Episode 03: Their Own Backyard

On a drive through Oroio Grande last spring, I'm heading northeast towards the 227, a rural highway that takes you from A.G., up to San Luis Obispo through Edna Valley, an alternate route to the 101, a 1500 mile freeway that goes from Los Angeles all the way up to the state of Washington. Before I merge onto the official on ramp of the 227, I turn into a residential neighborhood and everything suddenly gets a lot quieter. As trucks behind me continue on the state route, I turn up a steep street surrounded by wooden fences. I expect to be able to keep driving, but the top of the street turns into a cul-de-sac, and I realize that the only way out is to turn back around the way I just came from. In the 10 seconds that it takes me to make a U-turn, I see a man emerge from the driveway next to me. He's short, in his late 70s with white hair, glasses, and a mustache, and wearing a light-colored t-shirt and sweatpants. It's almost 2 pm, but he looks a little disheveled, like he just got out of bed. He stands there and watches me closely as I turn back down the steep street. I don't say anything to him. I'm not here to cause trouble. It seems unproductive at this moment. But I do turn and make eye contact with him before I drive off. It's a brief mutual acknowledgement. We've never met, but I know exactly who he is, and he knows exactly why I'm driving by his house. This is Ruben Flores, Paul Flores' father, and this is the house the Flores family moved into in June of 1992 when they left their home in Torrance. I'm still buzzing from the encounter a half mile later when I pass a blue nautical-themed house near the village. In the driveway, Mike McConville is working on his van, and his girlfriend, Susan Flores, is climbing into her car. Just seconds after their house is out of sight, I make eye contact with a striking blonde college student with dark, friendly eyes. This is Kristen Smart, on the infamous billboard in the Ero Grande Village. I park in front of a nearby coffee shop and stop to think for a minute. It's the first time I've given this particular thought, any serious consideration. Ruben and Susan Flores are both still living in the houses they lived in, back in 1996, at the time that Kristen went missing. Addresses that have been printed in newspapers, whose curbs have been the sight of numerous candlelight vigils and protests. They're easy to find online. Their son, Paul Flores, has lived in the south-base since late 1996, and their daughter lives a thousand miles north. Like I said, the family only moved up from Torrance in 1992, and almost all of their relatives still live there today. Except the two of them. In the two separate houses they were living in, on May 25, 1996. Their lives have been anything but peaceful here. With a population of just over 15,000, most people in town know who they are, where they live, and what they've been accused of. When locals approach them, they often end up being asked to leave by police minutes later. I'm sure they both know the AGP-D phone number by heart now. They spend days looking out their windows, waiting for someone to approach their front doors. A camera sitting on their window sill at all times, ready to threateningly take pictures of anyone who gets too close. If you think my run-in with Ruben was a coincidence, you can find him on Google Street View, giving the same intimidating stare down to the Google car. So when you're in your 70s, your nearest family member is 200 miles away, and the residents of your neighborhood are constantly eyeing you with suspicion. Why would you not move somewhere else? Anywhere else. Sitting in my car in front of this coffee shop, I can only come up with two reasonable options. The first is that they love O'Royal Grande. I mean, really love it. In spite of the lack of privacy, the tension they must feel every time they step into a grocery store, and over two decades of calling the police on passers-by who stop for a little too long to tie their shoes, they sincerely believe that their quality of life couldn't be better anywhere else but this small beautiful town. That, or they're afraid to leave because they're protecting something. It's no secret now that the early days of this investigation lacked a certain sense of urgency. Even after searching Paul Flores' empty and clean Cal Poly dorm room, a room that four trained cadaver dogs alerted to the scent of human decomposition in. It takes the sheriff's department another two weeks to get a search warrant for the Flores family home in O'Royal Grande, and another week after that to serve the warrant. On July 22, 1996, when detectives show up to Ruben Flores' front door, Kristen Smart has already been missing for two months. The search of the home is short, but police end up seizing a black police baton hanging in the entryway of the house, illegal for private citizens to own. Three separate telegramed Tribune articles about Kristen's disappearance, one hidden under Ruben's mattress, one hidden under Paul's mattress, and one from the kitchen, and one from the kitchen. The newspaper articles seem suspicious. Paul's name hasn't been released to the public yet, so they're not saving the articles as a memento