On May 24th, 1996, a Friday evening in California, a 19-year-old girl picked up the phone and called her parents. They didn’t answer, so she left a voicemail. Good news, good news. I’ll call you Sunday. Her parents replayed that message for years. That Sunday never came. And to this day, they still don’t know what the good news was.
Her name was Kristen Smart. And before we talk about what happened to her, you need to understand just one thing about her. Kristen was the kind of person who moved through the world like nothing could stop her. He signed every email with the same line. Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation.
She didn’t just say it. London at 16. Venezuela as an exchange student. Hawaii the summer before college. Working as a lifeguard, spending her days in the ocean. 6′ 1 in tall. Quiet confidence. The kind that makes a person feel safe going places alone. And that right there is the first thing you need to hold on to.
Because the same independence that made Kristen who she was, the same fire that pushed her to say yes to every adventure was the exact quality that put her alone on a street at 2:00 a.m. on a night that changed everything. She enrolled at Calpaly St. Louis Abyispo in fall 1995. Started in off-campus apartments, hated it, and by January had moved into Mir Hall, room 20, right at the heart of campus. the red bricks.
She called it a fresh start. She dyed her natural blonde hair dark brown. She tried on new names. Roxy, Trixie, Marisol. It was doing what every freshman does. Testing who she could become in a place where nobody had already decided who she was. But she was struggling. Hard classes, ADHD, a 5:00 a.m.
lifeguard shift she had to wake up at 4:20 every morning to make. She called her mom and admitted she was falling behind. Even begged to drop out. Her mother wrote her a long letter. The world of opportunities is at your fingertips. Get back on the horse. Kristen stayed. That matters because a girl who almost quit and chose to stay was a girl who still believed things could get better.
And on the afternoon of May 24th, they did. She had missed a biology exam earlier in the semester. That Friday, she found out she could make it up. For someone who had been grinding and fighting to stay afloat, that small piece of news felt enormous. At 5:30 p.m., she called her parents. They didn’t pick up. Good news. Good news. I’ll call you Sunday.
She was happy. Genuinely, purely happy. And she wanted to celebrate. Memorial Day weekend. Most of the campus had cleared out. Her closest friend on campus was Margarita Compos, another freshman with ADHD, also grinding through a tough first year. Kristen knocked on her door. Come out with me. Let’s find a party. Margarita didn’t want to.
She was exhausted. But Kristen pushed and eventually Margarita gave in. One important detail. Kristen had no ID on her that night. No wallet, no money, no credit cards. She didn’t even have her own dorm key. She’d lost it recently. The only key she had was margaritas tucked into her sock. She was carrying nothing that connected her to who she was.
Their first stop was a small gathering on campus. A few guys on a couch video games on the TV. Margarita looked around and thought, “I stopped studying for this.” They left. But Kristen wasn’t done. She wanted to check frat row. Margarita had had enough. He handed over her dorm key, turned back toward the hall, and that was that. Kristen watched her go, and then she kept walking, alone, independent, unstoppable, just the way she always was.
About a tenth of a mile further, she found it. A birthday party at an unofficial Sigma Key house, 135R. Around 60 people, music thumping from inside, red cups everywhere. She walked in alone. She introduced herself as Roxy. It was social, laughing, pulling a guy named Trevor Bolter aside to tell him she had a crush on a basketball player across the room. She was having fun.
But here is the detail that investigators would later circle back to again and again. Multiple people at that party said they barely saw Kristen with a drink in her hand that night. She wasn’t a heavy drinker. She sometimes pretended to drink at parties just to fit in. By most accounts, she had very little alcohol that evening. though.
When Tim Davis, one of the hosts, walked outside at 2 am to clear people out, and found Kristen Smart lying on the neighbors front lawn, completely unconscious, too cold to stand, barely aware of where she was, something didn’t add up. A girl who barely drank, lost out, cold before the party even officially ended.
