Episode 01: A Face On A Billboard

[BLANK_AUDIO] It's a cold and cloudy winter afternoon in San Luis Obispo. And I'm retracing Missing Cal Poly student, Kristen Smart's last known steps. In May of 1996 from a house just off campus, to the entrance of her red brick dorm building. [BLANK_AUDIO] On perimeter road, seagulls are screaming overhead as I pass a huge, modern looking wreck center with students on the second story looking down at me through Florida ceiling glass windows while they run on treadmills. [BLANK_AUDIO] Other students walk by me having loud conversations on their cell phones. [BLANK_AUDIO] Maybe I'm just self-conscious, but it feels like some of them are looking at me suspiciously. [BLANK_AUDIO] I'm dressed pretty modestly and wearing a hat and a backpack. So I'm not sure what exactly they're picking up on. But maybe I'm giving off some sort of vibration that says, I don't belong here. [BLANK_AUDIO] At 1.2 girls pass me and I clearly hear one say to the other, that guy did not look our age. [BLANK_AUDIO] So much for self-esteem. [BLANK_AUDIO] I cross a bright green crosswalk and I'm my right or a series of red buildings with California theme names and brass on their sides. [BLANK_AUDIO] Sequoia, Santa Lucia, Fremont. [BLANK_AUDIO] The full walk only takes me about 11 minutes and by the end of it, I'm surprised to see that the distance between the last place she was seen alive and the door to her dorm building at Mirror Hall is just about 40 yards. [BLANK_AUDIO] It's in these 40 yards that Kristen Smart disappeared over 23 years ago and the case is still unsolved. [BLANK_AUDIO] There are currently more than a half million people missing in the United States. [BLANK_AUDIO] A staggering 50,000 are added to the list every month, but the vast majority of them are quickly found and removed. Teenage runaways angry with their parents or people who just wanted to be left alone for a while. [BLANK_AUDIO] Still, 650,000 have never been found dead or alive. [BLANK_AUDIO] It's a heartbreaking statistic, but one that most of us are not really equipped to do much with. The majority of these cases I'll never even hear about. [BLANK_AUDIO] A few of them all probably become aware of from the news or a headline I scroll by, but since I'm not an investigator, there's really not much help I can provide. [BLANK_AUDIO] It's a little different if you have access to some of the people and places involved. [BLANK_AUDIO] It's different when someone goes missing in your own backyard. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] Growing up on the California Central Coast is probably pretty much like growing up anywhere else. [MUSIC] People who aren't from here see it as a picturesque seaside paradise. And the people who were born here can't wait to get out to move to a real city where there are things to do. These days I find myself somewhere in the middle. [MUSIC] I was born in 1988 in Santa Maria, 60 miles north of Santa Barbara, and 30 miles south of San Luis Obispo. I grew up in Orcett, a small town which is pretty much just Santa Maria in everything but name and population. [MUSIC] In May of 1996, I was in second grade when a 19 year old Cal Poly student named Kristen Smart went missing. [MUSIC] As an eight year old, I really didn't know how to process that information except to be a little more afraid of kidnappers when I was playing in my front yard. I was still trying to master tying my shoes. [MUSIC] With the OJ Simpson trial barely in the rear view mirror and a few months to go until the murder of John Bene Ramsey. The Kristen Smart disappearance took center stage on our TV that summer. Especially because it happened in our own community. >> Kristen Smart. >> Kristen Smart. >> Kristen Smart. >> Then over the next few years, it kind of just stopped. Besides the occasional comparison to later missing persons cases, I didn't hear her name for a long time. In a Royal Grande, about 18 miles north of me, there's a small strip of businesses on Branch Street that locals call the village. Just across the street from a historic swinging bridge that spans the Royal Grande Creek is a billboard, faded from years of sunlight, and recently set back between a couple of trees. It used to be more prominent, but it's easy to miss now unless you're really looking for it. Missing Cal Poly student. Kristen D. Smart. $75,000 reward. It wasn't something I thought of often, but driving past that billboard was a periodic reminder that, oh yeah, they still haven't found that girl. It's been 23 years now. For the last four years, Kristen has been a missing person for longer than she was alive. As many times as I'd heard Kristen's name, I couldn't tell you a single thing about her. And when I started asking around last summer, I found that almost everyone I talked to remembered her name and her face from the billboard, but that was as much as they could tell me about her. Several of them had her confused with Elizabeth Smart, a girl from Sandy, Utah, who was abducted from her bedroom in 2002 when she was just 14 years old, but was subsequently rescued a year later. And for various reasons, which I'll get into in later episodes, quite a few people I asked thought that Kristen's body had already been found. There are people still living locally though, who have to know more. I'm just not sure how to find them. I googled Kristen's smarts name every few years, and I was never able to find much. There's a Wikipedia page, but it's short, rarely more than a few paragraphs. And I never got a strong sense of the timeline of events in her disappearance. But then, I happened upon a 5,000 word article that ran in the Los Angeles Times on June 18th, 2006, incidentally 12 days after I had graduated from high school, an article I had somehow missed, up until last summer. Written by Peter H. King, it was the first in a series of true crime stories that he was commissioned to write for the paper. Last May, I had some free time, so I sat down to read it, and spent two days pouring over details that I had never heard before. Events that took place in locations I've driven by a thousand times, and I was suddenly hooked and needed to know more. So I looked for a documentary about the case, but there wasn't one. A couple of half hour spots on shows like Vanished or Unsolved Mysteries, but no full length deep dive into the whole story. I found a few podcasts that did their own episode about it, but they mostly revolved around reading from the Wikipedia page while making mixed drinks. Which really isn't what I was looking for. So how did I get here, making a documentary about this case myself? I don't know. I just checked and I'm a musician and a recording engineer, according to my LinkedIn profile. At least once a day I ask myself, "What are you doing?" And my answer, on a good day, when I'm not pulling my hair out, is pretty simple. I'm going to try to learn everything I can about Kristen's smart and what happened to her, in the only way that I know how. By talking to people. First on my list, Peter King, the LA Times writer, who's since gone freelance. Hello. Hi, is this Peter? Yes, it is. This Chris. It is. Good. Okay. So, what can I do for you? I want to find out what made him interested in Kristen's smart's case to begin with, and how it affected him to dig so deeply into it. I'm upfront with him that I am not a professional, and I know he is. So I want to get a sense of where he came from. And And whether he feels like he was able to accomplish what he set out to do. How long had you been at the LA Times and was this like your typical sort of assignment? I had started there in the early 80s. Wondered away to the to the Maclatchee papers, came back and at some point they decided they wanted me to do long form true crime stories. I think it lasted two years. And the first one I did was Kristen Smart. I attended Cal Poly in the 70s. I had stayed attached to the university through it, advisory boards and whatnot. And you would drive down over the hill, quest to grade and you would see that big billboard. I had a sense of place about Cal Poly. There's a part of my life and this seemed to be a wound that Cal Poly had suffered. And I wanted to explore it, kick it around and see what to meet the mystery was that they couldn't resolve the case. The public university in the middle of California, it just seemed interesting to me that they had not been able to put it together. And when I started, I was sort of like you Chris, I didn't know anything about it really, which was a good way to start