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Terra.Anatolia
  • 8 hours ago
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00:00:00These are unforgettable.
00:00:02This is one of them.
00:00:05Young, vibrant, 19-year-old women
00:00:07don't just vanish into thin air.
00:00:09It just doesn't happen.
00:00:11It kind of consumes you.
00:00:13It does.
00:00:14As a mother, my mission will always be to bring Kristen home.
00:00:18When you cover murders for a living,
00:00:20you see the best and the worst of police work.
00:00:23This story had both.
00:00:25I told the authorities back then
00:00:27there was no way she just took off.
00:00:29After the time investigators started,
00:00:31the solid evidence was gone.
00:00:33I'm retracing Kristen Smart's last known steps.
00:00:37This podcast sort of raised this case to a national level.
00:00:41I think it haunts everybody that's involved in this case.
00:00:44He had planned this.
00:00:45He had stalked her.
00:00:47This kid was a one-man crime wave.
00:00:49He was.
00:00:50I was like, holy smokes, this is the guy.
00:00:53The only suspect in Kristen Smart's disappearance
00:00:56had stayed just beyond the reach of police for decades.
00:01:00He was free to assault you and other women too.
00:01:04Yes.
00:01:05The reason why might make you as angry as it does me.
00:01:09He doesn't belong out in the street.
00:01:11We need to get this done.
00:01:12That was terrifying to have to face them.
00:01:14I just kept thinking, you have to do this for Kristen.
00:01:24This is Dateline Unforgettable.
00:01:26I'm Josh Mankiewicz with a fresh look at justice for Kristen Smart.
00:01:40Time does not heal all wounds.
00:01:43That's a lie we like to tell ourselves.
00:01:48They took 26 years of our life that we have been having to fight.
00:01:55For the Smart family, time has been torture.
00:02:00Their daughter Kristen was just 19 when she vanished.
00:02:03That was more than a quarter century ago.
00:02:10You don't give up.
00:02:13You don't give up.
00:02:15Nope.
00:02:16You can't.
00:02:18Here are two more truths about time.
00:02:20When someone goes missing, a delay in the investigation is time lost forever.
00:02:25And sometimes a kind of investigative momentum vanishes along with it.
00:02:29And if you're trying to cover up a crime, that delay is a gift that buys you time.
00:02:36Both of those facts had devastating consequences for Kristen Smart's family and for other women,
00:02:42who later became prey for a predator.
00:02:46I think that my worst nightmare was that there was a lot of victims.
00:02:51Kristen Smart, also known as Roxy.
00:02:5419-year-old Kristen Smart never made it home.
00:02:59It's a mystery that leaves the Smart family haunted.
00:03:12For those of us above a certain age, 1996 doesn't sound like that long ago.
00:03:17Of course, it was a different time, a simpler time.
00:03:22There was no Instagram, TikTok, or texting.
00:03:26Friendships were made and cultivated in person.
00:03:32Her freshman year at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo,
00:03:38Vanessa Shields started a great friendship.
00:03:41She was two doors down from me, and we just, a bunch of us girls all became friends and kind of became inseparable.
00:03:49She was Kristen Smart from Stockton, California, and also a freshman at Cal Poly.
00:03:56She inspired me by her independence, and that's why we befriended each other.
00:04:03Margarita Campos lived in the room next door to Kristen.
00:04:06At that time, I was just, I was much more sheltered than she was, so she was fascinating to me and different and curious.
00:04:15We were, you know, studying each other's rooms, listening to music, going to parties, going to eat, going to work out.
00:04:22A lot of silly stuff, just hanging out and talking.
00:04:25That's a school where you can always find a party.
00:04:27Always, yeah. Even on a holiday weekend, yeah.
00:04:29Including that Memorial Day weekend.
00:04:33On Friday, May 24th, 1996.
00:04:36Plenty of students headed out of town for the holiday.
00:04:40Vanessa went home for the weekend.
00:04:43Kristen and Margarita stayed.
00:04:48The two women drove with some other friends to an off-campus party.
00:04:53It was just a really mellow, like, chill party.
00:04:56It wasn't very vivacious in any sort of way, and that was a great disappointment to Kristen.
00:05:01Because, like, that was just too low energy for her.
00:05:04She thought, party, lively.
00:05:08So they left.
00:05:10Kristen and Margarita were dropped off in a neighborhood where a lot of students lived, on the outskirts of campus.
00:05:16They walked for a bit. Kristen wanted to find another party.
00:05:21Margarita did not.
00:05:22She just was standing with her arms crossed and was like, come on, you have to come with me.
00:05:28And I just, I was like, I really don't want to go.
00:05:32And then she was like, come on.
00:05:35And it was just a push and pull of two independent women.
00:05:39Kristen had gone out without her keys, her purse, or even a jacket.
00:05:45She wore a t-shirt, surf shorts, and tennis shoes.
00:05:50Margarita gave Kristen her key so she could get back in the dorm.
00:05:55I think she put it in her shoe.
00:05:58Because she didn't really have, she didn't have any pockets in her, board shorts.
00:06:02She watched Kristen walk toward the houses on Crandall Way.
00:06:05She was not going to turn around and walk back with me to the dorms.
00:06:07That I knew.
00:06:09That's when I last left her.
00:06:16The next day, Margarita was surprised when Kristen didn't stop by to tell her how the evening went.
00:06:23I knocked on her door.
00:06:25I thought she was maybe still sleeping.
00:06:27I didn't see her for, gosh, the whole day.
00:06:30When Kristen's roommate returned Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, she and other women on the floor realized something was wrong.
00:06:40All of Kristen's belongings were in the room.
00:06:45Her backpack, ID, makeup.
00:06:48They called campus police right away.
00:06:51And then the campus police were like, well, are you sure she didn't go on a trip over the weekend?
00:06:59Because it was Memorial Weekend.
00:07:01Camping, and we're like, no, all her stuff is here.
00:07:04And they were like, well, she's over 18, so we have to wait for 24 hours.
00:07:10Vanessa Shields returned Monday evening to her panicked dorm mates.
00:07:16And a missing friend.
00:07:19And then I'm like, where's Kristen?
00:07:21Kristen's friends notified the resident advisor in the dorm, and again spoke with campus police.
00:07:29They just thought she just took off.
00:07:30She thought she just went on a fun trip.
00:07:33And that's what was frustrating because we knew she wouldn't just take off.
00:07:36We knew she wouldn't do that.
00:07:38If she were planning to take a mini vacation or go home or run off anywhere, you would have known about it.
00:07:44Myself and a lot of the other girls would have known.
00:07:46Yeah, Kristen was very vocal about what she was doing or where she was going.
00:07:50And then the phone rang at the Stockton home of Stan and Denise Smart.
00:07:55It was Cal Poly Campus Police.
00:07:58They said, your daughter's not at school.
00:08:01Did she go home?
00:08:02We think she has gone camping.
00:08:04And that's the first time we ever heard that.
00:08:07And they didn't know where she was.
00:08:09And I was immediately fearful because that's just not her.
00:08:13She's not going to leave on a last minute camping trip.
00:08:17No.
00:08:19Stan Smart got in his car and drove the four and a half hours to San Luis Obispo.
00:08:25Her friends in the dorm waited and hoped for answers.
00:08:30Even though we had this feeling that something was wrong, I don't think we could grasp at that moment how bad it could be.
00:08:37She was right.
00:08:39No one knew how bad it could be or how long it would take.
00:08:43For the amount of time that I've invested into telling this story, it's a fraction of a fraction of living through it.
00:08:52This is an ordeal most people would fold under.
00:08:57Your children are part of who you are, so you're fighting for them.
00:09:02You're fighting for justice.
00:09:04And fighting against time.
00:09:07Years lost.
00:09:09And no idea yet what a terrible price would be paid.
00:09:13Because he wasn't locked up from early on, he had the opportunity to do other things.
00:09:19Absolutely correct.
00:09:20I think it haunts everybody that's involved in this case.
00:09:33Stan Smart raced to San Luis Obispo when he learned his oldest daughter, Kristen, had not been seen on her college campus for days.
00:09:48You're thinking what during that drive?
00:09:51When I get there, she'll already be back.
00:09:53Well, hopefully, yeah, that I just talked to her.
00:09:56So I'm disappointed.
00:09:58That did not happen.
00:10:02They were saying, oh, well, you know, she probably went away and she's disappeared.
00:10:07And has she ever run away before? And so on and forth.
00:10:10Back home in Stockton, California, Kristen's mom, Denise, camped out by the phone, waiting for updates.
00:10:19My hopes would have been that the nightmare would be over once he got there and she would be there.
00:10:25But I was, I just knew something wasn't right.
00:10:30Kristen had struggled a bit at Cal Poly.
00:10:33She was less than completely happy with her decision to enroll there.
00:10:39One of the things that we shared with each other was our disenchantment with Cal Poly.
00:10:46Denise responded to some of her daughter's complaints in a letter she wrote just a few weeks before Kristen disappeared.
