As the name suggests, NBC’s “Dateline: Justice for Kristin Smart” looks into the case of Kristin Smart, a 19-year-old freshman at California Polytechnic State University who disappeared on May 25, 1996, and was never seen or heard from again. This news magazine is focusing on what happened on that day more than 26 years later by looking at the latest developments in the case to try to get to the bottom of it. Now, if you’re here too because you want to know everything, we’ve got you covered.
How Did Kristin Smart Die?
Stan and Denise Smart had Kristin Denise Smart on February 20, 1977, in Augsburg, Germany. But when she was young, her family moved to the U.S., so she spent most of her childhood in Stockton, California. She went to a party the night before she went missing. She was a student at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo. A little after 2 a.m. Cheryl Anderson and Tim Davis, two students who had just left the same party, found her passed out on a neighbor’s lawn on May 25, 1996.
Together, they decided to help Kristin walk back to her dorm. Then, as they were helping her get up, another student named Paul Flores came over to help. Tim and Cheryl left soon after because they lived farther away, and Paul told her that he walked her only as far as his dorm room and then let her go the rest of the way on her own. He said that Kristin looked good at that point, so he didn’t worry about her. But no one ever saw her again after that. No one knows even if she got back to her room or not.
The University Police, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office, and the FBI have been looking for the missing teen for decades, but they haven’t been able to find him. They have also gotten nowhere with warrant executions, DNA testing, physical evidence, and in-person interviews. In 2016, they were able to dig up a hillside on the Cal Poly campus after hearing that Kristin might have been buried there, but she wasn’t. Though officials now think she might have been under the deck of a White Court home and was just recently taken out.
Who Killed Kristin Smart?
On May 25, 2002, which was six years after Kristin Smart went missing, she was officially ruled dead. People think she was taken from the party, possibly raped, and killed on the same night she left. And the truth is that Paul Flores has been a suspect from the start, since he was the last person to see Kristin alive. A former San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s officer once said, “There are no other suspects” besides Paul in Kristin’s sudden disappearance and death. This shows that Paul has been carefully looked into.
Since the Cal Poly police didn’t even search Paul’s room until June 10, 1996, there is a chance that important evidence that could have linked Paul to the crime was lost along the way. But by this time, the school year was over and he had moved to a completely different place. Also, a bloody earring that belonged to Kristin was found at Paul’s mother’s old house. This earring has since been lost, but the stories about it still exist. Also, in one of his early taped interviews, he admitted to investigators that he had lied about a fact. He then cut the interview short by refusing to answer any more questions.
In the nearly 30 years since then, every part of Paul’s life has been looked at. In April 2020, a search warrant will be carried out at his home in San Pedro, California. This actually led to a lot of date rape drugs and a few homemade videos of him raping, sodomising, and having sexual relationships with other young women. Then, in March 2021, almost a year after these discoveries, his father Ruben Flores’ home on White Court in Arroyo Grande, California, was searched. There, cadaver dogs and a ground-penetrating radar found signs that Kristin may have been buried there in the past.
So, on April 13, 2021, Paul and Ruben were each charged with one count of first-degree murder and one count of being an accessory after the fact. In other words, the second man was accused of helping his son hide the teen’s body on purpose, while the first man was directly accused of a possible sexual assault that turned into a murder. After all of this, the two were put on trial in the summer of 2022. The results, which came out in October, showed that Kristin’s classmate was guilty as charged and his father had done nothing wrong. Paul got the right punishment, which was 25 years to life in prison.
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