The Disappearance of Kristin Smart

By Jodi goggins

When Kristin Smart was 19, she had lofty goals. After growing up in Stockton, California, Kristin was almost finished her freshman year at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo in May of 1996..."She was a dreamer. She had expectations," her mother, Denise Smart, said in an interview with FOX40 in May of 2018. "She was going to be a millionaire. She was going to be an architect. She was going to be Joan Lunden. She was going to travel the world – she had a very adventurous spirit."...But when Kristin called her mother on Memorial Day weekend in 1996, it was the last time her family would hear her voice. Three days later, Denise recalled, she got an SOS call from the Cal Poly Police Department, asking if they knew where their daughter was...Kristin had gone missing from campus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393117070

Book preview

When Kristin Smart was 19, she had lofty goals. After growing up in Stockton, California, Kristin was almost finished her freshman year at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo in May of 1996.

She was a dreamer. She had expectations, her mother, Denise Smart, said in an interview with FOX40 in May of 2018. She was going to be a millionaire. She was going to be an architect. She was going to be Joan Lunden. She was going to travel the world – she had a very adventurous spirit.

But when Kristin called her mother on Memorial Day weekend in 1996, it was the last time her family would hear her voice. Three days later, Denise recalled, she got an SOS call from the Cal Poly Police Department, asking if they knew where their daughter was.

Kristin had gone missing from campus. The last anyone had seen of her was on a Friday night, when her friends remembered dropping her off at a fraternity party.

The story is that she had been drinking and she was sitting outside on the grass, and Paul and Tim offered to walk her home, her mother explained.

According to Denise, Kristin never showed up at her dorm at Muir Hall – Paul Flores, another student at Cal Poly, was the last person to see her alive. Two days after the party, Paul was booked by the police after turning himself in for driving under the influence. In his booking photo, he sported a black eye – and over the next few months, he told a number of different stories to explain the significant bruising.

Paul Flores is – without question – the perpetrator to this crime, Denise stated. I believe (he) took her life. She did not walk away and go kill herself. She did not walk away and lose her life. She did not walk away and dig herself a grave. She was kidnapped.

A delayed response

The last time Kristin was seen alive was when she was leaving a house party at around 2 a.m., May 25 – with her friends Cheryl Anderson and Paul Flores. The party was located on Crandall Way, near the Cal Poly campus where Kristin lived. According to eyewitness reports, all three had been drinking that night, enjoying the Memorial Day weekend, and appeared to be having a good time.

Cheryl told investigators that she left Kristin and Paul to return to her own dorm at Sierra Madre Hall. Paul walked with Kristin some of the way back to her dorm, but said they split up when they reached Santa Lucia Hall, where his room was located.

When Kristin hadn’t shown up by May 27, her friend Jennifer Phillips – who also lived at Muir Hall – called Cal Poly’s university police department to report that she was missing. However, the agency did not take a report, so she reached out to the San Luis Obispo Police Department. A report was taken at that time, and Kristin’s parents were contacted, but Phillips was referred back to the campus authorities.

Organized searches of the campus started May 30, and several people reported seeing the six foot tall student both at the university and on area hiking trails. Paul Flores was interviewed first by Cal Poly police investigators, followed by two investigators from the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office.

Kristin’s dorm room was finally searched by Mike Kennedy with the Cal Poly university police June 5, and Paul’s room was searched five days later. By then, however, the university term had finished, and most of Paul’s belongings had been moved out of the dorm.

It had already been more than two weeks since Kristin had disappeared.

Paul Flores was interviewed again June 19, at the Arroyo Grande Police Department. This time, the interview was recorded, and Paul confessed that he’d lied in a previous interview, when he’d told investigators that he’d gotten a black eye during a game of basketball. He said the bruising had actually occurred while he was doing some truck repairs. Then, he refused to answer any further questions, abruptly ending the interrogation.

That could have been me.