because then I just started peeling away layers after layers and trying to leverage information to get more information and find in the right people that could actually lead you to a document or a description and whatnot. So I spent some time on it, I ended up going down to the place and the times let me go pretty deep on trying to get as far to the bottom as I could. While we talk about it, we both agree that what really pulled us into this case was Kristen's parents, Stan and Denise Smart. She was a dreamer. In news clips like this one from last year, I moved by the Smart Families Grace and Composure two decades into the tragedy of what happened to their daughter. And so is Peter. To a parent, 99.9% sure is a long, long way away from 100% sure. But they're never going to give up until they get to that 100% because who wants to be the parent, when the way we're child returns, you know, one in a million. So well, we look for a while, but then we just figured you were gone. I mean, that would be. It would have to hunt them. It's trite, but they're the real victims. Kristen is the primary victim, but what they've lived through is harsher than a penitentiary term. You know, you can be a prisoner in your own mind. Do you have kids? I don't. Okay, I've got two. And Denise is never going to stop. She's never going to say, "Oh, you're right. Now, let's move on. She never going to move on." She might do other things, and they've got other children, and they get their love and all that, but they're really prisoners of this. It's just so frustrating that it can't get resolved. But I don't think that they would find closure. They would just know on their hearts as their daughter had a. was gone for sure. What I remember is sort of a discomfort about myself trying to. even though they wanted a story in the Los Angeles Times, but I'm still. I'm kind of different that way. I was still trying to thread that needle. Let them know. I'm not here to exploit. You know, if you want me to go away, I will go away. But if you work with me, I'll work real hard to get an accurate story. So I was trying to forge a relationship a little more than just an interview. They were helpful. If memory serves, I think I spent a couple months recording, and it wrote fairly quickly. Once I had all the material probably a couple of weeks. I'm not a stone cutter, but I'm also not the world's fastest rider. That took some time. What was sort of the legacy of that piece? Once you put it out, what kind of response did you get, and how do you feel about it this much later? Response to articles is sort of a funny thing. You get conspiracy theorists. You get malmours. I just want to agitate you. You get fans. Comes in in all capital letters. I don't open up the email or read the letter. It didn't solve the case. You always go in looking for a homer. But oftentimes you got to be content on second base with the double. This is probably a double. I think it got a lot of eyes opened, you know, like your own. This is, maybe your documentary is the legacy of that article. No pressure, right? I don't even know if I'm capable of putting something like this together. And even if I am capable, do I have the right? The more I thought about it, the more I decided that I only needed the approval of two people. I am driving northbound on the 101 to Stockton to see Stan and Denise Smart. I had a hard time getting to sleep last night, which is really rare for me. There's a lot of anticipation and nerves. When I first reach out to the Smart family, I'm not sure how receptive they'll be to sitting down for another interview. In the late 90s, they did the usual talk show circuit, Mori Povitch, Lisa, Sally Jessie Raphael, and more serious shows like 2020 and Unsolved Mysteries. But a few years ago, Stan Smart made a judgment call. No more TV shows. No more allowing the story of their daughter's disappearance to be exploited for ratings. So when I show them what I've been working on for the past year, they're cautious, but receptive. Like Peter King, it's important to me to let them know that I'll go away if they want me too. But I'll later learn that they can see early on, that my heart is really in this, that I want to find their daughter almost as badly as they do. Almost. So they invite me to their house in Stockton. The house they moved into when Kristen was 9 years old. And after 4 hours on the freeway, I pull up to the curb in front of the staircase that leads to their front door, which I recognize from Kristen's high school graduation videos. I take a minute to collect myself before I get out of the car. How are you? [Unintelligible Long przekings] [Unintelligible Long przekings] I take a seat on their sofa in front of a coffee table, on top of which sits a box of family photos. Denise sits next to me, nursing a wasp sting that she got on her arm the day before, and stand pulls up a chair across from us as I start to go through the box. You know it's kind of crazy when you look at these pictures, it's like it's just a regular normal family. It's just like how do these crazy things happen to just. and everyone assumes that happens to other people. One of the pictures shows the three smart children dressed in nutcracker costumes, with blush on their cheeks, and Matt, Kristen's younger brother, looks a little less than enthused. So when we first moved here, so we moved into some apartments, we were gonna have a house built down the street, and that fell through, so we bought this house. But to keep them busy, because you know, normally you move to it, and when you're in town kids are signed up for different sports or to do things, but you can't do it late, so I've just signed them up to be in the nutcracker. None of them have ever been dancers. [Unintelligible Long przekings] After talking for an hour or so, and doing my best to explain what my goals for this story are, Stan offers to drive me around Stockton, to show me some of the places where Kristen like to hang out. [Music] Over the years, Denise has become the de facto spokesperson for the smart family. Stan has gotten quieter, and has a hard time coming back to the San Luis Obispo area now, associating it with painful memories of searching for his daughter's body, in forests, tunnels, and riverbeds. I expect him to be guarded, but he doesn't seem to have any trouble opening up to me. My son and I went camping, playing around in the river there with wetsuits looking for gold in the cracks. So, last year we had gone, it's a good father in some time. We had gone up there and spent about four days. We had a quarter ounce of really nice chunky gold, and which was exciting. It's normally, you don't find hardly any of the lights at this time, next to none. So, when you do find something that's exciting, and the water is just beautiful crystal clear. So, it makes for a good time. So, I could take you by for elementary school. This is Mabel Baron across the intersection on the left. So it's a K through 6. And then Lincoln High School is over here about a mile to the right. And it's a 9 through 12. And next door is the junior high middle school. But this is Mabel Baron. Stan Pauses looking serious for a minute. I'm inside so he's 20/28 in the chair. She was real interested in athletics. I mean, she was a good swimmer. She was a competitive at the level of her other two children afterwards. But a good swimmer and she liked volleyball. And she did things with volleyball kids. See if we can find a spot here where I can park back here. See it's filled with park here. It's filled up. And she liked water skiing and swimming all over her kids. And so Steve, we love that. Denise has arranged a lunch on the marina with a group of family friends who all knew Kristen growing up to share some of their favorite memories with Miuwala Muntown. Kristen babysat for many families in her neighborhood and was everyone's first choice because of how much she engaged with the kids, showing them how to make tie-dye shirts and rehearsing skits for them to perform for their parents. Once when a mother came home after being out for the evening, she found Kristen standing in her doorway with a panicked look on her face. Fearing that something had happened to one of her kids, she asked what was wrong and Kristen profusely apologized for spilling a little bit of nail polish in her living room. Amongst her friends, Kristen was warm and a little quiet. The last one to start a fight and the first one to invite them on vacations with her family order her house for a sleepover. There are five