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Tonight on Dateline. Young, vibrant 19-year-old women don't just vanish into thin air.
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It just doesn't happen. It kind of consumes you. It does. As a mother, my mission will always be to bring Kristen home.
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I told the authorities back then there was no way she just took off. I don't think we could grasp how bad it could be.
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By the time investigators started, the solid evidence was gone. I'm retracing Kristen Smart's last known steps.
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This podcast sort of raised this case to a national level. I think it haunts everybody that's involved in this case.
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He had planned this. He had stalked her. This kid was a one-man crime wife. He was.
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I was like, holy smokes, this is the guy. He was free to assault you and other women too.
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Yes. He doesn't belong out on the street. We need to get this done. That was terrifying to have to face him.
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I just kept thinking, you have to do this for Kristen. 26 years of secrets. Now, hear the whole story. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.
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Here's Josh Mankiewicz with Justice for Kristen Smart. Time does not heal all wounds.
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That's a lie we like to tell ourselves. They took 26 years of our life that we have been having to fight.
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For the Smart family, time has been torture. Their daughter Kristen was just 19 when she vanished.
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That was more than a quarter century ago. You don't give up. You don't give up? No.
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You can't. Tonight, you'll hear the inside story of a decades-long investigation.
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As we'll explain, it is the story of justice denied for more than just one family.
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What surprised me was the volume of women. I think that my worst nightmare was that there was a lot of victims.
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Kristen Smart, also known as Roxy. 19-year-old Kristen Smart never made it home.
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It's a mystery that leaves the Smart family haunted. For those of us above a certain age, 1996 doesn't sound like that long ago.
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Of course, it was a different time, a simpler time. There was no Instagram, TikTok, or texting.
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Friendships were made and cultivated in person. Her freshman year at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo,
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Vanessa Shields started a great friendship. She was two doors down from me and we just, a bunch of us girls all became friends and
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kind of became inseparable. She was Kristen Smart from Stockton, California, and also a freshman at Cal Poly.
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She inspired me by her independence and that's why we befriended each other. Margarita Campos lived in the room next door to Kristen.
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At that time, I was much more sheltered than she was, so she was fascinating to me and different and curious.
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We were, you know, studying each other's rooms, listening to music, going to parties, going to eat, going to work out.
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A lot of silly stuff, just hanging out and talking. That's a school where you can always find a party.
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Always, yeah. Even on a holiday weekend, yeah. Including that Memorial Day weekend.
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On Friday, May 24, 1996. Plenty of students headed out of town for the holiday. Vanessa went home for the weekend.
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Kristen and Margarita stayed. The two women drove with some other friends to an off-campus party.
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It was just a really mellow, like, chill party. wasn't very vivacious in any sort of way,
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and that was a great disappointment to Kristen because that was just too low energy for her.
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She thought, party, lively. So they left. Kristen and Margarita were dropped off in a neighborhood
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where a lot of students lived, on the outskirts of campus. They walked for a bit.
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Kristen wanted to find another party. Margarita did not. She just was standing with her arms crossed
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and was like, come on, you have to come with me. And I just, I was like, I really don't want to go.
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And then she was like, come on. And it was just a push and pull of two independent women.
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Kristen had gone out without her keys, her purse, or even a jacket. She wore a T-shirt, surf shorts, and tennis shoes.
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Margarita gave Kristen her key so she could get back in the dorm. I think she put it in her shoe because she didn't have any pockets in her board shorts.
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She watched Kristen walk toward the houses on Crandall Way. She was not going to turn around and walk back with me to the dorms. That I knew.
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That's when I last left her. The next day Margarita was surprised when Kristen didn stop by to tell her how the evening went I knocked on her door I thought she was maybe still sleeping I didn see her for gosh the whole day
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When Kristen's roommate returned Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, she and other women on the floor realized something was wrong.
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all of Kristen's belongings were in the room her backpack ID makeup they called campus police right
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away and then the campus police were like well are you sure she didn't go on a trip over the
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weekend because it's a memorial weekend camping we're like no all her stuff is here and they were
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like, well, she's over 18, so we have to wait for 24 hours. Vanessa Shields returned Monday evening
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to her panicked dorm mates and a missing friend. And then I'm like, where's Kristen?
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Kristen's friends notified the resident advisor in the dorm and again spoke with campus police.
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They just thought she just took off. She thought she just went on a fun trip. And that's what was
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frustrating because we knew she wouldn't just take off. We knew she wouldn't do that.
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If she were planning to take a mini vacation or go home or run off anywhere, you would have known
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about it. Myself and a lot of the other girls would have known. Yeah, Kristen was very vocal
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about what she was doing or where she was going. And then the phone rang at the Stockton home of
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Stan and Denise Smart. It was Cal Poly campus police. They said your daughter's not at school.
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Did she come home? We think she has gone camping. And that's the first time we ever heard that.
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And they didn't know where she was. And I was immediately fearful because that's just not her.
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She's not going to leave on a last-minute camping trip. No. Stan Smart got in his car and drove the four and a half hours to San Luis Obispo.
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Her friends in the dorm waited and hoped for answers. Even though we had this feeling that something was wrong, I don't think we could grasp at that moment how bad it could be.
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She was right. No one knew how bad it could be or how long it would take. For the amount of time that I've invested into telling this story, it's a fraction of a fraction of living through it.
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This is an ordeal most people would fold under. Your children are part of who you are, so you're fighting for them.
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You're fighting for justice. And fighting against time. Years lost. And no idea yet what a terrible price would be paid.
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Because he wasn't locked up from early on, he had the opportunity to do other things.
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Absolutely correct. I think it haunts everybody that's involved in this case. Stan Smart raced to San Luis Obispo when he learned his oldest daughter Kristen
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had not been seen on her college campus for days. You're thinking what during that drive?
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When I get there, she'll already be back. Well, hopefully, yeah, that I just talk to her.
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I'm disappointed. That did not happen. They were saying, oh, well, you know, she probably went away and she's disappeared.
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And has she ever run away before? And so on and forth. Back home in Stockton, California, Kristen's mom, Denise, camped out by the phone, waiting for updates.
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My hopes would have been that the nightmare would be over once he got there and she would be there.
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but I was, I just knew something wasn't right. Kristen had struggled a bit at Cal Poly.
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She was less than completely happy with her decision to enroll there. One of the things that we shared with each other was our disenchantment with Cal Poly.
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Denise responded to some of her daughter's complaints in a letter she wrote. just a few weeks before Kristen disappeared.
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Wake up and smell the roses, she wrote. You have a world of opportunities at your fingertips.
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You're kind of telling her... Suck it up, buttercup. Time to start acting like a grown-up.
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Right. She had no doubt Kristen would get through this rough patch. She was never one to shy away from a challenge or an adventure.
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Well, she loved travel. She loved exploring. She 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.
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She spent summers in London, Venezuela, and Hawaii. Matt Smart is Kristen's younger brother.
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To you, she was like a star. Well, yeah, she was an artist. She was an adventurer. She was an individual who was just full of life. Get out there and get it done.
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She arrived at Cal Poly in the fall of 1995, excited to start college life. And the campus certainly seemed a safe place.
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You feel like you're in a kind of sheltered community because, you know, it's really kind of away from town.
