that Paul Flores was capable of murder, they all said –

“Without a doubt.”

Episode 7: The Tip of the Iceberg

Chris Lambert had originally planned that his podcast, Your Own Backyard, would only be 6 episodes long. But by the time the 3rd episode aired, he’d been flooded with emails containing various tips and leads into not only Kristin Smart’s disappearance but also Paul Flores’ background, leading to him releasing four more episodes over the course of the next two years. During the year and a half that he researched Kristin’s story, he had made friends with various residents in both Arroyo Grande and San Pedro where Paul now lived, and they sent him constant updates regarding the movements of Ruben, Susan, and Paul Flores.

Chris had reached out to the San Luis Obispo County’s Sheriff Office in October 2019 and asked them if he could interview them for the podcast. In a postscript, he added that someone close to Susan Flores had told him that not only were they convinced that Ruben and Susan had helped Paul to get rid of Kristin’s body, but that Susan was obsessed with his podcast. Apparently, she liked to lurk on the various Facebook groups that had been created in support of the Smart family in order to keep an eye on what people were saying about her precious little boy. Chris told the Sheriff’s Office that if they wanted to use the podcast to entice Susan or the Flores family into the open, he was more than happy to assist.

Chris received an email from Sheriff Parkinson to let him know that they’d consider his request, and then he didn’t hear anything back. Unbeknownst to him, they had called a planning meeting with the DA’s office the next day and discussed possible strategies they could use to get the Flores family talking about the case again, and it included listening to the podcast themselves.

A number of tips had been called in soon after Chris published the first few episodes of Your Own Backyard, and some of them included references to the two trucks that the Flores family had owned when Kristin Smart had disappeared – Paul’s green Ford Ranger, and Ruben Flores’ white Nissan. Chris had found out that shortly after Kristin’s disappearance, Ruben had told a friend of his that he had bought Paul a new truck bed liner for his birthday. Chris theorized that if they’d transported Kristin’s body on the back of Paul’s truck, it was possible that her blood or DNA could have been left behind on the bed liner, prompting Ruben to get rid of it. And since Paul’s birthday is in October, Ruben’s story that he bought Paul a birthday present in June was suspicious.

Back in 1997 John Murphy had also thought that it was suspicious, but when he asked Ruben in November 1997 where the trucks were, he explained that they’d sold Paul’s Ford and that his Nissan had been stolen. Ruben also claimed that the stereo that Paul had removed from his truck on the Sunday night after Kristin had disappeared, had also been stolen, and Chris basically called bullshit.

The trucks had never been searched, and with the help of the FBI, the Sheriff’s Department managed to track them down and searched them for any trace evidence. Unfortunately, they didn’t find anything.

In December 2019, the Sheriff’s Office obtained permission to place a wiretap on the phones of the four members of the Flores family – Ruben, Susan, Paul, and Ermelinda. The warrant only allowed them to monitor the family for 30 days, so in January 2020, Detective Cole reached out to Ermelinda’s ex-husband Brett, and asked him if he would be willing to talk to the police. Brett called Ermelinda, who called Susan, who then called Paul. Then Detective Cole went to see Ermelinda and handed her a letter as a part of an immunity offer.

In the letter, Detective Cole explained that –

“When I started reviewing this case, I kept an open mind and assumed that Paul Flores was not involved in Kristin’s disappearance. I now know for sure he is, and Kristin is dead, and so do you.”

“Paul is very soon going to be in a position where he needs to tell us his story. This case will be solved soon. You could be the one who is responsible for ending this nightmare for everyone, and move on with your life.”

Ermelinda slammed the door in Detective Cole’s face, but a photo of the letter and the immunity offer made its way to Susan, Ruben, and Paul. Detective Cole later told Chris Lambert that this is one of the problems with wire-tapping – communication methods like email and WhatsApp exist, so the Sheriff office had no idea what they were discussing online.

But when they did talk on the phone, the Detectives noted that they spoke in code. Well, not very sophisticated codes, but they would use references like “KS”, “MW”, and ‘You Know Who”. But in the end, the Sheriff’s Office had achieved their goal – the Flores family were talking to each other about the case, and a certain podcast was convincing both Ruben and Susan that time was running out.

Tick. Tock.

On the 26th of January 2020, Susan called her son. Initially, their conversation was about everyday things – how Susan’s boyfriend, Mike, was doing, family news, a funny post about Paul that Susan had read on one of the Facebook groups, and an upcoming surgery that Susan had to undergo.

Then Susan turned to more pressing issues. The Flores family had been in contact with their lawyers, and Susan needed Paul to call his lawyer and get his story straight. She also asked him to send him the details of his policies and banking information so that – if he did end up getting arrested – she could ensure that his affairs were in order.

Then she told him that she and Ruben had managed to put aside some money to pay for his legal defense if necessary, before explaining that she’d rather use that money for herself, instead of wasting it on an effort to keep Paul out of prison. Irritated, Paul asked her if there was something else she needed, and Susan said, yes.

“The other thing that I need you to do, is to start listening to the podcast. I need you to listen to everything they say so we can punch holes in it – wherever we can punch holes. Maybe we can’t.”

“You’re the one that can tell me.”