different conversations going on around the table and it's hard to keep up with all of them. Everyone laughs when they recount the time Kristen applied to be a counselor at summer camp in Hawaii, even though she wasn't old enough yet and was accepted anyway. And everyone cries when one of the songs from Kristen's memorial service comes on the radio while we're talking about her. I go back to my hotel later with a plan to meet the smarts the next day before I leave. And for the first time that night, I feel a tremendous sense of loss. In a way that before now had only been empathy. Now, I feel like I've lost a friend. Early the next morning, I meet with Stan and Denise again. There he is. Thank you. Yeah, you're doing well enough. Talking into a microphone is an uncomfortable process for everyone. She's ready to talk. You going to talk to him? Get your voice on there and you can go play. You're being tapered now. All right. What would you like, sir? You guys want to talk at the same time? You want me to do you first? And it doesn't matter to me. And go the other room and talk to him first. Sure. I sit down with Stan in the family room and later Denise in the kitchen and ask to hear Kristen's story from the beginning. I'm just trying to reflect back. February 20th, 1977. Kristen was born overseas in Germany, Oxford, Germany. We were so thrilled to have a child because we hadn't been able to conceive. We thought we were going to have to adopt a German baby boy. After a long two-day labor, Kristen was born. Stan went to breakfast with our good friends and said the answer to our population is the men should have the children and there would only be one for a family. Betty didn't share that with you. And then we decided to return back to the US after we had been there just about three years overseas. Wonderful experience. We had a little girl that we brought home. She seemed like she would almost fit a shoe box. We had with everybody expects when you go to Germany. You come back with a Volkswagen, a Kuku Klok and a child. So there we go, we had all three. We came back and he got a job just outside of the city at a high school as a counselor. I guess the first priority of business was just kind of getting settled in Kristen. She cried a lot. And as it turned out, she was allergic to milk. Fortunately, about nine months, we figured it out. And she turned into a kid that you really wanted to keep. And she was much happier. And she got older, sort of feeling a sense of invincibility and she could do anything she wanted to do. She walked very early, she talked very early. She was like on a mission really. She knew what she wanted to do. And a lot of kids are that way. But that big zest for life, like holy moly, I'm not going to do anything. You know, kind of like that. In October 1979, the smart second child, Matthew, was born. Initially, if you're the only child, you're sort of the center of the universe. And then when the second child comes along, you need to have a daughter or something to play with. Since you're no longer the center of the universe. And she's so embraced having a brother. I remember her in the hospital. It's like, where are his shoes? And I said, well, he doesn't need any shoes. He just said, well, when is he going to walk? And I said, well, it's going to be a while. And I've seen other families where a new child comes in when the child is two. And they want nothing to do with that child. And she was, well, you had to stop her from smothering the boy. Because she was just on him. Just on him. So that started very early. Finally, in January 1982, Lindsay, the last of the three smart children, was born. And then the third child. So then we were a complete family having three children, two girls and a boy. And then, of course, Lindsay was little. And a brother at that point can really be a pain. So it's like, well, good. I've got someone who'll do it. I told him to do. Being the eldest child, I think she was an overachiever. Meaning she did things to please her mom and dad. And in school, she worked hard to have good grades. And I think you find that true. Most families, when there's more than one child, the oldest one. The parents really sort of focus on that child initially, you know, getting a school and working and so on and forth. So she met that. And she was always the organizer. It's like I said before. She periodically thinks she was a teacher in line of them all up and make them sit and tell them what to do. And sometimes they do it. Sometimes they wouldn't do it. And then she set up her little church service. And make them sit and pray. And sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't work. In home videos, you can see an active and engaged big sister playing with her siblings in the snow and on beaches. Running lemonade stands and singing Christmas carols. As she grew up, Kristen participated in school plays, soccer games, and swim tournaments. On a cruise, she learned to make omelets the way the ships cooked did. And back at home, started a routine of making them for her family on Sunday mornings, even though she mostly avoided eating egg yolks. She spent time in London with friends, and Venezuela, where she was a foreign exchange student for a summer. When she smiles at the camera, her dark eyes narrow, with genuine warmth. She was close with both of her parents. She joined me in doing things, although I think her interests are more in line with her mother. My interests are quite a bit out of doors and doing things outside and camping and going places. So she always enjoyed going where we go to use somebody or if we go to the beach. So she liked water and she liked travel things that we did that way. And I think that was part of her makeup. Loved travel extensively. The globe is their playground. So I think she had those values. I think she was always finding her sense. And I think this is important for a lot of parents to understand is that continuity in a child's life is really important. So we move from UBCD as she came here in fourth grade. Fourth grade, you know, they think they're pretty hot stuff, fourth graders. And you have to break into the group. So she did the standard birthday thing. So she was embraced by her friends and pulled into it. And then they kind of changed the boundaries on the school. So that kind of upset the apple cart. So you have to find new friends then. And then they went back to Mabel Baron and she reconnected with, you know, the friends that she had made earlier. So I would say, she wasn't leader of the group, she wasn't the leader of the pack, but she was certainly not quiet. She was just part of the group. I meet one of Kristen's closest friends, Anne Marie, for breakfast while I'm in Stockton. Afterwards we sit in my car, facing the Stockton Marina, while she flips through a photo album to show me pictures, and I ask her to tell me about her friend. Okay, is it on? It is, yeah. Just, I remember Kristen as a dear childhood friend, we got to know each other from elementary school and were really good friends in fifth, sixth grade and on seventh and eighth grade and stayed in touch through high school even though we went to different high schools for a while. My most memorable memories of her and I was young kids stuff playing at each other's house on weekends and she loved to swim so a lot of our activities involved around swimming in the summertime. I remember being at her house a lot, you know, you'd sleep over at your friend's house and baking cookies and making popcorn and watching movies and I just loved her parents and her sister and her brother, our families knew each other and we were just for, you know, these really good childhood friends and we went through sixth grade graduation and eighth grade promotion graduation together. She had a lot of vibrancy and you can see from photos, she has this wonderful smile and a laughter she appreciated humor. A lot of memories come back when I look at pictures of us, pictures of us and sixth grade kids. We were just being goofy at the pool or at this thing called the beach club where kids would go and there was a pool and like a little beach and you just go and hang out like sixth grade kids, like what we were like 12 years old probably and I remember her love of drawing especially like architecture and homes and she'd have graph paper and remember she would show me, I have this memory of being over her house when we went swimming and she was showing me some of her new drawings, some of her new architecture, the houses that she would