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It was still hard for her little brother to say goodbye. It like should we just leave her here It a lot of trust that you putting in that Trust that she make the right choices and that those around her will
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Particularly because at 18 or 19, college freshmen are just on the cusp of adulthood.
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For Kristen, that brought a time of reinvention. And she began going by other names, like Roxy.
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What was the deal with her calling herself Roxy? What was the nickname she gave herself?
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I think it's just kind of like this alter ego. She kind of just wanted to have fun and play with it.
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As much as Kristen was exploring her new independent self, her ties to home remained strong.
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She called you guys every Sunday? Every Sunday. Kristen left a message on her parents' answering machine
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the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. They weren't home. You know, you know your children's voice,
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And 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.
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No call that Sunday. It was Tuesday, three days after she'd been last seen, that campus police took an official missing persons report.
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It was clear that they weren't really concerned. And they still thought she could have been a runaway.
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They thought she could have just been out having fun. Soon, Cal Poly was buzzing about the missing freshman.
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And what happened at an off-campus party? I didn't want him near her. I just didn't want him near her.
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I didn't like it. I didn't really want him near anybody. You had a bad feeling. Yeah.
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It is probably not terribly surprising that a search for a missing college student might lead investigators to a party.
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One of my girlfriends was like, let's go out tonight, and we just ended up there.
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long ago kendra coed was herself an 18 year old college student who happened to end up at an
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off-campus party here on the evening of friday may 24th 1996 it was just a party i remember going in
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and it was boring i guess it was just me and my friends sort of sitting out in the back um talking
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Kendra said she was walking around asking if anyone had a piece of gum. Remember, she was 18.
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I know that sounds so silly, but I was looking for gum, and then I ran into a guy who said,
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yes, I've got some gum. And we started talking, and then at one point we're sort of in the center of the room,
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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,
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but not before somebody was like yelling in the background, get a room. And I was so embarrassed.
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You ever seen this guy before? Nope. I'd never seen him before. Still, she was determined to get some gum.
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He said he had some in his car. And I walked around to the side of the house and then he grabbed me again and started to kiss me again.
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And I pushed him back this time and I said, dude, no, no, bye. I'm leaving. And I walked back to where my friends were, and I was like, that guy is so weird.
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Just, he's weird. Trevor Bolter had a weird experience of his own that night at the Crandall Way party.
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He was a sophomore at Cal Poly at the time. This very tall, very attractive girl, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, walks up to me and says,
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Hi, I'm Roxy. Okay? And I go, hi. He didn't know it, but that was Kristen Smart.
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The newly minted adult, now road-testing her new nickname, Roxy. This was the party Kristen found after leaving her friend Margarita.
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To Trevor, she seemed confident, flirty. She grabs my hand, and she takes me to the bathroom.
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Okay, so my head's spinning a little bit. Inside the bathroom, they talked a bit.
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And she goes, okay, I have to use the bathroom now. And I'm like, okay. so I walk out of the bathroom
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and that's when he says he had another strange encounter this guy that I've never seen before
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like is right in my face and he's like what I'd like to know is what you did with her in the bathroom
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and I was like oh god is that her boyfriend I'm like what have I gotten myself into
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you know I'm like my head's spinning and I go nothing man absolutely nothing and then he goes oh laughs
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he goes oh cool Kendra Coed did not know Kristen Smart, but she definitely noticed the tall young woman walk into the party.
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And she also remembers the moment, less than an hour later, when she saw her fall to the floor.
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For whatever reason, I'm not even sure why I did it. I didn't know her. But I stood up and I walked across the room and she was on the ground and this guy that had kissed me was sort of hovering over her.
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She learned the guy was named Paul. He was also the same person who'd confronted Trevor outside of the bathroom.
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And I was like, just go away. And me and a couple other people helped pick her up.
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And I took her outside. She had a cup in her hand. So her and I went outside and we went out the front and sat on the porch.
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And I just sort of sat with her for a few minutes. And I said are you okay Stay away from that guy Did she seem drunk She did seem very out of it She smelled like alcohol I don recall But I do know that when I saw her walk in she seemed okay
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And by the time that she fell down and I picked her up and took her outside, she did not seem okay anymore.
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By the early morning hours, Kristen was in bad shape. She was in the front yard and seemingly unable to stand up.
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And I recognized her, obviously, as the girl that I had tried to help earlier. And I asked her if she needed someone to walk her home.
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She's lying down at this point. She's lying down, yes. And she says? And she says, no, I've got to ride.
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And I'm sure I said, are you sure? And eventually we walked away. No way Kendra could know, of course, but she'd be thinking about that moment for a long time.
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I should have dragged her up and walked her home. I just wish I'd done something differently.
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Hindsight, right? Stories about that party would be told again and again. The question was, who was telling the truth?
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How did you end up with Ron? I don't even know. Memorial Day weekend was over. Students at Cal Poly were back on campus and back to class.
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Word was spreading about a young woman who hadn't been seen since the early morning hours of Saturday, May 25th.
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Kristen Smart. It was about 2 a.m. Saturday morning when Kristen Smart, also known as Roxy, said goodnight to friends.
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No one has seen the 19-year-old since. I think I saw it on the news where this girl Kristen was missing
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and I saw her face and I was like, oh my God, that's the girl. Ever since that party, Kendra had been thinking about her interactions
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with the young woman she only knew as Roxy and the guy she knew as Paul. She called campus police.
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Tell me about that call. I relayed the whole story. It was at the party. I had this encounter with Paul at the beginning.
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I had this encounter with Kristen in the driveway and, you know, on the porch and saw Paul leaning over her.
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And I told him everything. You told police that Paul seemed creepy. Yes. And that he tried to kiss you.
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Yes. A couple of times. Yes. And that he'd shown some interest in her. Yes. Their response was?
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Okay, we'll be in touch. And how long until they were in touch? Never. Maybe she didn't hear back because campus police had spoken with other students from the party.
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Turns out Kristen did not have a ride home, as she'd told Kendra. Apparently she'd walked back to campus with some other partygoers.
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One of them was Paul. Full name, Paul Flores, a Cal Poly freshman majoring in food science.
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He'd grown up in nearby Arroyo Grande. Thanks for coming down. I am not. This is, it's not a criminal matter.
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Cal Poly police asked Paul Flores to come in. So you were drinking, let's see, you were drinking in the residence halls, huh?
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Paul told police the evening began for him with a few beers in the dorm before the party.
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How did you get to the party? I walked in. Were you feeling the effects of the alcohol at that time?
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Yeah, I was, but it's pretty good. Paul said that at the party Kristen, aka Roxy, approached him.
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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?
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Did you find Roxy attractive? No. How come? She was drunk. She was taller than me.
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Paul told investigators that after the party, he and another female student walked most of the way back to the dorms with Kristen.
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Other students said that was around 2 a.m. How did you end up with Roxy? I don't even know.
00:22:20
We were just all leaving at the same time. When you were walking, were you helping her physically walk home?
00:22:27
No, she wasn't leaving on you. No, she walked in just fine a couple times to see her hug when she said she was cold.
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Did she say anything? Was she feeling sick or anything on the way home? No. Paul lived in the building right across this walkway from Kristen.
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The other young woman left to go home, and Paul said he and Kristen split off here,
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a few steps away from her dorm. Where was she going? Was she walking? Was she standing still? Was she laying down?
