Paul Flores as a Young Cal Poly Student: The Kristin Smart Conviction

Paul Flores is the man convicted of murdering Cal Poly San Luis Obispo student Kristin Smart, who vanished on May 25, 1996, after he offered to walk her home from an off-campus party. He was a freshman at the same university, was named as the sole suspect within weeks, and then went uncharged for nearly 25 years. He was arrested in April 2021, convicted of first-degree murder in October 2022, and sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison. Smart’s body has never been found.

Who Paul Flores Was in 1996

Flores grew up in Torrance, California, and later in Arroyo Grande on the Central Coast, graduating from Arroyo Grande High School in 1995. He enrolled at Cal Poly that fall as a food science major and lived in Santa Lucia Hall.¹ He would attend for only one year.

Even before Smart disappeared, the university had received reports about his behavior. A later wrongful death suit filed by the Smart family listed at least four incidents in the months before May 1996: a December 1995 report that Flores climbed the trellis of a female student’s apartment to spy on her; a January 1996 report of vandalizing campus property while intoxicated and a university warning about harassment of a staff member; and March 1996 police reports from three female students describing six weeks of stalking, silent phone calls, and an attempted break-in.² Some women on campus knew him by the nickname “Chester the Molester” for a reputation of groping women.³

The Night Kristin Smart Disappeared

On Friday, May 24, 1996, Kristin Smart, a 19-year-old Cal Poly sophomore, attended an off-campus party hosted by members of the Kappa Chi fraternity in San Luis Obispo. She drank heavily and eventually passed out on a lawn next to the house.³

Around 2 a.m. on May 25, another student, Cheryl Anderson, tried to help Smart walk back to campus. Flores appeared and offered to help, putting his arm around Smart’s torso. At the turnoff to Anderson’s dorm, Flores tried to hug or kiss Anderson, who left after he promised to walk Smart the rest of the way to her dorm at Muir Hall.³

Flores later told investigators he walked Smart only as far as his own dorm at Santa Lucia Hall and left her to continue alone.⁴ Smart was never seen again. Her roommate reported her missing on May 27.⁵

Why the Case Went 25 Years Without Charges

The first weeks of the investigation went badly. Campus police initially assumed Smart had gone out of town, even though she had left her purse, money, and identification behind. Investigators did not formally interview Flores for six days. His dorm room was never sealed as a potential crime scene, and by the time it was inspected 16 days later, a university cleaning crew had already sanitized it. When cadaver dogs were eventually brought in by the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office, they went directly to Flores’s bed.³

An earring found in the driveway of his mother Susan Flores’s home in early 1997 reportedly resembled jewelry Smart had worn. It was never marked as evidence and was later reported misplaced.³

Flores himself sat for two police interviews in the weeks after Smart vanished, and his shifting account became central to the later prosecution. He first said he had rubbed Smart’s shoulders to warm her up and walked her partway home, insisting the contact was “not sexual in nature at all,” and denied ever hearing the nickname “Chester the Molester.” Two days after Smart’s disappearance he had been picked up on an outstanding DUI warrant, and his mug shot showed a black eye and scratches on his hands and knees. He gave different explanations for the eye at different times: playing basketball, waking up with it, and hitting it on his steering wheel while changing his car stereo in the middle of the night.⁶

In a more confrontational second interview on June 19, 1996, Flores refused a polygraph, said his parents had told him not to talk to investigators, admitted he had told “fibs,” and attributed inconsistencies to a possible “blackout.” Investigator Bill Hanley told him at the end of the session he had “no doubt” Flores was involved.⁷

Kristin Smart was declared legally dead on May 25, 2002.⁸ Without a body, without eyewitnesses to a killing, and with physical evidence compromised by the early investigation, prosecutors did not believe they had a case they could win.