Tim helped her up. Another student, Cheryl Anderson, offered to walk with them back to campus. The three of them started moving through the dark streets toward the dorms. And then out of nowhere, a figure appeared behind them. He said his name was Paul Flores. He said he was going the same direction. He stepped forward, put his arm around Kristine’s bare waist like he already knew her, and told Tim and Cheryl he could help.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t wait. He just inserted himself. Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation. That was Kristen’s motto, her whole identity. But that night, someone else had already decided to write her story for her. And the most terrifying part, nobody at that party had been watching him all night.
Stay with me. Because what happened in the next 40 yards changed everything. 40 yards. That is the exact distance between Paul Flores’s dormatory and the front door of Kristen’s building. Not a mile, not a dark highway, 40 yard on a flat lit path, a walk that takes less than 30 seconds. He never made it.
Here is Paul Flores’s official story. He walked Kristen as far as his own dorm, Santa Lucia Hall. He stood there. He watched her walk the remaining 40 yards to Mure Hall on her own. He saw her go inside. He went to his room. He went to sleep. Clean, simple, completely unverifiable. Because Tim Davis had already split off earlier.
He had a car nearby and drove home. Cheryl Anderson had turned off toward her own dorm. He had watched Paul and Kristen disappear together down that dark path. Kristen barely able to stand. Paul’s arm locked around her waist. After that, no witnesses, no cameras, nothing. That same night, Kristen was supposed to return Margarita’s key.
She never came back. By Saturday morning, Kristen’s roommate, Crystal, returned and found Kristine’s backpack sitting exactly where she left it Friday. Belongings untouched. It looked like nobody had slept there. Crystal told herself Kristen would turn up by afternoon. Afternoon passed, evening passed. By Sunday, the silence wasn’t just weird, it was deafening.
Friends started asking around campus. Has anyone seen her? Every answer was the same. No. On Monday morning, they finally called campus police. Please, our friend is missing. Campus police refused to take the report. They said Kristen had probably gone somewhere for the long weekend. Students do this all the time, they said.
And then in a detail that is almost impossible to absorb. They suggested she might have gone to Hawaii because she loved Hawaii. A girl with no packed bags, no clothes taken, no wallet, no ID, no money, no credit cards, had spontaneously booked a flight to Hawaii for the weekend. That was the official position of the campus police. Her friends tried local police next.
Same response, no urgency, no report, no movement. Time was running out and Paul Flores knew exactly how much of it he had. Inside the smart family home, the hours were passing very differently. Stan and Denise had expected their Sunday call. It didn’t come. They told themselves she got busy, she forgot. Then campus police called them asking if Kristen was home with them.
Denise Smart said later, “That’s when a mother’s instinct kicks in and you say, “This is not right.” Because Denise knew her daughter. Kristen had called every Sunday without fail. She would never travel without telling someone. This was not Kristen’s behavior. The police tried to reassure her. She probably just forgot to check in.
They said they were telling a mother that her daughter, who left behind her wallet, her ID, her medication, her backpack, had simply forgotten to call. A missing person report was not filed until 4 days after Kristen was last seen alive. 4 days where Paul Flores moved freely. 4 days where his dorm room sat unsecured. 4 days where anything, evidence, clothing, a mattress could be moved, cleaned, or disposed of without a single officer paying attention.
Kristen’s father, Stan, drove down to campus himself. He walked those paths. He put up flyers with his own hands. He and Denise had already accepted what should never have been necessary. If anyone was going to find their daughter, it was going to be them. There is one detail from Cheryl Anderson that never received the attention it deserved.
On the walk home that night, before she turned off toward her own dorm, she had noticed how Paul was holding Kristen, not guiding her the way a helpful stranger would. He had his arm locked around her waist, keeping her close, keeping her moving, steering her. Daryl felt uncomfortable enough to stay longer than she planned.
She did not want to leave Kristen alone with him. He held on until she literally reached the door of her own building, at which point she had no real choice. She asked Paul to promise he would get Kristen safely to her room. He promised. Then she watched them disappear down the path together.