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She was walking. He said he returned to his room, threw up from too much drinking,
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then took a shower around 5 a.m. So, it's very important that you realize how important this investigation is.
00:23:13
You're grasping this. She hasn't surfaced. We haven't had any sightings of her. At this point, you're the last person in the car.
00:23:22
As they spoke, something caught the investigator's attention. Take your hand off for a second.
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What happened to your eye? I bet I will play basketball. Paul Flores had a black eye, a shiner he said he got on Memorial Day.
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the Monday after the party. You've been completely honest here with everything that you told us.
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Okay. As far as your injuries and that sort of thing. Yes. And that was that. Paul Flores was sent on his way.
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Okay, Paul. Thanks for coming down. All right? I appreciate it. We don't know what campus police made of Paul Flores'
00:24:00
story. We do know that the next time he sat down with investigators, Paul Flores was saying something different.
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You lied to us, though, right? June 1996. Cal Poly students were packing up for summer break
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and lingering over those last days of the semester was a huge unanswered question.
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What had happened to missing freshman Kristen Smart? We'd gone over and out around the campus talking to people.
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Her father Stan was still there in San Luis Obispo every day, walking the campus and the surrounding community.
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He wasn't leaving without his daughter. People were really nice. No one ever turned me away.
00:24:54
If there was a locked gate, they would unlock it and say, you go ahead and look, you know, we feel for you.
00:24:59
But they didn't have any information. They didn't have any information, that's right.
00:25:03
Campus police were talking with people too, with some help from San Luis Obispo DA detective Bill Hanley.
00:25:10
Nearly one month after Kristen disappeared, Hanley and his partner asked Paul Flores to come in for a second interview.
00:25:19
What do you think happened to Roxy? What's your best guess as to what happened to her?
00:25:25
My best guess is maybe she knows. Because her door was by the parking lot over there.
00:25:30
So then I would figure my best guess is she went off with someone. It was clear that he possibly was the last one to see her.
00:25:41
Okay. A stranger or what? It could have been just someone she knows. Someone might have gone, you know, hey, let's go to Taco Bell or something.
00:25:52
Once again, he told them about his walk back to the dorms with Kristen. I went up to my dorm because the walkway goes that way towards my dorm,
00:25:59
and then she started walking that way. By now, investigators had been asking around about Paul Flores.
00:26:06
Remember, he said he'd gotten that black eye at a basketball game Monday. Well, a friend told police he noticed it earlier that weekend.
00:26:15
Last time we talked to you, you had a black eye. And what did you tell us? I told you I got to play basketball.
00:26:23
Investigators knew he was lying, and now came a different story. Where did you get it?
00:26:29
In my car. Because I was uninstalling my radio because I'm selling my truck. And how did you get the black eye?
00:26:35
I hit the steering wheel. Why didn't you tell us that? Because it doesn't sound like a very likely thing.
00:26:41
Well, you lied to yourself, right? Well, I guess you can call it a little white lie.
00:26:46
How you got your black eye to white lie? Yep. So what's going on here? This is a guy covering his tracks.
00:26:53
Yes. And not very effectively because you smell it. He showed visible signs of being nervous.
00:27:00
He had a white t-shirt on. He kind of put his arms inside of the shirt sleeves. You're actually going to rip your t-shirt up.
00:27:08
No, I'm just getting injured. Like he's protecting himself. That's correct. Suspicious? Yes.
00:27:15
Enough for an arrest? Not close. Well, we know he's not being truthful. That we're positive of.
00:27:24
And that was the frustrating thing. In fact, one day after this interview, the campus newspaper The Mustang put it bluntly.
00:27:33
Investigators' parents remain clueless about missing Polly's student. The newspaper even quoted campus police as saying,
00:27:42
there is no evidence of any criminal activity. It doesn't look like she was the victim of a crime.
00:27:49
A strange comment, given that Cal Poly PD then handed over the case to the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Department for further investigation.
00:27:59
That was nearly one month after Kristen disappeared. I find it unfortunate that they didn't reach out for some additional help.
00:28:09
The investigation definitely got off to a slow start. Pat Hedges was a commander in the Sheriff's Patrol Division back in 1996.
00:28:17
He was not assigned to the case at the time. He is familiar with the investigation conducted by Cal Poly PD
00:28:24
and the criticisms that followed it. When we assumed the investigation 30 days later,
00:28:31
we weren't able to just start at square one. We were like in a negative number. Campus police did look around Paul Flores' dorm room early on.
00:28:42
What they didn't do was take any photos, seize any evidence. Nothing that could be tested for blood or DNA or some trace that Kristen had ever been there.
00:28:54
And by the time the sheriff's department took over the case, students had moved out for the summer and the dorm had been thoroughly cleaned.
00:29:03
All the dorm rooms had been sanitized, so we were at a bit of a disadvantage on that.
00:29:08
Because that might be your crime scene? Most likely. Everything indicated that that was at least a significant scene.
00:29:15
There may have been others, but that would have been a place to start. Kristen's family says campus police never should have been in charge of such a serious investigation to begin with.
00:29:27
They had background in if you were double parked or you were drinking and underage.
00:29:32
Or your bicycle got stolen. Right. And there was something else. From the start, some of those interviewed, including Kristen's friend Margarita.
00:29:42
Remember campus police focusing on what Kristen wore and what she drank. So campus police were asking us, like, how much did she drink?
00:29:52
Did she drink every night? You know sort of personality profiling her They also wanted to know about Kristen sex life The type of questions that they would ask me were like really explicit in relation to sex We looked at the
00:30:08
first audio interview with Paul Flores just a few days into the investigation. The unredacted
00:30:15
transcript shows campus police calling Kristen promiscuous or massively promiscuous three times.
00:30:24
An interrogation technique? Maybe. But there's no reason to talk that way to Kristen's friend.
00:30:30
I remember one of the campus police was like, oh, well, she was sexually promiscuous.
00:30:34
The Cal Poly police took me aside and said, you know, your daughter was doing some things that would put her at risk.
00:30:44
And that she'd gone to a party and she had drank alcohol. Like that was unusual for college kids to go to a party and drink alcohol.
00:30:53
and that she was scantily dressed. And I listened to all this, and he was portraying to me that our daughter disappeared,
00:31:04
and if she was dead, she'd brought it onto herself, which was totally wrong. You think they would have worked on it differently if she'd been coming back from the library
00:31:13
and never had any boyfriends and was wearing a hazmat suit? It definitely would have been different, because it was a different era.
00:31:23
And there was a lot of victim shaming. And it's like women get what they're asking for.
00:31:32
Now one month in, the case was in new hands. And with some new sniffing around, they were about to discover something huge.
00:31:43
These dogs indicated that there had been a deceased person in that room. Vanessa Shields went home for the summer,
00:32:03
heartbroken over her missing friend and dorm mate, Kristen Smart. She was replaying memories when it hit her.
00:32:11
That party on Crandall Way was not the first time Kristen ever met Paul Flores. We were at a party, and I just remember looking over and seeing this guy
00:32:21
kind of behind, staring. Staring at Kristen? Staring at Kristen. It was just a kind of very serious,
00:32:26
kind of intense and direct, you know, just kind of staring. Now she says that memory gave her chills.