00:10:54Wake up and smell the roses, she wrote.
00:10:58You have a world of opportunities at your fingertips.
00:11:03You're kind of telling her.
00:11:05Suck it up, buttercup.
00:11:07Time to start acting like a grown up.
00:11:09Right.
00:11:11She had no doubt Kristen would get through this rough patch.
00:11:15She was never one to shy away from a challenge or an adventure.
00:11:19Well, she loved travel and she loved exploring.
00:11:24She was always instrumental in helping us plan a vacation, writing it all up, going to AAA because, you know, there was no Google at that time.
00:11:34She spent summers in London, Venezuela, and Hawaii.
00:11:39Matt Smart is Kristen's younger brother.
00:11:43To you she was like a star.
00:11:45Well, yeah, she, she was an artist.
00:11:48She was an adventurer.
00:11:49She was an individual who was just full of life.
00:11:51Get out there and get it done.
00:11:54She arrived at Cal Poly in the fall of 1995, excited to start college life.
00:12:01And the campus certainly seemed a safe place.
00:12:05You feel like you're in a kind of sheltered community because, you know, it's really kind of away from town.
00:12:11It was still hard for her little brother to say goodbye.
00:12:14And it's like, should we just leave her here?
00:12:19It's a lot of trust that you're putting in that.
00:12:22Trust that she'll make the right choices and that those around her will.
00:12:27Particularly because at 18 or 19, college freshmen are just on the cusp of adulthood.
00:12:32For Kristen, that brought a time of reinvention.
00:12:37And she began going by other names like Roxy.
00:12:41What was the deal with her calling herself Roxy?
00:12:44It was a nickname she gave herself.
00:12:46I think it was just kind of like this alter ego.
00:12:47She kind of just wanted to have fun and play with it.
00:12:49As much as Kristen was exploring her new independent self, her ties to home remained strong.
00:12:58She called you guys every Sunday?
00:13:01Every Sunday.
00:13:03Kristen left a message on her parents' answering machine the Friday of Memorial Day weekend.
00:13:10They weren't home.
00:13:12You know, you know your children's voice.
00:13:14And there was so much laughter and levity in it that she was so happy that, you know, that was the last I heard from her.
00:13:27No call that Sunday.
00:13:30It was Tuesday, three days after she'd been last seen, that campus police took an official missing persons report.
00:13:39Remember, by this time Kristen's dorm mates had already called campus police twice.
00:13:44Everyone who knew Kristen realized right away something was wrong.
00:13:47However, campus police were slow to start an investigation.
00:13:52We see this a lot.
00:13:54For police, the concern of a family member or friend is frequently discounted if the person who is missing is legally an adult, even or maybe especially if they're a college student.
00:14:06It was clear that they weren't really concerned.
00:14:09They still thought she could have been a runaway.
00:14:11They thought she could have just, you know, been out having fun.
00:14:14Soon, Cal Poly was buzzing about the missing freshman.
00:14:19And what happened at an off-campus party?
00:14:24I didn't want him near her.
00:14:26I just didn't want him near her.
00:14:27I didn't, I didn't like it.
00:14:29I didn't really want him near anybody.
00:14:30You had a bad feeling.
00:14:31Yeah.
00:14:32It is probably not terribly surprising that a search for a missing college student might lead investigators to a party.
00:14:52One of my girlfriends was like, let's go out tonight, and we just ended up there.
00:14:59Long ago, Kendra Coed was herself an 18-year-old college student who happened to end up at an off-campus party here on the evening of Friday, May 24th, 1996.
00:15:14It was just a party.
00:15:17I remember going in and it was boring, I guess.
00:15:21Kendra said she was walking around asking if anyone had a piece of gum.
00:15:26Remember, she was 18.
00:15:28I know that sounds so silly, but I was looking for gum and then I ran into a guy who said, yes, I've got some gum.
00:15:34And we started talking and then at one point we're sort of in the, sort of in the center of the room and he grabs me and he starts to kiss me and it was very weird and I took a minute and I stepped back and I pushed him away, but not before somebody was like yelling in the background, get a room and I was so embarrassed.
00:15:56You ever seen this guy before?
00:15:57Nope.
00:15:58I'd never seen him before.
00:16:00Still, she was determined to get some gum.
00:16:02He said he had some in his car.
00:16:06And I walked around to the side of the house and then he grabbed me again and started kissing me again and I pushed him back this time and I said, dude, no, no, bye.
00:16:17I'm leaving.
00:16:18And I walked back to where my friends were and I was like, that guy is so weird.
00:16:22Just, he's weird.
00:16:25Trevor Bolter had a weird experience of his own that night at the Crandall Way party.
00:16:29He was a sophomore at Cal Poly at the time.
00:16:32This very tall, very attractive girl wearing shorts and a t-shirt walks up to me and says, hi, I'm Roxy.
00:16:42Okay.
00:16:43And I go, hi.
00:16:44He didn't know it, but that was Kristen Smart, the newly minted adult, now road testing her new nickname, Roxy.
00:16:54This was the party Kristen found after leaving her friend Margarita.
00:16:59To Trevor, she seemed confident, flirty.
00:17:02She grabs my hand and she takes me to the bathroom.
00:17:07Okay.
00:17:08So my head's spinning a little bit.
00:17:10Inside the bathroom, they talked a bit.
00:17:13And she goes, okay, I have to use the bathroom now.
00:17:15And I'm like, okay.
00:17:17So I walk out of the bathroom.
00:17:19And that's when he says he had another strange encounter.
00:17:22This guy that I've never seen before, like, is right in my face.
00:17:29And he's like, what I'd like to know is what you did with her in the bathroom.
00:17:32And I was like, oh, God, is that her boyfriend?
00:17:35I'm like, what have I gotten myself into?
00:17:37You know, I'm like, like, my head's spinning.
00:17:39And I go, nothing, man.
00:17:41Absolutely nothing.
00:17:42And then he goes, oh, laughs.
00:17:43He goes, oh, cool.
00:17:44Kendra Cohen did not know Kristen Smart.
00:17:48But she definitely noticed the tall, young woman walk into the party.
00:17:52And she also remembers the moment, less than an hour later,
00:17:57when she saw her fall to the floor.
00:18:02For whatever reason, I'm not even sure why I did it.
00:18:04I didn't know her.
00:18:05But I stood up and I walked across the room.
00:18:08And she was on the ground.
00:18:09And this guy that had kissed me was sort of hovering over her.
00:18:14She learned the guy was named Paul.
00:18:17He was also the same person who'd confronted Trevor outside of the bathroom.
00:18:22And I was like, just go away.
00:18:23And me and a couple other people helped pick her up.
00:18:26And I took her outside.
00:18:29She had a cup in her hand.
00:18:31So her and I went outside.
00:18:32We went out the front and sat on the porch.
00:18:35And I just sort of sat with her for a few minutes.
00:18:37And I said, are you okay?
00:18:38Stay away from that guy.
00:18:40Did she seem drunk?
00:18:41She did seem very out of it.
00:18:44Did she smell like alcohol?
00:18:45I don't recall.
00:18:47But I do know that when I saw her walk in, she seemed okay.
00:18:50And by the time that she fell down and I picked her up and took her outside, she did not seem okay anymore.
00:18:58By the early morning hours, Kristen was in bad shape.
00:19:02She was in the front yard and seemingly unable to stand up.
00:19:07And I recognized her, obviously, as the girl that I had tried to help earlier.
00:19:11And I asked her if she needed someone to walk her home.
00:19:15She's lying down at this point.
00:19:16She's lying down.
00:19:17Yes.
00:19:18And she says?
00:19:19And she says, no, I've got a ride.
00:19:21And I'm sure I said, are you sure?
00:19:24And eventually we walked away.
00:19:28Kendra could not have known what would happen later, but she would be thinking about that moment for a long time.
00:19:35The obvious victims in stories like this are the people who are no longer here.
00:19:39But the people I meet are the victims who get left behind.
00:19:43People who were tortured by what they did or maybe did not do years and sometimes decades ago.
00:19:49I should have dragged her up and walked her home.
00:19:52I just wish I'd done something differently.
00:19:55Hindsight, right?
00:19:59Stories about that party would be told again and again.
00:20:04The question was, who was telling the truth?
00:20:07How did you end up with Roxy?
00:20:10I don't even know.
00:20:25Memorial Day weekend was over.
00:20:28Students at Cal Poly were back on campus and back to class.
00:20:33Word was spreading about a young woman who hadn't been seen.
00:20:37Since the early morning hours of Saturday, May 25th.
00:20:42Kristen Smart.
00:20:44It was about 2 a.m. Saturday morning when Kristen Smart, also known as Roxy, said good night to friends.
00:20:50No one has seen the 19-year-old since.
00:20:53I think I saw it on the news where this girl Kristen was missing and I saw her face and I was like, oh my God, that's the girl.
00:21:00Ever since that party, Kendra had been thinking about her interactions with the young woman she only knew as Roxy and the guy she knew as Paul.