Boom.

According to Detective Cole –

“That gives Paul knowledge of what took place. Why else would they want to punch holes in it, unless Paul actually knew what happened [to Kristin]?”

Sheriff Parkinson, Detective Cole, and the DA finally had what they needed. On the 5th of February 2020, people all over the East Coast woke up to the news that Ruben’s house, Susan’s house, Paul’s house, and Ermelinda’s house had all been raided. The police seized all of their electronic devices – their cell phones, laptops, and computers – citing that it was possible they contained evidence that hadn’t existed back in 1996.

And they were right – chillingly so.

Because despite the fact that most of their devices contained ordinary, everyday things, Paul’s Dell Computer contained a folder titled ‘Practice’, that supported the testimonies of the women that Chris had talked to. In it, the police found hundreds of photos and videos of drugged women with red ball gags in their mouths being assaulted by Paul. Not only that but also hundreds of explicit photos and videos of kids, and it left no doubt in the police’s mind that Paul was a sexual predator.

The Meerkats

Over the course of the next year the San Luis Obispo County’s Sheriff’s Office, the DA’s office, and Chris Lambert started piecing together what they could to build a prosecutable case against Paul Flores. Chris spent months going through the Smart family’s notebook, and as he explained it, it enabled him to piece together a puzzle of what had happened that Memorial Day weekend.

According to Chris, most of the people who’d worked on the case over the years rarely spoke to one another, but because he’d spoken to EVERYBODY, he was the only one with all of the pieces of the puzzle, and he gave the Sheriff’s office dozens of new leads to follow.

Detective Cole had requested that Assistant DA Chris Peuvrelle should be assigned to the case, and he immediately agreed. His wife was an avid listener of Your Own Backyard, and he started listening to the podcast as well, using it to test his knowledge of the case. Peuvrelle also reached out to Chris to get the contact information for some of the women he’d spoken to, helping them to build a stronger case against Paul.

On the 25th of November 2020, Chris released Episode 8: The 16-Hour Gap, in which he explained that between 2 am and 6 pm on Saturday, the 25th of May 1996, no one knows where Paul was.

Chris’ theory was that after Cheryl had left him with Kristin that night, Paul had tried to get Kristin to follow him to his room. She tried to fight him off because the Australian exchange student had passed them on his bicycle and saw her struggling against Paul. We know from Tim and Cheryl’s testimonies that Kristin could barely walk, and Paul managed to drag her to his dorm room which was on the ground floor of Santa Lucia Hall.

Chris speculates that Paul had tried to sexually assault Kristin, but ended up killing her instead. It has been suggested that he’d stuffed her mouth to keep her from screaming, but that the drugs had caused her to start vomiting during the attack, and she suffocated. Panicked, Paul left her there and ran to his sister Ermelinda’s house, covered in Kristin’s vomit.

She called Ruben, and Ruben raced to Cal Poly to help Paul. We know this because Susan complained to a colleague of hers that Ruben had run out of the house that morning and wouldn’t tell her where he was going.

Early that morning, a woman saw two people running towards a suspicious red car that was parked outside of the entrance to Cuesta Park in San Luis Obispo. Her description matches the convertible red Chevrolet that Ermelinda had been driving at the time, and it’s been theorized that they’d dumped some evidence in the park. Search parties would later search the park, but found nothing.

Meanwhile, Paul helped Ruben to wrap Kristin’s body in his bedsheets, then carried her through his bedroom window before placing her on the back of Paul’s truck. Ruben then drove back to Arroyo Grande where he hid Kristin’s body while Paul stayed behind. He took a shower, cleaned his room, withdrew money from an ATM, and bought tickets for a movie that night, creating an alibi.

That Sunday morning, he called Ruben from his dorm room and left campus carrying a bag that Ruben claimed contained laundry. He supposedly spent most of the day working on his truck, and that night, he’s arrested by the Arroyo Grande police for breaking his probation after failing to appear in court for a DUI charge and loses his driver licence. The photo they take of him that night is the only record there is of his black eye.

Ruben posts bail for him that night, and the Monday, Susan comments on his black eye. Paul tells her he doesn’t know where he got it from, and Ruben says that he got it while removing the stereo from his truck, a story they later stick to. Chris theorizes that Ruben – and not Kristin – had punched Paul as punishment for killing Kristin.

While Chris speculates that Susan didn’t know what Paul had done until at least a month later, Susan, Ruben, Ermelinda, and her boyfriend at the time, Brett, had allegedly assisted Paul in escaping justice. The only question was – where did they bury her?

Now, if you live in a small community, you’re probably familiar with old ladies and their propensity to stare out of windows at passersby. My husband jokingly refers to them as meerkats because they are always watching and miss nothing, and they were crucial to cracking the case wide open.

Because both Susan and Ruben are – to put it mildly – hated in their community, both Chris Lambert and the Sheriff’s Office had no shortage of spies. And just days after the first raids took place in February 2020, some of Ruben’s neighbors notified both Chris and the Sheriff’s office that something fishy was going on.

