The last man seen with Kristin Smart was convicted on Tuesday of killing the college freshman, who vanished from a California campus 25 years ago.
Jurors unanimously found Paul Flores guilty of first-degree murder, the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported. Flores was one of Smart’s college classmates at the time.
His father, Ruben Flores, was charged as an accessory in a separate trial for allegedly helping to conceal the crime but was found not guilty by a separate jury, the Tribune reported.
“This has been an agonizingly long journey with more downs than ups,” Stan Smart, Kristin’s father, said at a press conference after the verdict was announced. “Without Kristin, there is no joy or happiness in this verdict.”
Smart disappeared from California Polytechnic State University over Memorial Day weekend in 1996. Her remains were never found.
A 2019 true crime podcast about Smart’s disappearance, produced by a local reporter, had revived interest in the case. Although Paul Flores was interviewed by investigators immediately after the murder, he was not initially arrested or charged.
In 2020, officials conducted search warrants on properties linked to Paul Flores and his family. In 2021, after Paul was named the “prime suspect” in the case, both Flores and his father were arrested and charged in Smart’s murder.
Prosecutors now maintain Paul Flores, now 45, killed the 19-year-old during an attempted rape on 25 May 1996, in his dorm room at Cal Poly, where both were first-year students. He was the last person seen with Smart as he walked her home from an off-campus party where she became intoxicated.
His father, now 81, was accused of helping bury Smart behind his home in the nearby community of Arroyo Grande and later digging up the remains and moving them. A jury acquitted him of these charges. The conflicting verdicts were read moments apart in the same courtroom.
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.
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 (20km) south of Cal Poly in 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 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 had occurred and he cast doubt on testimony from witnesses, including a student who was in Smart’s dorm who testified to seeing Paul Flores in Smart’s room. He also referred to forensic evidence offered by the prosecution as “junk science”.
The trial was held in Salinas, 110 miles north of San Luis Obispo, after a judge granted a defense request to move it. The defense argued that it was unlikely the Flores men could receive a fair trial with so much much notoriety in the city of about 47,000 people.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