like lay out and map them out and there was so much attention to detail and she had such a gift. I remember that's why she, in my memory that's why she went and chose Cal Poly to go to because they had such a good architecture program and that was her dream, you know, that into travel the world. She had a great smile, a great laugh, you know, I just remember lots of laughter and having a good time, you know, and just doing your normal everyday kid things, never getting into trouble. I mean, we were pretty innocent. We were in Girl Scouts together. She was a wonderful friend. She was, I would still imagine that we would be friends today. I have no doubt we would, you know, still friends with her family and where she here I could imagine our kids playing together, you know, which we back living close to where we are. I don't know, but it's just not fair. She should be here and she's, you know, amazing person and I just, I have struggled with it for so long. Stan worked as the principal of vintage high school in Napa and because of the long commutes wasn't able to spend much time at home in Stockton. So in her junior year, Kristen decided to switch schools, leaving her friends behind to spend more time with her dad. I think that was a difficult year for her because, you know, I reflected on when I went to high school, I remember the principal's son was a student during the time that I was going to high school and I thought about, you know, I think it was very, very hard for her to, to meet her dad's standards for his high school in Napa, vintage high school. We didn't have a home that we were living in. We moved around and through Rotary, a lot of the Rotarians and I had been a Rotarian, provided us with places to stay when they were traveling. We stayed in some beautiful homes, house sitting and also I rented some places. We might be, you know, in one location for a week or a few days and I think that was difficult for her. We didn't always have a bed to sleep in. Sometimes we slept in sleeping bags and so we had a lot of time in the morning and then we went to school and then we afterwards go out to dinner somewhere. I really didn't have the facility to cook there later I did. I think it was difficult for her to socialize and that she didn't have a place to meet friends or, you know, communicate very well other than at school at the time. So she stuck that out for a year, which was a bit trying on her, maybe on me a little bit and then she came back home to mom and completed over here at Lincoln High School and she was so often. In her last year of high school, Kristen reconnected with her old friends like Roxy. I think probably I was her close as long as friends. So she was friends with my sister. My sister was in her grade. I'd say she was probably one of the best friends you can have for just a very kind, polite, caring, shy girl. She helps me with my homework a lot because she was really, really, really smart. Some of the fun as memories we have her parents would take her and I to use somebody and we'd climb, you know, climb her hike. Kristen loved to shop and we would go to the spree outlet, which was really fun. You know, it was a little kid or just a, you know, a young girl. It's a big, basically warehouse of just boxes and boxes of discount clothing. She used to share her clothes with me and she was always so sweet about it, you know. She loved Bob Marley, Tom Petty, she even liked rap. My sister and I would pick her up. I don't think she had a car in high school. So my sister was always the DJ of all of our music. And some of the songs that we played, you know, Kristen would get a just smile thinking about it because she'd get all, you know, embarrassed, you know, kind of or just because we would play some of the, you know, more graphics songs. But she was really shy, really shy. After graduating from Lincoln High School on June 8, 1995, Kristen traveled to the island of Oahu. The work is a camp counselor and lifeguard at Camp Mokuleia. Over what no one knew would be the last summer of her life. Kristen, you hear me? I tracked down Rachel Bird, who shared a cabin with Kristen at Mokuleia that summer. Kristen was my co-counter at camp and so I spent every single day with her morning, noon and night for three months or whatever it was. You are told who's in your cabin. There's younger cabin, you know, medium age cabin and older cabin. So we took care of the youngest kids for a whole summer and Kristen and I got placed together meeting her. She was tall, beautiful, blonde, sure for girl like really chill. Only got four or five weeks after summer camp it started my cousin passed away. Did she have a heart problem and she passed. And I remember Kristen being somewhere that actually was a big support to me during that time because it was really my cousin was like a sister to me. She was always there for me and then I think there's actually a picture of it. I remember a little hug ceremony and there's a picture where I'm crying and Kristen touching me and she's just a sweet girl, you know. She was definitely like the surfer girl. She left me out in the water. Anytime she could go circuit ref period or anything like that she wanted to be out there doing that. I remember doing hair wraps on her hair. She was just that very like, "Bercy, I wouldn't want to say like flower child." But like that kind of like, "Yeah, like nothing ever seemed to get there." Calm and collected. You know, we were both tall. I'm tall and hefty and she was tall and skinny but I was joked at like the two of us were the twin towers because we were both so tall. We were both over like, you know, six feet aish and her legs went up to like my shoulders and my legs went to like her knees because I thought I'm tall but with the short legs and she just had these legs for days and she was gorgeous, right? Like anybody would be around and she'd be the person that's not feeling automatically or eyes would go straight to Kristen because she just had that look. We'd go to Waimei and we'd get shaped by some kids. It's fun zone 24/7, right? We're high with more kind of the nurturing mother's height. She was very like, "Mello." It's all good. It's good. Like we're good. When you were there, it was all about just being in Hawaii, being at the beach. We have pictures of being out front of our cabin with all of us dancing on picnic tables. You know, we were young and it was fun, you know? And then winter reunion, we had a winter reunion like between Kristen's and New Year. I think I actually went over New Year's. It's a smaller version of camp, not as many kids. And then we were getting ready to go back. and June to be counter-sign. And I know she's been hired because I was working at the camp, and we were gonna be co-counters again. And that's that whole summer with kind of this. Well, where is she? Is she somewhere? Did she go somewhere? Like, you're just, you know, dancing through life. And then all of a sudden, something stops it. And somebody's gone and it's like, wait, but I wanna hold onto those memories. Like, I wanna remember every moment because I didn't know there weren't gonna be any more moment. (soft music) (soft music) Focused on her academics, but struggling with mild ADD. Kristen had doubled up her workload to graduate a semester early, attending San Joaquin Delta College for extra credits to increase her chances of being accepted to a four-year university. It worked. She was accepted to UC Santa Barbara and had already paid a deposit for a dorm room there. When she abruptly decided that she would rather attend somewhere a little closer to home. So after returning from Oahu, Kristen moved from Stockton to San Luis Obispo to study at California Polytechnic State University, known to students and locals as Cal Poly, where she originally intended to major in architecture, but later switched to communications studies with the goal of traveling the world as a reporter, like Joan London. Here again, her friend Roxy from Stockton. - We stayed close and tell she left for school. I don't do therapy too often, but I'm in PT right now 'cause I just had a baby, you know? Some weird things have been popping up. You've ever had mouth treatment before, where they put your hand in your mouth. They do all your muscles. A memory popped back in my head, maybe two, because you had called me. She was going off to college and she did not wanna come back to Stockton, she just wanted to become an architect and live overseas and kind of just become free. She told me she wouldn't be calling me too