Trial set in ’96 case of missing college student
LOS ANGELES — The smiling face of Kristin Smart still looks out from a billboard in front of attorney James Murphy Jr.’s law office more than 25 years after the college freshman vanished from a campus on California’s picturesque central coast.
It once offered a $75,000 reward to help find the college student, but these days the billboard simply says: “Justice For Kristin.”
Smart is still missing, but the man last seen with her at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo in 1996 is on trial more than a year after he was arrested on a murder charge along with his father, who is accused of helping hide her body.
Opening statements are scheduled Monday in Monterey County Superior Court in Salinas in the trial of Paul Flores and his father, Ruben, who is charged as an accessory. Both men have pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors said the younger Flores, now 45, killed the 19year-old Smart during an attempted rape May 25, 1996, in his dorm room at Cal Poly, where both were first-year students. His father, now 81, allegedly helped bury the slain student behind his home in the nearby community of Arroyo Grande and later dug up the remains and moved them.
Paul Flores had long been considered a suspect in the killing, but prosecutors only arrested him and his father in 2021 after the investigation was revived.
San Luis Obispo Sheriff Ian Parkinson acknowledged missteps by detectives over the years and he credited a popular podcast about Smart’s disappearance called “Your Own Backyard” for helping unearth new information and inspiring witnesses to speak with investigators.
San Luis Obispo Superior Court Judge Craig Van Rooyen ordered the pair to trial after a 22-day preliminary hearing.
Defense lawyer Robert Sanger previously said the evidence remained the same as it did in the 1990s when Paul Flores was the prime suspect but never charged with a crime.
“The evidence then and now is based on speculation and not proof of facts,” Sanger said in court documents.
Separate juries were selected to weigh the evidence against each defendant. The trial is expected to last about four months.