because they mention them. But what's weirder is what the police don't do in this search. They don't bring cadaver dogs, even though they detected human remains on Paul's dorm room mattress. They don't bring a forensic team, and they don't ask to search any of the Flores family's vehicles. In fact, it's pretty much just a visual inspection of the house. A spokesman for the Sheriff's Department later claims that this is because they weren't actually looking for Kristen. They were only looking for her belongings, like her friend Margarita's dorm key, something that would directly tie Paul to her disappearance. The whole thing is surprisingly relaxed. Ruben calls Susan when the detective show up, early that morning, and she comes over and picks up Paul, and they both leave. What the investigators don't know at the time is that Susan isn't even currently living at the house with Ruben and Paul. She moved out back in April after filing for legal separation from Ruben, and has been living in her own rental property on East Branch Street, which she abruptly pulled from papers just a week after she had listed it for rent. Remember how Paul joked with his Cal Poly remate that he took Kristen to his mom's house? And how he told investigators on June 19th that he needed to leave his interview so he could clean up some concrete at his mom's house? It flies right over everyone's heads because they don't know that Susan was living somewhere else at the time. If they had caught it, they might have requested to search that house too, because the inference you could make if someone is cleaning up concrete two weeks after a girl disappeared is that concrete first had to be either poured or broken just prior to June 19th. But they think that her rental property is just a rental property, so it goes unsearched for the entire summer. Two months later, on August 28th, Susan Flores lists the Branch Street home for rent in the five city's Times Press Recorder for $895 a month. The listing reads, "Emaculate three-bedroom, two-bath, stove refrigerator, water trash, softener, and reverse osmosis system included. $1,200 security, no pets." The ad runs until September 6th, but she apparently doesn't find her rental. So on September 27th, she runs another ad, lowering the price to $875 a month. At the exact same time, a young married couple are visiting the wife's mother, who also lives on East Branch Street, eight houses down from Susan's rental. They've just moved up from Cypress, California to work at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center and are looking for a place in the area when they see that Susan's house has just gone up for rent. They apply and are accepted the same day. They move in on October 1st, 1996. The couple, Mary and Joe Lasseter, are in their mid-20s. and raising Mary's six-year-old son together. They love the house with its large front windows that face the street and the all concrete backyard which connects to their driveway. In fact the only strange thing they notice after moving in is the postcards they start getting in their mailbox. Some from locals and some was stalked in return addresses, asking them to cooperate with police and tell their son to come forward. The lacitors have no idea what the letters are about. On a warm Saturday in October just a few weeks after moving in Mary pulls her white Acura and Tegrua up the driveway where it intersects with the backyard so she can reach it with the hose. While she's cleaning the car something shiny catches her eye next to the front driver's side tire. Something that will finally make this location a point of interest for the investigation. A single woman's earring with a dark reddish smudge on the back. Thinking the earring might be important Mary picks it up by its hook and puts it into a ziplock bag before showing her husband. She starts to suspect that it might be related to the postcards they've been receiving. A few weeks later on October 28th the lacitors are visited by a detective whose name they can't recall but who Joe later describes as big and bald and scary. And he starts to press them to find out if they're hiding anything they know. To assure them that they're cooperating Joe Lacitor retrieves the earring from inside and hands it over to the detective. Then things get quiet for a while. Meanwhile Paul Flores has spent the summer working at Miller's Unickel 76 station in Pismo Beach. If you travel on the 101 you're probably familiar with the big orange ball on the side of the freeway. Late that summer after months of stalled search efforts, Stan and Denise smart traveled down from Stockton and pull up to the gas station. As Paul is filling up their gas tank with no idea who they are. Denise steps out of the car and introduces herself. Paul refuses to talk and retreats to a storage closet. He doesn't come back out. In November 1996 he quits the 76 station and moves to orange California where word gets back to the smart family that he's enlisted in the Navy. In an attempt to keep him from fleeing the smarts attorney James Murphy quickly files a civil suit against Paul. Since the smart family their attorneys, DA investigators and sheriff's detectives all believe that Paul knows what happened to Kristen