Episode 01: A Face On A Billboard

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. 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's ceiling glass windows while they run on treadmills. Other students walk by me having loud conversations on their cell phones. Maybe I'm just self-conscious, but it feels like some of them are looking at me suspiciously. 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." At 1.2 girls past me, and I clearly hear one say to the other, "That guy did not look our age." So much for self-esteem. I cross a bright green crosswalk, and on my right are a series of red buildings, with California theme names and brass on their sides. 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. It's in these 40 yards that Kristen Smart disappeared over 23 years ago, and the cases are still unsolved. There are currently more than a half million people missing in the United States. 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. Still, 650,000 have never been found, dead or alive. It's a heartbreaking statistic, but one that most of us are not really equipped to do much with. The majority of these cases all never even hear about. 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. It's a little different if you have access to some of the people and places involved. It's different when someone goes missing in your own backyard. Growing up on the California Central Coast is probably pretty much like growing up anywhere else. 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. 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 Orkett, a small town which is pretty much just Santa Maria, in everything but name and population. In May of 1996 I was in second grade when a 19 year old Cal Poly student named Kristen Smart went missing. 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. With the OJ Simpson trial barely in the rearview 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. Then, over the next few years, it kind of just stopped. Besides the occasional comparison to later missing person's 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 Smart's 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 18, 2006, incidentally 12 days after I had graduated from high school, an article I had somehow missed up until last summer. Even 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 asked 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 Smart and what happened to her. And 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 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 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 McClatchy 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 advisory boards and whatnot, and you would drive down over the hill, quest to grade, and then you would see that big billboard. I had a sense of place about Cal Poly, as a part of my life, and this seemed to be a wound that Cal Poly had suffered. When I wanted to export it, kick it around and see what, to me, the mystery was that they couldn't resolve the case. At a 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 writing it up, going down to the place and the times let me go pretty deep on, trying to get to 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 Family's 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, one in a million, we look for a while, but then we just figured you were gone. That would have to haunt them. It's right. There are the real victims. Kristen is the primary victim, but what they've lived through is harsher than a penitentiary term. 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. Let's move on. She's 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 when their heart says their doctor 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 Los Angeles times, but I'm still, I'm kind of different that way. I was still trying to thread that needle, letting 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, you know, an interview. They were helpful. If memory serves, I think I spent a couple of 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, you get conspiracy theorists, you get malmowers, just want to agitate you. You get fans. Comes in and all capital letters. I don't open up the email or read the letter. It didn't solve the case. We always go in looking for a homer, but oftentimes you've got to be content on second base with a 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 just 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 to. 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 and stalk them. 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. 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 Stan pulls up a chair across from us, as I start to go through the box. It's kind of crazy when you look at these pictures, it's like this is just a regular normal family. It's just like, how do these crazy things happen to just, and everyone that seems to happen 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 going to 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 moved in 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 had ever been dancers. 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. 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. Hi, son, I went camping, playing around in the river there with wet suits 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 is normally, don't find hardly any 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. Lincoln pause is looking serious for a minute. She was really interested in athletics, I mean, she was a good swimmer, and 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 here. 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 me while I'm in town. 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. Hearing 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? Yeah. I'm talking into a microphone as 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 taped right 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 to the other room and talk to him first. Sure. Yep. 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 little 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 that 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 U.S. after we had been there just about three years overseas. Wonderful experience. We had a little girl that we brought home. Seemed like she would almost fit in a shoe box. We had what everybody expects when you go to Germany. You come back with a Volkswagen, a Cuckoo clock, 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. 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 gonna 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 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 his shoes, he doesn't walk it. When is he gonna walk?" And I said, "Well, it's gonna be a while." And I've seen other families where a new child comes in when that 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, you know, the third child, so then we were a complete family having three children, you know, 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, that the eldest one, the parents really sort of focus on that child initially, you know, getting a school and working and so on forth. So she met that. And she was always the organizer, it's like I said before. She periodically thinks she was the teacher in line 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. And she grew up, Kristin 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. And 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 in doing things outside and camping and going places. She always enjoyed going when we go to Yosemite 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 kind of 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 moved from Ubasidia, 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, you know, 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. We're 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 kid 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, you know, 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, 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 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 I 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, you know. 