Kristin Smart
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A 19-year-old college student from San Luis Obispo goes missing on Memorial Day weekend in 1996. She was last seen leaving an off-campus party one early Saturday morning. Years later, soil samples detected the presence of human blood on one of the primary suspect's properties. But without ever recovering human remains, is that enough to secure a conviction against him?

This is Forensic Tales, episode number 261, The Disappearance of Kristen Smart. ♪

Memorial Day weekend 1996, the unofficial kickoff to summer.

a weekend that usually falls on the last Monday of May and marks the start of hotter weather and summer activities, vacations, trips to the beach, time off, and for many college students, it's a big party weekend.

Nineteen-year-old Kristen Smart was no different. Born in West Germany to parents Denise and Stan Smart, both teachers of American military service members serving overseas, Kristen and her family eventually found themselves in Stockton, California, a city 90 miles east of San Francisco. Growing up, Kristen had a brother and a sister, Lindsey and Matt. They were both

All three Smart kids went to Stockton's Lincoln High School, and in 1995, Kristen graduated and accepted her enrollment at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California. So by May of 1996, she was a 19-year-old freshman. When researching about who Kristen Smart was, the best resource I found came directly from the website kristensmart.org.

I think this site beautifully describes just the kind of person that she was. So I want to read a direct quote from that website. Quote,

The love for her family, especially her brother and sister, was without equal. Brother-sister squabbles never lasted long, as she would always come up with a fun new action plan that got everyone on the same page. Although she could appear shy in new situations, she had an inner confidence that never held her back from any ambition she had. She loved family vacation, new adventures, and was always the planner.

Summers were Kristen's favorite, and she was always drawn to something new. She spent the summer of her sophomore year in high school just outside London with family friends going to school. The next summer, she wanted to become fluent in Spanish and was an exchange student in Venezuela. The summer before her senior year, she was basking in the sun and perfecting her bike riding skills in the honors program at UCSB.

End quote. The college that Kristen picked was Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, or simply Cal Poly for short.

It's a public state school about 240 miles south of our parents' house in Stockton. So it would have been an opportunity for her to go away to college, but still be close enough to our family so that if she wanted to go home for a weekend, she could. She could just make that four-hour drive north and be back at her parents' house in no time. I think Kristen shared that dream with a lot of other young people her age.

go away to college, have that freedom for the very first time in life, become an adult. But when she got homesick, she could just pack up her car and head home. Or if she needed to do laundry, she could go home and use her parents' washing machine for free. Of course, a four-hour drive is a long way to go just for laundry, but I remember when I was back in college and a lot of kids would do that very thing.

Kristen also decided on Cal Poly because that's where her mom really wanted her to go to school. She heard how safe the university was, so when it came time for Kristen to go away for college, the obvious choice was Cal Poly. She wouldn't have to worry about what her daughter was up to or stay up all night long wondering if she was safe or not. Cal Poly was supposed to be a safe university, but in a tragic twist of fate,

the same university that Kristen's mom thought was safe would actually become the same place where her daughter would disappear from.

So it's the start of Memorial Day weekend, 1996, Friday, May 24th. A lot of the other kids at Cal Poly decided to take off, go somewhere else, or just go back home for the long weekend. But Kristen was one of those students who decided to stay. The same thing could also be said about another student who lived in the dorm room right next to Kristen, Margarita Campos.

The two had become fast friends ever since moving into the same dorm building on campus. Although Margarita would say later on that she thought the two of them were polar opposites. Still, they just instantly connected as friends.

That night, the two planned to go to a party. It's Memorial Day weekend. It's college. What else would they do? At first, Margarita was like, no, you go to the party. I'm just going to stay in my room and get some studying done. Even though it's Memorial Day weekend, Margarita said that Kristen was always the more social one of the two. So it wasn't really that uncommon for Margarita to say something like that.

But eventually Kristen convinced her friend to go to the party with her that night. But when they got there, it was dead. It was a ghost town. There were only a couple of other kids there, and most of them were just guys playing video games.

So the girls left and walked to an area off campus where there were always frat parties, sororities, a lot more exciting things going on than just a few guys playing video games in a dorm room. But after a while, Margarita wanted to go home. She had had enough of the frat party and the sorority scene, just everything for one night she was done. So she asked her friend Kristen if they could leave and go back to the dorm.

But Kristen said she wanted to stay. After going back and forth for a couple of minutes, Margarita eventually handed over her keys to the dorm building. She knew Kristen didn't have anything with her. Her phone, purse, ID, everything was back in her dorm room. So she gave her the keys to the building so that when she got home later on, she could get back in.