Smart but they haven't been able to locate her body. They don't want to move forward with a criminal case too soon. Just a few months earlier the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman had filed a civil suit against OJ Simpson which ultimately found him responsible for the deaths of the two victims. Hoping that they can similarly have Paul held responsible for their daughter's death. The smarts file a wrongful death suit on November 26th. Paul was scheduled to attend the Navy's Seaman Apprentice School on December 10th but because of the civil suit he's rejected from the Navy on December 3rd. As part of the suit Murphy's office is able to depose witnesses. They Sapina Sheryl Anderson and Tim Davis the other two students who walked back to campus with Paul and Kristen after swampy Phil's party in May. They Sapina a handful of Paul's co-workers and his former boss from the 76 station and they Sapina Mary and Joe Lasseter the current tenets of Susan's rental house on East Branch Street. On January 23rd 1997 the first group of deponents are questioned at James Murphy's office on Branch Street. They expect to learn a lot through the depositions but they don't have much success. Sheryl Anderson recounts the party where she says she didn't see or interact with Kristen and the walk back to the dorms which they already know about from her interviews with police. Tim Davis flat out refuses to show for his deposition. He even reportedly has some choice words for James Murphy when they speak on the phone. I'm not sure of the legality of not showing up for a deposition but as far as I can tell Tim Davis was never charged with contempt and it's the last time we'll hear from Tim. Because of his refusal to show a lot of people have quietly speculated about Tim Davis's involvement in whatever happened to Kristen that night. When Murphy asks Sheryl about that possibility her response is absolutely not. No question in my mind at all. But Sheryl also admits that Tim is a personal friend of hers so it becomes another one of these issues where the truth of what happened that night is obscured by someone's refusal to talk about it. According to Murphy the most enlightening piece of information that comes from these depositions actually comes from the Lassiter family. They mention the earring that they found in their yard and turned over to a detective and it turns out to be the first time that the attorney or the smart family have heard about it. The detective who collected the earring the one who Joe referred to as big and bald and scary never informed the smarts about it. After the depositions conclude on January 24th Murphy puts in a request for the smarts to view the earring to see if they can identify it as Kristen's. If it is it's a huge lead. The Sheriff's Department doesn't respond in a timely manner. In fact all of February 1997 goes by with no word. In early March, Stan and Denise smart grow impatient and finally drive down to slow from Stockton. They show up at the Sheriff's Department requesting to see the earring. It's only then after a month of being stalled that they're told that earring has been misplaced. The identity of the Sheriff's detective who collected and misplaced the earring has never been released so I can't get a comment from him. Instead I decide to look for Mary Lassiter and I find her living in the same town as me just 1.9 miles away. Mary and I go back and forth for months through Facebook and phone calls. In fact I start to wonder if she doesn't really want to talk to me but we keep rescheduling and she never asks me to go away. By the time it happens I think we're both a little surprised. Hi Mary. Nice to meet you. How you doing? Hi Sharon. Nice to meet you. Do you find something? Just as one I told you about it. They do show the. Did you put them all in a certain order? Her pit bull chase is locked in a backroom and barks through most of my visit but that's his job. Her mother Sharon is here too. Sharon is the one who lived on East Branch Street first before Mary and her husband Joe moved into Susan's house. Here's a weird coincidence. In 1996 Sharon was living on East Branch Street, ate houses down from Susan's and was married to a Richard Flores. S and R Flores just like Susan and Ruben. I'm glad Sharon's here because they can both refresh each other's memories. We were looking for a house and we were like oh it'd be so nice if we can find a house by my mom you know and then in 96 this house was at Ferent and we applied and we got it quick. So we were like oh this is awesome my son because he was in grade school my mom takes him. He goes you know we go to work. We all three worked at Sierra Vista Hospital. Me, my husband and my mom and then so we were really excited to find a house right next to my mom. Excited until they start to get some weird mail. Post cards from Stockton that said things like please have your son come forward to tell what he knows. Mary's son is six and she doesn't know anyone in Stockton so the mail clearly isn't for her but besides that things are great for the class at her family. Mary and Joe are 28 and 26 respectively working at the same hospital together and living in a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood