Paul Flores was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Kristen Smart 25 years after she disappeared. Kristen Smart disappeared from her university in 1996. Paul Flores was the last person to see her alive.
Prosecutors maintain the younger Flores, now 45, killed the 19-year-old during an attempted rape on May 25, 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.
During the trial, Flores’ attorney tried to say someone else killed her. He even mentioned Scott Peterson.
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?”
They’ve always considered Paul Flores a suspect. He had a black eye when they first interviewed him. The story behind the black eye was a lie. He said he got it playing basketball with friends. The friends all denied his claim. He later said he must have bumped his head while working on his car.
Police searched dozens of locations over the last two decades. They finally turned their efforts to Paul Flores’s father’s house.
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.
I’m glad that Kristen Smart has justice after all these years.
Source HuffPost