00:32:36
Then you saw him again. Another party, yeah. About a few weeks later, he actually came up to us.
00:32:40
And that's when he introduced himself and talked to her. What did he say when he talked to you guys?
00:32:45
You could just tell he was kind of nervous, but yet he had this little confidence
00:32:47
to come up to her. I was kind of surprised that he thought he had a chance with her
00:32:50
because she was a really beautiful girl, and he just wasn't her type. The sheriff's office was now playing serious catch-up
00:32:59
on an investigation they'd inherited from campus police. Are you operating under the presumption that she's no longer alive?
00:33:07
I would say that would be a safe assumption. Even though Paul Flores had moved out, his dorm room cleaned,
00:33:16
detectives decided to go back in, this time with cadaver dogs. Out of the 113 rooms in Santa Lucia Hall,
00:33:26
all four dogs detected human decomposition in the same place, the now vacant room of Paul Flores.
00:33:36
That was progress, just not enough. That in and of itself is not, that's not enough to go forward.
00:33:44
You can't arrest anybody on the basis of that. Well, no, not really. It indicated that there had been a situation there at some point in time.
00:33:53
It doesn't give enough for the prosecutors to prosecute a case. It was all quite provocative.
00:34:01
But where was Kristen? Team number three, behind the squad leader with his hand up, please.
00:34:08
Hundreds of volunteers searched the Cal Poly campus and its surrounding hillsides.
00:34:12
Keep your eyes on the ground. You're looking for anything that looks out of place.
00:34:17
The Smart family met with local politicians, asking for more to be done. And at one of those meetings, someone tried to offer Denise Smart some advice.
00:34:28
He said, Mrs. Smart, he said, this perpetrator took your daughter's life. Don't let him take another life. Don't let him take your husband.
00:34:40
Don't let him take your children. Be present for your children and your husband.
00:34:45
I was so infuriated with him. How dare he tell me that my daughter had died. We're still looking for her.
00:34:54
Yeah, we're 30 days in and we've not given up. We're going to find her. And I was so mad at him and upset.
00:35:03
By this time, Paul Flores had stopped talking with police. He ended up dropping out of Cal Poly and moving back home.
00:35:10
Denise Smart knew Floris was the last person seen with her daughter. Now her desperation led her to do something unusual.
00:35:21
She decided to reach out to Paul's mother, Susan, mom to mom, with a campaign to present the story of her daughter's life.
00:35:31
I need to send their family, this is who Kristen is. So I made several pages of pictures of Kristen,
00:35:38
that this is who we're missing and that we would love to have, could they please help us.
00:35:43
And so you send all this to the Flores family? Yeah, and it was returned. She sent it back.
00:35:49
She said, we have our own pictures, which tells me she opened it and then sealed it
00:35:53
and then sent it back Stan Smart drove to the Flores home in Arroyo Grande to try to speak with Paul father Ruben So 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 want to talk
00:36:14
That was Ruben? That was Ruben. And you said, I'm Stan Smart, I'm looking for my daughter.
00:36:18
Yeah, yeah, I'd like to talk. He did not want to talk. He indicated that I should leave or someone's apt to get shot.
00:36:27
Well, that's silly talk, immature talk. So I got back to my vehicle and I left. Ruben Flores denies saying that to Stan.
00:36:38
Stan and Denise say the attitude of the Flores family was all about protecting their son.
00:36:46
And then it was Memorial Day weekend. Again. One year had gone by. So by May 1997, they really hadn't made a lot of progress in the investigation.
00:37:00
Chloe Jones is the courts and crime reporter for the San Luis Obispo Tribune. All they had at the time were the cadaver dog alerts and evidence that Paul Flores lied about having a black eye.
00:37:13
On the anniversary of her disappearance, the sheriff showed his hand. And it looked like a losing one.
00:37:21
Ed Williams, the sheriff at the time, told the Tribune that they had no other suspects in the case
00:37:26
and that all roads lead to Paul Flores, and they needed Paul Flores to tell them what happened.
00:37:31
That's pretty much like a memo to Paul Flores saying, if you keep your mouth shut, you have nothing to worry about.
00:37:36
It's like, what are you saying? Do you understand what you're saying? That was in the newspaper.
00:37:40
You are telling us that he is the suspect, and if the suspect doesn't talk, then the case isn't solved.
00:37:46
Paul Flores continued to keep quiet. The Smarts, however, were figuring out ways to get him to talk.
00:37:56
Could you provide me with the names of the persons with whom you have discussed the Kristen Smart case?
00:38:16
By the fall of 1997, Kristen Smart had been missing for nearly a year and a half.
00:38:23
She'd last been seen walking off into the night with her classmate Paul Flores. The Smart family, initially frustrated by campus police,
00:38:33
were now losing faith in the next team of investigators. When it went to the Sheriff's Department,
00:38:42
we were very hopeful that it was going to be moving forward and that we would have answers.
00:38:47
But that was short-lived. Once again, the Smart family took matters into their own hands.
00:38:56
Why did you file the wrongful death lawsuit? To solicit information because we weren't getting any information.
00:39:04
In a civil case, their attorney could do what detectives could not, question Paul Flores, not in an interrogation,
00:39:13
but in a videotaped deposition. Could you provide me with the names of the persons
00:39:19
with whom you have discussed the Kristen Smart case? Well, sort of. I refuse to answer that question based on the Fifth Amendment,
00:39:30
Fifth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, Fifth Amendment. That's how he answered nearly every question, taking the Fifth.
00:39:37
Perhaps knowing this civil deposition could later be used by criminal prosecutors.
00:39:43
The United States Constitution. Went back to the house. The attorney for the Smarts also deposed Paul Flores' father, Ruben.
00:39:51
Has your son ever told you that he did not kill Kristen Smart? We never asked that question.
00:40:02
Paul's dad was questioned because investigators believed Kristen's murder happened in Paul's dorm room,
00:40:08
and her body was moved after that. Was there a law enforcement theory of how he got her body out of the dorm and what he might have done with it?
00:40:18
There were several theories. One, that he had help taking her from the college. Paul did not have a car on campus.
00:40:29
And the morning after that party, he made one phone call to his parents' house. Investigators and the Smart suspected his family was involved in helping Paul cover up the murder.
00:40:41
Do you have any information whatsoever as to where Kristen Smart's body may be? No.
00:40:48
The depositions provided a lot to interpret, but not hard evidence. The family decided to put their lawsuit on hold.
00:40:57
They tried something else. About a mile from the Flores home, the Smart's lawyer put up a billboard offering a reward for the missing Cal Poly student.
00:41:09
And then years went by, and with them, the answers the Smart family sought seemed to slip away.
00:41:18
I have seen couples driven apart by something like this. It can ruin a marriage, it can wreck a family.
00:41:25
That didn't happen with you. Well, we had two children that I think we were both...
00:41:31
With a glue to keep us together. Remember that unsolicited advice about being present?
00:41:38
The advice which so infuriated Denise back when Kristen was just 30 days gone? It kept ringing in her ears.
00:41:47
And it helped. I remember that conversation to this day. And I did try to be present.
00:41:54
I went to their swim meets and basketball games and soccer games and I sat there you know for them And I thought you know Kristen not here I need to be here for both of us
00:42:08
So the Smart family tried to live their lives without her. Kristen's friend Vanessa did the same.