with a spacious yard for their kid to play in. And we have these pictures I don't know how you want to do these. Okay so this is the house that's what it looked like when we moved in you know it was beautiful. I had a sunroom in the front and these are our cars. It was a big long driveway and a gate. There was no garage. Right over here I wish I could have had it in the picture but if time I didn't know. There used to be those old trash cans before they had these the metal ones that you put out on the street with the metal lids. Yeah yeah yeah exactly that was back here that was Kitty corner to the shed. They had it there were there. And they're like don't use that trash can we're gonna come pick it up tomorrow or the next night or something. So please don't use that we're gonna come get it. Rubin came and picked it up what was such a big deal about a trash can. You know what I mean? And then I pulled my car up, his truck wasn't there, but I pulled it all the way up and opened the gates to wash my car. That's this accurate. Yes. And when I was washing the car, you see these little things in the driveway? Yeah, little cramps. Yeah, when I was washing my-- dad washing my rims and stuff, and I was cleaning up, I found it earring. And I was like, oh, you know, it's probably from the previous people that lived there. And so I went to my husband and I'm like, look, what-- you know, and there was like little-- it was like a red thing, and it was like a smudge like fingerprint look on the back. Just red like maroon, like old looking. And as much that it was like half a fingerprint. And I was like, look, Joe, look at this. And I said, I'm going to put it in a baggy and in a file. And I put it with all the other things, all the hate millerhead, everything, right? And then, I don't know how the cops found out about it. Oh, I think they came and interviewed my husband. How was that work? And my husband said, well, my wife found it earring, too. And he said, I want that earring. You need to give it to us for evidence. And so my husband, it was in a baggy and he gave it to him. So I mean, we didn't know any what else to do. And so we gave it to him. Then we went to when we had to go to our depotitions, which was really, really weird and odd. And we were separate. We couldn't be together. Me and my husband with the smarts. I've never met the smarts before. It was so sad and horrific because I felt like they thought I knew something and I didn't, you know what I mean? And they had never heard about the earring. And I was like, I gave it to the cops. Now we gave it to the cops, but they never, and they gave him those information. That was the first time they heard of the earring. And then they're like, that was a big ordeal. It's all in my deposition and everything. I said, I gave it to them. And now they're saying, I think they said they got it, but they lost it. But it gets kind of weirder than that. Sergeant Dave Petrovsky tells the Mustang daily that the earring was never even booked into evidence. Because they did a quote, visual inspection and determined that it wasn't Christens. I don't know what this means because the smart family was never given a chance to view it and the Sheriff's Department doesn't go into any more detail except to say that it looked like one a small child would wear. Because the earring's lost forever now, we can never know for sure. I made a note to ask Mary to draw me a picture from memory, but she's done me one better than that. Because earlier that week, she walked into the mall and bought a nearly identical pair. This is not the earring, but this is and this is a lot smaller, but this is a clone to what it looked like except for the turquoise was more in the tear drop shape of the earring too. James Murphy had a billboard. And on that billboard, she has, she's wearing a necklace that matched. And I told my husband, "Look, look, that is one of her earrings." Mary's right about the similarity. In the picture on the billboard in the Eroio Grande Village and many other from the same series of senior portraits, Kristen is wearing a necklace. Hanging in the middle are three silver pendants, each with a small blue-green stone in the center. It looks exactly like the stand-in earring she's holding in front of me. I'll clarify that whenever either of us describe the earring as silver or turquoise, we're actually describing the colors as opposed to the materials. Mary doesn't think that the earring she found was an expensive one, but something that a typical teenager would wear. The Sheriff's Department disagreed. Sheriff Ed Williams tells the telegram Tribune that Mary's description of the earring, quote, "is not supported by the many people who saw it, but absent having the earring, we can't disprove that." I read Mary an article from the Mustang Daily, where Sergeant Petrowski also challenges her description. "Date Petrowski does not believe the silver necklace in the photograph matches the earring. He said the earring did not have any turquoise in it." "Oh, that is a full-blown light. That's a full-blown light." "Turquoise in it." It says, "Well Murphy said last year recalls that it did include turquoise." Petrowski says, "It certainly was not a