One neighbor reported that around the 7th and 8th of February 2020, Susan Flores, her boyfriend Mike McConville, and Ruben Flores could be heard arguing throughout the night. Another neighbor reported that Ruben Flores had removed a fence that blocked access to his backyard and that Mike McConville’s truck and his trailer had been parked next to the deck all weekend, blocking their view of the deck. And in Your Own Backyard, Chris had also mentioned several times that Ruben Flores was suspiciously protective when it came to his deck and the backyard.

The White Court house was built on a piece of land that had once been a part of an avocado orchard. The house had been built on a steep slope, and in some places, the crawlspace underneath the house was easily 8 feet high. A deck had been built at the back of the house, and the sides of the deck were enclosed with lattice, creating a storage space underneath the house that could be accessed via a side door.

A plumber who’d once worked on Ruben’s house had contacted Chris and told him that he had once been called out to fix a toilet in the house. When he told Ruben that he’d have to dig underneath the house to find the problem, Ruben chased him away and told him that he’d fix the problem himself.

A man who’d once rented a room in the house told Chris that he’d once stored empty barrels underneath the house. When Ruben found out about it, he lost his shit and banned the guy from ever entering the crawlspace again. And Paul’s one and only ex-girlfriend had told Chris that while visiting Paul’s father at the White Court house, she’d admired the avocado orchard and wanted to explore further.

When she made to enter the backyard, Paul and Ruben urged her back to the front of the house. At the time she thought that it was odd, but after they broke up, she found out that Paul was a suspect in Kristin’s disappearance, and then she became convinced that Kristin was buried in the avocado orchard. And an ex-roommate had called in a tip, explaining that Paul had told her once that Kristin was buried underneath a structure in his parent’s yard, and that the stupid police had been standing on top of her, but hadn’t found her.

Chris was able to provide the Sheriff’s Office with all of their names and contact numbers, and it gave Detective Cole the motivation he needed to obtain a search warrant for Ruben Flores’ house.

On the 15th of March 2021, Ruben Flores was handed a copy of the search warrant and was ordered to leave the property for the entire duration of the search. Forensic vans, archaeologists, cadaver dogs, and GPR search teams descended on the property, pitched a forensics tent, and for the remainder of the day, they searched the backyard and the avocado grove.

Ruben had fled to Susan’s house, and he, Susan, and Mike would take turns to drive past the property all day, mockingly waving at their neighbours, the press, Chris Lambert, and the police as if they knew that the police wouldn’t find anything.

But they did.

Around 6 pmthat evening, Chris Lambert watched on as a bunch of detectives entered the space underneath the house and started carrying buckets of soil into the tent. The soil was sent off for testing, and would later come back having tested positive for human blood. In a statement issued to the media, the Sheriff’s Office would later explain that they’d found evidence of a human burial site.

They also found proof that the body had been dug up and removed, and a Luminol test indicated that it had been transported using Mike McConville’s trailer, which was still parked on the property. But traces of red, grey, and black fibres that were consistent with the type of clothing that Kristin had been wearing that night were found in the soil, and it was enough circumstantial evidence for them to conclude that Kristin Smart had, up and until February 2020, been buried underneath Ruben Flores’ house. People vs.

Flores On the 13th of April 2021, 44-year-old Paul Flores was arrested for first-degree murder while in the commission of, or the attempted rape, of Kristin Denise Smart. Ruben Flores, who’d just turned 80, was arrested that same morning for being an accessory after the fact. Their trial was originally scheduled to begin on the 25th of April 2022, but the defense requested a change of venue and argued that the Arroyo Grande community was too prejudiced against Paul and Ruben.

He rightly claimed that they wouldn’t receive a fair trial, so it was moved to Monterey County’s Courthouse in Salinas, California, where Judge Jennifer O’Keefe would hear their case. Because they’d been charged with two different crimes that overlapped, both Paul and Ruben each had their own jury. This meant that if any evidence was presented that implicated Paul but not Ruben, Ruben’s jury was required to leave the courtroom and vice versa.

The court had also ordered that no cameras or recording equipment would be allowed into the courtroom, and this meant that the media and Chris Lambert had to sit and make handwritten notes for the entire duration of the trial. Their trial started on the 18th of July 2022, and Assistant DA Chris Peuvrelle started his opening statement by saying – “One thousand, three hundred and fifty-nine. That’s the number of Sundays that have passed since Kristin Smart last spoke to her family.”

He outlined the state’s case, explaining their theory of what had happened that night. He went on to explain that several witnesses would testify that it wasn’t the first time that Kristin had met Paul – in fact, he’d been stalking her for weeks beforehand, used to lurk around in Muir Hall, and had confronted Kristin in her dorm room on numerous occasions. He continued to explain that several people would testify that they hadn’t seen Kristin drink anything that night, that Paul had been hovering around her, and that within an hour of arriving at the party, Kristin had seemed to be heavily intoxicated.

He explained that Paul had already had a history of assaulting intoxicated women and that it wasn’t a leap to assume that as soon as he had Kristin alone, Paul had tried to assault her as well, killing her in the process. His theory regarding what happened to Kristin’s body mirrors Chris’s theory, and he explains that for the next 24 years, Ruben Flores had done his best to conceal his son’s crimes, going so far as to dig up the body and move it once he realized that the police were closing in on them. And that when Ruben, Susan and Mike were providing DNA for a test back in 2021, Ruben had asked Detective Cole – “Why are you taking their DNA?