00:42:16
I graduated, moved back down to San Diego, and was in medical research. And then I got married, got divorced.
00:42:25
all the ups and downs of life that Kristen never got to have. I was always thinking about her, especially around Memorial Day weekend.
00:42:33
There's a part that you kind of lose hope that maybe we'll never solve this. Since leaving Cal Poly, Margarita has struggled,
00:42:42
knowing she didn't stay with Kristen that night. I had a lot of guilt and a lot of shame and humiliation.
00:42:49
My friend disappeared because I left her alone. The way I got over my guilt and shame was Kristen's mom.
00:43:01
She told me that if I would have stayed with Kristen that night, it might have been two girls and not one.
00:43:09
Over the next decade, Paul Flores finished school at Community College. The smarts saw him as the only suspect, and so did law enforcement.
00:43:19
except Stan and Denise say they heard less and less from the sheriff's department.
00:43:25
You 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.
00:43:33
And after a while it gets a little draining. I can't tell you how many times I wrote letters and I said,
00:43:38
will you just call us once a week and say we're working on something this week. I need to know that you are doing something to help Kristen.
00:43:50
Okay. And use her name. I had to tell them to use her name. The Smarts are complaining about the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Department under Pat Hedges.
00:44:02
He had taken over the top job in 1998. The Smart family has this strong sense that there was a period during the time that you were sheriff
00:44:12
when no work was being done on this case, in which law enforcement's eyes were essentially off of Paul Flores.
00:44:19
Are they right about that? No, no, they weren't right. We conducted both covert and overt surveillance on him.
00:44:27
Detectives had obtained warrants for wiretaps on the Flores family phones. Perhaps we could get family talking about the case.
00:44:36
They didn't overhear anything unusual. Sheriff Hedges also brought in undercover FBI agents
00:44:43
to cozy up to Paul and get him talking about his past. They're hoping he says, well, I did kill this girl, but he didn't do it.
00:44:53
He was one of the toughest nuts to crack, if you will. Sheriff Hedges left office in 2010,
00:45:03
no closer to solving the Kristen Smart case than investigators before him. Do you think you did a good enough job of keeping the Smart family informed?
00:45:13
Because they don't think so. Yeah. In retrospect, we probably could have done a better job.
00:45:23
Then someone else started investigating the Kristen Smart case. Someone who'd been intrigued by that face on that billboard after all of these years.
00:45:34
And his interest would change everything. I've driven by a thousand times, and I was suddenly hooked and needed to know more.
00:45:57
Chris Lambert grew up more than a half an hour south of San Luis Obispo. When Kristen Smart disappeared in 1996, Chris was eight years old.
00:46:08
Over the years, he drove past those billboards and the fading photos of Kristen Smart.
00:46:16
I would see this big billboard that said, Kristen Smart missing, $75,000 reward.
00:46:23
And each time I would pass it, I would go, that girl's still missing? More than two decades later, those billboards were still up.
00:46:30
And he says it jarred something in him. I started asking friends and family members, do you remember the Kristen Smart story?
00:46:39
And what came out was that a lot of people didn't know the details or were confused about who she was.
00:46:46
Chris had never investigated any crime. He was a musician, not a journalist. He wasn't even a friend of the Smart family.
00:46:55
He did, however, have an idea. Everything hit me in a very personal way because it's my home.
00:47:02
I wonder if this is the kind of story that I could put together in a way that people would consume in podcast form.
00:47:09
In 2018, he began cold calling anyone connected to the Kristen Smart case. And people talked.
00:47:16
I don't have a background in this, and I don't have the ability to arrest them. I do think people opened up to me and still open up to me more than they have to the sheriff's department, the FBI, or other people investigating.
00:47:28
He started putting together the first episodes of a podcast, not sure what would happen.
00:47:35
One of my biggest fears early on is when I reach out to Kristen Smart's parents,
00:47:40
they might say, we don't want you to tell this story. Chris attended a memorial the following year for what would have been Kristen's 42nd birthday,
00:47:49
and he approached Denise Smart. Hi, I'm here to learn about your daughter, And I think that they could see early on that I wasn't like anybody else that had approached them up to this point.
00:48:00
We've had people who wanted to write books, people who wanted to write stories. And you've turned them down.
00:48:05
Oh, they didn't feel right. And very calmly, as Chris does, he just sort of told me about an idea for a podcast.
00:48:15
It was an idea the Smart family liked. It happened in my own backyard, which is why I named the podcast Your Own Backyard.
00:48:24
I'm retracing missing Cal Poly student Kristen Smart's last known steps. It is how many around here either learned of or remembered the story of the young woman on the billboard
00:48:35
and the story of the man suspected of taking her away. What Chris did not see coming was that the podcast made more people want to talk with him.
00:48:46
How many people contacted you and said, I have some personal knowledge of this case?
00:48:50
I think hundreds, if not thousands by this point. The same comfort that we had with him apparently was the same comfort that those who came forward to talk with him had.
00:49:01
Chris heard stories from people who knew Paul Flores as a little kid. Some of them, not very flattering.
00:49:08
There's an incident where he's swimming in the family pool. At some point, there's a girl that he gets into a fight with, and suddenly he's holding her down under the pool so she can't breathe.
00:49:17
Finally, an adult has to pull him off. Chris learned that in the years after Kristen disappeared, Paul Flores had moved south to Los Angeles County.
00:49:26
He worked for a while at a Coca-Cola bottling plant and was a regular at the local bars.
00:49:32
He was also arrested multiple times for drunk driving. Chris interviewed one of Paul's girlfriends during that time.
00:49:39
There was something always odd about him and his family. There was always lots of secrets.
00:49:45
He didn't have very many friends. At first, Chris expected only locals would listen to his podcast.
00:49:53
I thought if I can just get a couple thousand local people listening to this, that'll be worth it.
00:49:59
That wasn't the way it played out? No, it blew up. Not in the thousands. Your Own Backyard podcast gained millions of listeners.
00:50:09
It's different when someone goes missing in your own backyard. It caught the attention of the latest sheriff in town, Ian Parkinson.
00:50:19
Chris told the story that people didn't know. And he opened the eyes across the country to Kristen.
00:50:29
Sheriff Parkinson had been in office for eight years by then. He'd run on a promise to make cold cases like Kristen's a priority.
00:50:38
I promised that I would do everything I could to find Kristen and prosecute those that were responsible.
00:50:47
He just really cared. We felt movement. We felt progress. And there was communication.
00:50:55
The smarts say Parkinson and his cold case investigator Clint Cole stayed in regular touch,
00:51:02
returned their calls, and ran down tips that still trickled into the family. None of that led to immediate answers. It did make the smarts feel they had two real allies,
00:51:13
a podcaster and a detective working together in an unorthodox relationship. Chris is a good guy. He gave us some valuable information.
00:51:24
Sharing information with the podcaster, that's not in the manual, is it? No, it's not. It's a risk. But we met with him and we got a good vibe from him.
00:51:37
Detective Clint Cole was now focusing on the Flores family. He got warrants for new wiretaps and started monitoring their phone calls.
00:51:47
I heard you ordered some cookies. Yeah, but I had them mailed. Yeah. The Flores family is very cautious.
