Father Acquitted as Son Is Convicted in Cold Case That Has Haunted California

After 25 years of mystery surrounding the disappearance of Kristin Smart, a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo student who went missing after a party, a jury on Tuesday finally convicted a man of killing her.

Paul Flores, now 45, was convicted of her murder. His father, 81-year-old Ruben Flores, who was accused of helping his son hide Smart’s body, was found not guilty of accessory to murder by a separate jury on Tuesday afternoon.

Tuesday’s decision puts to rest two-and-a-half decades of speculation into what happened to Smart, who was last seen alive as she walked alongside Paul Flores by university residence halls on May 25, 1996, after a Memorial Day weekend party where the teen became “incapacitated” by something she drank.

Prosecutors had argued that Flores showed a pattern of abuse toward women, and that it wasn’t a coincidence he was around to walk her home after Smart passed out on a lawn.

Flores, also a university student at the time, “hunted” Smart for months, prosecutors said during the trial, frequently popping up in places she’d been, or sometimes hanging around her dorm itself, despite living in a different residence hall.

Smart’s old roommate told investigators that Flores was “unnaturally interested in Kristin,” according to prosecutor Christopher Peuvrelle, but she was “too nice to tell him off.”

On the night of her disappearance, Peuvrelle said Smart’s friend saw Flores emerge from the dark to help Smart up after she passed out and he offered to walk her home. The friend left the two together, a decision she’s “regretted ever since.” It would be the last time Smart was seen, alive or dead.

The defense, meanwhile, argued that Flores was simply doing “a good deed” by escorting Smart home, saying there was no concrete evidence he “hunted” his classmate, and that’s why he wasn’t arrested for over two decades.

Flores told cops at the time that Smart was “walking real slow” and that he hugged her waist to keep her warm as they walked to her residence hall. He said he dropped her off, then immediately returned to his room across campus.

Cops noted in police reports that Flores had a bruise under his eye when they interviewed him. They also documented that he’d changed his story about the night and how, exactly, he got that bruise.

Despite these fishy details—and Smart’s parents own accusations that Flores murdered their daughter—the case went unsolved for decades, largely because Smart’s body was never found. This was a detail the defense harped on constantly throughout the 11-week trial, arguing there was no physical evidence that proved the father and son were guilty.

“Kristin Smart has never returned home, she is believed now to be deceased, but there is no evidence of what happened to her,” said Robert Sanger, Paul Flores’ defense attorney.

Prosecutors countered that argument, however, by calling on two woman who claimed Flores raped them several years after Smart had vanished. This, prosecutors claimed, supported their theory that he sexually assaulted Smart, then killed her and hid her body.

The Daily Beast exclusively reported in 2016 that four women had accused Flores of sexual assault, with one accusation dating back as early as high school. That woman, just a 10th grader at the time, alleged that Flores and a friend drugged and raped her in 1994. A second woman, who also attended Cal Poly, alleged Flores groped her at a 1995 Halloween dance party—and tried to rape her in the bathroom at her friend’s birthday later that year.

In the trial for Ruben Flores, which ran concurrent with that of his son, prosecutors homed in on where the father may have helped his son hide Smart’s body. Prosecutors called on soil experts to study an area under a deck at Ruben Flores’ California home, which was rumored to be where the duo hid the body before they allegedly moved it sometime in 2020.

An investigation showed there was an “anomaly” in the soil under the deck at Ruben Flores’ California home, which supposedly contained human blood and other bodily fluids consistent with a person having been buried there and removed. The area studied was 6 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet, testified archaeologist Cindy Arrington, and was dug by hand. There were also fibers present that matched the color of Smart’s clothing the last time she was seen, she testified.

These details clearly tied Ruben Flores to the crime, prosecutors argued, but a jury disagreed on Tuesday.

Harold Mesick, Ruben Flores’ defense attorney, successfully argued that Arrington’s discovery wasn’t enough to warrant a conviction, insisting that the blood found under his home could’ve belonged to anyone, possibly even Ruben Flores himself.

“The amount of blood is so minuscule ... it could be anyone’s blood. It could be Ruben Flores’ blood,” Mesick said. “I am going to tell you it is not Kristin Smart’s blood.”

Mesick later argued that Smart was unhappy at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, suggesting the teen may have ditched town on her own and may still be alive today.

“The state has done a great job of demonizing Paul Flores and my client,” Mesick said in his closing remarks. “My client is absolutely innocent. He has not dug a grave in his life. I think this case screams reasonable doubt.”