That image stayed with her for decades. When investigators finally began speaking to people at the party, every single account pointed the same direction. The last person seen with Kristen Smart was Paul Flores. He walked her home. He was alone with her. And yet, Paul Flores was not formally interviewed for 6 days after she vanished.
But here is what makes that even harder to accept. When investigators did finally write their initial incident report, this is what they chose to focus on. Smart does not have any close friends at Kpali. 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 behavior. These observations are in no way implying that her behavior caused her disappearance, but they provide a picture of her conduct on the night of her disappearance. The police report spent more words describing Kristine’s social life, who she talked to, how she behaved, whether she had close friends, than it spent on the one person who was alone with her when she disappeared.
All Flores was left completely unbothered for 6 days. Kristen’s smart was reduced to a character judgment before she was even officially declared missing. When investigators finally brought Paul in, they noticed something immediately, something that had no business being on his face 4 days after a birthday party.
a black eye, deep, dark, obvious. They asked him how he got it. He said, “Basketball.” His basketball friends said something different entirely, and that was just the first lie. That black eye had no business being on his face. Paul said basketball. His friends confirmed he had the black eye before the game even started.
When pushed, he changed his story. Said he hid his eye on his steering wheel at 2:00 a.m. while removing a car stereo. a man 5′ 10 in tall somehow hitting his eye on his own steering wheel hard enough to bruise it deeply. He also had scratches on the back of his hand and rug burn on both knees. None of it added up.
And when investigators pointed out the lie, Paul shrugged and said it was a small detail that didn’t matter. But here is what investigators were starting to understand. This wasn’t a man who made one bad decision on one bad night. This was a man who had been practicing for years, hiding in plain sight, doing exactly enough to make people uncomfortable, but never quite enough for anyone to stop him.
Paul Flores grew up in a Royal Grande, California. His parents tried. But when Paul was in middle school, he attacked another student so violently that the boy ended up hospitalized for an extended period. The court recommended anger management. His parents declined. They did not believe their son needed it. That was the first time someone looked at what Paul Flores was capable of and chose to look away. It would not be the last.
By high school, Paul had no friends, not one. His parents were so concerned about his isolation that they bought a pool table, hoping neighborhood kids would come over, hoping their son would find his place. Nobody came. Paul graduated without a single close friendship. His classmates didn’t just ignore him, they actively avoided him.
The nickname they gave him, Scary Paul, wasn’t a joke. It was a warning passed between them in hallways. He got into Kalpali not because of his grades. He was failing food science, a Dminus by his own academic record. He got in because the university gave preference to local applicants. That was the only reason he was there.
And at college, without the social structure of a hometown to contain him, his behavior began to escalate. Paul’s pattern with women followed three distinct stages. Not random, not impulsive, a system. Stage one was access. He would show up to parties uninvited every weekend. He wasn’t there to socialize. He was there to find someone vulnerable.
He would drink alone in his dorm room first, then wander campus until he found a gathering with women in it. Stage two was pressure. Once he identified someone, he wouldn’t approach directly. He would insert himself, make physical contact without asking. A hand on a shoulder, an arm around a waist.
If a woman pushed back, he wouldn’t leave. He would follow her across the room and try again. Multiple women at Kristine’s party that night reported exactly this. Cheryl Anderson’s friends had a name for him long before that night. They called him Chester the Molester. That nickname didn’t come from one incident. It came from a pattern so consistent that women on campus had begun warning each other about him as routine.
Stage three was isolation. 5 months before Kristen disappeared. December 1995, Paul climbed the exterior trellis of an apartment building in the middle of the night and attempted to get onto a female student’s balcony, she saw him. She called the police. Officers came, told him to get down, and sent him home.
No charges, no follow-up. Three women in that same building later reported Paul had been calling them repeatedly, harassing them, refusing to stop. Nothing was done. This is what hiding in plain sight looks like. He was doing everything in the open. and the system kept looking the other way. At the party on May 24th, Paul’s behavior followed the same pattern, accelerated.