00:51:53
They're very careful. As Cole listened, he heard something interesting. The other thing I need you to do is to start listening to the podcast.
00:52:03
On the wiretap, Susan, Paul's mom, says to him, I need you to start listening to the podcast.
00:52:09
I need you to listen to everything they say so we can punch holes in it. Wherever we can punch holes, maybe we can't.
00:52:19
You're the one that can tell me. That told me that he's involved. Why else would he be able to poke holes in the podcast?
00:52:30
And he doesn't respond to that question. He doesn't say why. I don't know why. I didn't do anything.
00:52:35
Detective Cole found that very suspicious. Investigators also discovered the Flores family had started secretly communicating using encrypted messaging applications.
00:52:47
Together, it was enough to get new search warrants on properties owned by the Flores family, including the home Paul Flores owned in Los Angeles.
00:52:58
It was a total hoarder house, filthy, black mold. It was such a mess. Amid the mess, investigators seized Paul Flores' electronic equipment, computers, phones, hard drives.
00:53:13
We were looking for any correspondence, text messages, any evidence that could be related to the crime.
00:53:23
And those devices had stories to tell. Stories about what Paul Flores had been doing in the years since Kristen Smart vanished.
00:53:32
At the time, did you suspect that you might be drugged? No. From the beginning, investigators heard Paul Flores had a reputation.
00:53:55
He was awkward made some women uncomfortable and there was more Chris Lambert spoke with women who knew him in the years before Kristen Smart vanished
00:54:06
They described him as frightening. Well, his nickname was Scary Paul. You wouldn't want to be alone in a room with him.
00:54:13
You wouldn't let any of your friends be drunk around him. In 2020, investigators say they confirmed that and more
00:54:21
when they scoured those computers and hard drives seized from Paul Flores' home in San Pedro,
00:54:28
a waterfront neighborhood of Los Angeles. We found Paul's search history, and we found downloads of pornography film
00:54:39
about raping drunk college students that he'd saved. and in a file labeled practice they discovered paul flores had stored some videos starring himself
00:54:54
they show paul flores having sex with girls that are passed out they're clearly not in any state to give consent no not at all i watched two of
00:55:07
them partially and it was enough to make me sick that somebody could do that to somebody this is
00:55:12
date rape that he's videotaping. Absolutely. Investigators learned Flores would approach
00:55:18
women at bars in his L.A. neighborhood around closing time. That's where this woman says she
00:55:25
met him in 2015. He noticed you. I guess so, yes. We agreed to call her Sam and conceal her identity.
00:55:36
It was late, Sam says, and she was tipsy and waiting for a ride outside a bar when Flores
00:55:42
approached her. He asked if he could take me home, you know, like, I could take you home. It's,
00:55:48
you know, it's fine. And he was very persistent. Describe him. He was awkward and he seemed meek.
00:55:57
That's how I felt like, oh, he's just, you know, it's one in the morning and he just wants to hang
00:56:03
out and he's being awkward about it. But let's go get something to eat. She says she got into
00:56:08
Floris' car and they drove to a restaurant, after which she agreed to go back to his place.
00:56:16
And when he opens the door, it was just a hoarding mess. And I thought, what in the world
00:56:23
did you get yourself into? She says that on his couch, she tried to think of an exit strategy.
00:56:31
He offers me water and we still talk. He's not doing anything other than talking.
00:56:39
Yeah, he's not aggressive or anything. But I know that I wanted to leave and I don't know why I didn't muster up the energy or voice I want to go.
00:56:52
Because you would have had no trouble saying that. Never. I'm very, I'm feisty. If I don't like something, you'll know.
00:57:01
What happens next? We go to his bedroom, and then we have relations that I'm not participating in.
00:57:12
Meaning he's forcing himself on you? Not forcing. It's just I'm just laying there and just thinking to myself, I want this to be over.
00:57:23
I want to go home. But I never vocally said it. afterwards sam says she passed out woke up a few hours later and went home feeling groggy
00:57:34
all of which was weird she says because she hadn't had any alcohol for several hours
00:57:39
it was about 1 a.m when i had my last drink and i just had water at the restaurant and at his house
00:57:46
sam was not one of the women in paul flores's videos however when investigators saw those videos
00:57:54
They suspected Flores was drugging and raping women. From the search warrant, they found meds in his house.
00:58:03
We found Flexeril and Tramadol. In speaking to a local doctor, he said that Tramadol and Flexeril mixed together with alcohol
00:58:15
could produce a sedative state of mind for someone who ingested them. A sedative state of mind similar to what you see on those videos with those women.
00:58:26
Correct. Years after her encounter with Paul Flores, Sam listened to Chris's podcast and started connecting the dots.
00:58:36
Oh my gosh, now it all makes sense why everything happened the way it did. Sam flashed back to that glass of water Paul Flores handed her at his place.
00:58:47
He went to the kitchen and grabbed me a glass of water that I did not see. So he was alone with your glass of water for a few seconds.
00:58:56
As well as when I was at the restaurant with him, I did get up to go to the restroom twice.
00:59:03
That brings us back to a detail on the night Kristen went missing. Despite all the talk about her being intoxicated, people didn't report seeing her drink much.
00:59:13
I left her around like 10.30 or 11. Dead sober, by the way. I never saw her actually drinking,
00:59:22
but she was definitely under the influence of something. All these years later, a clear picture was starting to emerge for investigators.
00:59:31
They believe in all likelihood Paul drugged Kristen the night she disappeared and went on to do it to other women
00:59:37
again and again and again. if paul flores is guilty of kristin smart's murder then he wasn't prosecuted for it back
00:59:47
when it happened and he was free then yes to assault you chemically and literally and other women too yes all because of the inaction of law enforcement back then Yeah they dropped the ball
01:00:06
When you see Paul Flores essentially assaulting women who cannot resist, you got to know, that's the price of not arresting him up here.
01:00:15
Yep. Yep. And that told us that we need to get this done, right? He doesn't belong out on the street.
01:00:26
Investigators hoped this would be their shot, to finally lock up Paul Flores. If not for Kristen's murder, then maybe on rape charges.
01:00:35
So we involved LAPD to help identify these women. We had crimes that we were witnessing.
01:00:43
We had many, many conversations with LAPD and Los Angeles DA's office. Those attempts to build a rape prosecution against Flores in L.A. were unsuccessful.
01:00:56
He was still out there, free to walk the streets or go to any bar. And 24 years later, the smarts still had no answers.
01:01:06
What investigators really needed was to dig up some new evidence. And in 2021, they quite literally did.
01:01:14
I was sitting right there, heart pounding, thinking we were going to find her. More than two decades after Kristen Smart's disappearance, Paul Flores was still a free man.
01:01:40
then in 2021 a tip came in relayed by podcaster chris lambert chris told detectives that a guy
01:01:50
who rented a room on ruben floris's property had moved out and he was now talking he told us that
01:01:58
no one was allowed underneath the deck of the house for any reason and to the naked eye what
01:02:05
was under the deck? Just some yard tools, nothing really. But it was off limits. It was off limits
01:02:13
according to this renter who lived there for 10 years. On March 15th, 2021, Cole's team served
01:02:22
another search warrant at Ruben Flores' home. This time they came equipped with cadaver dogs,
01:02:27
a couple of archaeologists, and some ground-penetrating radar. The search lasted two days.
