On Friday, May 24, 1996, Kristin Smart, a freshman at Cal Poly, attended an off-campus party. By around 2am, Kristin was so drunk that she could not walk unsupported and needed help getting back home. A few friends escorted her part of the way, and one student who was walking with them, Paul Flores, offered to take her to her dorm. From the condition of her dorm room the following morning, it was evident that she had never gotten back, and she has not been seen ever since, nor has her body been found.
After a missing-person report was filed with the campus police on May 28, the San Luis Obispo Sheriff took over the investigation, conducting an extensive search for Kristin, but she was never found. From the very early stages of the investigation, Paul Flores, a poor student on the verge of expulsion who had been reported for stalking by various women, was regarded the prime suspect. Flores initially claimed to have parted with Smart outside her dorm building; at his 1997 interrogation he took the Fifth. At the time, Smart’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against him, and the suit has been stayed by judges ever since.
Over the years, a revolving door of Sheriffs took over the investigation, executing numerous search warrants, but there were long stretches in which the investigation lulled. Throughout the years, numerous private parties and entities (including a man from North Carolina and a local newspaper publisher) attempted to revive the investigation, occasionally sticking flyers near Paul Flores’ house. His neighbors were all aware that he was the suspect in an unsolved murder, and described him as an awkward man who kept to himself except when drunk (which was often), when he became belligerent and physical toward women.
On September 29, 2019, a recording engineer and singer-songwriter named Chris Lambert, who grew up seeing billboards with Kristin Smart’s image on them, decided to delve into the case and started a podcast called Your Own Backyard. The first episode features a conversation between Lambert and the Smart family, in which they give him their blessing for his project. In Episode 2, broadcast on October 6, he identifies Flores as the only suspect in the case. The first ten episodes of the podcast covered the events before and after Smart’s disappearance, and offered some additional information: Flores’ involvement in several violent rapes and sexual assaults in the years since the murder, neighbors’ reports of his parents’ suspected involvement in burying and/or moving the body, and incriminating statements Flores was said to have made to fellow skaters at the skate park. Among the most striking testimonies Lambert was that of a coworker of Paul’s mother, Susan Flores, recalling that the mother had complained one night about not sleeping well because her her husband, Ruben Flores, had gotten up and left their home after receiving a call. Even more striking was the second claim: a former tenant in Susan Flores’ home heard an alarm sound at 4:20 a.m. daily — possibly a wakeup alarm Smart set since she used to report to her job as a lifeguard at the Cal Poly pool at 5 a.m, suggesting that Smart, or her belongings, were buried in the mother’s backyard at least for that time.
In February 2020–a few days after Lambert broadcasted an interview with the Sheriff–the authorities executed search warrants at four locations in California and Washington State, including at Paul Flores’ home, and recovered various “items of interest.”
On November 25, 2020, Lambert broadcasted an episode titled “The 16-Hour Gap,” in which he examines, in great detail, Flores’ movements during the weekend around Smart’s murder. The episode stops shy of making speculations, but does present facts that suggest a body being moved using a truck that had its truck bed replaced.
In March 2021, investigators used cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar to search Ruben Flores’s back yard in Arroyo Grande, finding some indications of human DNA too old and corrupted to test. A month later, on April 13, 2021, Paul and Reuben Flores were both arrested; the son was charged with murder and the father of being an accessory after the fact. Lambert reported on these developments in two episodes released on the same day (July 6, 2021), titled The Beginning of the End 1 and 2.
The son and father were tried jointly in Monterey County (there was a change-of-venue motion) with two sets of juries, which facilitated the introduction of out-of-court statements and other evidence that would be admissible only against one, but not the other (this solves the codefendant confession problem posed by the Confrontation Clause and obviates the need to sever trials.) Lambert, who attended the trial but obviously could not broadcast from within the court, continued to make and broadcast podcast episodes about the trial throughout its 10 weeks, which along with some concluding interviews with the prosecutors, some of the jurors, and the Smart family, add up to 17 additional episodes. Flores was convicted and, in Marc 2023, sentenced to 25-to-life; his father was acquitted.
The trial revealed the extent to which the police and Lambert collaborated in the last, fruitful investigation. Lambert was on location when pivotal events, such as the execution of search warrants, occurred; he could not have known about these had he not been notified by the police. Moreover, the probable cause needed for executing those warrants came from testimony gathered by Lambert, not by the police.
The latest news are that, in late October 2024, Flores filed an appeal. KSBY reports that the appeal is based, at least in part, on jury contamination issues. Juror 237, the brief argues, had several anxiety attacks during the trial, for which she blamed the defense attorney, and even revealed to the bailiff “that her neutrality had begun to waver.” The reporting now describes the juror as number 273, but it seems like they are referring to the same person; the brief further indicates that:
[J]uror No. 273 admitted she knew people who listened to a viral podcast detailing the case, but that she discouraged discussion with those people about the matter. The defense counsel claimed the juror’s comment indicated that she had discussed her involvement in Flores’ trial and requested her removal for a fourth time. However, the brief states the trial court denied the request, saying that “it would be strange if no one knew why” juror No. 273 had missed an extensive amount of work due to the trial.
These allegations raise concerns about jury contamination, which are rooted in the fact that closing arguments–and some of the questions during witness examination–mentioned “the podcaster.” I worry very much that Lambert’s thorough, hard work might become the victim of its own success, and that the concerns about jury contamination could support this appeal.
The most painful part of this affair is that, in the years following Smart’s disappearance, Paul Flores turned out to be a terrifyingly violent man, who has been investigated for dozens of rapes, with three incidents–one in Redondo Beach, two in Los Angeles–almost leading to prosecution, but ending with nothing for reasons that are vaguely given in this LA Times article and that I simply cannot comprehend. The DNA found in the rape survivors matches his. In a 2020 raid of his home, police found a computer file named “Practice,” which contained video evidence of numerous instances in which Flores raped and sodomized women, many of them clearly appear unconscious. These videos, and plenty of evidence about his previous efforts at intoxicating women and then raping them could be offered at any sexual assault case against him as an exception to the evidentiary rule against former criminal behavior, because the incidents are so similar that they might as well be his calling card. If released following a successful appeal, and absent a merited and justified prosecution for the unrelated rapes, Flores, who is now in his late forties, would still be capable of violently assaulting women. This is exactly the opposite of what Lambert, and everyone who cooperated with his project, would want as an outcome.
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