He showed up uninvited. Tim Davis witnessed a loud crash and turned to find Paul on the ground on top of Kristen. When Trevor Bolter came out of a side room where he’d been talking to Kristen, Paul was standing directly outside the door, immediately interrogating him about what had happened inside. On the walk home, Paul repeatedly told Cheryl to go ahead without them. He didn’t want to witness.
And even at the moment Cheryl finally left, he asked her for a kiss. She said no. He asked for a hug. She said no again. And then she watched him walk into the darkness with Kristen. When Paul was interviewed on June 19th, 4 weeks after Kristen vanished, he told the investigator he needed to leave early. He had somewhere to be.
The investigator asked twice before Paul finally answered. He said he needed to go clean up some concrete at his mother’s house. Investigators didn’t think much of it. They didn’t know yet that Paul’s mother, Susan, lived at a completely different address, not with his father, Reuben. That detail, that connection, would take years to fully understand.
His roommate, Derek, back from a holiday weekend, had heard about Kristine’s disappearance. He asked Paul, half joking, “What did you do with her?” Paul looked at him and said, “She’s at my house having lunch with my mom.” Derek thought it was strange. He mentioned it to investigators. It went into a file. Years later, when police finally searched Paul’s home in San Pedro, they found something that reframed everything.
On his computer was a folder containing videos. At least 10 different women, all unconscious, all filmed without their knowledge. Paul used incapacitating substances to exploit vulnerable individuals without their consent. The folder had a name. He called it practice. Not a mistake, not a moment of weakness.
practice, as in he had been rehearsing, as in he had been doing this long enough that he thought of it as a skill. Date rape drugs were also found in his home. Multiple women who encountered Paul in the years after Kristen’s disappearance came forward with the same story. A drink that tasted strange, waking up somewhere unfamiliar, piecing together what had been done to them. Kristen was not the first.
The evidence makes that unmistakably clear. When Kristine’s family filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit, the one legal mechanism they had to force Paul into a room, he sat down across from their attorney and said exactly four words on the record, his name. After that, 27 times the same line.
On the advice of my attorney, I refused to answer that question based on the fifth amendment of the United States Constitution, his family’s names, his address, whether he had ever been to Calpali 27 times. Silence. And then, sensing the walls beginning to close, Paul Flores tried to enlist in the United States Navy. He wanted out of California, out of reach, out of the story entirely.
But Kristen’s family got there first, and they made sure the Navy knew exactly who Paul Flores was. In 2014, 18 years after Kristen Smart vanished, there was a water leak in Reuben Flores’s kitchen, a plumber came to fix it. The repair required access beneath the back deck. Reuben Flores refused to let him go under there.
He let the leak go unrepaired. He let his kitchen stay damaged. Rather than allow one plumber for 1 hour beneath that deck, 18 years had passed, and whatever was under there still needed protecting. To understand why, you first need to understand a geography mistake that cost investigators everything. Paul’s parents were separated in 1996.
His father, Reuben, lived at his own property in a Royal Grande. His mother, Susan, lived separately at her rental house on East Branch Street about a mile away. Police assumed Susan lived with Reuben. They searched Reuben’s property. They left the Branch Street house completely untouched.
So, when Paul told investigators on June 19th that he needed to leave the interview early because he had to go clean up some concrete at his mother’s house, nobody in that room understood what he was actually saying. Not Reuben’s house. A completely different address that had never been searched. By the time investigators untangled the geography, months had passed.
That August, Susan put the Branch Street house up for rent and moved back in with Reuben temporarily. A young couple, Joe and Mary Lacier, moved in that October. From their very first day, Susan pointed to an aluminum trash can outside. Don’t touch it. Don’t use it. Someone will collect it. The next day, Reuben Flores arrived and took it away personally.