Now the next morning, Margarita sat around and waited to hear back from her friend. She knew she had to hear from her at least some point that day since she gave her her building key, but that never happened. So after a while, she went to Kristen's room to check on her and see if she was there. Maybe she was just still asleep from the night before, but she wasn't. She had never come home the night before because everything in her room was exactly how she left it.

By the time anyone reported Kristen missing to the Cal Poly Police, which was the university's on-campus police department, no one had seen her in about 48 hours, which is a really long time for someone to be missing. But even with that in mind, the campus police didn't seem to be very concerned.

They thought maybe she decided to leave town too, like a lot of the other kids, or maybe she decided to go back home. So just because her friends hadn't seen her all weekend long, that shouldn't be a big deal.

But her friends were like, no, she wouldn't do something like that without telling us first. If Kristen had gone home for the weekend, she would have said something. Plus, everything is still back into her dorm room. Her ID, purse, everything. She wouldn't go home or anywhere else without bringing that stuff with her. So wherever she was, she had absolutely nothing with her.

By Monday the 27th, the police called Kristen's mom asking if she was with them. But of course, Kristen's mom is like, no, what are you talking about? She's supposed to be at school. She never came home this weekend. Why are you calling and asking me that? Should we be worried? So that's the moment that Denise and Stan Smart found out that their daughter was missing.

Right away, they tried to file a missing person report with the campus police, but they were essentially told they couldn't because it was too early. I think we've all heard the saying, you can't be reported missing until you're missing for like 48 or 72 hours, right?

Well, it's possible that's the case here, but it's also possible that the Cal Poly police had never even investigated a case like this before, so they probably didn't even know where to start. But eventually, after some convincing, Kristen was officially labeled as a missing person. Except there was already a problem. Four days had already gone by since anyone had seen her.

Little by little, the pieces about what happened started to come together. Sometime that night, Kristen ended up at an off-campus frat party. It was mostly frat guys, so she probably didn't know anyone there. Now later on, it was discovered that Kristen had become very intoxicated at this party. Whether it was alcohol, drugs, a combination of both. Did she take them on her own? Was she drugged?

There's a lot of unanswered questions here, and depending on who you ask, you might get a different answer. But all the police suspected was that at some point during this frat party, Kristen became extremely drunk and ended up passing out on the lawn next door to the party. When some of the other kids at the party were questioned by the police, some of them said that she was so drunk that she couldn't even stand on her own two feet.

They said they saw her chugging vodka all night, while others said they never saw her take a sip of alcohol while out the party. So again, this all depends on who you speak to.

Two of the people the police spoke to were Cheryl Anderson and the other was a guy named Paul Flores. They were both at the party and both of them said they helped Kristen that night. Cheryl was a fellow student and acquaintance with Kristen who lived in the dorms and Paul Flores was a food science major who also lived in the dorms.

Now, what exactly happened next isn't clear, but here's what the police eventually believed happened. Around 2 o'clock in the morning, Cheryl Anderson and a guy named Tim Davis found Kristen passed out on the lawn. This was at the house right next door to the party. They both helped her to her feet and decided to walk her back to her dorm. But while they were helping her, another student approached them and offered his help as well, Paul Flores.

He saw Tim and Cheryl trying to help her, and he was like, hey, let me help you guys out. I'm headed back to the dorm buildings too.

So at this point, it's Cheryl, Tim, and Paul all trying to get Kristen back home safely. But somewhere along the way, Tim and Cheryl bail. Tim Davis apparently leaves the group because he lives somewhere off campus and he needs to get back to his car. And Cheryl Anderson also leaves. She heads in the direction of another dorm building and just assumes that Paul Flores would be the one to walk Kristen all the way back home.

So now the picture looks like this. Paul Flores and Kristen Smart are all alone. He was the only one who stayed to actually make sure that she made it inside of her dorm building. So the police knew right away they had to question Paul Flores, but they didn't do it right away. They apparently waited six full days before they ever officially interviewed him.

But when they did, this is what he had to say. He said he walked Kristen as far as his dorm, the St. Lucia Hall building,

But after that, he said he allowed her to walk on her own the rest of the way to her building. And that was the last time that anyone ever saw her. He said he didn't actually walk her to her front door. He got to his building first and hers was only a short walk away. So he told the police that he let her walk the rest of the way by herself. He said he just assumed that she would make it inside okay because it was so close.