00:21:11She called campus police.
00:21:13Tell me about that call.
00:21:14I just, I relayed the whole story.
00:21:16I was at the party.
00:21:17I had this encounter with Paul at the beginning.
00:21:19I had this encounter with Kristen in the driveway and, you know, on the porch and saw Paul leaning over her and I told him everything.
00:21:28You told police that Paul seemed creepy.
00:21:32Yes.
00:21:33And that he tried to kiss you.
00:21:34Yes.
00:21:35A couple of times.
00:21:36Yes.
00:21:37And that he'd shown some interest in her.
00:21:38Yes.
00:21:39Their response was?
00:21:40Okay, we'll be in touch.
00:21:42And how long until they were in touch?
00:21:44Never.
00:21:45Maybe she didn't hear back because campus police had spoken with other students from the party.
00:21:51Turns out, Kristen did not have a ride home, as she'd told Kendra.
00:21:56Apparently, she'd walked back to campus with some other party goers.
00:22:00One of them was Paul.
00:22:02Full name, Paul Flores, a Cal Poly freshman majoring in food science.
00:22:08He'd grown up in nearby Arroyo Grande.
00:22:12Thanks for coming down.
00:22:13This is, it's not a criminal matter.
00:22:16Cal Poly police asked Paul Flores to come in.
00:22:20So you were drinking, let's see, you were drinking in the residence halls.
00:22:25Uh-huh.
00:22:26Paul told police the evening began for him with a few beers in the dorm before the party.
00:22:32How did you get to the party?
00:22:33I walked in.
00:22:34Okay, were you feeling the effects of the alcohol with that time?
00:22:36Yeah, I was both pretty good.
00:22:37Paul said that at the party, Kristen, a.k.a. Roxy, approached him.
00:22:44Like, I talked to her one time at the party, and she said, hi, I'm Roxy, you know, how do you like me or something like that?
00:22:51Did you find Roxy attractive?
00:22:53No.
00:22:54She was drunk.
00:22:55She was taller than me.
00:22:56Paul told investigators that after the party, he and another female student walked most of the way back to the dorms with Kristen.
00:23:07Other students said that was around 2 a.m.
00:23:10How did you end up with Roxy?
00:23:12I don't even know.
00:23:13Okay.
00:23:15We were just all leaving at the same time.
00:23:18When you were walking, were you helping her physically walk home?
00:23:22No.
00:23:23She wasn't leaving on you?
00:23:24No.
00:23:25She was walking just fine a couple of times and gave her a hug when she said it was cold.
00:23:29Did she say anything?
00:23:30Was she feeling sick or anything on the way home?
00:23:32No.
00:23:34Paul lived in the building right across this walkway from Kristen.
00:23:38The other young woman left to go home, and Paul said he and Kristen split off here, a few steps away from her dorm.
00:23:48Where was she going?
00:23:49Was she walking?
00:23:50Was she standing still?
00:23:51Was she laying down?
00:23:52She was walking.
00:23:54He said he returned to his room, threw up from too much drinking, then took a shower around 5 a.m.
00:24:01So, it's very important that you realize, you know, how important this investigation is.
00:24:06Yeah.
00:24:08You're grasping this.
00:24:10She hasn't surfaced.
00:24:11We haven't had any sightings of her.
00:24:14At this point, you're the last person in the car.
00:24:17As they spoke, something caught the investigator's attention.
00:24:21Take your hand out for a second, Paul.
00:24:23What happened to your eye?
00:24:24I bet I will play basketball.
00:24:26Paul Flores had a black eye, a shiner he said he got on Memorial Day, the Monday after the party.
00:24:34You've been completely honest here with everything that you told us?
00:24:37Yes.
00:24:38As far as your injuries and that sort of thing?
00:24:41Yes.
00:24:43And that was that.
00:24:44Paul Flores was sent on his way.
00:24:47Good, Paul.
00:24:48Thanks for coming down.
00:24:49All right?
00:24:50Good, Paul.
00:24:51I appreciate it.
00:24:52We don't know what campus police made of Paul Flores' story.
00:24:56We do know that the next time he sat down with investigators, Paul Flores was saying something different.
00:25:03Well, you lied to us though, right?
00:25:12June 1996, Cal Poly students were packing up for summer break.
00:25:23And lingering over those last days of the semester was a huge unanswered question.
00:25:29What had happened to missing freshman Kristen Smart?
00:25:33We had gone over and out around the campus talking to people.
00:25:36Her father Stan was still there in San Luis Obispo every day, walking the campus and the surrounding community.
00:25:44He wasn't leaving without his daughter.
00:25:46People were really nice.
00:25:47No one ever turned me away.
00:25:49If there was a locked gate, they would unlock it and say, you go ahead and look, you know, we feel for you.
00:25:53But they didn't have any information.
00:25:54They didn't have any information, that's right.
00:25:57Campus police were talking with people too, with some help from San Luis Obispo D.A. Detective Bill Hanley.
00:26:04Nearly one month after Kristen disappeared, Hanley and his partner asked Paul Flores to come in for a second interview.
00:26:13What do you think happened to Roxy? What's your best guess as to what happened to her?
00:26:20My best guess is maybe she, you know, because her door was by the parking lot over there, so then I would figure my best guess is she went off with someone.
00:26:30It was clear that he possibly was the last one to see her.
00:26:35Okay.
00:26:37A stranger or what?
00:26:39It could have been just someone she knows, you know, someone might have gone, you know, hey, let's go to Taco Bell or something.
00:26:46Once again, he told them about his walk back to the dorms with Kristen.
00:26:50I went off to my dorm because the walkway goes that way towards my dorm and then she started walking that way.
00:26:57By now investigators have been asking around about Paul Flores.
00:27:01Remember, he said he'd gotten that black eye at a basketball game Monday.
00:27:05Well, a friend told police he noticed it earlier that weekend.
00:27:10Last time we talked to you, you had a black eye.
00:27:12And what did you tell us?
00:27:14I told you I got to play basketball.
00:27:17Investigators knew he was lying.
00:27:19And now came a different story.
00:27:22Where did you get it?
00:27:23In my car.
00:27:24Because I was uninstalling my radio because I'm selling my truck.
00:27:28And how did you get the black eye?
00:27:29I hit the steering wheel.
00:27:30Why didn't you tell us that?
00:27:32Because it doesn't sound like a very likely thing.
00:27:35Well, you lied to us though, right?
00:27:37Well, I guess you can call it a little white lie, but...
00:27:40How you got your black eye is a white lie?
00:27:42Yep.
00:27:44So what's going on here?
00:27:45This is a guy covering his tracks.
00:27:47Yes.
00:27:48And not very effectively because you smell it.
00:27:51He showed visible signs of being nervous.
00:27:54He had a white t-shirt on.
00:27:56He kind of put his arms inside of the shirt sleeves.
00:28:00You're actually going to rip your t-shirt up.
00:28:02No, I'm just...
00:28:03I'm just getting injured.
00:28:04All right.
00:28:05Like he's protecting himself.
00:28:06That's correct.
00:28:08Suspicious?
00:28:09Yes.
00:28:10Enough for an arrest?
00:28:12Not close.
00:28:14Well, we know he's not being truthful.
00:28:17That we're positive of.
00:28:19And that was the frustrating thing.
00:28:20In fact, one day after this interview, the campus newspaper The Mustang put it bluntly.
00:28:27Investigators' parents remain clueless about missing Polly's student.
00:28:32The newspaper even quoted campus police as saying,
00:28:35there is no evidence of any criminal activity.
00:28:39It doesn't look like she was the victim of a crime.
00:28:43A strange comment.
00:28:45Given that Cal Poly PD then handed over the case to the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Department
00:28:51for further investigation.
00:28:54That was nearly one month after Kristen disappeared.
00:28:57I find it unfortunate that they didn't reach out for some additional help.
00:29:04The investigation definitely got off to a slow start.
00:29:07Pat Hedges was a commander in the Sheriff's Patrol Division back in 1996.
00:29:12He was not assigned to the case at the time.
00:29:15He is familiar with the investigation conducted by Cal Poly PD and the criticisms that followed it.
00:29:21When we assumed the investigation 30 days later, we weren't able to just start it at square one.
00:29:30We were like in a negative number.
00:29:32Campus police did look around Paul Flores' dorm room early on.
00:29:37What they didn't do was take any photos, seize any evidence.
00:29:41Nothing that could be tested for blood or DNA or some trace that Kristen had ever been there.
00:29:47Failing to process Paul's room as a potential crime scene early in their investigation suggests campus police were not equipped to handle a case like this.
00:29:58Actually, that's being polite.
00:30:01It was a huge mistake that could not be fixed.
00:30:04Any evidence that may have existed could have been removed, degraded, or in this case simply scrubbed away.
00:30:11By the time the Sheriff's Department took over the case, students had moved out for the summer, and the dorm had been thoroughly cleaned.