A trash can specific enough to warn new tenants about. Important enough for Reuben to drive over and collect himself. In the weeks that followed, letters began arriving at the Brandt Street House, not addressed to the Lacers, but to the Flores family. Strangers writing in, “You know what your son did. Come forward.
Tell the truth.” Mary kept every letter. She created a file. And then one morning, washing her car in the driveway, she noticed something near her front tire. An earring, small, silver, a turquoise stone set into the face, and on the back, a dark reddish smudge, a dried fingerprint in what appeared to be blood.
Mary had seen Kristen’s missing person posters around the area. She recognized the match. She put it in a small bag immediately. When investigators came to the property months later, they took it with them. It was never officially logged as evidence. It was placed in a desk drawer inside the sheriff’s department and lost. When Kristine’s family finally learned about the earring through their own civil attorney, they drove to the police department and demanded to see it.
Investigators told them it was gone. A visual inspection had been conducted, they said, and the earring wasn’t connected to the case. They didn’t just lose her jewelry. They lost the only physical piece of Kristen that had fought its way back to the surface. But the earring wasn’t the only ghost Mary Lacier lived with in that house.
Every morning, consistently, reliably, long before the sun hit the California coast, the house began to speak. At approximately 4:20 a.m., Mary was woken by a beeping sound rising from the garden. faint, mechanical, cold, like a digital watch alarm going off beneath the ground. He and her mother searched the backyard at night.
They crawled along the fence line. They pressed close to the soil. They never found it. After several months, the beeping stopped. Kristen Smart reported to her lifeguard shift at 5:00 a.m. every single morning. It would have set her watch alarm for 4:20 to be there on time. That watch, if it was hers, had been underground counting out mornings she would never wake up for until the battery ran out and the garden went silent.
In the backyard of the Branch Street house, Joe Lacader tried to grow flowers in a large planter box built against the back wall. The three smaller boxes grew fine, but the fourth, 6 ft long, 3 ft wide, killed everything he planted. He dug down to find out why. Beneath the soil was a solid layer of cement.
A neighbor confirmed the planter boxes had been constructed during the summer of 1996, the same summer Kristen disappeared. That same neighbor remembered watching Paul Flores late at night with at least one other person digging in that backyard for approximately 5 hours. He watched them lower something into a hole, something wrapped like a rolled carpet, something so heavy it took two men to carry.
He watched them cover it with dirt. He watched them pour concrete over the top. A garage was later built directly over that spot, blocking all access from the backyard to the driveway. The Flores family’s behavior across the years that followed was not the behavior of people with nothing to hide. A man who rented a room at Reubin’s house for nearly a decade told investigators that whenever Reuben mentioned Kristen Smart, he did not speak about her as a missing girl.
He used highly disparaging and aggressive language when referring to the victim, not grief, not guilt. active specific contempt for a 19-year-old who had been missing for years. In 2007, 11 years after Kristen disappeared, investigators returned to the Branch Street house with ground penetrating radar.
The equipment detected a disturbance in the soil beneath the backyard. Investigators reviewed the reading and decided it was not worth excavating. Then, in February 2020, police searched Reuben’s property with proper forensic equipment. They dug beneath the back deck. They sent soil samples to a lab. That night, hours after police left, a neighbor noticed something.
Reuben, Susan, and Susan’s boyfriend, all three of them outside in the dark after midnight, arguing. Trailers being brought in and out, activity concentrated directly beneath the deck that had just been searched that same day. The lab results came back weeks later. Forensic analysis of the soil samples from beneath the deck indicated the presence of human biological evidence.
Forensic analysis also found fibers in the earth, black and white, matching the color of the clothing Kristen was last seen wearing. The forensic archaeologist who examined the site found a hole approximately 4x 6 ft beneath the deck, roughly the size of a grave. The hole was empty, but it had not always been.
The ground itself told investigators something was here. Something was removed. By this point, the evidence was strong. The picture was clear. And yet, without a body, without that final definitive link, prosecutors hesitated. That hesitation would last until one man with no law enforcement background, no journalism degree, and no official authority decided he had waited long enough.