match, but without it, I can't prove that." "Wow." Could Mary's memory of the earring be wrong? If the earring contained no turquoise, as Sergeant Petrowski says, "Could her image of it have changed over the past 23 years to match Kristen's necklace on the billboard?" Well I can kind of answer that one, because in a Santa Maria Times article from January 24, 1997, more than a month before the earring was even reported missing, the smart say that Mary's description was that it contained a "turquoise or turquoise colored stone." So it's not her memory. Now the two options seem to be that either Mary is lying about what the earring looked like right from the start, or the sheriff's detectives were lying about what the earring looked like. I don't know which is the case, but one important thing to factor in is that if Mary was describing the earring this way before she even knew that it had been lost, then she was risking the sheriff's department releasing photos of it to dispute her description. And that's not what happened. Instead, it disappeared. This is where conspiracy theories about this case come in. Could the sheriff's department really have misplaced something this important, or were they intentionally covering something up? I won't speculate on this because I have no idea. But there's one piece of Mary's story that I think is even more chilling than the earring. There was a corner, and then they planted like a planner, which was really weird because they laid cement, and then they waited, and then they laid a double cement. And my husband was like, flowers aren't going to grow like that. You know, you need soil. And I'm getting freaked out because at night I'm hearing this in the backyard, in the master bedroom, I'm hearing this beep, every night at 420 in the morning, you know, a watch like go, beep, beep, beep, beep, since a day I moved in. And me and my mom went back there and trying to put a stick like to see where we could do. Remember that? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure. I'm not even looking out the window trying to figure out exactly where the student went go from because there was cement. Yeah. So there was dirt there. There was cement. What did you think, what area did you think it was coming from? Like where my bedroom window was? Huh. Right below her bedroom window. Yeah. And we were poking all around. It was a plan that they put in. According to the depositions of the next door neighbors, they saw these planter boxes being cut out of the existing concrete over the summer of 1996 after Kristen's smart went missing and before the last that her family moved in. Again, remember when Paul told detectives that he needed to leave his interview on June 19th to clean up concrete at his mom's house? This places the date of the concrete work before June 19th. And the watch that Mary heard beeping? Sharon remembers it just as well. She occasionally spent the night with Mary when Joe was working overnight at the hospital and both of them went into the backyard to find the source of the noise, crawling around the planter boxes on their hands and knees, pushing sticks down into the soil until they hit more concrete below to try to find a watch. Mary thinks the time of the alarm 420 am is a marijuana reference which was popular with college students at the time and still is. Otherwise 420 in the morning seems like a very strange time for a teenager to set their watch alarm for. But I want to play you a clip from Denise Smart, which you already heard in episode 1. Eureus DeVol, Mary says that eventually the watch battery died and the alarm stopped going off, which implies that it had probably been placed there not long before her family moved in. After cooperating with the detectives and attorneys, the Lasseter family are evicted from the house in early March, right around the same time the earring was lost. Because they have 30 days to vacate the premises, the Lasseter's give James Murphy's office permission to search the house in the backyard before they move out. Susan and Ribbon turned to complete 360, evicted us for doing the deposition, gave us an eviction notice. We don't want to live there anymore anyways, because of all the hate and everything. They should have told us in the beginning, if somebody passes away in a house, you're supposed to tell somebody, they should have told us that information before we rented it. And they were telling us, no, you can't let people come into my house. This is our house and then the lawyers told me and showed me that if you are a tenant there, you have rights that anybody come there because it's you're paying rent there. Even though somebody else owns it, you have a right to let anybody come and check and do what they want. So after they did all this and they were cheating us very, you know, hatefully and stuff, but I would have done it anyways. I'm like, what do I have the right that I can do? I was asking James Murphy and I'm like, what can I do without getting in trouble? You know, 'cause it's their home, but I'm running. They said, well, you are there, you can do whatever they want. And I had people asking me to let them do X-ray. I let them do that. I let them do whatever I said you guys can do