01:02:37
They found a very suspicious location underneath the deck, six foot by four feet deep.
01:02:42
Even to the uneducated eye, you could tell that that was a hole that had recently been dug.
01:02:48
Yes, you could see actual shovel marks in some of the areas. And 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.
01:03:04
They kept digging. I was sitting right at the hole, heart pounding, thinking we were going to find her.
01:03:11
This is it. This is it. Except it wasn't. If Kristen Smart had been buried under that deck, she was there no longer.
01:03:23
Before they left, investigators took samples of those stains. And then Paul Flores' mother Susan agreed to talk on camera with a reporter from NBC affiliate KSBY.
01:03:38
But they keep trying to find the answers with us, and they keep failing because the answers aren't here.
01:03:47
Yeah, it was surprising. They've always been very quiet, not wanting to discuss things.
01:03:53
So when I saw that tape, I was shocked. This is ridiculous what happened here today. They took his life away from him, too.
01:04:03
Susan Flores said she had no idea what happened to Kristen Smart. And that her family was being targeted unfairly.
01:04:12
And were you guys anticipating this? Were you guys surprised at all? No, I'm not surprised at anything they do.
01:04:21
They're harassing maniacs. It's not going to change the fact that we can't help this family find their child.
01:04:29
The woman Denise Smart had once tried to reach mother to mother still had nothing to offer.
01:04:36
It's interesting, it's two families that, I mean, your family's done everything you can to find some answers,
01:04:42
and they've done everything they can. To ensure that we don't. Investigators rushed those stain samples from the dig to the lab.
01:04:51
And finally, a break. They tested it. It's positive for human blood, four feet down.
01:05:00
That blood was too degraded for a DNA test. Yes, it was too degraded. But who has blood in their soil four feet down with human decomp stains and a previously dug area?
01:05:13
If that's not crystal smart, then who is it? Who else did you have buried in your backyard?
01:05:18
That's what finally gets you over the arrest hurdle. Yes, that finally got us to a point where we felt the case was chargeable and winnable.
01:05:28
On April 13, 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
01:05:45
and finally put him in cuffs. When it finally happened, it was that surreal moment.
01:05:52
It like they really arrested him They really arrested him I didn really know how I should feel or how to process it but of course it seemed like a fantastic outcome
01:06:05
I was so happy and relieved to know that a day that I had hoped would happen for years finally came.
01:06:13
So I was just relieved that someone I felt was violent was off the streets. The charge against Paul Flores?
01:06:20
Murder during the commission or attempted commission of rape. And that same day, the sheriff's office made a second arrest.
01:06:30
Ruben Flores was charged as an accessory after the fact, accused of helping his son conceal Kristen Smart's body.
01:06:38
Then we found out they'd arrested Ruben, and it's like, it was a good day. It was a good day.
01:06:46
Ruben Flores' attorney said his arrest was simply a tactic to try to pry a confession
01:06:52
out of his son Paul. So, would Paul Flores finally talk? Or maybe he already had.
01:07:01
He just blurts this out? Yes. No smirk. No smile. No, oh, I'm screwing with you.
01:07:09
He just says it. Straight face. For 26 years, the Smart family waited and waited and hoped for this day.
01:07:34
July 18, 2022. The criminal trials of Paul Flores and Ruben Flores began. Paul was 45, the same age Kristen would have been.
01:07:46
During the trial, the judge allowed still photography but no audio or video. Father and son would be tried in the same courtroom at the same time, but with separate juries.
01:07:58
Prosecutor Chris Pouvrell. Young, vibrant 19-year-old women don't just vanish into thin air and leave all of their earthly possessions and belongings behind.
01:08:08
It just doesn't happen. The case against Paul Flores was almost entirely circumstantial.
01:08:15
No DNA, no eyewitnesses, and of course, no body. This was the first nobody case that I tried.
01:08:22
It's extremely difficult. And I'm trying to build that circumstantial evidence to show
01:08:27
there's just no other explanation for what happened to Kristen. The prosecutors spun a decades-long narrative
01:08:34
from the night Kristen disappeared all the way to those searches at the florist's home.
01:08:41
Party-goers and Kristen's friends, like Vanessa Shields, took the stand. What's it like to walk in that courtroom when he's there?
01:08:49
That was terrifying. I had to stare at him. He still had that same really intense stare
01:08:55
that just kind of gives you the creeps. And I was anxious, I was nervous, but then I just kept thinking, you know, you have to do this for Kristen.
01:09:03
The jurors watched that 1996 interview with Paul Flores. Why was it so hard for you to tell us that you got that black eye hitting the sternum?
01:09:12
It didn't really matter. They listened to his changing explanations of his black eye,
01:09:17
and they saw what investigators believed was telling body language. The backbone of the prosecution's case was the forensics,
01:09:28
starting with the cadaver dogs alerting at the door, and then decades later, the discovery under Ruben Flores' deck.
01:09:36
The prosecution brought in a scientist who explained something called a hem-direct test that determined the samples were human blood.
01:09:45
Were you worried that all the jurors weren't going to really grasp the technical stuff?
01:09:51
I feel like people today were really pretty savvy, thanks to shows like yours. I think people understand that if you test for human blood, it's human blood.
01:10:00
The state's theory was that Flores murdered Kristen while raping her, part of a pattern of sexual assault that continued for years.
01:10:09
Prosecutors documented numerous rapes they believe Paul Flores committed by drugging and assaulting women and then recording it on video.
01:10:18
The judge allowed two of those women to testify anonymously. They said they met Paul at a bar and they went home with him.
01:10:27
They were given a drink and then they don't remember anything besides bits and pieces of being assaulted.
01:10:32
They gave very emotional, very, very powerful testimonies to the point that even some jurors cried during it.
01:10:39
Prosecutor Pouvrell saved one witness until the last days of his case. This woman.
01:10:46
Her name is Jennifer Hudson. She says she met Paul Flores in 1996, just weeks after Kristen disappeared.
01:10:55
We were at a skateboard ramp at someone's house, a college kid's house. Jennifer was just 19 then, hanging out with friends.
01:11:03
This guy comes up and sits across from a buddy and myself. Someone had the radio playing.
01:11:12
And after a few songs, a public outreach commercial came on looking for Kristen.
01:11:18
Mentions Kristen Smart by name. Right, right. She says that guy had a dramatic reaction to hearing the name Kristen Smart.
01:11:27
And says, the bitch was a d*** tease and I'm sick of dealing with her s***. so I put her under a ramp at his place in Wozna. Wozna is a rural area not far from where the
01:11:42
Flores family lived, the implication being that Kristen was buried there near a skate ramp.
01:11:49
You believe him? A thousand percent. You know when a person has a soul. He did not.
01:11:53
And that's what made me believe him. She says she later saw story on the Kristen Smart case and recognized Paul Flores. However, she did not go to police
01:12:07
back then because she says she was scared and she didn't think it would do any good.
01:12:14
Had I gone to the law on my own and said at any point, I ran into this guy and this is what he
01:12:21
said, would that have been enough to arrest him? No. And you would have felt in danger? Absolutely.
01:12:27
The one person that I did tell in 2002 was a roommate of mine. That roommate later left a tip on a website dedicated to finding Kristen.