00:30:21All the dorm rooms had been sanitized, so we were at a bit of a disadvantage on that.
00:30:27Because that might be your crime scene?
00:30:29Most likely. Everything indicated that that was at least a significant scene.
00:30:34There may have been others, but that would have been the place to start.
00:30:37Kristen's family says campus police never should have been in charge of such a serious investigation to begin with.
00:30:46They had background in if you were double parked or you were drinking and underage.
00:30:51Or your bicycle got stolen.
00:30:53Right.
00:30:55And there was something else.
00:30:57From the start, some of those interviewed, including Kristen's friend Margarita.
00:31:00Remember campus police focusing on what Kristen wore and what she drank.
00:31:07So campus police were asking us, like, how much did she drink?
00:31:10Did she drink every night?
00:31:12You know, sort of personality profiling her.
00:31:15They also wanted to know about Kristen's sex life.
00:31:19The type of questions that they would ask me were, like, really explicit in relation to sex.
00:31:25We looked at the first audio interview with Paul Flores, just a few days into the investigation.
00:31:32The unredacted transcript shows campus police calling Kristen promiscuous, or massively promiscuous, three times.
00:31:42An interrogation technique? Maybe.
00:31:46But there's no reason to talk that way to Kristen's friend.
00:31:49I remember one of the campus police was like, oh, well, she was sexually promiscuous.
00:31:52The Cal Poly police took me aside and said, you know, your daughter was doing some things that would put her at risk.
00:32:02And that she had gone to a party and she had drank alcohol.
00:32:07Like, that was unusual for college kids to go to a party and drink alcohol.
00:32:11And that she was scantily dressed.
00:32:14And I listened to all this and he was portraying to me that our daughter disappeared and if she was dead, she'd brought it onto herself, which was totally wrong.
00:32:27I mean, you think they would have worked on it differently if she'd, you know, been coming back from the library and never had any boyfriends and, you know, was wearing a hazmat suit?
00:32:35I would have been, definitely would have been different because it was a different era and there was a lot of victim shaming.
00:32:44And it's like women get what, you know, what they're asking for.
00:32:49Now, one month in, the case was in new hands.
00:32:53And with some new sniffing around, they were about to discover something huge.
00:33:01These dogs indicated that there had been a deceased person in that room.
00:33:06Vanessa Shields went home for the summer, heartbroken over her missing friend and dorm mate Kristen Smart.
00:33:25She was replaying memories when it hit her.
00:33:29That party on Crandall Way was not the first time Kristen ever met Paul Flores.
00:33:34We were at a party and I just remember looking over and seeing this guy kind of, you know, behind staring.
00:33:41Staring at Kristen?
00:33:42Staring at Kristen.
00:33:43It was just a kind of very serious, kind of intense and direct, you know, just kind of staring.
00:33:49Now she says that memory gave her chills.
00:33:54Then you saw him again?
00:33:55Another party, yeah. About a few weeks later, he actually came up to us and that's when he introduced himself and talked to her.
00:34:01What did he say when he talked to you guys?
00:34:02You could just tell he was, like, kind of nervous but yet he had this little confidence to come up to her.
00:34:06I was kind of surprised that he thought he had a chance with her because she was a really beautiful girl.
00:34:10And, you know, he just wasn't her type.
00:34:14The sheriff's office was now playing serious catch-up on an investigation they'd inherited from campus police.
00:34:22Are you operating under the presumption that she's no longer alive?
00:34:25I would say that would be a safe assumption.
00:34:30Even though Paul Flores had moved out, his dorm room cleaned, detectives decided to go back in, this time with cadaver dogs.
00:34:38Out of the 113 rooms in Santa Lucia Hall, all four dogs detected human decomposition in the same place.
00:34:49The now vacant room of Paul Flores.
00:34:53That was progress.
00:34:56Just not enough.
00:34:57Not enough.
00:34:58That, in and of itself, is not, that's not enough to go forward.
00:35:02You can't arrest anybody on the basis of that.
00:35:05Well, no, not really.
00:35:07It indicated that there had been a situation there at some point in time.
00:35:12It doesn't give enough for the prosecutors to prosecute a case.
00:35:15It was all quite provocative.
00:35:19But where was Kristen?
00:35:21Team number three, behind the squad leader with his hand up, please.
00:35:25Hundreds of volunteers searched the Cal Poly campus and its surrounding hillsides.
00:35:31Keep your eyes on the ground.
00:35:32You're looking for anything that looks out of place.
00:35:35The Smart family met with local politicians, asking for more to be done.
00:35:40And at one of those meetings, someone tried to offer Denise Smart some advice.
00:35:47He said, Mrs. Smart, he said, this perpetrator took your daughter's life.
00:35:55Don't let him take another life.
00:35:57Don't let him take your husband.
00:35:59Don't let him take your children.
00:36:01Be present for your children and your husband.
00:36:04I was so infuriated with him.
00:36:05How dare he tell me that my daughter had died.
00:36:10Right. We're still looking for her.
00:36:12Yeah. We're 30 days in and we've not given up.
00:36:15We're going to find her.
00:36:17And I was so mad at him and upset.
00:36:21By this time, Paul Flores had stopped talking with police.
00:36:25He ended up dropping out of Cal Poly and moving back home.
00:36:30Denise Smart knew Flores was the last person seen with her daughter.
00:36:34Now her desperation led her to do something unusual.
00:36:39She decided to reach out to Paul's mother, Susan, mom to mom,
00:36:44with a campaign to present the story of her daughter's life.
00:36:48I need to send their family, this is who Kristen is.
00:36:53So I made several pages of pictures of Kristen, that this is who we're missing
00:36:57and that we would love to have, could they please help us.
00:37:01And so you send all this to the Flores family?
00:37:03Yeah. And it was returned.
00:37:05She sent it back.
00:37:06She said, we have our own pictures, which tells me she opened it and then sealed it and then sent it back.
00:37:14Stan Smart drove to the Flores home in Arroyo Grande to try to speak with Paul's father, Ruben.
00:37:20So I drove up there and there was a fellow out in the front and I remember stepping out of my truck and introducing who I was and he didn't want to talk.
00:37:32That was Ruben?
00:37:33That was Ruben.
00:37:34And you said, I'm staying smart, I'm looking for my daughter.
00:37:36Yeah, yeah, I'd like to talk.
00:37:39He did not want to talk.
00:37:40He indicated that I should leave or someone's happy to get shot.
00:37:44Well, that's silly talk, immature talk.
00:37:49So I got back to my vehicle and I left.
00:37:53Ruben Flores denies saying that to Stan.
00:37:56Stan and Denise say the attitude of the Flores family was all about protecting their son.
00:38:03And then it was Memorial Day weekend.
00:38:07Again.
00:38:09One year had gone by.
00:38:12So by May 1997, they really hadn't made a lot of progress in the investigation.
00:38:18Chloe Jones is the courts and crime reporter for the San Luis Obispo Tribune.
00:38:24All they had at the time were the cadaver dog alerts and evidence that Paul Flores lied about having a black eye.
00:38:31On the anniversary of her disappearance, the sheriff showed his hand and it looked like a losing one.
00:38:39Ed Williams, the sheriff at the time, told the Tribune that they had no other suspects in the case and that all roads lead to Paul Flores and they needed Paul Flores to tell them what happened.
00:38:49That's pretty much like a memo to Paul Flores saying, if you keep your mouth shut, you have nothing to worry about.
00:38:54It's like, what are you saying? Do you understand what you're saying?
00:38:57That was in the newspaper.
00:38:58You are telling us that he is the suspect and if the suspect doesn't talk, then the case isn't solved.
00:39:06Paul Flores continued to keep quiet.
00:39:09And the smarts' hopes for a break in the case faded.
00:39:14When it went to the sheriff's department, we were very hopeful that it was going to be moving forward and that we would have answers.
00:39:21But that was short-lived.
00:39:24I didn't know Denise and Stan Smart before we did this story.
00:39:28The more I learned about them, the more impressed I was.
00:39:31They repeatedly banged on law enforcement's door, but not in a confrontational way.
00:39:37They didn't give up.
00:39:38And when it looked as if the investigation had stalled, they did not depend on others to make things happen.
00:39:43Instead, they figured out a way to get Paul Flores to talk.
00:39:48Why did you file the wrongful death lawsuit?
00:39:51To solicit information because we weren't getting any information.
00:39:55In a civil case, their attorney could do what detectives could not, question Paul Flores, not in an interrogation, but in a videotaped deposition.
00:40:08Could you provide me with the names of the persons with whom you have discussed the Kristen Smart case?
00:40:16Well, sort of.
00:40:17I refuse to answer that question based on the 5th Amendment, 5th Amendment, 5th Amendment, 5th Amendment.
00:40:25That's how he answered nearly every question, taking the 5th.
00:40:29Perhaps knowing this civil deposition could later be used by criminal prosecutors.
00:40:35The United States Constitution.
00:40:37Went back to the house.