whatever you want to do while I'm here. That's legal. Now I just don't want to get in trouble. So I let them do it all. I think they even brought dogs. On March 3rd, 1997, James Murphy's office organizes a search of the East Branch Street house with Carda cadaver dogs and a geologist. The dogs search the attic and a crawl space underneath the home, but don't find anything. They do react, though, to the corner of the backyard where the aluminum garbage can used to be. The one that the lascitors were asked not to use and that Ruben was insistent about picking up right before Mary found the earring. The Flores is attorney dismisses this and says that dogs typically react when they sniff trash cans. But my understanding is that these dogs are trained to sniff out human-specific chemicals because they're often searching through garbage or landfills to find human remains. Regardless, their search turns up nothing. But the geologist does a ground penetrating radar sweep of the backyard and in his interview with police, he says he found some anomalies underneath the concrete on the west side of the yard, but was 85 to 90% sure it was natural and not man-made. However, he tells police he harbors a slight doubt because this is the first search he's ever done for a human body and he didn't have the proper equipment for it. Also, he says he was troubled by pieces of broken concrete in the yard, which he was told were left over from work, Paul and Ruben Flores had done the previous summer. And by stains on the west side of the house, which indicated that dirt had been piled up against it for a period of time and splatters of dirt on the fence. Mary Lasseter has never been able to shake the thought that Kristen's body could have been in that backyard at some point. If she was there, I don't think she's there now. I believe that they probably moved her. Do you feel like she was there at the time that you were living there? Yes. I definitely do. The Lasseter's move out in April of 1997 and rather than finding new tenants are selling the house. Susan Flores moves into it herself. The address and pictures of the house have been printed in newspapers and rumors start to circulate throughout the community with people driving by, taking pictures, honking their horns, knocking on the door and sending her mail. Still, it's not enough to get Susan to move anywhere else. The smart family takes a different approach. Denise Smart carefully assembles and packages a collage with pictures of Kristen from birth through adulthood, with a desperate plea for the Flores family to tell police what they know. Denise writes, "As one mother to another, I hope you can empathize with my sense of loss. The hardest part is not knowing. Not being able to share in her future is one thing, but not being able to give her one last celebration of love and laying her to rest in the presence of her family and friends is still another. Please help us." Susan Flores returns the package a week later, with a note. "If I wanted to see pictures of your daughter, I would have asked for them. Look at them yourself." So the Sheriff's Department didn't know that Susan was living in the Branch Street House in May of 1996 when Kristen went missing. So they never filed a warrant to search that house, the way they did Rubens. They didn't do any forensics at either house. They didn't ask to search any of the Flores family's vehicles. And they lost a potential piece of evidence, which even appeared to have something resembling blood on it. But still, the Sheriff's biggest mistake, in my opinion, doesn't come until May of 1997, just before the one-year anniversary of Kristen's disappearance. Attorneys have not been able to depose Paul Flores or his parents yet, but on May 23, Sheriff Ed Williams tells the San Luis Obispo Telegram Tribune, quote, "We need Paul Flores to tell us what happened to Kristen's smart. The fact of the matter is, we have very qualified detectives who have conducted well over 100 interviews and everything leads to Mr. Flores. There are no other suspects. So absent something for Mr. Flores, I don't see us completing this case. It's a premature and resigned admission. And when Paul Flores is finally deposed on November 14, 1997, he takes the sheriff's advice. Where did you attend high school? On the advice of my attorney, I refused to answer that question based on the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution. What is the name of your father? What is your mother's name? What is your sister's name? Does your mother have a sister? On the advice of my attorney. His attorney, Melvin Delamott, has brought a printed sheet of paper for Flores to read from. Each time Murphy asks a new question, Delamott taps the paper in front of Paul. For the record, I would indicate that the witness is repeatedly looking at and having his attention directed by Mr. Delamott to an 8 1/2 inch by 11 inch piece of white paper with some black lettering, which is upside down. And I can't read it from here, but I think I know what it says because the witness has read it into the record on a number of occasions. I would like that. I would ask that a copy of that document that the witness has been reviewing be attached as an exhibit