In 2016, an investigative piece was published by The Daily Beast, alleging the Arroyo Grande Police Department passed up the chance to arrest Paul Flores on charges of rape even before Kristin’s disappearance. According to the piece, four difference accusers have come forward with claims that Paul sexually assaulted them – and, the article states, at least one of these alleged victims spoke with detectives at the sheriff’s office.

The Daily Beast spoke with a 39 year old woman referred to as Jane, who said Paul Flores roofied her, raped her, and then left her outside her home in 1994. At the time, Jane said, she was 15 years old – a high school student living in Arroyo Grande. According to Jane’s story, she’d been regularly accepting rides to and from school from Paul when another boy told her she needed to be careful.

Paul had written her name over and over again on a piece of paper, the classmate told her, and kept circling it – more than 100 times. But Jane said she dismissed the warning, assuming Paul just had a crush on her and didn’t know how to express it.

Then, she went to a party with him at his friend’s house – he gave her a plastic cup full of liquid, which Jane said she drank without question. Shortly after, she said, she passed out.

I was lying down on my back, she said. He’s on top of me. I know I didn’t have any pants on and he was in me and I could feel him. He was staring at my face, looking at me, and he was enjoying himself.

According to Jane, she was only conscious for a few seconds – long enough to feel him penetrating her – before she blacked out again. Her next recollection is being dragged down a dimly lit street, with Paul and one of his friends holding her up by her arms.

Finally, they dropped her near her family’s home.

They took off running, she said. I remember thinking, ‘If my mom’s not home, I’m going to die right here.’

As soon as her parents found her, Jane said they rushed her to the Arroyo Grande Community Hospital. When officers from the Arroyo Grande Sheriff’s Department arrived, Jane said she told them everything she could remember – but it didn’t matter. According to Jane, law enforcement appeared to have already made up their minds about the case, choosing to believe Paul’s claims that she’d willingly gotten drunk and had sex.

The next thing I know is the cops telling me, ‘We can’t do anything because (Paul) and his friends are saying she was drunk and it was consensual, she said.

Jane remembers her father trying to convince the officers to look at it from Jane’s perspective – she’d blacked out, he pleaded, and was therefore unable to consent to anything. Still, she said, the police refused to move past the ‘he said, she said,’ dynamic. Besides, Jane was drunk – and Paul had witnesses backing up his story. Jane did not.

When Jane tried to look into the case herself, she was told by a police administrator with the department that, since it was a case involving sexual assault, it fell under a non-disclosure category. However, according to a different administrator at the sheriff’s office, a search of the department’s records turned up absolutely nothing about the rape claim Jane had filed.

The reaction Jane received from the police department made her feel like she couldn’t share her story – so she kept it a secret for many years. Not even her husband knew what had happened.

I don’t like to talk about it, even to him, she admitted. I don’t like to talk about that day.

But Jane realized that what Paul Flores had done to her was minor compared to what had happened to another girl who’d gotten to know him. When she saw on the news that Kristin Smart had gone missing, she came to the unfortunate conclusion that maybe, she’d actually gotten lucky.

I remember being home, watching the news about Kristin Smart, and there goes Paul, she said. "And it all came back to me.

I was like, ‘Oh my God. That could have been me.’

Jane isn’t the only victim of Paul Flores’ to come forward with her story years later. Three other women have alleged that Paul sexually assaulted them, but Jane’s was the only actual rape.

Sarah remembers Paul Flores being a fixture while she was studying at Cal Poly. Along with a drunk friend of his, she said, Paul would crash almost every party she attended.

I would turn around and he would be right there, lurking, she said. He would be stalking me.

Just a few months before Kristin Smart disappeared, in late 1995, Sarah attended a Halloween party. While she was on the dance floor with a friend, Sarah alleges, Paul Flores came up to her and – without warning – reached over and grabbed her crotch. She immediately began yelling at him, she said, and her friend took a piece of gum out of her mouth and threw it at him.