During the intervening decades, other women accused Flores of sexual assault. A 2007 report in Redondo Beach led to a DNA match to Flores in 2011, but the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute in 2013, citing insufficient evidence to prove the encounter was nonconsensual beyond a reasonable doubt.⁹ Two other women later testified at the murder trial that Flores raped them, one in 2008 and one in 2011, after they lost consciousness in his company. A February 2020 search of Flores’s San Pedro home also turned up homemade videos on his computer showing him engaging in sex acts with unconscious women, along with images of minors performing sex acts with adults.¹⁰

How the Case Was Finally Cracked

In September 2019, musician and independent journalist Chris Lambert launched a podcast called Your Own Backyard, re-examining Smart’s disappearance in detail. Lambert tracked down witnesses who had not been heard from before and passed them along to law enforcement. By the time of the arrests in April 2021, the podcast had been downloaded 7.5 million times.¹¹

Among the new witnesses were a former colleague of Susan Flores who recalled Susan saying, after Memorial Day weekend 1996, that her husband Ruben had received a middle-of-the-night phone call and left the house; a former tenant who heard a watch alarm go off daily at 4:20 a.m. at Susan Flores’s home, potentially significant because Smart, a lifeguard, had a 5 a.m. shift; and a former Australian exchange student at Cal Poly who had witnessed Flores and Smart struggling near where Smart was last seen, an account investigators had previously dismissed. Sheriff Ian Parkinson later credited Lambert with helping bring forward “several key witnesses.”¹¹

In March 2021, investigators searched Ruben Flores’s home in Arroyo Grande using cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar and dug beneath the house. Sheriff Parkinson later said “forensic physical evidence” linked to Smart was found at “at least two homes,” and a county probation report referenced “biological evidence” discovered under Ruben Flores’s deck.³

On April 13, 2021, Paul Flores, then 44, was arrested at his home in San Pedro and charged with Smart’s murder. His father, Ruben Flores, then 80, was arrested the same day and charged with being an accessory after the fact.³

The Trial and Conviction

The trial was moved from San Luis Obispo to Monterey County Superior Court in Salinas after the defense successfully argued that decades of local coverage made a fair local trial impossible. Judge Craig Van Rooyen, granting the change in March 2022, found the case had reached a “saturation point” in the community.¹² Paul and Ruben Flores were tried together but with separate juries, before Judge Jennifer O’Keefe.¹³

Prosecutors argued that Flores targeted Smart at the party because she was intoxicated and unable to consent, killed her in or near his dorm room during a rape or attempted rape, and then enlisted his father to help bury the body. Deputy District Attorney Christopher Peuvrelle described Flores as someone who “routinely drugged women throughout his life.”¹⁴

Two women testified they had been drugged and raped by Flores in 2008 and 2011, offered to establish a pattern of predatory behavior.¹⁵ Cadaver dog handlers testified their dogs alerted to human remains under the deck at Ruben Flores’s home. An archaeologist, Cindy Arrington, testified she found soil stains consistent with human decomposition and an anomaly matching the dimensions of a grave; soil samples tested positive for human blood.¹⁴

Jennifer Hudson, who was 17 in 1996, testified that during the summer after Smart vanished she was at a social gathering when radio announcements about the case aired. She said Flores called Smart a “dick tease,” told her he had “taken care of her,” and said he had buried the body “under my place in Huasna.” Hudson said she did not go to police until 2019 because she had been a “scared 17-year-old kid.”¹⁶

Defense attorney Robert Sanger argued there was no physical evidence of a murder and characterized the prosecution’s case as “built on passion, prejudice, opinion and innuendo.”¹⁷ He challenged Hudson’s credibility and pointed at other individuals in the area in 1996, including Scott Peterson, then also a Cal Poly student and later convicted of a separate murder.¹⁸

After a three-month trial and four days of deliberation, the jury found Paul Flores guilty of first-degree murder on October 18, 2022.¹⁹ The separate jury for Ruben Flores returned a verdict of not guilty on the accessory charge the same day.²⁰

Sentencing and Where Flores Is Now

On March 10, 2023, Judge Jennifer O’Keefe sentenced Paul Flores to 25 years to life in state prison, the maximum for first-degree murder. She also ordered him to register as a sex offender for life, finding that he had assaulted and killed Smart with the “purpose of sexual gratification and sexual compulsion.” Speaking directly to Flores in court, O’Keefe said, “You have been a cancer to society,” and, “You deserve to spend every day you have left behind bars.”²¹ He is eligible for a parole board hearing after serving 15 years.²²

Flores has largely exhausted his appeals. His court-appointed attorney filed a 75-page brief alleging prosecutorial misconduct, juror issues, and trial errors, and asked that the conviction be overturned or reduced to second-degree murder. The California Court of Appeal rejected all seven points in an unpublished opinion on October 24, 2025.²³²⁴²⁵