So right away, we've got some red flags. Kristen is clearly intoxicated, whether voluntarily or not. She's passed out on someone's lawn. She couldn't even walk on her own. She doesn't have her purse, her ID. We know she left all of that back in her dorm room that night. And now this Paul Flores guy says that he let her walk home on her own to her own building, and now no one's ever seen her or seen her since.

Yes, her building was just a stone's throw away from his. In fact, CBS News reported that it was only about 40 yards away. But still, if he was trying to be this nice guy, he should have finished the job. He should have walked her all the way inside of her building to make sure, to be 100% sure, that she made it home okay. But he says he didn't.

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After this conversation with the police, Paul Flores is let go, and the search for Kristen really starts to heat up. Missing person billboards are put up. Hundreds of volunteers offer to come look for her. Some people used horses to look for her, while others used radar devices to search difficult grounds. Reward money is offered up not too long after that. For it being such a slow start in the beginning, the case really started to take off.

Not long after that, two investigators with the district attorney's office were called in to help the campus police with the search.

No one in the department really had any type of experience with a missing person case like this. That's just not something that campus police usually deal with. They're used to stolen bicycles or maybe a DUI here and there, not missing students. So when the two detectives from the DA's office sat down and spoke with Paul Flores again, they noticed several inconsistencies in his story.

Most notably was his changing story about how he got a black eye. At first, he said he got it while playing basketball with some friends. But according to one of those friends, he already had the black eye before he showed up to basketball. He told them that he woke up with it. He also had scratches up and down his arms. This was all seen within days of Kristen's disappearance.

So when the police asked him about it again, he admitted that he did lie and he offered up a new explanation. He now said he got it after hitting his eye on his steering wheel in the middle of the night while changing his stereo. So now that's at least three different stories about how he got a black eye. And I don't think he ever offered up an explanation about how he got the scratches.

By the time they got around to searching Paul's dorm room, Kristen had been missing for 16 days. So even if he was considered a suspect here, they gave him plenty of time to get rid of any potential evidence that he might be hiding in his dorm room. But that didn't mean that nothing was found. Paul claimed that after walking Kristen back from the party, he went to his own room in a different building while she walked alone to her building.

But when cadaver dogs were called in, they told a different story. The first dog was brought in and they had it go through the dorms. It didn't do anything until it was put in the direction of Paul's room. And that's where the dog went crazy. Remember, Paul already had a chance to clean everything out of his dorm room before the police searched it. So this was days later. But the dogs were still alerted to it.

Then it happened again. A second dog was brought in, and they did pretty much the same thing. They went crazy as soon as they got closer to Paul's room. These were dogs specifically trained to find the scent of human remains.

But besides looking for evidence to pin everything on Paul Flores, there was also the issue of what the campus police even thought about the case. According to Kristen's family, the police were pretty quick to judge her. Just days after she went missing, an incident report seemed to suggest that her behavior while at the frat party might have contributed to her disappearance. So they were sort of saying, yeah, she was really drunk,

And these things happen when you're really drunk. So obviously, the family wasn't very happy about that. The police had already dropped the ball by waiting so long to officially label her as a missing person. And now they're suggesting that her behavior may or may not have had something to do with her disappearance. Now, I don't know about you, but some might say that's a classic case of victim blaming.

So the search for Kristen continues, and the case is eventually assigned to the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office, an agency with a lot more resources than a school police department. But not even the Sheriff's Office had any luck. Kristen was still very much missing.

A few months go by, summer ends, and fall rolls around. Again, she's still missing. No one has heard from her, no sightings of her, nothing. After that frat party, she just simply vanished. But just when things are looking down during the fall of 1996...

The sheriff's office learned about a woman named Mary Lassiter. She came forward saying that she was renting a house that belonged to Paul Flores' mother, Susan, in Aurora Grande, California.

And while she was staying there, she said she found a single woman's earring in the driveway. And when she picked it up, she thought the earring looked exactly like the necklace that Kristen Smart was wearing on the billboards. So she thought it would be a good idea to pick up the phone and call the police. So at this point, that's another thing linking Paul Flores back to the case. But here's another mistake made by the police.

Apparently, when this woman went to them and handed them the earring...

They lost it. They lost it before it could ever be marked as evidence. Now, it's unclear how or why this happened. How does the police lose such a valuable piece of evidence in a missing person case? If that really was her earring and it was supposedly found on Paul Flores' mom's property after her disappearance, then that's probably what many people would consider a very important piece of evidence.