He pushed her down onto the ground, Sarah recalled, but the other men present quickly retaliated, defending Sarah and her girlfriend and chasing Paul away from the scene.

Shortly after that happened, Sarah said she attended another party where Paul Flores showed up. It was her friend’s birthday, and Sarah had just slipped away to use the washroom. Before she could lock the door behind her, however, Paul came barging in.

He slammed and then pushed me up against the inside wall, by the toilet, she said. His hands were on my upper arms, and he started telling me all these sick things he was going to do to me.

According to Sarah, Paul even threatened to rape her. She responded by forcefully kneeing him in the groin, kicking him firmly in the shin, and racing out of the bathroom and back into the crowd. When Paul tried to return to the party, as well, Sarah said other men came over and scared him away.

I got in his face, said Sarah’s ex-boyfriend, who she’d been dating at the time. I told him, ‘You never do this again. You never look at her again! If you ever come near her again, I will kill you!’

Sarah’s ex-boyfriend declined to be identified, requesting that his name remain anonymous. He added that he’d never noticed that the man pictured in dozens of stories describing the disappearance of Kristin Smart was the same person he’d chased off just a few months before.

But Sarah has never gotten over what happened to her that night.

Still, to this day, I am afraid to go to the bathroom by myself, in public places, she admitted. I have a PTSD fear of someone kicking the door in.

Another testament to Paul Flores’ history of mistreatment of women came from a female cousin of his, who also requested to remain anonymous. She described her cousin as a pervert – me, my sister, my cousin – Paul has no limits, she said.

She recounted an event that occurred during a family camping trip sometime in the early 1990s. According to her story, another of their female cousins had playfully grabbed Paul’s wallet, and took some money from it to pay for Slush Puppies. In response, Paul threw a different female cousin on the ground, climbed on top of her, and started pushing his hands down the front of her top – even after the girls had already returned the wallet, his cousin recalled.

He had her pinned down and had his hand down her bathing suit, groping her, she said.

By 2002, Paul Flores had been expelled from Cal Poly and rejected by the United States Navy. At that time, he was attending LA Harbor Community College – and one night, he met a 21 year old student at a Hermosa Beach bar, referred to by the Daily Beast as Laura.

Laura and Paul dated for a while before moving in together in the nearby community of Lawndale, where they lived with another male roommate. According to Laura, Paul was quite sexually aggressive. She recalled one particular incident where they’d been wrestling around in bed, playfully, when Paul all of a sudden reached for a butter knife and pressed it into her face.

Immediately, Laura said she started screaming, Stop! at the top of her lungs, until their roommate forced his way into the room and rescued her.

It wasn’t until after they broke up that Laura began digging into her ex-boyfriend’s past, and she realized Paul had been accused – and the only suspect – in the disappearance of Kristin Smart. She’s still haunted by the moment she discovered those details, she said.

My heart dropped, she recalled. I called my mom; I was crying.

After the women shared their stories with the Daily Beast, the media outlet claims it attempted to obtain an interview with Paul Flores. He was located outside of his home, but refused to provide any sort of comment on the allegations made by these women.

No, no, no, he allegedly said. I’m fine. I’m good. Have a good day.

Still, Kristin’s parents Stan and Denise provided a statement to the Daily Beast, thanking the women for their bravery in coming forward with their stories and adding they hope the additional information helps lead to a break in the case of their daughter’s disappearance.

These new allegations against Paul Flores are very troubling and deserve to be thoroughly investigated, the statement read. We are grateful to these brave women for having the courage to talk about their experiences, and we ask anyone who may have information they think could be helpful to contact the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office. Any tidbit of information or recollection could make the difference in the recovery of our beloved Kristin.

Even after more than two decades, Paul Flores remains the main – and only – suspect in Kristin Smart’s disappearance. Still, investigators have been unable to uncover sufficient evidence to make an arrest. When Paul was brought in to give a deposition, he refused to cooperate with detectives, responding to each question by invoking his Fifth Amendment right.

"It’s probably