much when she left for school, which was heartbreaking because I was a senior at the time. So I didn't talk to her when she was in school at all. I guess that's kind of common, you know, when you leave a town like Stockton. But the neat thing, you know, my husband said that, I didn't peak in high school, well, I'd say that Kristen didn't peak in high school, you know what I'm saying? Like she had her life to peak. I think that it was her time to, you know, get her architect degree and stay the world, you know? Because she enrolled late, she missed her chance to get a dorm room on campus. So she moved into the Stinner Glen apartments at 1050 Eastfoot Hill Boulevard, now known as the Slow. So she had a really nice room made there. I thought she was nice, but she came from a very small, very sheltered kind of background. So it wasn't an unhappy dorm relationship. She just wanted to be on campus. And so her name from the get-go was on the waiting list. When she returned to Cal Poly after spending Christmas 1995 with friends back at Camp Moca-Lailia, she moved into room 120 at Mirror Hall, one of six historic residence halls known as the Red Bricks. When she got the call that she could go, she had to give 30 days, I think, to Stinner Glen. And then I didn't help move her. She somehow probably found someone with a car or something, but she got resettled. And she said, "Oh, it's so much better. I can walk to class." 'Cause, you know, Stinner Glen is not right next door. Acclimating the life on campus, Kristen worked to reinvent herself. Using nicknames like Kiana or Marisol in her emails, and dying her naturally blonde hair brown. She still called her parents every Sunday, though, and they traveled down to San Luis Obispo several times to visit her. We probably went down after the Christmas holidays, and we went down after Easter vacation because we'd gone on a trip with the kids. That's when I saw the brown hair. She told me about the brown hair and sent a picture, but it's seeing in person, okay? She was like all children going away. They're rather independent when you get to college. And myself, my wife, and yourself, and everyone else knows that, you know? And it was like brown. But I think, you know, sometimes kids make their hair red or green or something. So how long she would have kept it? I don't really know. The college classes came as a bit more of a struggle for Kristen than high school had. And not long after moving into Mir Hall, she started to express doubts about whether Cal Poly was right for her. There were other places she told her mother, like the University of the Virgin Islands, or Puerto Rico, where she could go to get a doctorate. When Denise came down to visit her in early 1996, Kristen broke down, begging her mother to let her drop out and go somewhere else. She really felt everyone was too much the same. And the reality is freshman year is really hard year for many majority, I would say. It's a huge transition, being away from home, being responsible for your laundry and having to do your homework. And she was working as a lifeguard, so she would try to get as many hours as she could at the pool. And of course, is the newbie, which hours are open? You know, the 5 and 6 AM hours. And she was like most teenagers at the time. They love their sleep. So she was probably tired, she was fatigued, and adjusting. But like I said, I don't think it's unusual for kids in their first year of college, too. In fact, I had a friend whose son was a year ahead of Kristen. And he was at Pepperdine. And I talked to her about Kristen, not wanting to be there, she said, oh my god, that just sounds like Todd last year. He just wanted out of there, so bad. But once he finished that year, it's like, I never said I didn't want to come back here. So it's just a transitional phase, I think. And I think with my other two, they were really entrenched in swim team, and they swam for their colleges. So you kind of have a built-in network of fast friends that you blood sweat and tears with. So it's very much of a bonding thing. And for other kids going to college, you have to work to build your network of friends. It's not automatic. And although she could swim on the swim team, and they asked her to at Cal Poly, I think maybe she was a little swimming burned out. She was always happy, camper. She wanted to, after being there for nearly a year, she wanted to go to another school to travel more. She wanted to go to the school overseas. She had all these grandiose ideas, at least they could have that way at the time. In early May of 1996, which is a few weeks left of the spring quarter, Denise sent her daughter a letter, reminding her that she had a world of opportunities at her fingertips, energy her to learn from her mistakes, and finish out the semester. Yeah, I do remember writing it. It's probably the last letter she got from us. So that's kind of hard. And like everybody's mentioned before, she was smart enough, kid. But it's like, I think she's trying to do too much at one time. So you learn from your mistakes. You have to prioritize what's really important. And you're in school, not turn a lot of money. You're in school so that you can in the future have a career that you like and earn your money. So I think she tried to take on too much and didn't really prioritize the academic piece of it. I don't have any issues of-- I mean, kids go off to college. You don't know what they're doing. So she certainly didn't write and tell me, oh, I went and did this, and so it was-- parents got a very modified version of what's going on. And the version I got was, well, I can't study that much because I have to go to work. I have to get up, you don't understand. I have to get up at 4.30 in the morning. It's like reprioritize. So we weren't really there, and we weren't helicopter parents. Because she was. Even in '19, she knew everything that. Do you remember the last time you saw her in person? I do remember sitting on the bed in the hotel room with her and just kind of talking about life kind of in general. And then we were going to go to her dorm later. I think Stan took her back to her dorm. And she said, but you have to wait a little while, because I'm going to clean it up. You're going to be some press, how clean our room is. And Crystal was gone that weekend. So they talked about Lindsey could spend the night in the dorm with her. It just didn't happen just because I don't know. I think we went to a place where we go eat ribs. McClendon. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So I just got late. And she went back to the hotel with us. So it was probably whenever spring break was for them. Probably March or something like that. On May 22nd, Kristen wrote her last letter to her friend Ann Marie, who she hadn't really kept in touch with after going away to college. On stationary decorated with angels and cherubs, she expressed her condolences. My mom died suddenly by suicide when I was a freshman in college. At the end of my-- we were both freshmen at the same time. I was in San Diego and she was in Cal Poly. And after Kristen went missing, her mom found this letter. And she had written a sympathy note to me. And she actually had talked to her mom about it over the phone. and Denise gave that to me about a month or so. after Kristen went missing and it's something I've held onto to this day because it means so much of the words that she wrote and how much she cared, even though we were apart because we were both at different schools and whatnot. Pre-cell phone era Kristen had a standing date to call home every Sunday night from her dorm room to stay in touch with her family. On Friday, May 24, the start of a three-day memorial day weekend, she made an unscheduled phone call to her parents who were out at the time. She left a message on their answering machine that she had good news and would call back on Sunday. Stan and Denise Smart listened to the message later that night. My wife actually had a message, "Good news, good news!" I don't even know how we found out along the way, but we did find out that the call was about. She was concerned about a grade and they apparently had found a paper, you know, or a test and she had a good score on it, so she was excited about that. Was it a biology or chemistry class or something where they hadn't couldn't find her final so they had given her an incomplete? And so I know she. Well, we were talking about that beforehand because she didn't like confronting people. And I said, "If you took the test, say responsibility