He is housed at Corcoran State Prison in the San Joaquin Valley. He was transferred there in June 2024 after being attacked twice at Pleasant Valley State Prison, first slashed in the neck in August 2023, then stabbed in the recreation yard in April 2024. He was subsequently placed in a Protective Housing Unit.²⁶

What Remains Unresolved

Kristin Smart’s body has never been recovered. Investigators believe her remains were at one point buried under Ruben Flores’s deck in Arroyo Grande and later moved.²⁷ In May 2026, authorities executed a search warrant at the Arroyo Grande home of Susan Flores after a team of scientists, including a retired FBI forensic scientist, reported detecting compounds consistent with decomposing human remains using an experimental soil vapor sampling technique.²⁸ The search ran from May 6 to May 9, 2026. Sheriff Parkinson stated afterward: “We did not recover Kristin Smart.”²⁹ Susan Flores has never been charged in connection with the case.³⁰

The Smart family also has a civil case pending. In January 2024, Kristin’s parents, Denise and Stan Smart, and her siblings filed a wrongful death and negligence lawsuit against Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo County Superior Court, alleging the university failed to act on prior reports about Flores, botched its initial response to the disappearance, and failed to secure his dorm room as a crime scene.³¹ Cal Poly has contested the lawsuit, arguing it maintains immunity based on a 1997 court ruling that the murder was not foreseeable, that the claims violate the statute of limitations, and that a prior lawsuit filed in the 1990s bars relitigation. The next hearing is scheduled for August 2026.³²

1
San Luis Obispo Tribune. Paul Flores Biographical Details
2
Noozhawk. Kristin Smart Family Sues Cal Poly
3
CBS News. Kristin Smart Verdict: Paul Flores Guilty
4
New York Times. Kristin Smart Case Timeline
5
KSBY. Kristin Smart Investigation: A Timeline
6
San Luis Obispo Tribune. Recorded 1996 Interviews With Paul Flores
7
Mustang News. Recorded 1996 Interview Reveals Flores Advised by Parents Not to Speak With Investigators
8
San Luis Obispo Tribune. Kristin Smart Legal Declaration of Death
9
NBC News. Suspect in Kristin Smart Killing Previously Suspected in 2007 Rape Allegation
10
San Luis Obispo Tribune. Paul Flores Sexual Assault Allegations
11
KCRA. Kristin Smart Case Podcaster Helped California Cops Solve Cold Case Killing
12
Lompoc Record. Judge Approves Moving Kristin Smart Trial Out of San Luis Obispo County
13
KSBY. Paul, Ruben Flores Make First Monterey County Court Appearance
14
Mustang News. Kristin Smart Murder Trial Closing Statements
15
San Luis Obispo County District Attorney. Paul Flores Convicted by Jury
16
San Luis Obispo Tribune. Jennifer Hudson Testimony in Paul Flores Trial
17
KSBY. Closing Arguments Underway in Kristin Smart Murder Trial
18
NPR. Kristin Smart Murder: Paul Flores Sentencing
19
San Luis Obispo Tribune. Paul Flores Found Guilty of First-Degree Murder
20
KSBY. Jurors Reach Verdicts in Kristin Smart Murder Trial
21
San Luis Obispo Tribune. Paul Flores Sentencing
22
ABC News. Paul Flores Sentenced to 25 Years to Life
23
KSBY. Appeals Court Upholds Paul Flores First-Degree Murder Conviction
24
San Luis Obispo County District Attorney. Paul Flores’ Petition for Review Denied by California Supreme Court
25
San Luis Obispo Tribune. Paul Flores Appeals Exhausted
26
KSBY. Convicted Killer Paul Flores Moved to Another Prison for His Safety
27
NBC News. Search of Property Linked to Kristin Smart’s Disappearance
28
Los Angeles Times. Kristin Smart Search Resumes in SLO County
29
New York Times. Kristin Smart Search: No Remains Recovered at California Property
30
San Luis Obispo Tribune. May 2026 Search of Susan Flores Property
31
KCRA. Kristin Smart Family Sues Cal Poly for Negligence and Wrongful Death
32
San Luis Obispo Tribune. Cal Poly Response to Smart Family Lawsuit