They didn’t commit a felony. Only I did.” Paul’s attorney, Defense Attorney Robert Sanger, explained to the court that no one knew what happened to Kristin Smart, and that the Sheriff’s Office didn’t have any evidence to explain what had happened to her.

“The fact is, there’s a lot of ‘sort of’ evidence.” Sanger went on to explain that Kristin hadn’t been the sweet ray of sunshine that the Smart family and the media made her out to be. She hadn’t been happy at Cal Poly, had engaged in ‘at risk behaviour’, got wasted at a party, and had then most likely run away.

Paul’s sex life had nothing to do with her disappearance. He then argued that the entire case against Paul was one big gigantic conspiracy theory and that the DA’s office, the Sherriff’s Office, the Smarts, “the Podcaster”, and the entirety of Arroyo Grande had it in for his client, and the so-called evidence they had, consisted of nothing more than junk science. Ruben’s attorney, Defence Attorney Harold Mesick, told the court that for almost 26 years, Ruben Flores had been terrorized by the Smart family, the media, and his community.

Police detectives, ‘wonder dogs’, and psychics had torn up every inch of his house and yard, and hadn’t been able to find a shred of evidence to prove that he’d had anything to do with Kristin’s disappearance. Mesick invited the jury to make note of the evidence that the prosecution had to prove that Ruben was in fact guilty, and that – “…at the end, if you have an empty notebook, I’ll ask you to return a ‘not guilty’ verdict.” For the next 10 weeks, the court heard the testimonies of the Cal Poly witnesses, Kristin’s friends, the dog handlers who’d searched Paul’s room, and the experts who’d conducted a search of Ruben’s yard.

They watched interrogation tapes, watched as both Paul and Ruben lied to the police, and heard how Paul explained in June 1996 that after THEY had returned to the dorm room that night, he’d taken a shower because he’d been covered in vomit. Mesick didn’t do much but joke with the witnesses throughout the trial, but Sanger bumbled about, making self-deprecating jokes when he explained that DA Peuvrelle had a fancy logo on his laptop’s deskop background and he didn’t. Sanger implied that the GPR experts weren’t experts because they didn’t have PhD’s.

The dog handlers were just volunteers, and even though they were doing honourable work, their opinions couldn’t be trusted since they were all in a ‘club’ and didn’t work independently. He scoffed at the results of the soil tests done to determine that Kristin had indeed been buried underneath Ruben’s deck and then produced an ‘expert’ who did have a PhD but had never performed a soil test in her life. She had to call an expert in Germany in order to form an opinion on the viability of the test.

My favourite part was when Sanger implied that the cadaver dogs were all ‘friends’, that they and their handlers had conspired together to indicate the presence of a decomposing body in Paul’s room. And because Detective Cole and Peuvrelle wore purple ties in honor of Kristin, it was proof that they and ‘The Podcaster’ were all a part of the conspiracy aimed at destroying Paul Flores’ reputation. Chris, the prosecution, the jury, the public, and I all thought that Sanger was an idiot, but the media hailed Peuvrelle as a hero.

He’d later admit to Chris Lambert that he’d followed Chris’ live tweets of the case, had read the comments about the case, and then did his best to answer the public’s questions whenever he called a witness to testify. In his closing argument, Sanger once again argued that the case was all a big conspiracy theory, and then blamed Kristin for what had happened that night by explaining that if she hadn’t made a habit of getting into cars with boys, if she hadn’t gotten drunk, and if she hadn’t been dressed the way she was, she wouldn’t have been targeted that night. When it was his turn to take to the stand, Peuvrelle directly quoted a Twitter user when he explained that Sanger was wrong to blame Kristin for what had happened that night.

Kristin did nothing wrong by wanting to go out that night. She did nothing wrong by wearing a crop-top and black board shorts, and she did nothing wrong by wanting to enjoy the party. It was Paul who’d done wrong by stalking her, who’d drugged her, forced himself on her, dragged her into his bedroom, and then killed her.

On the 18th of October 2022, both juries finally came back with their verdicts. Ruben Flores was found not guilty and was free to go. Paul however, was found guilty of first-degree murder, and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Your Own Backyard On the 18th of October 2023, Chris released an episode titled “Closer to Closure: A Conversation with the Smart Family”, in which he explains that nothing had turned out the way he expected. He’d expected to publish his six episodes and be done with Kristin Smart. Instead, he was able to achieve his goal of finding justice for Kristin Smart.

Chris seems far too humble to admit it, but Assistant DA Chris Pauvrelle, Detective Clint Cole, Sherriff Ian Parkinson, and the Smart family have all said that if it hadn’t been for Chris Lambert, Paul wouldn’t be in prison today. The Smarts explain that their victory over the Flores family is bittersweet. Even though they’re happy that Paul can’t hurt anyone else anymore, they still don’t know where Kristin’s body ended up.

But they insist that they won’t give up until they’ve found Kristin. Their only wish is that their kids won’t have to continue to carry the burden of their sister’s loss once they’re gone. Until then, they ask that if anyone in the Arroyo Grande area happened to see where either Ruben, Susan, or Mike McConville drove to over the weekend of the 7th and 8th of February 2020, they should please contact the San Luis Obispo County Sherrif’s Office, and help them to finally put Kristin to rest.