to find it." So don't feel bad that you put it in a wrong pile or did you put your name on it. And she said it was a scantron, so you had to fill out your name. So her name was on it. So I heard afterwards, I don't know if it was from me. I don't know how we found out, but we found out that that's what the good news, the good news was. So if you only knew that and what you knew now, you know, it's a nice, nice community, wonderful people and I can't think of a safer location. However, it's just like any location there are one or two people that can destroy someone's life, so things can change overnight. That Friday evening, after making the phone call, Kristen got dressed and ready to go out with friends for the night. After settling on a gray crop top, black shorts, and a pair of red Puma brand shoes, she left me her hall with her friend, Margarita Compos, who lived in the room next door to hers. She didn't bring her ID or money with her, and she had lost her rim key, so she was depending on Margarita's key to get them back into the dorm building that night. They ran into two other girls in the hall, who were also looking for something to do. After the four of them flagged down a guy in a truck they knew, and asked him to drive them around to find an off-campus party to attend. As a side note, Kristen was afraid to drive and never got her own driver's license. Margarita Compos was probably Kristen's only close friend at Cal Poly. They bonded over their ADD and spent a lot of time in Margarita's room talking about boys and making cassette mix tapes. I tried to get in contact with Margarita for a few months through social media and email, and when those were unsuccessful, through cold calling her. I left her a few messages and never heard back, so I figured that she wasn't interested in talking to me, but I was wrong. Hello. Hi, is this Chris? It is. Hi, Chris. This is Margarita. Sorry, I didn't get back to you sooner. The story of Kristen's last night has been told many times, and through small inaccuracies and early news stories, the details have become mixed up and embellished over the years. So I asked Margarita to walk me through her memory of that night, from how they decided to go out looking for a party in the first place, right up to the last time she ever saw Kristen. So that night, she was hanging in my room, and I was kind of stressed out so I was like, "Oh my gosh, I have this biology final, and I hated biology at the time, like I ended up switching my major." But that set, I was like stressed out, and she's like, "Oh, what are we going to do tonight?" And I was like, "I don't know, nothing. I'm going to do nothing. I'm going to study." And she's like, "Oh, come on, let's do something." So that's what she brought her music, and she was like, "Oh, can I use your, I had a double cassette tape so you can make a recording of music?" And so she's like, "Oh, I want to make a recording of this or something, as we were listening to music." And that's why, in my mind, I just think of Cindy Lopper as a year true colors. I remember her almost telling me, "Come on, Margarita, we're going to go out. You can't just stay here. We have to go out." And I was like, "Oh, God. It was almost like she wasn't going to let me stay home. She wanted me to go." And then somehow we connected with the girl down the hallway, and they were all the down the hallway, and I guess one of the girls was like, "I'm going to pick us up and we're going to go to some party." I don't know if it was a party or a get-together or something, but we went down, ended up all piling up in this truck and driving to some residential home. At a house off of Foothill Boulevard, they sat and watched a few guys play video games for a while. Before they decided it was, in Kristen's words, a dud, not how she wanted to spend her Friday night. It was a dud, and Kristen was like, "Oh my God, this is such a dud. We are leaving." I think they gave us beer, and that's what we think we had only had one beer. When I left her. They went back to driving around in the truck for a while, looking for a better party. Because it was Memorial Day weekend, though, a lot of students had left town to stay with their families, and the parties were scant. That night was such a chill night. It was such a quiet night in San Luis Pisco, and it was just like a couple of us driving around a truck around town. I'm pretty sure Kristen was the one who said, "Just drop Margaret and I off here, because we're just going to keep walking around. We're going to keep walking around." I'm pretty sure it was California and Foothill. Kristen and Margarita walked around for a bit, eventually ending up near the unofficial frat houses surrounding the Cal Poly campus, where there had to be at least one party going on. Margarita followed Kristen into the parking lot of the Foothill Hossea into apartments, at 190 California Boulevard, before she started to get tired of looking. We were kind of in the parking lot and she kind of walked across the parking lot to cut over probably to Crandall. I was like, "No, I'm cool. I had a pee." I remember that very good thing. I really have to pee, Kristen. She's like, "Just go here and the bushes. Just go pee right here." I was like, "No, I just want to go back. I'm tired. I don't think there's any parties." I don't think there's any parties. She's like, "Well, let's just try this street. Let's just try this street." I don't want to. I just became a certain. I put my foot down and I just wanted to go back. She was like, "No, I'm just going to walk up this way." I was like, "Please." She's like, "Please." We had this sort of like, "Please, no, you please, no, you please." Just like really quick-married. A really quick. I was like, "No, Kristen, I don't want to." I think she was so determined to find a party. I was so over it. She wanted to find that party. She was begging me and begging me. I was like, "Well, as long as you get home safely, so I gave her my key because I knew that by the time I walked back to the dorm, the doors would still be open. But if she took any longer, the doors would be closed." It was almost like a minute of time. I remember rushing back and I'll never forget her shadow was against the partially on the back wall and partially on the dumpster. There was like a big dumpster trash can. It was cool. Her shadow was just really tall and big. That's one of my last memories. I'm going this way. Here's the key. Bye. And she was disappointed in me. I mean, honestly, I think that's what helped. That's really hard for me. She was angry. She was angry that I didn't want to go with her. But not angry to the point of like, if she saw me the next day, she would have probably been like, "Oh, you missed this great party." She wouldn't have been angry with me as I'd never want to talk to you again. It wasn't like that. Angry or not, Margarita handed her rim key to Kristen and turned and walked up Montevista place back towards California Boulevard. Kristen walked the opposite direction to foot hill Boulevard towards Crandelway. I left her by herself knowing that she was not going to go home until she tried every avenue to find a social outlet that night. She just wanted to have a social outlet that night. And she was not going to give up that easily. I gave up. She did not. While she had no idea that it would be the last time she ever saw her friend, Gilt has weighed on Margarita in the years since. I was a girl scout for many years and you're supposed to use the buddy system and I just would hire that night and she didn't come back. It didn't take Kristen long to find the party she was looking for. A little after 10pm, just a tenth of a mile from where she split from Margarita. She walked into a birthday party being thrown by members of the Capacai fraternity for a senior named Ryan Swampy fell and his friend Tom Gore at 135 Crandelway. Like a lot of people, I initially had the impression that Kristen had been at a crazy frat party with shirtless guys doing keg stands and punching each other in the face. But that's not exactly right. About 20 people were invited to Swampy fells party. That's his nickname Swampy. But several people filtered in and out, like Kristen. What happened inside is a little hard to discern. The people who attended have been notoriously tight-lipped in the years since, talking only to investigators in the immediate aftermath of the party and never publicly. Part of the reason for this is that a lot of people present were members of Kappa Kai, and college fraternities