Kristin Denise Smart was born on February 20, 1977, in Augsburg, Bavaria, West Germany. Kristen had dreams of becoming an architect but had already accepted and paid a deposit for a dorm room at California Polytechnic State University. She moved into room 120 at Muir Hall in an area called the Red Bricks. This was to be the start of her real college experience.
On the night of May 25, 1996, Kristen attended a birthday party with her friend Margarita Campos. Margarita didn’t want to go to the party initially, so after walking for a while towards the party, she wanted to return. But Kristen wanted to attend the party. Margarita returned to her room, while Kristen ended up going to the party.
Around 10 p.m., about a tenth of a mile from where she left Margarita, Kristen found a party. According to people who were there, all the guys seemed very interested in Kristen right away, and Kristen ended up drinking a lot that night. Two people who were there that night, Tim Davis and Cheryl Anderson, found Kristen lying on the grass outside someone’s lawn while walking home from the party. They decided to take her back to her place to ensure she got back safely.
As they were walking, another student caught up with them – 19-year-old Paul Flores. He was acting like a hero, putting his hands around her bare waist.
Paul lived in Santa Lucia Hall, which is close to where Kristen was living in Muir Hall. Paul claimed he continued walking Kristen to his building and then watched her walk over to her building, which is about 40 yards away. After he saw her safely enter her dorm, he went inside his own building, and that was it for the night.
However, that night Kristen was supposed to spend in Margarita’s room but never showed up. Her friend Jennifer Phipps called the campus police to report her missing, but they refused to take the report. So they called Kristen’s parents, which really upset them.
Finally, on May 28th, the police decided to file a report for Kristen. They started by interviewing several witnesses from the parties Kristen attended that night, trying to build a timeline of who she spoke to and what that night was like. After interviewing several people, there was one person of interest – Paul Flores.
When the campus police interviewed Paul Flores several times, they noticed he had multiple injuries like scratches on the back of his head, rug bone on his knees, and a black eye. When he was interviewed on June 19th, Paul was very anxious and wanted to leave immediately. He said he had somewhere he needed to be, when officers asked where he had to go, he said he had to clean up some concrete at his mom’s house.
On June 26th, 1996, the campus police handed the case over to the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s department. Within three days, they organized a search of the campus that included over 400 volunteers, helicopters, cadaver dogs, all things that would have been really helpful to have when she first went missing.
Four dogs ended up picking up something outside room 128 in Santa Lucia Hall, which was Paul’s room. By the time campus police had searched his room, he had already left for the summer and it was cleaned by the janitor. When the dogs were let inside the room, they still hit on Paul’s mattress, and they also detected the same scent on a telephone and a trash can in the room.
The police served a search warrant at Ruben’s house, the most significant thing they found were newspaper clippings about Kristen’s disappearance. From the very beginning of the investigation, Ruben and Susan Flores (Paul’s parents) were very evasive about the investigation.
On August, Susan put her house up for rent, and it was rented by Mary and Joe Lasseter and their six-year-old son, who moved in on October 1st. But right when they moved in, Susan, their landlord, told them there was this aluminum trash can out front and they shouldn’t touch it or throw anything away in it – someone would pick it up. Then Ruben came and picked that trash can up the next day.
One day, Mary was outside cleaning her car when she noticed something shiny near her front tire – it was an earring, also with a dark reddish fingerprint smudge on the back of it. She decided to put it in a little baggy and saved it. In October, investigators actually came to talk with them in their house, so they took it in as evidence.
As soon as the local police department took over the case, Paul completely stopped cooperating, and then they had a deposition on November 14th, 1997, in which Paul refused to answer any questions, and that Fall Paul tried to enroll in the Navy so he could flee the situation, essentially, but Kristen’s family decided to file a $40 million wrongful death lawsuit against him, so that he wouldn’t be able to leave. Luckily Paul ended up being rejected from the navy, and because of the lawsuit they were able to subpoena him, so the deposition started in January 1997.
When they interviewed the tenants, Mary and Joe, the Smart family was shocked to hear about this earring, as no one ever told them that an earring had been found. So, their lawyer put in a request for them to see and identify the earrings to see if it really belonged to Kristen, but they never heard back for over a month.
So eventually Stan and Denise, Kristen’s parents, decided to go down to the police department themselves and demand to see the earring. When they did, they found out that the earring was lost. So years later, Mary ended up buying a pair of earrings that she said was almost identical to the one she found, which actually matches the necklace Kristen was wearing from her missing poster.