Dismembered Appendices Following Kristin’s disappearance, the “Kristen Smart Campus Security Act” was passed, and requires that campus police have to involve law enforcement in any criminal investigations right away. A case was opened by the LAPD to investigate the number of sexual assaults that Paul had committed, but they had trouble locating the women in the photos, lessening their chances of building a strong case against him. However, according to Detective Cole, those photos will form a part of Paul’s file when he’s up for parole in 15 years, and should ensure that he’ll never be granted his freedom.

According to an article published by Vanity Fair in January 2023, Your Own Backyard has been downloaded over 24 million times. I’d definitely recommend it since I found it extremely satisfying that when Chris interviewed Detective Cole in episode 7, since he still had no idea that they were on the brink of solving the case. That, and it’s really good.

On the day of the sentencing, all of the media representatives held a mini-ceremony and granted Chris Lambert the Number 1 media tag to honour his efforts in finding justice for Kristin. After the trial, Chris met with some of the jury members who’d convicted Paul Flores. They’d all listened to his podcast, and they told Chris that they often felt left out during the trial because the attorneys often referred to the podcast, and they weren’t allowed to listen to it.

After listening to it, however, they feel that important evidence had been left out of the trial, but they feel more confident in the knowledge that they’d done the right thing by finding Paul guilty. One of Ruben’s jury members was let go shortly before the jury returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict. According to the jury member, he’d mentioned his struggle with the case to his priest, which isn’t allowed.

Later, one of the other jury members explained that he’d been in the process of convincing the others that Ruben was indeed guilty. If he’d been allowed to stay, it is possible that Ruben Flores would have been found guilty instead. John Murphy and his law firm assisted the Smart family in their fight to find justice for Kristin for over 25 years – all of it pro bono.

From 2000 onwards, Paul’s attorney met with John Murphy on numerous occasions to discuss possible deals in exchange for the location of Kristin’s body, including involuntary manslaughter. Apparently, Paul wanted to get away with just a slap on the wrist, but the Smarts insisted that he had to pay for what he did to their daughter. In return, they might have lost the opportunity to finally bring her home.

Denise Smart refers to Chris Lambert as her fourth child, and he’s officially been adopted into the Smart family. In Your Own Backyard, Chris explains that the Cal Poly faculty had failed Kristin after she didn’t show up for her final exams. In 2020, students at Cal Poly started a petition and got Cal Poly to rectify their mistake.

Stan and Denise established the Kristin Smart Scholarship Fund in order to help young women reach for their dreams. It’s entirely funded by public donations, and if you’d like to contribute, you can find all the necessary information on their website at kristinsmart.org And lastly, this case was listed as “For Writing” when I started working with Simon. So, I guess, thank you to Simon for recommending the case!

Key Takeaways Kristin Smart disappeared from Cal Poly in May 1996 after Paul Flores, the last person seen with her, walked her home from a party. Campus police initially dismissed Kristin as a runaway, delaying the investigation and allowing crucial evidence in Paul’s dorm room to be destroyed. Musician Chris Lambert’s 2019 podcast ‘Your Own Backyard’ reignited interest in the cold case and provided key leads that helped authorities build a prosecutable case.

Paul Flores was convicted of first-degree murder in 2022 and sentenced to 25 years to life, while his father Ruben was acquitted of accessory charges. Despite the conviction, Kristin Smart’s body remains missing, and her family continues searching for her final resting place. Frequently Asked Questions Who was Kristin Smart and what was she like?

Kristin Denise Smart was born in February 1977 to Stan and Denise Smart, both educators, while they were stationed at an American military base in Augsburg, Germany. She was a tall (over 6ft), dark-eyed blonde who was smart, friendly, but quiet. She was athletic, participating in swim team and volleyball, loved to swim, design floor plans, and travel.

She spent time as an exchange student in Venezuela and worked as a lifeguard and camp counselor in Hawaii. She adopted a Bohemian/hippy look in the 90s with little braids and loved Bob Marley, Tom Petty, and rap music. She started at Cal Poly in September 1995, originally studying architecture before switching to communications.

What happened on the night Kristin Smart disappeared? On Friday, May 24, 1996, Kristin went to a party at 135 Crandall Way with her neighbor Margarita Campos. She wore a grey crop top, black Roxy-brand board shorts, and red Puma sneakers.

After leaving the party around 2 am on May 25, she was found asleep on a lawn. Fellow student Tim Davis and Cheryl Anderson offered to walk her home. Paul Flores, a blonde student who lived in the adjacent dorm building, offered to help carry Kristin.

Tim left first at a parking lot, and Cheryl continued with Paul and Kristin. Cheryl noted Paul holding Kristin’s bare stomach in a way that made her uncomfortable. When they reached Cheryl’s dorm, she asked Paul to walk Kristin to her room, and he promised he would.

This was the last time Kristin was seen alive. Why were the initial police investigations into Kristin Smart’s disappearance criticized? The initial police response was heavily criticized for multiple failures.