have a code of silence involving incidents that could get their charter revoked. In 2002, Sigma Kai pledged Brian Gillis died in his Stinner Galen apartment, the same complex that Kristen lived in during her first quarter at Cal Poly. GHB, or Gamahydroxibuteraid, sometimes referred to as the "date rape" drug, and the main ingredient in a concoction known as "fatorade" was found in his system, which he was believed to have ingested at a Sigma Kai party the night before. When his roommate found him in the morning, he had asphyxiated on his own vomit. After the news broke, members of Sigma Kai drove up to Lake Nassami into it to have what they referred to as "around table discussion", feeling speculation that they were trying to get their story straight as a way to cover up their involvement. Cal Poly Sigma Kai chapter lost its charter four months later, and was ordered to pay over $350,000 as the result of a wrongful death suit filed by Brian's parents. In December 2008, another Cal Poly freshman named Carson Starky died of alcohol poisoning after a hazing incident by Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Before calling paramedics hours later, fraternity members removed Carson's pledge pin in an attempt to hide their association. When asked why charges took so long to be filed, the San Luis Obispo police chief blamed a lack of clear and open cooperation by the fraternity throughout the investigation. Their charter was later suspended. Outside of that reasoning, I've encountered a lot of hesitance that I can't explain. Even when I reached out to party attendees who were not members of the frat, some of them blocked me on social media, and others tried to severely downplay how much of the party they could remember, even though I only contacted them after hearing from their own friends that they had shared very vivid stories about being there. Since the party is such an important detail in Kristen's case now, I really want to talk to someone who was there, so I'm not just trying to stitch together two or three unverifiable details that have been rumored over the last 20 years. But how am I even going to find out who was there that night? If none of them will ever talk. It's important to explain here that Kristen's case has never been declared cold. Even though it's gone unsolved for 23 years, a case is only considered cold when law enforcement decides that they've exhausted all of their leads. Early on in researching this story, I traveled to the San Luis Obispo Courthouse to request any records on the case that I'm legally allowed to see, and I find out pretty quickly that it's mostly a dead end. As the investigation is still considered ongoing and active, none of the documents or evidence are disclosed to the public. But what the clerk is able to give me essentially turns out to be a table of contents of those non-disclosable items. Paperwork from a previous legal effort to get a hold of these documents, which I'll talk about in later episodes. The list is pretty insightful but incredibly frustrating to go through. To see the titles of reports I'm not allowed to read, with descriptions like supplemental report regarding underwear and memo regarding pizza cart. On page 17 there's a list of initials that each read report of contact. Towards the top of the page is report of contact with RF, Ryan Swampy-Fell. After verifying the initials of four other known attendees of the party, who I'll mention a little later, I'm able to confirm that this whole page is a list of people who are interviewed in the aftermath of Kristen's disappearance, most of whom had seen her on the night of May 24. And with the aid of social media, I start sifting through friend lists, looking for matches to those initials, double checking them with sites like LinkedIn to confirm whether or not the people I'm finding attended Cal Poly in 1996. And then, each time I feel strongly that I've located another attendee, using their friend lists to search for more. One of the easiest sets of initials to fill in is TB, because Trevor Belcher came forward in 2013 on an episode of True Crime with Aphrodite Jones to say that he was at the party that night with his best friend Dominic, who was a member of Capacai. When the word gets out that I'm working on a documentary about this case, I find out that Trevor Belcher and I actually have a mutual friend in San Luis Obispo. And she hooks me up with his phone number. Hey Chris, it's Trevor. I'll be honest with you, usually nowadays that I don't talk to people, because I told my story, but I love podcast and you're a friend of April, so I'm happy to talk to you. I'll give you the whole scoop. I really can't answer the great questions like what happened that night. So I do have a certain level of a story that I think could be important to you. So you're a question for you right now. Am I being recorded? Yes. Is that okay? Do you want me to stop? No, no, no, totally fine. I mean, I get it with the podcast. I'll illuminate the story for you. I let Trevor know not so subtly that my equipment for recording in-person interviews is a lot fancier than my equipment for recording over the phone. So come down to LA. I'd love to see you. Just like that, I make a plan to drive down the following Thursday, but I let him know that I'm kind of surprised by his willingness to talk so openly after years of not talking, and he's honest with me. He's had a few cocktails tonight. But he's still willing to commit to meeting person. You know, I'm just saying, if you wanted to come down and hang out, and my dad goes to bed around 8, we could set up and we could just podcast and just you know, you just ask me the questions and I'll tell you, but I just want to make sure that you understand my perspective on things. So you can look, I just want you to tell the right story, right? I want it to be the best of your angles. Look, I think we'll have a great conversation at Thursday. I'll have my wits about me and I won't be all fucking buzz. We'll have a great talk. He texts me his address and I put it on my calendar. Great talk, you great meeting him. Bye. Trevor is important to the story, not just because he can give me insight into what swampy fells party looked like and who else was there, but also because he talked to Kristen several times at the party. The following Thursday, I'm driving on the Los Angeles freeway to Trevor's house in bumper to bumper traffic. My car broke down a week before and while it's in the shop, the only car available to rent was a white 2019 Mustang convertible. I'm a little embarrassed that this is going to be his first impression of me, but it's better than postponing our meeting. When I pull up in front of his house, the car projects a lit up Mustang logo onto the street from my side view mirror. I'm not sure what the purpose of this feature is except to add insult to injury. We sit down in his office, which is covered in every type of of metal. Trevor's dog Fox, an American Eskimo, sits on the floor in front of him. You'll hear him panting every once in a while. Hi, my name is Trevor Belter. I am 43 years old. Fox. Let me know if this is going to drive you nuts. I'm sure you're going to be a great guy. Well, then, at the most, right around the time when I saw Chris and Bufreshee went inside, it doubled or quadrupled. It was between 30 and 40. 