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 every day 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 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, you know, 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'd 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, but 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 stalked. In her last year of high school, Kristen reconnected with her old friends, like Roxy. I think probably I was, I was her closest longest friend. 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 or just a very kind polite, caring, shy girl. She helped 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 shop and we would go to the free 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, if she loved Bob Marley, Tom Petty, if 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 graphic songs, but she was really shy, really shy. After graduating from Lincoln High School on June 8th, 1995, Kristen traveled to the island of Oahu to work as 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? My track 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, one, 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 I think there's actually a picture of one of our Aloha ceremonies and there's a picture where I'm crying and Kristen touching me and she's just a sweet girl, you know. And she was definitely like the surfer girl, she left me out in the water, any time she could go circuit rest 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, bursty. 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 it was joke that like the two of us were the twin towers, 'cause we were both so tall, we were both over like, you know, six feet-ish and her legs went up to like my shoulders and my legs went to like her knees, 'cause 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 thought to you, automatically your eyes would go straight to Kristen because she just had that look. We'd go to Waimei and we'd get shaved ice with the kids, it's fun zone 24/7, right? We're high, it was more kind of the nurturing mother's height, she was very like, mellow, 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, you have pictures of being out front of our cabin, 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 in June to be counter's dad, and I know she's been tired because I was working at the camp, and we were going to be counter again, and that's not a whole summer with kind of this. 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 want to hold on to those memories. Like I want to remember every moment because I didn't know there weren't going to be any more moment. 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 until she left for school. I don't do therapy too often, but I'm in PT right now because I just had a baby, some weird things have been popping up. Have you 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 too, because you had called me. She was going off to college and she did not want to 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 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? 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 mate 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 Mocula Ia. 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 because, you know, Stinner Glen is not right next door. Still meeting 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 like, 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 mere 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 a.m. hours. And she was, like most teenagers, a good 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 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 campers 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 perded that way to me 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. I do remember writing and 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 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, to try 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 and say, reprioritize. So we weren't really there and we weren't helicopter parents. Because she was, you know, 19, she knew everything that during 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, 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 what's the place where you go eat ribs, McClendon. Yeah, so just got late and she went back to the hotel with us. So it was probably whatever 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 Kaapali 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 on to 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. Marie 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 24th, 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. Kristen 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 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 what 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 the 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 safe location, however it's just like any location there or 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 her. 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 so 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 mixtapes. 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. That night she was 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 I ended up switching my major but that said I was like stressed out and she was like oh god 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 you know. And she's like oh come on we have to do something so that's where she brought her music and she was like oh can I use your I had a like a double cassette tape so you can make a recording you know 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 Loper this year true colors. I remember her like almost telling me come on Margarita we're going to go out like you can't just stay here like we have to go out. And I was like oh god okay it's almost like she wasn't going to let me not she wasn't going to let me stay home she wanted me to go and then somehow we connected with the girls down the hallway and they were all the down the hallway and I guess one of the girls was like I was going to pick us up and we're going to go to some party and then I don't know if it was a party or a get together or something but we went down ended up all timing up in this truck and driving to some like 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's like oh my god this is such a dud like we are leaving you know I think they gave us beer and that's what we think like we'd 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 like it was such a quiet night in San Francisco 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 Marguerite and I off here because we're just going to we're going to keep walking around we're going to keep walking around and pretty sure it was California and foothill. Kristen and Marguerite 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. Marguerite followed Kristen into the parking lot of the foothill Hossie into apartments at 190 California Boulevard before she started to get tired of looking. We were kind of in the parking lot she kind of walked across the parking lot to cut over probably to Crandall and I was like um no I'm cool I had a pee and I was like and actually I remember that very good thing and like I really have to pee for a sin and she's like just go here in the bushes you know just go pee right here and I was like no I just I want to go back I'm tired I don't think there's any any parties like I don't think there's any parties and she's like well let's just try this street let's just try this street and I was like I don't want to and so I just I was just I just became a certain of my foot down and I just wanted to go back and she was like no I'm just going to want this way and I was like please and she's like please and we had this sort of like please no you please no you please you know but just like really quick marker to really quick and I was like no Kristen I don't want to and I think she was so determined to find a party and I was so over it she wanted to find that party and she was begging me and begging me and 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 it would the doors would still be open but if she took any longer the doors be closed it was almost like in the nick of time I like I remember rushing back and I 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 and it was cool I was like her shadow was just really tall and big and and that's one of my last memories I'm going this way you're going this way here's the key by and she was disappointed in me I mean honestly like I think that's what that will be 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 you know she wouldn't have been angry with me as in like I 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 foothill Boulevard towards Crandall way I left her by herself knowing that she was not gonna she's 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 guilt has weighed on Margarita in the years since I was a girl cat for many years and you're supposed to use the body system and I just would tire 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 10 p.m. 