When Kristin’s friends reported her missing on Monday, May 27, Cal Poly Police initially dismissed concerns, suggesting she was probably still on holiday. They didn’t open a missing person’s report until Tuesday, May 28. Cal Poly Police failed to seal off Kristin’s room, never searched Paul Flores’ room, and by the time the Sheriff’s Office requested call records for Paul’s room, the University had already wiped them.

When Paul left campus for summer, his room was emptied and cleaned by janitorial staff, removing potential trace evidence. Their first report on May 31 characterized Kristin as having ‘loose morals’ who had likely run away, noting she ‘lives her life in her own way, not conforming to typical teenage behaviour.’ What role did cadaver dogs play in the investigation?

Cadaver dogs played a crucial role at multiple points. On June 29, 1996, four cadaver dogs were led through the Red Bricks dorm buildings. Three dogs separately alerted to room 128 in Santa Lucia Hall—Paul Flores’ room.

Inside, each dog went to the bed on the left side and alerted at the foot of the bed. When the bed, trashcan, and telephone were removed and mixed with items from other rooms, the dogs again identified those from room 128. In March 1997, CARDA cadaver dogs searched the Branch Street house backyard and alerted where Ruben Flores had kept a trash can.

In March 2021, cadaver dogs were part of the search of Ruben Flores’ White Court house that led to discovery of evidence of a human burial site under the deck. Who created the ‘Your Own Backyard’ podcast and what inspired it? Chris Lambert, a singer-songwriter from Orcutt, California, created the podcast.

He was 8 years old when Kristin disappeared and had driven past her billboard for 14 years. On May 9, 2018, after releasing an album, he fell into a ‘Wikipedia rabbit hole’ and became obsessed with the case. He was shocked that everyone wasn’t talking about it constantly and that no documentary had been made.

Despite being ‘quiet, awkward, and not a professional anything at all,’ he spent a year and a half researching, interviewing witnesses, walking the route taken that night, and learning about the Flores family. The first episode ‘A Face on a Billboard’ was released September 30, 2019. How did the podcast help lead to Paul Flores’ arrest and conviction?

The podcast generated crucial tips and pressure. After Chris Lambert reached out to the Sheriff’s Office in October 2019 offering to use the podcast to entice the Flores family, they began strategizing. Tips after early episodes led to tracking down the Flores family trucks.

The podcast’s popularity convinced the Flores family they were running out of time. In a January 26, 2020 wiretapped call, Susan Flores told Paul to ‘start listening to the podcast’ so ‘we can punch holes in it’—evidence that Paul had knowledge of what happened. This helped lead to raids on February 5, 2020, where Paul’s computer was found containing hundreds of photos and videos of drugged, assaulted women and child exploitation material.

Chris Lambert also provided leads about suspicious activity at Ruben’s house, leading to the March 2021 search that found evidence of Kristin’s burial site. Assistant DA Chris Peuvrelle, Detective Clint Cole, Sheriff Ian Parkinson, and the Smart family all said Paul wouldn’t be in prison without Chris Lambert. What was Paul Flores’ history of troubling behavior before Kristin disappeared?

Paul Flores exhibited disturbing behavior from childhood. At 11, he allegedly tried to drown a girl at his mother’s daycare pool. In middle school, he made prank calls breathing heavily at girls.

He became a bully who picked fights, and in 1992 at age 16, he stomped on 13-year-old Nick Spreitzer’s head during a fight, causing severe injuries including vision loss and days of unconsciousness. He was ordered to anger management but never attended. At Arroyo Grande High School, he was known as ‘Creepy Paul,’ ‘Scary Paul,’ or ‘Psycho Paul.’

He stalked girls, left flowers on doorsteps, made heavy-breathing phone calls, and was described as ‘always staring.’ He showed up uninvited to parties, got drunk, aggressively flirted with women, and attacked them when rejected—body-slamming one girl, knocking another off a deck, and being found fondling a passed-out classmate. At Cal Poly, he failed most classes but excelled at party-trolling, and was suspected of drugging women with eye drops containing tetrahydrozoline (THZ).

What evidence was found during the March 2021 search of Ruben Flores’ property? On March 15, 2021, forensic teams, archaeologists, cadaver dogs, and GPR teams searched Ruben Flores’ White Court house. Around 6 pm, detectives entered the crawlspace under the house and carried buckets of soil into a forensics tent.

The soil later tested positive for human blood. The Sheriff’s Office announced they found evidence of a human burial site and proof the body had been dug up and removed. A Luminol test indicated the body had been transported using Mike McConville’s trailer, still on the property.

Traces of red, grey, and black fibers consistent with Kristin’s clothing (grey crop top, black board shorts, red Puma sneakers) were found in the soil. This circumstantial evidence led to the conclusion that Kristin Smart had been buried under Ruben Flores’ house until February 2020. What were the outcomes of the trial for Paul and Ruben Flores?

Paul Flores, 44, was arrested April 13, 2021 for first-degree murder while in the commission of, or attempted rape of, Kristin Smart. Ruben Flores, 80, was arrested the same morning as accessory after the fact. The trial began July 18, 2022 in Monterey County after a change of venue.