to this deposition and incorporated into the record. I think probably the best way to do this, Mr. Delamott, I'm not trying to be disrespectful of your position. I know of you and your reputation in our legal community. Nonetheless, I believe that the position that you are taking is clearly erroneous. I believe that it is a violation of the rules of civil proceedings. I know that you have done some civil work, but your instruction to your client to refuse to answer even the most simple and basic question, including questions that have absolutely no tendency and fact or law to incriminate him, is I believe misplaced. Nonetheless, if it is your position that Mr. Flores is not going to answer questions about his employment, his matriculation into Cal Poly, who his friends are, his relationship with his family members, things that occurred in his life prior to the date of the disappearance of Kristen Smart, vehicles that were available to him to use, things of that sort, perhaps I can cut to the chase and simply make a record as to the types of questions that I would be asked, and we can just have the blanket invocation. I get your position on that on the record, so when I go to a reviewing court, I have a clear and fair record. As I indicated, he plans to answer that he will invoke the fifth amendment on all your questions. If you have questions to direct to my client, go ahead and ask questions. Save the speeches for later, just ask the questions. Well, Mr. Delamott, it's not a speech. It's a civil procedure. If you're not going to ask questions, we'll discontinue the deposition leave. You're here to take a deposition. If you want to ask questions, go ahead. I'm going to make a record of my position in this case, Mr. Delamott. You can make the record some other time. Ask the questions us what a deposition is for. Not to make a speech. You can make speech to the court. You can do it in writing. You can do it orally. Ask the questions. We're here to answer the questions. We're required to do so. Ask the questions. Or we'll leave. It goes on like this for the entire tape. In May of '96, were you a student at Cal Poly? Paul refuses to answer a single question. It's pretty much the nail and the coffin for the case, for a while at least. 1998 moves by slowly, without any significant new developments. Denise Smart describes the investigation as a case without a lead agency. The Sheriff's Department says publicly that they're merely assisting Cal Poly, while Cal Poly says the case has been turned over completely to the sheriff. In July, Sheriff Ed Williams announces that he's leaving his position in August to take a new job with the state board of prison terms, so the title of Sheriff is passed off to a chief deputy until a new election can be held in November. It is objectively a mess. Even the governor of California agrees. On August 11, On November 13, 1998, Governor Pete Wilson signs the Kristen Smart Campus Safety Act and the law, which requires campus police to involve law enforcement in their investigations right from the start to avoid a situation like this from happening again. And it's well timed, because on November 13, 1998, another Cal Poly student goes missing. Rachel Newhouse's last scene leaving tortilla flats restaurant at 1051 Nipomo Street to walk back to her house on Gertrast Street. San Luis Obispo Police Department captain Bart Topham's comments to San Maria Times are impossible not to read as a direct reaction to the way that Kristen's case was investigated. Quote, "From early on, we jumped all over this. That is the only way to put it. We were satisfied early on that Newhouse was not following her usual pattern. It was not normal." Rachel's case is never treated as a runaway. The police department acts quickly, and within a day, a trail of Rachel's blood is found on the Jennifer Street bridge, a large structure that leads pedestrians over the top of the Amtrak station and into Rachel's neighborhood. San Luis Obispo goes wild with murmurs that the two disappearances are connected. Each girl stop walking by themselves at night, and the normally quiet town starts to buzz with nervous energy. It erupts into full-blown panic when a third college student, Andrea Crawford, goes missing from her duplex in the railroad district, a half mile away from where Rachel Newhouse's blood was found. Rumors start to spread that a serial killer is on the loose in San Luis Obispo, but the town doesn't have to speculate for long. As a month after Andrea's disappearance, the killer confesses, "Rex Allen Krebs, a convicted rapist, says he abducted and murdered Rachel Newhouse and Andrea Crawford, and both bodies are recovered from nearest secluded Davis Canyon home. While there are parallels between all three cases, Christen's is the outlier. Her body isn't found, and Krebs was in prison for rape at the time of her disappearance. Christian wasn't one of his victims. It's strange to say that as much of a nightmare as the families of Newhouse and Crawford have been through, the smart family are envious of one thing that they have. Answers. Let's not lose sight of Paul Flores. After being denied by the Navy in late 1996, he moved in with his sister and her husband, in an apartment in