What the soil held
The radar found something under the deck. Archaeologists dug down with hand tools, layer by layer.
They found a soil disturbance about the size of a casket. And in the soil, according to prosecutors, they found human blood.
The blood was too degraded to produce a DNA profile. But to investigators, it was the clearest sign in 25 years of where Kristin Smart had been. Their theory was that Kristin had been buried under that deck, and that years later, her remains had been dug up and moved somewhere else.
Neighbors and former tenants had their own memories. One woman testified that in the early 2000s she was steered away from the avocado trees in the backyard. “They did not want me there,” she said. A former roommate of Ruben’s testified that Ruben got angry about barrels stored under the deck. A neighbor testified that on February 9, 2020, days after the first search warrants, she heard loud arguing at the house as a fence came down and a cargo trailer was parked next to it.
On April 13, 2021, almost exactly 25 years after Kristin disappeared, Paul Flores was arrested and charged with her murder. His father, Ruben, then 80, was charged as an accessory after the fact, accused of helping to hide her body.
The trial
The trial was moved out of San Luis Obispo County because of the publicity. It opened in July 2022 in Salinas, in Monterey County. Father and son were tried together, but in front of two separate juries.
Prosecutors said Paul Flores had killed Kristin during an attempted rape in his dorm room in the early hours of May 25, 1996, and that his father had helped him bury her under the deck.
The jurors heard about the black eye and the changing stories. They heard the dog handlers describe the alerts in his dorm room. They heard Jennifer Hudson. They heard about what had been found under Ruben’s deck. And they heard from two women who testified that Paul Flores had drugged and raped them years later in Los Angeles. Prosecutors said searches of his home had turned up date rape drugs.
The defense said there was no body, no eyewitness and no real forensic evidence. It attacked the cadaver dogs as unreliable and called much of the science “junk.”
Kristin’s mother testified through tears about 25 years of dealing with investigators. “I felt like the life of my daughter was of no value to anyone but her family,” Denise Smart said.
On October 18, 2022, the jury found Paul Flores guilty of first-degree murder.
Ruben Flores’s jury found him not guilty. Outside court, he said, “It’s too bad the system works that way, on feelings instead of facts.”
“A cancer to society”
On March 10, 2023, Paul Flores came back to court to be sentenced. Kristin’s father, her brother, her sister and friends spoke about what her loss had done to them.
The prosecutor called Flores a “true psychopath” and asked that he never be released.
Judge Jennifer O’Keefe gave him 25 years to life. “Mr. Flores, you have been a cancer to society,” she told him. “This predatory behavior has spanned your adult life.”
His appeals have failed. A California appeals court upheld his conviction in October 2025, and the California Supreme Court declined to review it in January 2026.
Still looking
Kristin Smart’s body has never been found. Paul Flores has never said where she is.
In May 2026, 30 years after she disappeared, deputies went back to Arroyo Grande with ground-penetrating radar and soil-vapor testing equipment. This time they searched the home of Paul Flores’s mother. Sheriff Ian Parkinson said the soil tests suggested human remains had been there at one time, or still were. “We can’t call it Kristin,” he said, “but you know, we think there’s evidence to support human remains.” The search ended without finding her.
“Kristin has been moved, and we don’t know how many times she’s been moved and to where she’s moved,” Parkinson said.
Her family is still waiting to bring her home.
“For thirty years, we have lived with a pain no family should have to endure,” the Smart family wrote. They said they would keep going, the way Kristin would have. “She was not one to give up.”