Chris Lambert had driven past Kristen’s billboard thousands of times. He had grown up 8 miles from Calpali, and that smiling photograph, the reward offer, the phone number, had been part of the landscape of his entire childhood. In 2019, working as a CBS news consultant and musician, he finally searched the case properly. What he found wasn’t a mystery.
It was a verdict. The system had refused to deliver. One suspect, 23 years, no arrest. He told his girlfriend, half joking, “I think I’m going to solve this.” Then a friend, a writer who had grown up nearby, sent him an email that made the joke feel suddenly serious. I can’t believe I never told you. I went to high school with the guy who walked her home that night.
We all called him Scary Paul. On September 29th, 2019, he launched a podcast called Your Own Backyard. He was not a detective. He had no subpoena power. He could not compel a single person to speak to him. What he had was a microphone and one question he kept asking publicly week after week what actually happened to Kristen Smart.
The first episode streamed nearly 75,000 times in a single day. Here is what the system had failed to understand for 23 years. People do not walk into police stations and volunteer information about frightening men. Not when those men are still free. Not when two decades of experience have shown that reporting Paul Flores leads to nothing.
But people will talk to someone who is not wearing a badge. Chris opened each episode with a simple clear reminder. The statute of limitations has expired on everything except murder. If you come forward, you will not be charged with anything. That assurance unlocked doors that official investigation had never managed to open.
Witnesses who had never been contacted by police came forward. Women who had encountered Paul Flores in the years after Kristen disappeared began sharing what had happened to them. People who had lived near the Flores properties, people who had been at the party that night. They called in. They emailed. They reached out.
The system had spent 23 years waiting for Paul Flores to break. Chris Lambert spent several months finding everyone the system had never bothered to ask. One of those people was Neil Van Est, an Australian exchange student who had been at Calpali the night Kristen disappeared. He had reported what he saw in 1996. Investigators dismissed his account and set it aside.
For 23 years, his testimony sat in a file unread. What he had seen was this. Riding his bicycle back from the university library at approximately 2 am, he passed Sierra Madre Hall, Cheryl Anderson’s dormatory, and looked through the floor toseeiling glass windows of the lobby. Two people inside, a man and a woman.
The woman was trying to get away. The man was physically preventing her from leaving. He described the man as approximately 5′ 10 in tall. The woman several inches taller, close to six feet. Paul Flores was 5 foot 10. Kristen Smart was 6’1. Neil Vanest had witnessed the struggle. He had tried to report it and for 23 years, nobody listened.
After the podcast aired, police reopened his testimony. This time, they acted on it. But the testimony that cracked this case open completely came from a woman named Jennifer Hudson. He had been 17 years old in the summer of 1996, just weeks after Kristen disappeared. She was at a skate park with a group that included Paul Flores when a radio bulletin came on about the ongoing search for Kristen Smart.
Paul Flores turned toward Jennifer. He was calm, almost casual. I was at a party with that girl. I actually was there and I did it. And I put Kristen under a skate ramp at my parents house. Jennifer waited for him to laugh. For any signal that this was dark humor, he didn’t laugh. He held her gaze with eyes she would later describe in a courtroom through tears as cold and empty.
The kind of look that communicates clearly, “I am telling you this because I know you will never tell anyone.” She was 17. She was frightened. She eventually bought a gun, genuinely afraid that Paul Flores might decide she knew too much. She carried that secret for 23 years. It was only when a friend told her about your own backyard and she heard Chris Lambert explain that witnesses were protected that she finally made the call.
A 17-year-old girl had been sitting on a confession for over two decades. Not because she didn’t want justice, but because the system had never given her a reason to believe that coming forward would lead to anything except danger. The podcast also made the Flores family nervous in ways investigators could now use. In 2019, police obtained a court order to monitor Paul’s communications, citing the renewed public pressure.