Each had separate juries. On October 18, 2022, Ruben Flores was found not guilty and freed. Paul Flores was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

During the trial, Paul’s attorney Robert Sanger argued it was a conspiracy involving the DA, Sheriff’s Office, Smarts, and ‘the Podcaster,’ and victim-blamed Kristin. Ruben’s attorney Harold Mesick argued no evidence linked Ruben to the crime. A dismissed juror from Ruben’s panel had been convincing others of Ruben’s guilt before being removed for discussing the case with his priest.

What happened to Kristin Smart’s body? Kristin Smart’s body has never been found. Chris Lambert theorizes that after Paul killed Kristin in his dorm room, he ran to his sister Ermelinda’s house covered in vomit, she called Ruben, and Ruben raced to Cal Poly.

They allegedly wrapped Kristin’s body in bedsheets, carried her through Paul’s bedroom window, placed her on Paul’s truck, and Ruben drove her to Arroyo Grande where he hid her body. The theory is that Kristin’s body was buried under Ruben Flores’ White Court house deck for approximately 24 years. Evidence found in March 2021 confirmed a burial site there, but also that the body had been dug up and removed.

Neighbors reported suspicious activity February 7-8, 2020, including fence removal and Mike McConville’s truck/trailer blocking view of the deck. The Smart family continues to seek information about where Ruben, Susan, or Mike McConville drove that weekend, asking anyone with information to contact the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office.

Key Takeaways

• Kristin Smart disappeared from Cal Poly in May 1996 after Paul Flores, the last person seen with her, walked her home from a party.
• Campus police initially dismissed Kristin as a runaway, delaying the investigation and allowing crucial evidence in Paul’s dorm room to be destroyed.
• Musician Chris Lambert’s 2019 podcast ‘Your Own Backyard’ reignited interest in the cold case and provided key leads that helped authorities build a prosecutable case.
• Paul Flores was convicted of first-degree murder in 2022 and sentenced to 25 years to life, while his father Ruben was acquitted of accessory charges.
• Despite the conviction, Kristin Smart’s body remains missing, and her family continues searching for her final resting place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Kristin Smart and what was she like?

Kristin Denise Smart was born in February 1977 to Stan and Denise Smart, both educators, while they were stationed at an American military base in Augsburg, Germany. She was a tall (over 6ft), dark-eyed blonde who was smart, friendly, but quiet. She was athletic, participating in swim team and volleyball, loved to swim, design floor plans, and travel. She spent time as an exchange student in Venezuela and worked as a lifeguard and camp counselor in Hawaii.

She adopted a Bohemian/hippy look in the 90s with little braids and loved Bob Marley, Tom Petty, and rap music. She started at Cal Poly in September 1995, originally studying architecture before switching to communications.

What happened on the night Kristin Smart disappeared?

On Friday, May 24, 1996, Kristin went to a party at 135 Crandall Way with her neighbor Margarita Campos. She wore a grey crop top, black Roxy-brand board shorts, and red Puma sneakers. After leaving the party around 2 am on May 25, she was found asleep on a lawn. Fellow student Tim Davis and Cheryl Anderson offered to walk her home.

Paul Flores, a blonde student who lived in the adjacent dorm building, offered to help carry Kristin. Tim left first at a parking lot, and Cheryl continued with Paul and Kristin. Cheryl noted Paul holding Kristin’s bare stomach in a way that made her uncomfortable. When they reached Cheryl’s dorm, she asked Paul to walk Kristin to her room, and he promised he would.

This was the last time Kristin was seen alive.

Why were the initial police investigations into Kristin Smart’s disappearance criticized?

The initial police response was heavily criticized for multiple failures. When Kristin’s friends reported her missing on Monday, May 27, Cal Poly Police initially dismissed concerns, suggesting she was probably still on holiday. They didn’t open a missing person’s report until Tuesday, May 28.

Cal Poly Police failed to seal off Kristin’s room, never searched Paul Flores’ room, and by the time the Sheriff’s Office requested call records for Paul’s room, the University had already wiped them. When Paul left campus for summer, his room was emptied and cleaned by janitorial staff, removing potential trace evidence. Their first report on May 31 characterized Kristin as having ‘loose morals’ who had likely run away, noting she ‘lives her life in her own way, not conforming to typical teenage behaviour.‘

What role did cadaver dogs play in the investigation?

Cadaver dogs played a crucial role at multiple points. On June 29, 1996, four cadaver dogs were led through the Red Bricks dorm buildings. Three dogs separately alerted to room 128 in Santa Lucia Hall—Paul Flores’ room. Inside, each dog went to the bed on the left side and alerted at the foot of the bed.

When the bed, trashcan, and telephone were removed and mixed with items from other rooms, the dogs again identified those from room 128. In March 1997, CARDA cadaver dogs searched the Branch Street house backyard and alerted where Ruben Flores had kept a trash can. In March 2021, cadaver dogs were part of the search of Ruben Flores’ White Court house that led to discovery of evidence of a human burial site under the deck.

Who created the ‘Your Own Backyard’ podcast and what inspired it?