45 people. I just remember there was a ton of people outside in the backyard. Fish would have been playing, right? It would have been a lot of fish. Probably would have been grateful dead. It probably would have been Dave Matthews, I would think. But definitely, that house is a big jam band house. They liked the dead. They liked fish. It wasn't your hits of the day. It wasn't like, you know, what, like hooting the blowfish. You know, whatever it was at the time, or seal, or, no, it would be definitely like almond brothers, grateful dead fish, primarily fish. Those guys all, this to this day, they all love fish. So that's, that would have been what was playing. Yeah. When you walk into the Cranel house there, today, when you walk into the left, there was a pool table. Okay, so there's a pool table right there. And then there was a little half bar. It was like a bar. And they were like two or three stool seats. I remember for sure there's two seats. There might have been three stools. So I've seen my friends and they're like, hey, do you want a beer? And I think my memories that I had a Budweiser. So I would have been sitting first stool and then Dom sitting next to me. So I walked in, you know, and I didn't even notice Kristen, right? She walks over. And this is, this is exactly how this happens. She walks over. She is wearing vinyl shorts. She's wearing a mid-riff shirt. Obviously she's very, very pretty. Okay. She walks up to me. I think she might have said, hi, I'm Roxy and I went high and then she kisses me. Like, full on the mouth with tongue. Like, full on kisses me. And I'm like, huh? She grabs my hand and takes me to the bathroom. And I'm like, I had heard stories about the Cranel way bathroom that like, you know, crazy, crazy sex happens. And I was like, oh my god, am I going to be one of those stories? I don't know who this girl is. Oh my god. You know, she pulls me in there. And I remember it was dark for a second and then she finds the lights and she immediately walks over to the mirror and starts smoothing out her makeup. But she says, do you think I'm ugly? I'm like, no. And then I started to like look at her and she's like the way she's like, but do you think I'm ugly? Do you think I'm ugly? And I'm like, no. And I was starting to get more of a sense of who this girl was. And I'm like, okay, there's no shenanigans that are going on here. And she goes, okay, I have to go, I got to use the bathroom. Okay. And I'm like, oh, okay, cool. I don't even know how I got here. Trevor thinks Kristen's only motivation for pulling him into the bathroom was to make another guy jealous. Almost as soon as the door had closed, she asked him who she should hook up with, a tall basketball player, who Trevor had been talking to when she approached him, or another guy who he didn't know at all. It's not what Trevor was hoping for and he's not about to give up that easily. I go, why pick me? Right? This is the first thing she goes, she goes, uh-huh. Yeah. You know what she's doing her makeup and I'm like, okay. So Kristen's clearly not interested in doing anything more with Trevor. According to him, nothing else happened and Kristen kicked him out after about a minute. So I go and I sit down at the stool and don't just like, dude, what is going on of a vinyl check? And that's the guy is the part of your calling your vinyl check because she was wearing vinyl shorts. Actually, polyester most likely based on everything I've learned. Roxy quick silver brand board shorts, not all that unusual for Cal Poly and May, but the guys at the party certainly noticed, referring to them variously as vinyl, nylon, spandex, bicycle shorts, even a black skirt in early news reports. Much of the early investigation focused on Kristen's appearance and behavior at the party. Trevor had one more encounter with her before he left that night. Out in the backyard, she comes up again and I'll leave him alone, leave him alone, Roxy and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, she's like, please talk to me and that's now she's like really like an aburated. She goes, come back here, talk to me and she's like, oh, he hates me and I'm like, no, no. She's referring to the basketball player who she apparently had tried to flirt with but had been rebuffed by. And then I said to her, I'm like, geez, you know, dude, what is your sign? Right? Because I was in astrology, astrology, you know, I was like, I was 20 and she goes, Pisces, I go, I have a Pisces. What's her birthday? February 20th, I go, whoa, Roxy, that's my birthday. I said, we share the same birthday with Kurt Cobain. Really? Yeah. And then she grabs me by my face. She grabs me, like, my bing ears and pulls me in for a kiss. Quick, not a good kiss. And it was, I pushed her back and I was like, no, no, no, no, we don't, we don't have to do that or something. And she goes, like another rejection and she turns around, walks up and she walks into the house and it's the last I ever saw her. Trevor walks home around midnight, stopping for a donut and a pint of milk at donut stop in the California and Taft Plaza before getting back to his place on Toro Street around 1am. According to the list of investigative documents, law enforcement interviewed Trevor on three separate occasions as recently as 2005. That's probably because they found his trip to the bathroom with Kristen a little suspicious and wanted to follow up on it. Or because like me, they found him willing to talk and eager to help. From the parking lot where she separated from Margarita, determined to find a party even if she had to go alone, to the forward way she introduced herself to Trevor, a picture starts to emerge for me. A picture of a girl who's stuck in a school that she doesn't feel like she belongs at. A girl who introduces herself to everyone is Roxy. It's not really clear whether she borrowed that name from her stocked in front or from the Roxy Quicksilver short she was wearing that night. A girl whose freshman year is almost over, who can't wait to be back in Hawaii and to find some way to transfer to a school on a tropical island. And to deal with it all, she's trying her hardest to be recognized, to stand out from the crowd, to break out of her shell, to appear bold and confident even if she doesn't feel that way on the inside. It's definitely not the best night of her life, but it's probably not the worst either. She just needs to get back to her dorm. When Swampy Fells party comes to a close at around 2am, a group of students pours out of the front door to start walking back to campus. A freshman named Cheryl Anderson has been ditched by a friend who is supposed to walk her back to her dorm, so another student named Tim Davis offers to escort her. While they're standing around in the front yard talking to friends, Tim notices Kristen lying on the neighbor's lawn at 137 Crandoway and helps her to her feet. He tells her she needs to leave, but it's clear that Kristen is very intoxicated now and unable to walk on her own. So Tim tells Cheryl that they need to take Kristen back to her dorm too, and the three of them head towards campus. A little ways up the road, a third student named Paul Flores catches up to them. He's also heading back to the Red Bricks and offers to help them, wrapping an arm around Kristen's waist to hold her up. From 135 Crandoway, the walk back to the dorms is about a half mile. It's the route you heard me walk in the beginning of this episode, along campus way, behind the health services building, up via Karta, and right on perimeter road. Tim Davis's car is parked in a campus lot, so he breaks with the group to turn left on perimeter. Cheryl's dorm in the Sierra Madre towers is down Grand Avenue, so rather than walk up towards Mir Hall with Kristen and Paul, she asks him to make sure that Kristen gets back to her room and says "Good night." Paul stops instead at the pathway of his own dorm, Santa Lucia Hall, which is closer, and watches Kristen walk by herself, the 40 or so yards up the path to Mir Hall, and they both go to their respective rooms, alone. At least, that's what he tells the police. Next time. You've been listening to your own backyard, Episode 1, a face on a billboard. Your own backyard is written, produced and hosted by Chris Lambert. Associate producer is Alexandra Wallace. Special thanks to Dennis Mann, Peter King, Nicholas Winnery, Candace Vanderplace, Derek Payne, Jamie Lewis, Garen Sinclair, Sandy Arnold, April Cole Worley, Carrie Quimby-Zennich, Alyssa Brigham, Kaelin Pope, Sydney Brant, Olivia DeGenero, Dallas Branson, Javana Sarnacola, and Matthew Frank. If you feel that you have information that could help law enforcement with their investigation, you can directly contact San Lucipis Boscheraf's detectives at 805-781-4500. Want to reach out to us directly? Send an email to your own backyard podcast at gmail.com, or visit our website at yourownbackyardpodcast.com. To keep up with new episodes, subscribe to your own backyard on Apple podcasts, and follow us on Facebook or Instagram. Original music is by Chris Lambert. Want to help keep Kristen's memory alive? You can donate to the Kristen Smart scholarship at christensmart.org or by shopping at smile.amazon.com and selecting the charity Justice for Kristen. How do you feel about me doing this? Is this a little bit of an invasion of? No, because we've done many interviews in this room and usually we have television people arrive and then they have to reorganize our room. So this is less than true, just doing an audio, etc, etc. So no, I'm comfortable with that and I think you're doing a fine job and we really appreciate what you're doing. So be happy to help you. Yeah, it's interesting having a young person like yourself doing this.