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 fill and his friend Tom Gore at 135 Crandall way 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 Capacai and college fraternities have a code of silence involving incidents that could get their charter revoked in 2002 sigma chi pledge Brian Gillis died in a stinner glen apartment the same complex that Kristen lived in during her first quarter at Cal Poly GHB or gamma hydroxybutyrate sometimes referred to as the date rape drug and the main ingredient in a concoction known as faderade was found in his system which he was believed to have ingested at a sigma chi 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 chi drove up to lake nasa me into to have what they referred to as a round table discussion feeling speculation that they were trying to get their story straight as a way to cover up their involvement Cal Poly sigma chi chapter lost its charter four months later and was ordered to pay over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars as the result of a wrongful death suit filed by Brian's parents in December 2008 another Cal Poly freshman named Carson Starkey 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 twenty 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 twenty three 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 because 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 seventeen 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 Kappa Kai. 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 he's Trevor you know I'll be honest if you usually nowadays I don't talk to people because I told my story but like I love podcast and you're a friend of April so I'm happy to talk to you I'll give you the whole the whole scoop like I really can't answer like the great questions like what happened that night so I I do have like a certain level of a story that I think could be important to you so you're questioning for you right now am I being reported yes okay is that okay do you want me to stop no no totally fine I mean I get it with that was a podcast so why don't you tell me about what you're working on and maybe how I can help eliminate 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 meet in person you know I'm just saying like you know if you wanted to come down and like hang out and like my daughter goes to bed around 8 you know we could we could set up and we could just you know podcast and just you know you just ask you the questions and I'll tell you but I just want to make sure that like you understand my perspective on things so you can look I just want you to tell the right story right and I want it to be the best of your angle look I think we'll have a great conversation at Christmas you know and I'll have my wits about me and I won't be all talking buzz and we'll have a great talk he texts me his address and I put it on my calendar great talk to you great meeting you 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 what's up Chris okay cool you're all sealed up yeah you're in for the house that's right oh that's false okay okay we sit down in his office which is covered in every type of Beatles memorabilia you can imagine records toys autographs and a series of giant wall panels that make up their faces Trevor's dog Fox in 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 if this is going to be problematic because would you lay down on that energy all right so Dom and I could told me early in our days like hey we're swampy is having this birthday party we're having a small get together at the Crabble House and my memory serves me that I got there around 10 10 15 and Kristen Smart was already there okay so there were it wasn't a big party did you just want me to continue with the story it was to make how many people well when I walked in there I would think maybe there wasn't more than like 12 or 15 I mean it wasn't it was not a lot and at the most well then at the most towards the end of the night right right around the time when I last saw Kristen before she went inside it's it doubled or if not quadrupled so it was between like 30 and like 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 there 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 were they like hooting the blowfish whatever it was at the time or 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 Crabble House there to 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 bars like a bar and they're like two or three stool seats I remember for sure there's two seats there might have been three stools so I see my friends and they're like hey do you want to beer and I think my memory is that I had a bub wiser 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 midriff 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 candle way bathroom that like you know crazy crazy sex happens that I was like oh my god am I gonna be one of those stories I don't know who this girl is oh my god I 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 and 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 shenanigan that are going on here and she goes okay I have to go I gotta use the bathroom okay and I'm like oh okay cool I'm like don't 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 the first thing is she goes she goes uh-huh yeah you know while 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 dumbest like dude what is going on a vinyl check and that's the guy's the party you're 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 they're all leave him alone leave him alone roxy and I'm like no no no no she's like please talk to me and that's now she's like really like inebriated she goes come back here talk to me and she's like oh he hates me 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 australia astrology then you know I was thinking I was 20 and she was Pisces like I haven't Pisces what's a 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 my like my ears and pulls me in for a kiss quick not a good kiss and it was I pushed her back I was like no no no we don't we don't have to do that or so and she goes like another rejection and she turns around walks up and she walks into the house and 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 1 a.m. 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 christine 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 2 a.m 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 tell 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 a long campus way behind the health services building up via carta 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 Mirror Hall with Kristen and Paul she asks him to make sure that Kristen gets back to her room and says goodnight 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 Mirror Hall and they both go to their respective rooms alone at least that's what he tells the police next time you you've been listening to your own backyard episode one 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 Garenson Clare Sandy Arnold April Cole Worley Carrie Quimby's Enich Alyssa Brigham Kaelin Pope Sydney Brant Olivia Dijonaro Dallas Bronson Giovanna Cernacola and Mathew Frank if you feel that you have information that could help law enforcement with their investigation you can directly contact santa lucia bespoke sheriff'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 your own backyard podcast.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 christian's memory alive you can donate to the christian smart scholarship at christensmart.org or by shopping at smile.amazone.com and selecting the charity justice for christian 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 the television people arrive and then they have to reorganize our room so this is less than true if just doing an audio etc etc so no I'm 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 anyway it can yeah it's interesting having a young person like yourself doing yes so