In the recordings that followed, they captured Susan Flores advising her son. her words recorded without her knowledge. I need you to listen to everything they say on that podcast so we could punch holes in it wherever we can punch holes. Maybe we can’t. You’re the one who can tell me. A mother not grieving, not urging her son to come forward.
Strategizing, coaching, coordinating a response to a podcast. That recording confirmed what investigators had long suspected. This was never just Paul. This was a family that had spent 23 years managing the story together. In April 2020, a search of Paul’s San Pedro home produced the videos, the folder. What was inside it? By early 2021, the case file had reached a threshold.
On April 13th, 2021, 25 years after Kristen Smart walked into the dark, 25 years after her parents left the voicemail unreturned, 25 years after a campus police officer suggested she had probably gone to Hawaii, law enforcement arrived at two separate addresses simultaneously. Paul Flores arrested in San Pedro. Ruben Flores arrested in Aoyo Grande.
Sheriff Ian Parkinson stood in front of cameras that afternoon and said something that almost never happens in a law enforcement press conference. He credited a podcaster by name. Some of that information came to light through the podcast many of you are familiar with. The same institution that had lost an earring, that had chosen not to excavate a disturbance in the soil, that had publicly told a killer he only needed to stay quiet.
That institution was now acknowledging that a musician with a microphone had found what 25 years of official investigation had not. That moment was not a celebration. It was a quiet public admission of exactly how badly the system had failed. But arresting Paul Flores was only step one. The real test was still ahead.
October 18th, 2022, 26 years, four months, and 23 days after Kristen Smart walked into the dark, a jury filed back into a Montterrey County courtroom. The Smart family sat together. Stan, Denise, Matthew, Lindsay, the same family that had spent over a quarter century driving to campus to put up flyers, fighting a system that kept telling them to wait.
The clerk read the verdict. Guilty. First-degree murder. Denise Smart reached for her daughter Lindsay. They held each other. Stan sat still for a moment. The way a person sits when something they have waited for so long finally arrives and they are not quite sure how to feel it. Later that day, he stood at a microphone and said the only thing that was true.
Without Kristen, there is no joy or happiness in this verdict. The trial had been moved out of St. Louis Abyispo County entirely to Mterrey County about a 110 mi north. The case was so embedded in the local community after 26 years that finding impartial jurors was considered impossible. Over 1,500 potential jurors were summoned for screening.
The trial ran for nearly 3 months. Prosecutors called over 50 witnesses. Paul and Ruben Flores were tried simultaneously. Same courtroom, same judge, but with two completely separate juries, each deciding independently. Jennifer Hudson walked to the stand 26 years after a 17-year-old girl had heard a confession she was too frightened to report.
She testified through tears. She described the cold eyes, the flat voice, the words that had lived inside her for over two decades. They told the jury that throughout her testimony, she had looked directly at Paul Flores every time she wasn’t looking at her attorney. On some level, it was vindicating to sit up there and look him in his dead eyes and for him to have to sit there and listen in silence.
Several other women referred to as Jane does to protect their identities also testified about what Paul Flores had done to them in the years after Kristen disappeared. They described being drugged. They described waking up somewhere unfamiliar. They described piecing together what had been done to them while unconscious.
Prosecutor Christopher Puell addressed them in his closing argument. They spoke for Kristen. They said what Kristen could not. They are heroes. The defense’s response was, to put it plainly, desperate. Paul’s attorney called the forensic analysis junk science. He pointed out correctly that no body had been found.
He argued the prosecution was asking the jury to convict on speculation. And then the defense tried to link Scott Peterson, the man convicted of murdering his pregnant wife, to Kristen’s disappearance, noting he had been a student at Calpali. At the same time, the court dismissed it immediately. There was no evidence. It was not a defense strategy.
It was a distraction, and the jury saw it for exactly what it was. On October 17th, Reubin’s jury reached their verdict first. It was sealed until Paul’s jury returned. On October 18th, guilty, firstdegree murder. When Reubin’s verdict was read immediately after, not guilty of accessory after the fact, the relief in the Flores family was visible.