01:12:40
Years later, Chris Lambert saw that post and tracked down Jennifer, and he passed her name to Detective Clint Cole,
01:12:48
which is how Jennifer ended up telling her story in court more than 25 years later.
01:12:54
She wants to apologize to the smarts for not speaking up sooner. It still bothers me.
01:13:01
If it didn't bug me, I'd be as evil as Paul is. Over three months, the prosecution built its case,
01:13:10
while the defense argued the whole thing was shaky. I mean, it was hocus pocus. The verdict is passed up to the judge.
01:13:18
Your heart starts pounding out of your chest. The trials of Ruben and Paul Flores lasted months.
01:13:37
At the defense table, father and son sat side by side. The two defendants were represented by separate attorneys.
01:13:46
Robert Sanger defended Paul Flores. Ruben's attorney was Harold Mezek. What was your strategy going into trial?
01:13:55
Attack the prosecution's lack of evidence. Prosecution was very deft in this case.
01:14:01
They took what little they had and they spun quite a story. His central focus was on the forensics, the evidence dug up on the floor's property.
01:14:12
I mean, it was hocus pocus. What was buried under there if it wasn't Kristen Smart?
01:14:17
Nothing was buried under there. It was just disturbed soil from a tree being pulled out.
01:14:23
So when the prosecution says they have tests confirming human blood in the soil, what, they're lying about that?
01:14:29
They misused the heme direct test. It was specifically not approved or validated for use to discover soil in blood.
01:14:38
To hear the defense tell it if the case against Paul Flores was weak the case against his father was virtually non certainly Reuben would do anything for his son but Reuben didn have to do anything for his son
01:14:53
There was never a body in Reuben's yard. Ever. As for Jennifer Hudson and her story.
01:15:00
Jennifer Hudson's testimony, I think it was suspect. I think the way it was brought to light by the podcast and the possibility of a $75,000 reward,
01:15:12
I just did not find her credible at all. Also not credible to the defense, the prevailing notion that over the years,
01:15:21
the Flores family protected Paul. They're a sweet family. They've been totally mischaracterized in the press.
01:15:28
Why do you think the Flores family, this sweet, kind family, would be so antagonistic and so unwilling to help the Smart family
01:15:37
when they reached out for help for their missing daughter? They were approached in a way that they were this evil crime family that caused the disappearance of a young girl.
01:15:48
And that's just not true. In court, Misik echoed a theory campus police had pursued more than a quarter century earlier.
01:15:57
Maybe Kristen just took off. What I said was, without a body, we can't be sure she's dead.
01:16:04
And 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.
01:16:14
You're a smart guy. I don't even think you believe Kristen Smart's alive somewhere.
01:16:19
I do believe with all my heart that she may be alive. It may be a slim chance, but there's a chance.
01:16:26
That's why we need a body. Let me ask you the question. Why do you believe she's dead?
01:16:32
Because she's missing. No, not just that she's missing. She hasn't contacted her family.
01:16:38
She didn't contact any of her friends. She wasn't the sort of person to just up and disappear.
01:16:43
If she had disappeared, she would have taken her stuff with her. And she was last seen in the company of a guy who previously had a history of weird sexual behavior towards women
01:16:56
and later was accused of a number of rapes and of drugging women and having sex with them.
01:17:02
And he was the last person to see her alive. That's why I don't think she's around.
01:17:08
The defense concedes none of that. The evidence in this case, again, is weak, insufficient, and I'm going to get a lot of
01:17:15
heat for that. But I'm a defense attorney, so I get a lot of heat. After four days of deliberation, the juries were back in the courtroom, this time with
01:17:25
verdicts. Paul Flores guilty of first murder I mean I just kind of doubled up even though I wanted it it was just so unreal that this jury had actually listened
01:17:43
Ruben Flores' jury found him not guilty. We got the elephant. We didn't get the mouse.
01:17:50
Can you live with that? Do we have an option? Do we have a choice? This is a parent's worst nightmare.
01:17:58
The smarts came to Paul Flores' sentencing and spoke one by one. And we have waited long enough for this day.
01:18:07
They addressed the judge and Flores, and they fought back tears. Denise was last to speak, with one final appeal to Paul Flores, return Kristen to her family.
01:18:24
It is clearly too late for us. But Paul, it is not to wait for you, to tell the truth, to free your soul and your heart from the weight it must be carrying.
01:18:36
You are, after all, a human being. During that, Paul Flores didn't do as much as turn his head.
01:18:45
He's just a soulless, a soulless creature. The judge agreed. You have been a cancer to society.
01:18:57
You are committed to the maximum sentence that I can impose by law, an indeterminate term of 25 years to life.
01:19:05
If it were up to the smarts, Paul Flores' sentence would be longer. My next mission in life is to ensure that there is an enhancement for those who murder someone and harbor their body.
01:19:18
How would that help you? It would help us because there would be an incentive for him to come forward and tell us where Kristen is.
01:19:25
If they added 10 years to his sentence, it's probable that he might give this a second thought.
01:19:32
Another mission. In the wake of their frustration with Cal Poly Campus Police, the Smarts took action.
01:19:40
They helped pass the Kristen Smart Safety Act in California, requiring campus police to coordinate with local law enforcement.
01:19:50
Now they want that expanded. Well, it should be nationwide. We're not training campus police officers to deal with homicides or kidnappings.
01:20:01
In response to our requests for an interview after the verdict, the Cal Poly administration said Kristen's case was an anomaly and said,
01:20:11
terrible things can and do still happen in safe places. The university also said that it is never appropriate to describe a victim as promiscuous and it runs completely counter to our practices and procedures In May of 2023 27 years after Kristen disappeared
01:20:34
Cal Poly's president issued the school's first apology to the Smarts. We are very sorry for what the Smart family has endured.
01:20:42
While it is a different administration now than was in place in 1996, we recognize that things should have been done differently.
01:20:52
The SMARTS sued Cal Poly for negligence and wrongful death. Cal Poly argues the two-year statute of limitations has long passed
01:21:02
and that under California law, the SMARTS cannot sue the university because it is not liable for an injury caused by the act of another person.
01:21:14
The case is still pending. Chris Lambert released the final episodes of his podcast,
01:21:23
very much aware of what his curiosity helped bring about. I've been absolutely devastated by the loss of somebody I never even got to meet,
01:21:34
and I can't imagine had it been my own family member. Time has not dulled the smarts' memories of Kristen.
01:21:42
She just always believed in her future. She just knew what she wanted to do. She had wonderful hugs and smiles,
01:21:51
and she was a cheerleader for our other two children. Long ago, the Smarts found a way to navigate their loss,
01:22:00
to take that advice, to be present for one another. I'm glad you listened to that.
01:22:08
Well, I wasn't happy at the time, but... in retrospect, it was the right thing, right thing to hear.
01:22:16
A strong family, a happy one. That love fuels the smarts, even though they still don't have a daughter to bury.
01:22:26
You know, there's this feeling out there in the world by people who don't know you
01:22:30
that now we're at the end, you know. He's been locked up. You should be okay now.
01:22:38
It's not the end. Yeah, and this doesn't go away. does it? No. You know, as a mother, I feel like I have a piece of her within me. So it's,
01:22:50
you know, it's a death that is never going to go away. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.