But again, it was apparently lost and never officially logged into evidence. Over the next several years, countless searches were done. Even four months in, a grand jury was said to have been assembled to consider Paul Flores as a possible suspect.

But even then, no criminal charges were ever filed against him. And no one really knows what the grand jury said or what they did. Either way, Paul was still a free man. But that didn't mean he was completely off the hook. Because not long after the grand jury got together, the Smart family hired an attorney and filed a $40 million wrongful death lawsuit against him.

Even though no remains had ever been found, no body, nothing, they still felt like they had enough evidence suggesting that he was the person responsible for her disappearance. But during his deposition, Paul simply invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Anytime he was asked a question, he just said, nope, I'm invoking my Fifth Amendment right.

He did that a total of 27 times. The only answers he provided were his full name, date of birth, and social security number. That was it. And this tactic, from his perspective, seemed to work out for him because getting anywhere with a civil trial was virtually impossible. Until the police would consider him as a possible suspect in a criminal case, there wasn't much the family could do in a civil case.

It seems like everyone thought that Paul was the guy, but there just wasn't any solid evidence. Even other girls at Cal Poly had bad things to say about him. Paul Flores was known around campus as Chester the Molester. He got the nickname because of how he would treat drunk girls at frat parties.

Now, here's Kristen Smart, who goes missing after a frat party, and he's the last person to see her alive. Now get this, just five months after Kristen went missing, the police received a phone call from a student living off campus saying that a strange guy was climbing her wall and trying to get inside of her apartment. Who's that guy? Paul Flores, Chester the Molester.

Naturally, Paul's mom, Susan's house, became the focus of the investigation. He was the prime suspect, and there was that earring that was supposedly found in the driveway. But despite countless searches of the property over the years, no other evidence related to Kristen was ever found, at least not at this point. In 2002, six years later, Kristen was declared legally dead, and Paul was still very much a free man.

And for the next few years, everything was pretty much at a standstill. Not many people were talking about the Kristen Smart case anymore. Until Lacey Peterson came around. When Lacey Peterson went missing at Christmastime 2002, people started talking about Kristen Smart again. Why? What did they have in common?

Well, rumors started swirling after it was discovered that Scott Peterson, Lacey's husband, and the prime suspect in her disappearance both attended Cal Poly at the same time. So some people started to wonder, did Scott Peterson also know anything about Kristen Smart? They both went to the same school together at the same time, so what does he know?

Well, that might have sounded like a good rumor, but that's all that it was. Rumors. There was absolutely no evidence suggesting that Scott Peterson knew anything, and he was eventually officially ruled out as a suspect.

Now, the same can't be said about his own wife's disappearance on Christmas 2002 because Scott Peterson was eventually found guilty of her murder, their unborn son's murder, and then sentenced to life in prison.

Many years go by and it's now 2011, and things look like they might be heating up after San Luis Obispo got a new sheriff, Sheriff Ian Parkinson. When Parkinson became the new sheriff in town, he made a promise. He told the family that he would be making their daughter's case a top priority. And even though it had been 15 years, he promised to put more eyes on it. And he kept his word.

Ever since Sheriff Parkinson took office, he executed more than 23 search warrants and conducted 96 interviews. His teams also collected over 250 new pieces of evidence. From 2011 until 2016, they had spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on the case.

The FBI even had Kristen as a high-priority missing person case with a $75,000 reward for any information. They also dug up specific hillsides, searched the homes and properties of both of Paul Flores' parents,

seized his computers and laptops, monitored his cell phone and internet activity, found new credible witnesses, and once everything was said and done, the searches, the interviews, the new evidence, they still had Paul Flores at the top of the suspect list. But here's the issue. They still didn't have any forensic proof.

In 2019, Kristen's case got even more attention after a podcast created by freelance journalist Chris Lampert covered the story on his show. According to an article by Vanity Fair, Chris Lampert apparently lived only about a half hour away from Cal Poly's campus.

And even though he had zero investigative experience, he knew he wanted to find out as much as possible about Kristen's case. It was just a case that he had become fascinated with from the moment that he heard about it. How could a college student just disappear after a night out? After only walking a few yards back to her dorm room?

We've talked about this on the show before with the case of Tara Grinstead, an episode I did a few months back. Her case also got a lot of new attention after a podcast series did a special on her case. So essentially, the same thing happened here with Kristen Smart. After this podcast was published in 2019, more and more people started talking about it again.