For the Smart family, that second verdict landed differently. The soil beneath Reuben’s deck had contained human blood. Clothing fibers matching what Kristen wore that night had been found in that earth. A forensic archaeologist had concluded that a body had been buried there and removed. A neighbor had watched Reuben, Susan, and her boyfriend working beneath that deck the same night police had searched it.
The DNA had been too degraded to extract a direct match. And because of that single forensic limitation, a man who had refused a plumber access beneath his deck 18 years after her disappearance walked out of that courtroom free. The Smart family had waited 26 years for the full truth. They got half of it.
On March 10th, 2023, Paul Flores stood before Judge Jennifer O’Keefe for sentencing. Prosecutor Puell called Paul Flores a true psychopath and said he should never be released. Matthew Smart addressed the court. Paul chose to take a life. My sister Kristen’s life. A beautiful life. And now he must pay. Then Lindsay Smart stood up.
She did not talk about Paul Flores. She talked about a chair. I sat at home staring at my sister’s empty chair for over 26 years. For family holidays, for events, for every moment that should have included her. Paul had the freedom to do whatever he wanted with his family. And he still holds the key to the one thing I desperately want, my sister.
Bringing her home. Not just her memory, her an empty chair at every table for 26 years. That is what this case cost one family. Not just the loss itself, but the inability to grieve it properly, to close it, to say goodbye. Judge O’Keefe sentenced Paul Flores to 25 years to life. She ordered him to register as a sex offender for life.
Before she concluded, she looked at him and said, “For 25 years, you lived free in the community while Kristine’s family lived a nightmare. Your predatory behavior has spanned your entire adult life. It is necessary to remove you from society so that you can no longer prey on and victimize women. They called him a cancer to society.
Paul Flores was transferred to Pleasant Valley State Prison in August 2023. Within weeks, a fellow inmate attacked him. He was hospitalized, recovered, and returned. In April 2024, he was attacked again, stabbed in the recreational yard. He has since been moved to Corkran State Prison. He has never confessed. He has never told the Smart Family where Kristen is.
In January 2024, the Smart Family filed a formal lawsuit against Calpali University, citing negligence and wrongful death. Their attorney said simply, “The university could and should have prevented her death. They can’t give back the 25 years of torture wrought upon this family, but they want to see change.” The case is ongoing. Kristen’s body has never been found.
Sheriff Parkinson has made one promise he has not yet been able to keep. This case will not be over until Kristen is returned home. We do not take a breath. We do not put this aside. On the California coast near Cowpali, about a 10-minute drive from the campus where Kristen lived and studied and fought to stay.
There is a memorial at Pismo Beach called Kristen’s Point of Hope. It sits at a viewpoint above the ocean she loved. The water she swam in, the coastline she would have surfed if she had been given more time. Her family goes there. Her friends go there. Strangers who never knew her go there. She was 19 years old. She signed her emails with a quote, “She didn’t just say, she lived.
” Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation. She dyed her hair and tried on new names and fought to stay in school when everything felt too hard and called her parents every Sunday without fail and left a voicemail about good news that her family still doesn’t fully understand and walked into a party alone because she was brave enough to believe that nothing bad would happen to her.
She deserved to be right about that. The system finally delivered a verdict, but a verdict is not the same as the truth. And the truth, where Kristen actually is, what her family could finally lay to rest is still out there somewhere. Paul Flores knows. And he has chosen every single day since May 25th, 1996 to keep that to himself.
Kristen Smart lived her life as an exclamation point. After 26 years, the world finally stopped to listen. Do you believe Ruben Flores should have been convicted given everything the ground beneath his deck revealed? If Chris Lambert had never stopped at that billboard, do you think Paul Flores would ever have been arrested? Kristen’s body has never been found.
After everything, do you believe it ever will be? Leave your answer below. Because Kristen’s smart story is not over. And the more people who keep asking these questions, the better the chance that one day her family finally gets to bring her home.