00:40:39The attorney for the smarts also deposed Paul Flores' father, Ruben.
00:40:42Has your son ever told you that he did not kill Kristen Smart?
00:40:51We never asked that question.
00:40:54Paul's dad was questioned because investigators believed Kristen's murder happened in Paul's dorm room.
00:41:01And her body was moved after that.
00:41:04Was there a law enforcement theory of how he got her body out of the dorm and what he might have done with it?
00:41:10There were several theories.
00:41:13One that he had helped taken her from the college.
00:41:17Paul did not have a car on campus.
00:41:21And the morning after that party, he made one phone call to his parents' house.
00:41:27Investigators and the smarts suspected his family was involved in helping Paul cover up the murder.
00:41:33Do you have any information whatsoever as to where Kristen Smart's body may be?
00:41:39No.
00:41:41The depositions provided a lot to interpret, but not hard evidence.
00:41:45Kristen's family decided to put their lawsuit on hold.
00:41:49They tried something else.
00:41:50About a mile from the Flores' home, the smarts' lawyer put up a billboard offering a reward for the missing Cal Poly student.
00:42:00And then, years went by.
00:42:03And with them, the answers the Smart family sought seemed to slip away.
00:42:08Paul Flores may have thought the Kristen Smart investigation was behind him.
00:42:14If he did, he was wrong.
00:42:17Law enforcement kept eyes on him.
00:42:20And ears.
00:42:21They're hoping he says, well, I did kill this girl.
00:42:34The most difficult part of my job is seeing the toll of losing a child.
00:42:38No parent chooses what Denise and Stan Smart have endured.
00:42:42They've grown older with each passing year.
00:42:45And their firstborn child is forever 19.
00:42:48Would Kristen have kept the nickname Roxy?
00:42:50Would she have stayed at Cal Poly?
00:42:53What career would she have pursued?
00:42:55The smarts will never know.
00:42:57For more than a quarter of a century, they have poured their energy into seeking justice for what was stolen from them.
00:43:05I have seen couples driven apart by something like this.
00:43:09It can ruin a marriage.
00:43:11It can wreck a family.
00:43:13That didn't happen with you.
00:43:15Well, we had two children that I think we were both...
00:43:18With a glue to keep us together.
00:43:21Remember that unsolicited advice about being present?
00:43:25The advice which so infuriated Denise back when Kristen was just 30 days gone?
00:43:31It kept ringing in her ears.
00:43:34And it helped.
00:43:35I remember that conversation to this day.
00:43:39And I did try to be present.
00:43:40I went to their swim meets and basketball games and soccer games and I sat there, you know, for them.
00:43:49And I thought, you know, Kristen's not here. I need to be here for both of us.
00:43:54So the smart family tried to live their lives without her.
00:43:59Kristen's friend Vanessa did the same.
00:44:02I graduated, moved back down to San Diego and was in medical research and then I got married, got divorced.
00:44:09All the ups and downs of life that Kristen never got to have.
00:44:16I was always thinking about her, especially around Memorial Day weekend.
00:44:20Since leaving Cal Poly, Margarita has struggled, knowing she didn't stay with Kristen that night.
00:44:26I had a lot of guilt and a lot of shame and humiliation.
00:44:32My friend disappeared because I left her alone.
00:44:35The way I got over my guilt and shame was Kristen's mom.
00:44:44She told me that if I would have stayed with Kristen that night, it might have been two girls and not one.
00:44:50Over the next decade, Paul Flores finished school at community college.
00:44:56The smarts saw him as the only suspect and so did law enforcement.
00:45:02Except Stan and Denise say they heard less and less from the sheriff's department.
00:45:07You get the impression after a while that not much is going on, but we knew and they had told us they couldn't share everything with us.
00:45:16And after a while, it gets a little draining.
00:45:17I can't tell you how many times I wrote letters and I said will you just call us once a week and say we're working on something this week.
00:45:28And use her name. I had to tell them to use her name.
00:45:31The smarts are complaining about the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Department under Pat Hedges.
00:45:39He had taken over the top job in 1998.
00:45:42The smart family has this strong sense that there was a period during the time that you were sheriff when no work was being done on this case in which law enforcement's eyes were essentially off of Paul Flores.
00:45:56Are they right about that?
00:45:58No, no, they weren't right. We conducted both covert and overt surveillance on him.
00:46:02Detectives had obtained warrants for wiretaps on the Flores family phones.
00:46:09Perhaps we could get family talking about the case.
00:46:12They didn't overhear anything unusual.
00:46:16Sheriff Hedges also brought in undercover FBI agents to cozy up to Paul and get him talking about his past.
00:46:25They're hoping he says, well, I did kill this girl, but he didn't do it.
00:46:29He was one of the toughest nuts to crack, if you will.
00:46:36Sheriff Hedges left office in 2010, no closer to solving the Kristen Smart case than investigators before him.
00:46:46Do you think you did a good enough job of keeping the smart family informed? Because they don't think so.
00:46:51Yeah. In retrospect, we probably could have done a better job.
00:47:01Then someone else started investigating the Kristen Smart case.
00:47:05Someone who'd been intrigued by that face on that billboard after all of these years.
00:47:11And his interest would change everything.
00:47:15I've driven by a thousand times, and I was suddenly hooked and needed to know more.
00:47:34Chris Lambert grew up more than a half an hour south of San Luis Obispo.
00:47:38When Kristen Smart disappeared in 1996, Chris was eight years old.
00:47:44Over the years, he drove past those billboards and the fading photos of Kristen Smart.
00:47:53And each time I would pass it, I would go, that girl's still missing?
00:47:56I live in Los Angeles, and I saw the same billboards whenever I drove up the coast.
00:48:01They were impossible to miss.
00:48:03Chris Lambert told me seeing them again and again jarred something in him.
00:48:08I started asking friends and family members, do you remember the Kristen Smart story?
00:48:13And what came out was that a lot of people didn't know the details or were confused about who she was.
00:48:20Chris had never investigated any crime.
00:48:23He was a musician, not a journalist.
00:48:26He wasn't even a friend of the Smart family.
00:48:29He did, however, have an idea.
00:48:32I wonder if this is the kind of story that I could put together in a way that people would consume in podcast form.
00:48:38In 2018, he began cold calling anyone connected to the Kristen Smart case, and people talked.
00:48:46He started putting together the first episodes of a podcast, not sure what would happen.
00:48:53One of my biggest fears early on is when I reach out to Kristen Smart's parents, they might say, we don't want you to tell this story.
00:49:01Chris attended a memorial the following year for what would have been Kristen's 42nd birthday.
00:49:06And he approached Denise Smart.
00:49:10Hi, I'm here to learn about your daughter.
00:49:12And I think that they could see early on that I wasn't like anybody else that had approached them up to this point.
00:49:18We've had people who wanted to write books, people who wanted to write stories.
00:49:21And you've turned them down.
00:49:22Well, they didn't feel right.
00:49:25And very calmly, as Chris does, he just sort of told me about an idea for a podcast.
00:49:33It was an idea the Smart family liked.
00:49:37It happened in my own backyard, which is why I named the podcast Your Own Backyard.
00:49:41I'm retracing missing Cal Poly student Kristen Smart's last known steps.
00:49:47It is how many around here either learned of or remembered the story of the young woman on the billboard,
00:49:54and the story of the man suspected of taking her away.
00:49:58What Chris did not see coming was that the podcast made more people want to talk with him.
00:50:04How many people contacted you and said, I have some personal knowledge of this case?
00:50:07I think hundreds, if not thousands, by this point.
00:50:12Chris heard stories from people who knew Paul Flores as a little kid, some of them not very flattering.
00:50:19There's an incident where he's swimming in the family pool.
00:50:22At some point, there's a girl that he gets into a fight with, and suddenly he's holding her down under the pool,
00:50:27so she can't breathe.
00:50:29Finally, an adult has to pull him off.
00:50:31Chris learned that in the years after Kristen disappeared, Paul Flores had moved south to Los Angeles County.
00:50:37He worked for a while at a Coca-Cola bottling plant, and was a regular at the local bars.
00:50:43He was also arrested multiple times for drunk driving.
00:50:46Chris interviewed one of Paul's girlfriends during that time.
00:50:50There was something always odd about him and his family.
00:50:53There was always lots of secrets.
00:50:56He didn't have very many friends.
00:50:59At first, Chris expected only locals would listen to his podcast.
00:51:03That wasn't the way it played out.
00:51:06No, it blew up.
00:51:10Your Own Backyard podcast gained millions of listeners.
00:51:14It's different when someone goes missing in your own backyard.
00:51:19It caught the attention of the latest sheriff in town, Ian Parkinson.
00:51:23Chris told the story that people didn't know, and he opened the eyes across the country to Kristen.
00:51:33Sheriff Parkinson had been in office for eight years by then.
00:51:38He'd run on a promise to make cold cases like Kristen's a priority.
00:51:42I promised that I would do everything I could to find Kristen and prosecute those that were responsible.