And when people are talking about it, the police are more likely to do something. It creates public pressure. Almost from the moment the show hit Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all the other streaming sites, the show quickly hit over 75,000 streams every single day after the first episode came out.

So clearly, he wasn't the only one very interested in this story. It was also around this same time that even more women came forward saying Paul Flores had done something to them, sexually harassed them, or something worse. Multiple women came forward saying he took advantage of them sexually when they were intoxicated. Some of them even accused him of rape.

So now, April 2021, the police finally felt like they had enough to arrest Paul Flores, and that's exactly what happened. Paul's father, Ruben, was also arrested and charged with being an accessory after the murder. They believed he helped his son try and hide Kristen's body after he killed her. Now, just for reference here, by 2021, Paul was 44 years old and his father was 80.

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The arrest came after the Los Angeles Times newspaper reported in April 2020 that a search warrant had been executed at Paul Flores' house in San Pedro, California. And during the search, the police found, quote, items of interest inside of the place, including date rape drugs and homemade videos showing Paul, end quote, acts of sodomizing and raping young women, end quote.

So this is what police and prosecutors eventually came up with. They believed that initially, Paul Flores attempted to sexually assault Kristen that night as he walked her back to her dorm room, but something happened.

Maybe she fought back, or maybe something else happened. But the attempted sexual assault turned deadly, and Paul Flores ended up murdering Kristen. And then with the help of his father, he got rid of her body. And that's why she's never been found. They believed he had a pattern of that. The man known around campus as Chester the Molester. He had a history of taking advantage of classmates while under the influence at frat parties.

So for the authorities, all of this adds up. But here's the next question. What forensic evidence did they have against him? Sure, that sounds like a very plausible story based on what we know about him. But without Kristen Smart's body or any other forensic evidence, how are they going to convict him of murder simply based on his past behavior? Well, let's talk about it.

The biggest piece of evidence for prosecutors was cadaver dogs. I mentioned earlier how dogs were brought to the Cal Poly dorm buildings and they all hit on Paul Flores' room for the scent of human remains. Well, dogs were also used at Paul's parents' house, specifically his father Ruben's property. Now it's worth mentioning here that his parents had separated shortly before all of this happened.

So at first, the police were confused about which properties they should be searching, but they eventually straightened it out. Now at trial, prosecutors had experts testify that dogs trained to detect human remains had zeroed in on a section underneath Ruben Flores' deck during a search of his property. And just to add more credibility to this, this expert told the jury that this particular dog had

had been certified in human remains detection in 2017 and since then had never failed a single exam. So this was a very experienced dog. So when the dog got to the deck, it was especially interested in the crawl space entrance like maybe human remains had been there at some point. But here's an important detail. The dog showed interest in the area but didn't do an alert.

So according to this dog expert, that usually means that the source of the scent has been removed. So in other words, human remains had been around that crawlspace at one point, but since then, it's been removed.

Of course, this allowed the defense to say, well, dogs can't tell you exactly what they're smelling. And this particular dog isn't certified to detect human remains that have been removed from a particular location. So by no means was this piece of forensic evidence a slam dunk for either side. Next up, DNA.

A senior forensic DNA analyst with a private lab, a woman named Angela Butler, testified at trial that they found the presence of human blood in soil samples that were taken from the Flores' property. She said that her lab had received two soil samples from the police, one labeled upper soil sample and the other labeled deeper soil sample.

Both of them came from Ruben Flores' property. Well, after extracting the liquid from the soil samples, she conducted a second test looking for human blood.

And according to her, based on her testimony, the test for the deeper soil sample confirmed three results, two weak positives and one negative result using what is called a HEM direct. This is basically a type of test that looks for human blood in a sample.

Now, just to be sure the defense wouldn't say that the human blood could have gotten on the property some other way, prosecutors had the contractor who built the house back in 1991 testify that there were no human remains on the property when he originally built it. So if there were ever human remains or human blood found in the soil samples there, the

It came after the Flores family bought the property.

When it came to the upper soil sample, this expert testified that the sample didn't generate any positive results, so it's unclear if human blood was ever there. So that meant only one of the samples had traces of blood. Once they had determined that human blood had been in the soil, they tried to extract DNA from it, but unfortunately for prosecutors, they weren't able to get any from the samples.

It's possible they weren't able to get any DNA simply because the samples were too degraded. Or it's also possible that they were just too small of samples.