Mary had something bigger than the earring – along one of the walls of their house there were four planter boxes. Joe had tried to grow flowers in this box but they kept dying, so when he inspected the planter he realized there was actually a layer of cement underneath the dirt, which was odd for them. So they asked the neighbor about it, and the neighbor said that the planters were added in summer of 1996, the same year Kristen went missing. Also, after they had first moved into Susan’s home, every morning at around 4:20 a.m. they would hear the sound of a watch alarm going off, and over time, the beeping sound eventually stopped. Mary thought it was a watch and figured that the battery must have just died. She thought it was a strange time for an alarm to beep at 4:20 a.m., but remember, Kristen was a lifeguard, she had to be at the pool by five.
After Susan found out that Mary and Joe had done the deposition against her, she was angry and retaliated by kicking them out of her house, which at that point they were more than happy to leave. So by law they had 30 days to vacate, so they were gonna use this time to bring in some experts to search the property. A geologist came in and did a ground-penetrating sweep of the backyard and they also brought in cadaver dogs and they actually alerted to an area in the backyard where the aluminum trash can had been.
A neighbor across the street actually said that he had seen Paul right around that time outside late in the night with some other man digging something in the backyard in the dark for five hours. He also saw they were pouring concrete and he actually claims that he saw them dig a hole that was four feet wide and seven to eight feet long, and then drop something in it that looked like a rolled-up carpet, and since then they had actually built a garage on top of this spot. After Mary and Joe moved out of the house, Susan actually just moved back in.
Kristen was legally declared dead in May of 2002. In 2011, everything changed. There was a newly elected Sheriff named Ian Parkinson who took over the case and ordered a complete review of all the evidence. They had launched another search of the campus with cadaver dogs and earth movers this time.
In 2019, something huge happened for the case from someone not expected – Chris Lambert, he’s a musician, decided to make this podcast and it included a lot of new information and really compelling interviews. One person they found from the podcast and interviewed was an Australian exchange student named Neil Van Est. The night Kristen disappeared, he was riding his bike back from the library, late at night around 2:00 a.m., and he actually saw a man and a woman inside Sierra Madre Hall, which is Cheryl’s dorm, and they were struggling and fighting, it looked like the woman was trying to get away.
Then in February police executed four search warrants in California and Washington state at the homes of Paul, Ruben, Susan, and her sister, Ermelinda. But this new evidence led to a second search warrant of Paul’s home in San Pedro, California, and investigators said they were looking for specific items of evidence. Finally, they had enough to make arrests. It was reported that numerous “items of interest” were successfully found during the search. Among the items found in the search were date rape drugs and homemade videos showing Flores in acts of sodomy and raping young women.
On February 11, 2021, reportedly Paul Flores had been arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, on suspicion of being a felon in possession of a firearm, which is a felony. On March 15, 2021, a search warrant was issued to search Ruben Flores’s home, including the use of cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar. A 1985 Volkswagen Cabriolet was towed from the home of Ruben Flores after cadaver dogs searched the vehicle.
On April 13, 2021, Paul Flores and his father, Ruben Flores, were taken into custody by the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department in relation to the case. Paul Flores was charged with murder; Ruben Flores was charged with being an accessory. Investigations later concluded that Paul Flores attempted to rape Smart, although Dan Dow, District Attorney of the County of San Luis Obispo, has stated that the statute of limitations has expired on a sexual assault charge, but murder committed in the course of rape or attempted rape justified first-degree felony murder charges. In September 2021 a judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence of guilt for the case to proceed to trial.
The trial was set to begin on April 25, 2022, but was delayed, as a change of venue motion by the defense was granted on March 30, 2022. The case was moved to Monterey County, where it was heard by Judge Jennifer O’Keefe. Pretrial motions were heard on June 6 and 7, 2022, with some ruled upon and other rulings deferred. Over 1,500 jury summonses were sent to County residents. Jury selection began on June 13, and opening arguments began on July 18.
On October 18, 2022, the separate juries found Paul Flores guilty of first-degree murder and father Ruben Flores not guilty of accessory after the fact. Ruben Flores was facing a maximum sentence of three years in jail. One juror on the Ruben Flores case told Judge O’Keefe that he had discussed this case with his priest for “spiritual guidance” as it “was causing him stress.” That juror was dismissed and an alternate was sworn in, causing deliberations to begin again. Paul Flores was sentenced to 25 years to life on March 10, 2023.
Paul Flores was sentenced to 25 years to life on March 10, 2023. Paul Flores is currently serving his term at the Pleasant Valley State Prison. On August 23, 2023, Flores was attacked by his cellmate Jason Budrow, who is serving a life sentence for killing his girlfriend. Budrow had previously killed another cellmate, Roger Reece K.
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