00:51:52He just really cared.
00:51:54We felt movement.
00:51:55We felt progress.
00:51:57And there was communication.
00:51:58The smarts say Parkinson and his cold case investigator Clint Cole stayed in regular touch,
00:52:06returned their calls, and ran down tips that still trickled into the family.
00:52:11None of that led to immediate answers.
00:52:14It did make the smarts feel they had two real allies, a podcaster and a detective,
00:52:20working together in an unorthodox relationship.
00:52:23Chris is a good guy.
00:52:25He gave us some valuable information.
00:52:28Sharing information with the podcaster, that's not in the manual, is it?
00:52:35No, it's not.
00:52:36It's a risk.
00:52:38But we met with him, and we got a good vibe from him.
00:52:41Detective Clint Cole was now focusing on the Flores family.
00:52:45He got warrants for new wiretaps and started monitoring their phone calls.
00:52:51I heard you ordered some cookies.
00:52:52Yeah, but I had them mailed.
00:52:54Yeah.
00:52:56The Flores family is very cautious.
00:52:57They're very careful.
00:52:59As Cole listened, he heard something interesting.
00:53:03The other thing I need you to do is to start listening to the podcast.
00:53:08On the wiretap, Susan, Paul's mom, says to him,
00:53:12I need you to start listening to the podcast.
00:53:14I need you to listen to everything they say so we could punch holes in it.
00:53:17Wherever we can punch holes, maybe we can't.
00:53:22You're the one that can tell me.
00:53:25That told me that he's involved.
00:53:29Why else would he be able to poke holes in the podcast?
00:53:34And he doesn't respond to that question.
00:53:36He doesn't say why. I don't know why. I didn't do anything.
00:53:38Detective Cole found that very suspicious.
00:53:43Investigators also discovered the Flores family had started secretly communicating using encrypted messaging applications.
00:53:51Together, it was enough to get new search warrants on properties owned by the Flores family,
00:53:58including the home Paul Flores owned in Los Angeles.
00:54:01It was a total hoarder house, filthy black mold. It was such a mess.
00:54:09Amid the mess, investigators seized Paul Flores' electronic equipment, computers, phones, hard drives.
00:54:18We were looking for any correspondence or text messages, any evidence that could be related to the crime.
00:54:27And those devices had stories to tell.
00:54:31Stories about what Paul Flores had been doing in the years since Kristen Smart vanished.
00:54:37At the time, did you suspect that you might be drugged?
00:54:39No.
00:54:40From the beginning, investigators heard Paul Flores had a reputation.
00:54:57He was awkward, made some women uncomfortable, and there was more.
00:55:02Chris Lambert spoke with women who knew him in the years before Kristen Smart vanished.
00:55:08They described him as frightening.
00:55:11Well, his nickname was Scary Paul.
00:55:14You wouldn't want to be alone in a room with him.
00:55:15You wouldn't let any of your friends be drunk around him.
00:55:18In 2020, investigators say they confirmed that and more when they scoured those computers and hard drives seized from Paul Flores' home in San Pedro, a waterfront neighborhood of Los Angeles.
00:55:32We found Paul's search history, and we found downloads of pornography film about raping drunk college students that he'd saved.
00:55:47And in a file labeled Practice, they discovered Paul Flores had stored some videos starring himself.
00:55:56They show Paul Flores having sex with girls that are passed out.
00:56:04They're clearly not in any state to give consent.
00:56:07No, not at all.
00:56:09I watched two of them partially, and it was enough to make me sick that somebody could do that to somebody.
00:56:15This is date rape that he's videotaping.
00:56:17Absolutely.
00:56:19Investigators learned Flores would approach women at bars in his L.A. neighborhood around closing time.
00:56:24That's where this woman says she met him in 2015.
00:56:29He noticed you.
00:56:31I guess so, yes.
00:56:33We agreed to conceal this woman's identity and call her Sam.
00:56:37Before we hear more from her, here is how we found her.
00:56:41Producers Ann Priceman and Stephanie Barber put in long hours and miles of legwork on this story.
00:56:47We knew Paul Flores had lost his driver's license, and he'd been walking to bars near his home.
00:56:52So we sent Stephanie to those bars with Paul's photo to ask if anyone recognized him.
00:56:58Sam did.
00:57:00And she told a story that sounded as if it could have been told by any of the women in the videos Paul recorded.
00:57:05It was late, Sam says, and she was tipsy and waiting for a ride outside a bar when Flores approached her.
00:57:15He asked if he could take me home.
00:57:18You know, like, I could take you home. It's, you know, it's fine.
00:57:21And, um, he was very persistent.
00:57:25Describe him.
00:57:27He was awkward and he seemed, um, meek.
00:57:30That's how I felt. Like, oh, he's just, you know, it's one in the morning and he just wants to hang out and he's being awkward about it.
00:57:37But let's go get something to eat.
00:57:38She says she got into Flores' car and they drove to a restaurant.
00:57:43After which, she agreed to go back to his place.
00:57:47And when he opens the door, it was just a hoarding mess.
00:57:53And I thought, what in the world did you get yourself into?
00:57:58She says that on his couch, she tried to think of an exit strategy.
00:58:02He offers me water and we still talk.
00:58:09He's not doing anything other than talking.
00:58:11Yeah, he's not aggressive or anything.
00:58:12But I know that I wanted to leave.
00:58:15And I don't know why I didn't muster up the energy or voice I want to go.
00:58:23Which...
00:58:25Because you would have had no trouble saying that.
00:58:27No, never. I'm very, um, I'm feisty.
00:58:29If I don't like something, you'll know.
00:58:33What happens next?
00:58:34We go to his bedroom and then we have relations.
00:58:41That I'm not participating in.
00:58:44Meaning he's forcing himself on you?
00:58:46Not forcing. It's just, um, I'm just laying there.
00:58:49And, um, just thinking to myself,
00:58:53I want this to be over. I want to go home.
00:58:56But I never vocally said it.
00:58:59Afterward, Sam says she passed out.
00:59:02Woke up a few hours later and went home feeling groggy.
00:59:06All of which was weird, she says, because she hadn't had any alcohol for several hours.
00:59:11It was about 1 a.m. when I had my last drink.
00:59:15And I just had water at the restaurant and at his house.
00:59:19Sam was not one of the women in Paul Flores' videos.
00:59:22However, when investigators saw those videos, they suspected Flores was drugging and raping women.
00:59:30From the search warrant, they found meds in his house.
00:59:34We found Flexoril and Tramadol.
00:59:37In speaking to a local doctor, he said that Tramadol and Flexoril mixed together with alcohol could produce a sedative state of mind for someone who had ingested them.
00:59:52A sedative state of mind similar to what you see on those videos with those women.
00:59:58Correct.
01:00:00Years after her encounter with Paul Flores, Sam listened to Chris's podcast and started connecting the dots.
01:00:07Oh, my gosh. Now it all makes sense why everything happened the way it did.
01:00:13Sam flashed back to that glass of water Paul Flores handed her at his place.
01:00:19He went to the kitchen and grabbed me a glass of water that I did not see.
01:00:24So he was alone with your glass of water for a few seconds.
01:00:28Yes. As well as when I was at the restaurant with him, I did get up to go to the restroom.
01:00:33Twice.
01:00:34That brings us back to a detail on the night Kristen went missing.
01:00:39Despite all the talk about her being intoxicated, people didn't report seeing her drink much.
01:00:46I left her around like 10.30 or 11. Dead sober, by the way.
01:00:52I never saw her actually drinking, but she was definitely under the influence of something.
01:00:57All these years later, a clear picture was starting to emerge for investigators.
01:01:01They believe in all likelihood Paul drugged Kristen the night she disappeared and went on to do it to other women again and again and again.
01:01:12If Paul Flores is guilty of Kristen Smart's murder, then he wasn't prosecuted for it back when it happened.
01:01:19Mm-hmm.
01:01:20Mm-hmm.
01:01:21And he was free then.
01:01:22Mm-hmm.
01:01:23Yes.
01:01:24To assault you.
01:01:25Mm-hmm.
01:01:26Chemically and literally and other women too.
01:01:30Yes.
01:01:31All because of the inaction of law enforcement back then.
01:01:35Yeah, they dropped the ball.
01:01:38When you see Paul Flores essentially assaulting women who cannot resist, you got to know, that's the price of not arresting him up here.
01:01:46Yep.
01:01:47Yep.
01:01:48And that told us that we need to get this done, right?
01:01:55He doesn't belong out in the street.
01:01:57Investigators hoped this would be their shot, to finally lock up Paul Flores.
01:02:02If not for Kristen's murder, then maybe on rape charges.
01:02:06So we involved LAPD to help identify these women.
01:02:12We had crimes that we were witnessing.
01:02:14We had many, many conversations with LAPD and Los Angeles DA's office.
01:02:21Those attempts to build a rape prosecution against Flores in L.A. were unsuccessful.
01:02:27He was still out there, free to walk the streets or go to any bar.