But either way, no DNA profile was ever recovered from the soil. So it's impossible to say whether or not that was Kristen's blood. I think if the prosecution had a DNA profile from the soil, this would have been a slam dunk case. If that was Kristen's DNA, then obviously this is murder and Paul and Ruben Flores are responsible.

Because why else would her DNA, her blood, be found in soil on their property? But because no DNA was found or no DNA profile, prosecution would just have to convince a jury to convict them based on something else.

But I think it's still important to say yes, human blood was found on the property and cadaver dogs specifically trained to detect human decay were interested in both of the deck and the crawlspace of this house.

So now the prosecution's story is that Paul and Ruben had originally buried Kristen's body there, but at some point moved her to a different location. Maybe they did it because they were tipped off, or they were worried that they would come search the property. Or maybe they just didn't like having a dead body at their property, so they got rid of it sometime later.

Without finding Kristen's body, there was a lot the prosecution couldn't prove. Beyond a murder, they also couldn't say whether a sexual assault between her and Paul ever happened or not. Remember, that's a big part of the reason why the police suspected him.

Of course, he was the last person to see her alive, but he also had a long history of sexually taking advantage of classmates at these parties. So it definitely would have helped the state's case a lot, actually, if they could have told the jury that Kristen had also been sexually assaulted. But again, without finding her body, there's no forensic proof of that.

It's now the end of the trial, and the state's case relies on two things. One, the circumstantial evidence that we've already talked about. He's the last person with her. He has inconsistencies in his story. He has a black eye, scratches. He likes to harass and potentially assault women. He just has to be the guy. Then after he killed Kristen, he enlisted the help of his dad to get rid of her body.

That brings us to point number two, the soil and the dog evidence suggesting that a dead body had in fact at one point been on Ruben's property. That's really the two key pieces of forensic evidence here. Even though no remains were ever found, almost the entire state's case relies on this soil testing, the testing that suggests that human blood and remains had been there.

If the jury was going to side with the prosecution, this would be a landmark case. It's not every day a murder case gets decided on soil samples or this type of forensic testing. It's even more unusual because no remains were ever found. So if the jury was going to convict either one of these people, they would have to believe that yes, they did in fact move her body a second time somewhere off of their property.

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The answer to that question seems to be yes and no. The prosecution got a loss, but they also got a big win. On October 18, 2022, Paul Flores was found guilty of first-degree murder, and his father, Ruben Flores, was found not guilty of being an accessory after the fact.

If he had been found guilty, he was facing a maximum sentence of three years in prison. When it came to sentencing, now 45-year-old Paul Flores was sentenced to 25 years to life on March 10, 2023. So it seemed like the jury agreed that Paul was the killer, but they couldn't agree or decide on whether they thought his father helped him or not.

For Kristen Smart's family, this outcome was over 25 years in the making. They had always suspected Paul Flores was the guy. They just had to wait a very long time to get the justice they really deserved.

When it comes to the aftermath of the case, Kristen's body has never been found. Even now, 28, 29 years later, no one knows where he put her body. The forensic evidence might suggest that she was once buried at his parents' house, but where is she now? No one knows. I guess the only person who knows the answer to that question is Paul Flores himself. And since his conviction, he isn't talking.

Although not long after he was sentenced to 25 years, he was attacked by his cellmate, Jason Boudreau, who is currently serving a life sentence for killing his girlfriend. He also has a previous conviction for killing another cellmate.

Beyond sentencing and closure for the family, Kristen's case also has other impacts. The biggest was to Cal Poly and the campus police. Because of the criticism the department received for its slow response in the case, they decided to put Kristen in jail.

The Campus Security Act was created in August of 1998 and went into law in 1999. This bill essentially requires all public colleges and publicly funded educational institutions to have their security services make agreements with local police departments about reporting cases involving or possibly involving crimes against students, including missing students.

The hope is, is that if this were ever to happen again somewhere else, campus police would be trained and ready to respond as quickly as possible. And they would also involve the local police enforcement agencies in the area as quickly as possible. Kristen Smart was just 19 years old when she disappeared. Six years later, she was legally declared dead.

But what did Paul Flores do with her body? And where was the murder committed? His dorm room? Let's not forget, cadaver dogs were very curious about his dorm room when they were brought in. So was that where he actually killed her? And will he ever find her? As far as motives go, this is another question only Paul Flores knows. Why did this particular incident make him turn deadly?

Did she try to put up a fight and defend herself? Or did something else happen? And now my question, is there enough forensic proof that a dead body was once on his parents' property? And is it possible to convict someone without ever finding the victim's body?

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