Kristin Smart was killed in 1996, but her murderer, Paul Flores, wasn’t convicted of the crime until 2023. After he lost his final appeal to overturn or reduce his life sentence, Smart’s family has made it clear that they’re not done fighting for justice and they’re still determined to find her body. On the latest episode of Luxury Handbag Shopping’s Uncovered, investigative journalist Kristin Thorne explained why Smart’s family feels that they don’t have closure 30 years later.
Smart was just 19 years old when she was murdered on the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo campus, where she had just completed her freshman year. Flores, who was also a student at the school, was the last person seen with her leaving a party before she disappeared. Flores was arrested more than two decades later in 2021 and was later convicted of her murder. Smart’s body has never been found.
Thorne took a deeper dive into the case while speaking to the San Luis Obispo Tribune reporter Chloe Jones, who covered Flores’ case and has spoken to Smart’s parents.
“They still don’t have a body, and all they want to do is have her body, have that closure to lay her to rest,” Jones said of Smart’s family. “They’re still in a lot of pain, they’re still hurting. They still feel like, even though the trial’s done, they don’t have that closure that they’d like.”
Jones said that it’s still a “big mystery” where Smart’s body is, though her “family will never give up on” finding her.
“The sheriff and the DA also said something to that effect, where they felt like the case is still going until they find her body and can help give the family the closure that they need,” Jones added.
Jones explained that Flores “was always the person of interest ever since she first went missing.”
Despite this, it took two decades for him to be arrested. Jones said that detectives “did not treat it like a missing persons case when she first went missing.”
“A lot of evidence in his room disappeared, and essentially this botched investigation led to never having enough evidence to actually convict this person,” she continued.
Years after Smart died, police received a tip that allowed them to get a search warrant of Flores’ father’s backyard “where they found an empty clandestine grave that had alleged evidence of human remains being there.” Jones said that the evidence was “essentially a soil stain.”
“They did some ground-penetrating radar and found an anomaly in the ground, and the anomaly was about the size of a grave of a human body, and then when they dug up that anomaly to see what was in there, they found essentially, like, a bathtub ring stain,” she said. “They did some testing on it, and the testing of that bathtub ring tested positive for human blood.”
After Flores was arrested, he went on trial and was found guilty. During the trial, the judge allowed two women to testify who said they had been raped by Paul Flores.
“The testimonies of the women who said that they were raped by Paul Flores after Kristin was murdered were very powerful. It really connected with the jury, and it really connected with the gallery,” Jones said. “They were both extremely affected by it, and they also experienced very similar patterns of behavior, where they kind of were pursued by Paul at a bar.”
After Paul gave the women drinks, they both blacked out and woke up with Paul on top of them.
Following his sentencing, the jurors said that the alleged rape victims’ testimonies helped them find him guilty. “They believed that the two women, kind of, showed a pattern of behavior by Paul,” Jones said, because people who witnessed Smart at the party before her disappearance said she was “incredibly intoxicated and incredibly incoherent and unable to consent and could barely walk.”
Flores’ attorney argued in an appeal that the women should not have been allowed to testify.
Flores has consistently said he did not kill Smart, but he lost his second and final appeal in January.