01:02:33And 24 years later, the smarts still had no answers.
01:02:37What investigators really needed was to dig up some new evidence.
01:02:41And in 2021, they quite literally did.
01:02:46I was sitting right there, heart pounding, thinking we were going to find her.
01:02:52More than two decades after Kristen Smart's disappearance, Paul Flores was still a free man.
01:03:11Then in 2021, a tip came in, relayed by podcaster Chris Lambert.
01:03:18Chris told detectives that a guy who rented a room on Ruben Flores' property had moved out.
01:03:24And he was now talking.
01:03:26He told us that no one was allowed underneath the deck of the house for any reason.
01:03:34And to the naked eye, what was under the deck?
01:03:37Just some yard tools, nothing really.
01:03:41But it was off limits.
01:03:43It was off limits according to this renter who lived there for 10 years.
01:03:47On March 15, 2021, Cole's team served another search warrant at Ruben Flores' home.
01:03:55This time, they came equipped with cadaver dogs, a couple of archaeologists, and some ground-penetrating radar.
01:04:04The search lasted two days.
01:04:07They found a very suspicious location underneath the deck, six foot by four feet deep.
01:04:13Even to the uneducated eye, you could tell that that was a hole that had recently been dug.
01:04:18Yes, you could see actual shovel marks in some of the areas.
01:04:21And then as we got down, about 18 to 24 inches, we started seeing very suspicious staining that the archaeologist who was helping us said was consistent with human decomposition fluid.
01:04:34They kept digging.
01:04:36I was sitting right at the hole, heart pounding, thinking we were going to find her.
01:04:41This is it.
01:04:42This is it.
01:04:43Except it wasn't.
01:04:46If Kristen Smart had been buried under that deck, she was there no longer.
01:04:52Before they left, investigators took samples of those stains.
01:05:01And then Paul Flores' mother Susan agreed to talk on camera with a reporter from NBC affiliate KSBY.
01:05:09But they keep trying to find the answers with us, and they keep failing because the answers aren't here.
01:05:17Yeah, it was surprising.
01:05:19They've always been very quiet, not wanting to discuss things.
01:05:23So when I saw that tape, I was shocked.
01:05:26This is ridiculous, what happened here today.
01:05:29They took his life away from him, too.
01:05:33Susan Flores said she had no idea what happened to Kristen Smart and that her family was being targeted unfairly.
01:05:42And were you guys anticipating this?
01:05:44Were you guys surprised at all?
01:05:46No, I'm not surprised at anything they do.
01:05:50They're harassing maniacs.
01:05:52It's not going to change the fact that we can't help this family find their child.
01:05:59The woman Denise Smart had once tried to reach mother to mother still had nothing to offer.
01:06:07Investigators rushed those stain samples from the dig to the lab.
01:06:13And finally, a break.
01:06:16They tested it.
01:06:17It's positive for human blood, four feet down.
01:06:21That blood was too degraded for a DNA test.
01:06:23Yes, it was too degraded.
01:06:25But who has blood in their soil, four feet down, with human decomp stains and a previously dug area?
01:06:34If that's not Kristen Smart, then who is it?
01:06:36Who else did you have buried in your backyard?
01:06:38That's what finally gets you over the arrest hurdle.
01:06:41Yes, that finally got us to a point where we felt the case was chargeable and winnable.
01:06:51On April 13th, 2021, almost 25 years after Kristen Smart disappeared, detectives made the more than 200-mile trek from San Luis Obispo to Paul Flores' home in San Pedro and finally put him in cuffs.
01:07:10When it finally happened, it was that surreal moment.
01:07:13It's like, they really arrested him?
01:07:16They really arrested him?
01:07:18I didn't really know how I should feel or how to process it.
01:07:22But, of course, it seemed like a fantastic outcome.
01:07:26I was so happy and relieved to know that a day that I had hoped would happen for years finally came.
01:07:34So I was just relieved that someone I felt was violent was, yeah, off the streets.
01:07:38The charge against Paul Flores?
01:07:41Murder during the commission or attempted commission of rape.
01:07:45And that same day, the sheriff's office made a second arrest.
01:07:50Ruben Flores was charged as an accessory after the fact, accused of helping his son conceal Kristen Smart's body.
01:07:58Then we found out they'd arrested Ruben, and it's like, it was a good day.
01:08:05It was a good day.
01:08:07Ruben Flores' attorney said his arrest was simply a tactic to try to pry a confession out of his son, Paul.
01:08:15So, would Paul Flores finally talk?
01:08:19Or maybe he already had.
01:08:22He just words this out?
01:08:24Yes.
01:08:25No smirk.
01:08:26No smile.
01:08:27No, oh, I'm screwing with you.
01:08:30He just says it.
01:08:31Straight face.
01:08:45For 26 years, the Smart family waited and waited and hoped for this day.
01:08:54July 18th, 2022.
01:08:56The criminal trials of Paul Flores and Ruben Flores began.
01:09:01Paul was 45, the same age Kristen would have been.
01:09:06During the trial, the judge allowed still photography but no audio or video.
01:09:11Father and son would be tried in the same courtroom at the same time, but with separate juries.
01:09:17Prosecutor Chris Pouvrell.
01:09:20Young, vibrant 19-year-old women don't just vanish into thin air and leave all of their earthly possessions and belongings behind.
01:09:28It just doesn't happen.
01:09:29The case against Paul Flores was almost entirely circumstantial.
01:09:34No DNA.
01:09:35No eyewitnesses.
01:09:36And of course, no body.
01:09:39And I'm trying to build that circumstantial evidence to show there's just no other explanation for what happened to Kristen.
01:09:46The prosecutors spun a decades-long narrative.
01:09:51From the night Kristen disappeared, all the way to those searches at the Flores home.
01:09:56Party goers and Kristen's friends, like Vanessa Shields, took the stand.
01:10:02What's it like to walk in that courtroom and he's there?
01:10:05That was terrifying.
01:10:07I was anxious.
01:10:08I was nervous.
01:10:09But then I just kept thinking, you know, you have to do this for Kristen.
01:10:13The jurors watched that 1996 interview with Paul Flores.
01:10:17Why was it so hard for you to tell us that you got that black eye hit in the stern?
01:10:22It didn't really matter.
01:10:23They listened to his changing explanations of his black eye.
01:10:28And they saw what investigators believed was telling body language.
01:10:34The backbone of the prosecution's case was the forensics, starting with the cadaver dogs alerting at the door.
01:10:41And then, decades later, the discovery under Ruben Flores' deck.
01:10:46The prosecution brought in a scientist who explained something called a hem direct test that determined the samples were human blood.
01:10:56Were you worried that all the jurors weren't going to really grasp the technical stuff?
01:11:01I feel like people today were really pretty savvy, thanks to shows like yours.
01:11:06I think people understand that if you test for human blood, it's human blood.
01:11:10The state's theory was that Flores murdered Kristen while raping her, part of a pattern of sexual assault that continued for years.
01:11:18Prosecutors documented numerous rapes they believe Paul Flores committed by drugging and assaulting women,
01:11:25and then recording it on video.
01:11:28The judge allowed two of those women to testify anonymously.
01:11:32They said they met Paul at a bar, and they went home with him.
01:11:37They were given a drink, and then they don't remember anything besides bits and pieces of being assaulted.
01:11:43They gave very emotional, very, very powerful testimonies to the point that even some jurors cried during it.
01:11:49Prosecutor Pouvrell saved one witness until the last days of his case.
01:11:54This woman. Her name is Jennifer Hudson.
01:11:58She says she met Paul Flores in 1996, just weeks after Kristen disappeared.
01:12:05We were at a skateboard ramp at someone's house, a college kid's house.
01:12:10Jennifer was just 19 then, hanging out with friends.
01:12:14This guy comes up and sits across from a buddy and myself.
01:12:19Someone had the radio playing.
01:12:21And after a few songs, a public outreach commercial came on, looking for Kristen.
01:12:28Mentions Kristen Smart by name.
01:12:29Right, right.
01:12:30She says that guy had a dramatic reaction to hearing the name Kristen Smart.
01:12:37And says, da bitch was a tease, and I'm sick of dealing with her .
01:12:43So I put her under a ramp at his place in Wozna.
01:12:48Wozna is a rural area not far from where the Flores family lived.
01:12:54The implication being that Kristen was buried there, near a skate ramp.
01:12:59You believe him?
01:13:00A thousand percent.
01:13:01You know when a person has a soul.
01:13:03He did not.
01:13:04And that's what made me believe him.
01:13:08She says she later saw a story on the Kristen Smart case and recognized...
01:13:12Paul Flores.
01:13:15However, she did not go to police back then.
01:13:18Because she says she was scared and she didn't think it would do any good.
01:13:24Had I gone to the law on my own and said at any point,
01:13:29I ran into this guy and this is what he said, would that have been enough to arrest him?
01:13:34No.
01:13:35And you would have felt in danger?
01:13:37Absolutely.