Chris Lambert, a singer-songwriter from Orcutt, California, created the podcast. He was 8 years old when Kristin disappeared and had driven past her billboard for 14 years. On May 9, 2018, after releasing an album, he fell into a ‘Wikipedia rabbit hole’ and became obsessed with the case. He was shocked that everyone wasn’t talking about it constantly and that no documentary had been made.

Despite being ‘quiet, awkward, and not a professional anything at all,’ he spent a year and a half researching, interviewing witnesses, walking the route taken that night, and learning about the Flores family. The first episode ‘A Face on a Billboard’ was released September 30, 2019.

How did the podcast help lead to Paul Flores’ arrest and conviction?

The podcast generated crucial tips and pressure. After Chris Lambert reached out to the Sheriff’s Office in October 2019 offering to use the podcast to entice the Flores family, they began strategizing. Tips after early episodes led to tracking down the Flores family trucks.

The podcast’s popularity convinced the Flores family they were running out of time. In a January 26, 2020 wiretapped call, Susan Flores told Paul to ‘start listening to the podcast’ so ‘we can punch holes in it’—evidence that Paul had knowledge of what happened. This helped lead to raids on February 5, 2020, where Paul’s computer was found containing hundreds of photos and videos of drugged, assaulted women and child exploitation material.

Chris Lambert also provided leads about suspicious activity at Ruben’s house, leading to the March 2021 search that found evidence of Kristin’s burial site. Assistant DA Chris Peuvrelle, Detective Clint Cole, Sheriff Ian Parkinson, and the Smart family all said Paul wouldn’t be in prison without Chris Lambert.

What was Paul Flores’ history of troubling behavior before Kristin disappeared?

Paul Flores exhibited disturbing behavior from childhood. At 11, he allegedly tried to drown a girl at his mother’s daycare pool. In middle school, he made prank calls breathing heavily at girls.

He became a bully who picked fights, and in 1992 at age 16, he stomped on 13-year-old Nick Spreitzer’s head during a fight, causing severe injuries including vision loss and days of unconsciousness. He was ordered to anger management but never attended. At Arroyo Grande High School, he was known as ‘Creepy Paul,’ ‘Scary Paul,’ or ‘Psycho Paul.’

He stalked girls, left flowers on doorsteps, made heavy-breathing phone calls, and was described as ‘always staring.’ He showed up uninvited to parties, got drunk, aggressively flirted with women, and attacked them when rejected—body-slamming one girl, knocking another off a deck, and being found fondling a passed-out classmate. At Cal Poly, he failed most classes but excelled at party-trolling, and was suspected of drugging women with eye drops containing tetrahydrozoline (THZ).

What evidence was found during the March 2021 search of Ruben Flores’ property?

On March 15, 2021, forensic teams, archaeologists, cadaver dogs, and GPR teams searched Ruben Flores’ White Court house. Around 6 pm, detectives entered the crawlspace under the house and carried buckets of soil into a forensics tent. The soil later tested positive for human blood. The Sheriff’s Office announced they found evidence of a human burial site and proof the body had been dug up and removed.

A Luminol test indicated the body had been transported using Mike McConville’s trailer, still on the property. Traces of red, grey, and black fibers consistent with Kristin’s clothing (grey crop top, black board shorts, red Puma sneakers) were found in the soil. This circumstantial evidence led to the conclusion that Kristin Smart had been buried under Ruben Flores’ house until February 2020.

What were the outcomes of the trial for Paul and Ruben Flores?

Paul Flores, 44, was arrested April 13, 2021 for first-degree murder while in the commission of, or attempted rape of, Kristin Smart. Ruben Flores, 80, was arrested the same morning as accessory after the fact. The trial began July 18, 2022 in Monterey County after a change of venue. Each had separate juries.

On October 18, 2022, Ruben Flores was found not guilty and freed. Paul Flores was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. During the trial, Paul’s attorney Robert Sanger argued it was a conspiracy involving the DA, Sheriff’s Office, Smarts, and ‘the Podcaster,’ and victim-blamed Kristin. Ruben’s attorney Harold Mesick argued no evidence linked Ruben to the crime.

A dismissed juror from Ruben’s panel had been convincing others of Ruben’s guilt before being removed for discussing the case with his priest.

What happened to Kristin Smart’s body?

Kristin Smart’s body has never been found. Chris Lambert theorizes that after Paul killed Kristin in his dorm room, he ran to his sister Ermelinda’s house covered in vomit, she called Ruben, and Ruben raced to Cal Poly. They allegedly wrapped Kristin’s body in bedsheets, carried her through Paul’s bedroom window, placed her on Paul’s truck, and Ruben drove her to Arroyo Grande where he hid her body.

The theory is that Kristin’s body was buried under Ruben Flores’ White Court house deck for approximately 24 years. Evidence found in March 2021 confirmed a burial site there, but also that the body had been dug up and removed. Neighbors reported suspicious activity February 7-8, 2020, including fence removal and Mike McConville’s truck/trailer blocking view of the deck.

The Smart family continues to seek information about where Ruben, Susan, or Mike McConville drove that weekend, asking anyone with information to contact the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office.

Sources

• Original Casual Criminalist video: How a Podcast Helped to Find Justice for Kristin Smart
• Hero image source by Mailtosap / openverse, by-sa.

Related Coverage