Former classmate of Kristin Smart found guilty of her murder

A verdict has been reached in the trial of a father and son charged in connection with the murder of Kristin Smart, 19, who went missing in 1996.

Paul Flores, now 45, a former classmate of Smart, was found guilty of first-degree murder.

His father, Ruben Flores, 81, was found not guilty of being an accessory to the murder.

Prosecutors alleged that Ruben Flores helped hide Smart's body on his property in Arroyo Grande before moving it in 2020.

Smart went missing walking home from a party at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Paul was the last person seen with a very intoxicated Smart on May 25, 1996, as he helped walk her to her dorm at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo after a party, witnesses said.

Her body has never been found, but authorities arrested Paul and Ruben Flores in April 2021 and found alleged evidence related to Smart's murder in their homes.

The son’s defense attorney, Robert Sanger, had tried to pin the killing on someone else — noting that Scott Peterson, who was later convicted at a sensational trial of killing his pregnant wife and the fetus she was carrying — was also a Cal Poly student at the time.

During his closing arguments, Sanger told jurors that no attempted rape occurred and he cast doubt on testimony from witnesses, including a student who was in Smart’s dorm who testified to seeing Flores in Smart’s room.

He also referred to forensic evidence offered by the prosecution as “junk science.”

“This case was not prosecuted for all these years because there’s no evidence,” Sanger said. “It’s sad Kristin Smart disappeared, and she may have gone out on her own, but who knows?”

Paul Flores had long been considered a suspect in the killing. He had a black eye when investigators interviewed him. He told them he got it playing basketball with friends, who denied his account, according to court records. He later changed his story to say he bumped his head while working on his car.

However, the father and son were only arrested in 2021 after the case was revived.

Investigators conducted dozens of fruitless searches for Smart’s body over two decades but in the past two years they turned their attention to Ruben Flores’ home about 12 miles (20 kilometers) south of Cal Poly in the community of Arroyo Grande.

Behind latticework beneath the deck of his large house on a dead end street, archaeologists working for police in March 2021 found a soil disturbance about the size of a casket and the presence of human blood, prosecutors said. The blood was too degraded to extract a DNA sample.

The trial was held in Salinas, 110 miles (177 kilometers) north of San Luis Obispo, after a judge granted a defense request to move it. The defense argued that it was unlikely the Flores’ could receive a fair trial with so much much notoriety in the city of about 47,000 people.