01:13:38The one person that I did tell in 2002 was a roommate of mine.
01:13:45That roommate later left a tip on a website dedicated to finding Kristen.
01:13:50Years later, Chris Lambert saw that post and tracked down Jennifer.
01:13:54And he passed her name to Detective Clint Cole, which is how Jennifer ended up telling her story in court more than 25 years later.
01:14:04If Chris Lambert had not created his podcast and if Sheriff Parkinson had not been open to collaborating,
01:14:10Paul Flores might never have ended up in that courtroom.
01:14:13Chris was not a journalist or a detective, but information was coming to him and he was also digging it up.
01:14:20And the sheriff was willing to listen and act on it.
01:14:24Over the years, countless times, we've seen the opposite.
01:14:28Law enforcement turning down information because it did not come from the right source.
01:14:34Jennifer Hudson wants to apologize to the smarts for not speaking up sooner.
01:14:39Oh, it still bothers me.
01:14:41If it didn't bug me, I'd be as evil as Paul is.
01:14:46Over three months, the prosecution built its case, while the defense argued the whole thing was shaky.
01:14:53I mean, it was hocus-pocus.
01:14:55The verdict is passed up to the judge.
01:14:58Your heart starts pounding out of your chest.
01:15:00The trials of Ruben and Paul Flores lasted months.
01:15:20At the defense table, father and son sat side by side.
01:15:25The two defendants were represented by separate attorneys.
01:15:29Robert Sanger defended Paul Flores.
01:15:32Ruben's attorney was Harold Mezek.
01:15:35What was your strategy going into trial?
01:15:38Attack the prosecution's lack of evidence.
01:15:41Prosecution was very deft in this case.
01:15:44They took what little they had and they spun quite a story.
01:15:48His central focus was on the forensics, the evidence dug up on the Flores' property.
01:15:54I mean, it was hocus-pocus.
01:15:57What was buried under there if it wasn't Kristen Smart?
01:16:00Nothing was buried under there.
01:16:02It was just disturbed soil from a tree being pulled out.
01:16:06So when the prosecution says they have tests confirming human blood in the soil, what, they're lying about that?
01:16:12They misused the heme direct test.
01:16:15It was specifically not approved or validated for use to discover soil in blood.
01:16:22To hear the defense tell it, if the case against Paul Flores was weak, the case against his father was virtually non-existent.
01:16:31Certainly Ruben would do anything for his son, but Ruben didn't have to do anything for his son.
01:16:36There was never a body in Ruben's yard. Ever.
01:16:41Also not credible to the defense, the prevailing notion that over the years, the Flores family protected Paul.
01:16:50They're a sweet family. They've been totally mischaracterized in the press.
01:16:54Why do you think the Flores family, this sweet, kind family, would be so antagonistic and so unwilling to help the Smart family when they reached out for help for their missing daughter?
01:17:05They were approached in a way that they were this evil crime family that caused the disappearance of a young girl.
01:17:13And that's just not true.
01:17:16In court, Misik echoed a theory campus police had pursued more than a quarter century earlier.
01:17:22Maybe Kristen just took off.
01:17:26What I said was, without a body, we can't be sure she's dead.
01:17:30And I know that's hurtful maybe to hear the Smart family, but Ruben's not a part of this and we don't know where Kristen is.
01:17:39You're a smart guy. I don't even think you believe Kristen Smart's alive somewhere.
01:17:44I do believe, with all my heart, that she may be alive.
01:17:48It may be a slim chance, but there's a chance.
01:17:51That's why we need a body.
01:17:53Let me ask you the question.
01:17:55Why do you believe she's dead?
01:17:58Because she's missing.
01:18:00No, not just that she's missing.
01:18:02She hasn't contacted her family.
01:18:04She didn't contact any of her friends.
01:18:06She wasn't the sort of person to just up and disappear.
01:18:09If she had disappeared, she would have taken her stuff with her.
01:18:13And she was last seen in the company of a guy who previously had a history of weird sexual behavior towards women,
01:18:22and later was accused of a number of rapes and of drugging women and having sex with them.
01:18:28And he was the last person to see her alive.
01:18:31That's why I don't think she's around.
01:18:33The defense concedes none of that.
01:18:36The evidence in this case, again, is weak, insufficient, and I'm going to get a lot of heat for that.
01:18:41But I'm a defense attorney, so I get a lot of heat.
01:18:44After four days of deliberation, the juries were back in the courtroom, this time with verdicts.
01:18:52Paul Flores, guilty of first-degree murder.
01:18:58I mean, I just kind of doubled up.
01:19:00Even though I wanted it, it was just so unreal that this jury had actually listened.
01:19:09Ruben Flores' jury found him not guilty.
01:19:13We got the elephant, we didn't get the mouse.
01:19:16Can you live with that?
01:19:18Do we have an option?
01:19:19Do we have a choice?
01:19:20This is a parent's worst nightmare.
01:19:24The smarts came to Paul Flores' sentencing and spoke one by one.
01:19:30And we have waited long enough for this day.
01:19:33They addressed the judge and Flores, and they fought back tears.
01:19:42Denise was last to speak, with one final appeal to Paul Flores, return Kristen to her family.
01:19:50It is clearly too late for us, but Paul, it is not too late for you to tell the truth, to free your soul and your heart from the weight it must be carrying.
01:20:02You are, after all, a human being.
01:20:05During that, Paul Flores didn't do as much as turn his head.
01:20:11He's just soulless, a soulless creature.
01:20:16The judge agreed.
01:20:19You have been a cancer to society.
01:20:22You are committed to the maximum sentence that I can impose by law, an indeterminate term of 25 years to life.
01:20:31If it were up to the smarts, his sentence would be longer.
01:20:35My next mission in life is to ensure that there is an enhancement for those who murder someone and harbor their body.
01:20:43How would that help you?
01:20:45It would help us because there would be an incentive for him to come forward and tell us where Kristen is.
01:20:51If they added 10 years to his sentence, it's probable that he might give this a second thought.
01:20:57Another mission.
01:21:00In the wake of their frustration with Cal Poly Campus Police, the smarts took action.
01:21:06They helped pass the Kristen Smart Safety Act in California, requiring campus police to coordinate with local law enforcement.
01:21:15Now they want that expanded.
01:21:18Well, it should be nationwide.
01:21:20We're not training campus police officers to deal with homicides or kidnappings.
01:21:27In response to our requests for an interview after the verdict, the Cal Poly Administration said Kristen's case was an anomaly and said terrible things can and do still happen in safe places.
01:21:42The university also said that it is never appropriate to describe a victim as promiscuous, and it runs completely counter to our practices and procedures.
01:21:53In May of 2023, 27 years after Kristen disappeared, Cal Poly's president issued the school's first apology to the smarts.
01:22:05We are very sorry for what the smart family has endured.
01:22:08While it is a different administration now than was in place in 1996, we recognize that things should have been done differently.
01:22:17The smarts sued Cal Poly for negligence and wrongful death.
01:22:22Cal Poly argues the two-year statute of limitations has long passed, and that under California law, the smarts cannot sue the university,
01:22:33because it is not liable for an injury caused by the act of another person.
01:22:40The case is still pending.
01:22:44Chris Lambert released the final episodes of his podcast, very much aware of what his curiosity helped bring about.
01:22:54I've been absolutely devastated by the loss of somebody I never even got to meet, and I can't imagine had it been my own family member.
01:23:02Time has not dulled the smarts' memories of Kristen.
01:23:08She just always believed in her future. She just knew what she wanted to do.
01:23:15She had wonderful hugs and smiles, and she was a cheerleader for our other two children.
01:23:20Long ago, the smarts found a way to navigate their loss, to take that advice, to be present for one another.
01:23:29I'm glad you listened to that.
01:23:33Well, I wasn't happy at the time, but in retrospect, it was the right thing, the right thing to hear.
01:23:42A strong family, a happy one. That love fuels the smarts, even though they still don't have a daughter to bury.
01:23:50It's impossible to know if anyone could have prevented what happened to Kristen Smart.
01:23:56Here's what's certain. The way campus police responded made it harder to build a forensic case against Paul Flores.
01:24:03At the Crossbar Hotel, where he now lives, Paul has been attacked more than once, his throat slashed.
01:24:10He is every bit as unpopular inside prison as he was outside.
01:24:16And Denise and Stan Smart are serving a different kind of sentence.
01:24:21Theirs are for life.
01:24:23You know, there's this feeling out there in the world, by people who don't know you, that now we're at the end.
01:24:30You know, he's been locked up. You should be okay now.
01:24:35It's not the end.
01:24:37Yeah. And this doesn't go away, does it?
01:24:39No.
01:24:41You know, as a mother, I feel like I have a piece of her within me.
01:24:47So it's, you know, it's a death that is never going to go away.
01:24:51No.
01:24:52Sorry.
01:24:53I be...
01:24:55liquid...
01:24:573
01:25:022
01:25:04Honey
01:25:09ž
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