Irvine, and got a job at Blockbuster. Until the video rental store got a package in the mail, with news clippings about Paul's connection to the disappearance of a missing girl, and he was fired. In 1997, he's hired as part of the inaugural crew of an Outback Steakhouse, and starts working in the kitchen late that summer. Months ago, one of his former co-workers stumbled upon my Instagram before I'd even put out my first episode. I recognize her name from my research and reach out to her, but she's a little spooked, and says she's not interested in telling her story on the podcast. Until a few months later, when her husband tells her that it could be therapeutic to talk about that time in her life, she doesn't want to use her real name, so I'll call her Melinda. So that was just kind of my early party period, just kind of working in restaurants, and not really having a whole lot of plans, just kind of saving up some money and being a kid, the restaurant had just opened, so we were on the opening team. He was in the kitchen, and I was serving, so that's how I met him. He just seemed to me personally, I kind of felt sorry for him because he was kind of a loner, if you will. I mean, that's kind of the impression I got. He had a really bad stuttering problem. He had a hard time communicating, but he just seemed genuine at the time. Just seemed like he was just kind of a nice humble guy. And so we would hang out after work every once in a while, just have a drink and talk about the day or whatever, and he just seemed very innocent, kind of like, "Yeah, I just feel sorry for him." You know what I mean? It's hard to describe, but at that time, it was just like, "Oh, he's working in the kitchen. He doesn't have a lot of friends, and he didn't have a license." I guess I knew he had had a couple DUIs, but I didn't know if I knew that at the time, or if I found that out later or whatever, but so I would give him rides home, and you know, we'd go out with friends drinking or whatever. I would always take him home, and I just felt bad for him. We started hanging out more like January of '98 with friends and stuff, and he didn't have a license that little time, and then he moved to an apartment which was right across the street from where we worked. It's a time I was naive and just turned 21, so I was like, "Oh, we're all drinking in partying, and I didn't really know the scope of things." But whenever we did go out, he seemed to go from 0 to 60, which either he had a low tolerance or he had been drinking prior to what's going out. The problem with the fact that whenever he did drink a lot is when he started getting really weird. For one, he would stop stuttering when he drank a lot. So at the time, I was thinking, "Well, maybe that's his insecurity." So he would drink a lot to not stutter, but he would get very affectionate, but not in a good way. More of a nowadays, it'd be considered just way out of line. Back in those days, it still was out of line, but in that day in age working in restaurants, you're goofing around with people and you're like, "Okay, yeah, okay. He just gave me a great back off, dude." He would constantly talk about how he was a virgin, and I thought that was odd. Like, "Okay, thank you for sharing that information." It was just like, "Okay, hi guys, we're whatever." So like I said, I would be the designated driver, not necessarily not drinking, but because the fact that he would need to write home, and we were hanging out with just a group of guys and myself, basically, we were all friends. And the other guys would be like, "All right, we're taking off. You can do with him." It was like, "Oh, great. Thanks, guys. I get to do with drunk Paul." It was always kind of like the, "I'd roll my eyes like, all right, but I want people to make sure people get home safe. I don't want to just say, "Oh, forget you." Usually, the couple times I would take him home and he would just like try to like hit on me in the car and he was drunk, you know, and I'd just like, "Get out. Come on. I've tried to be nice about it because it was just like, "I treat it." I treat drunk people like toddlers because you just kind of go, "Okay, you know, all right, it's all good. Come on, I'm not going to be mad because it kind of sets them off." You never know. So, a couple times I would take him home and he would just, "Oh, come on. Just give me a kiss. Just give me a kiss." I'd like, you know, like, reach in for a kiss and I'd be like, "Now, I have to get out of the car. I want to make sure you're getting home safe." And then, as one particular night, he just would not stop and he wouldn't get out of my car. And he wasn't physically touching me or doing anything necessarily, but he just kept saying, "Okay, if you give me a kiss, I'll go inside. If you give me a kiss, if you just give me one kiss." And I'm like, "No, Paul, we're friends. I'm not doing that." You know, and it was just creepy. It got to the point where I was like, "Okay, what can I do to get you into the house besides physical anything?" You know? And finally, I said, "If I walk you to your door, will you please just go in house?" So this is, when I was 3 a.m., and finally, I was like, "Okay." And so I walked him up to his sister's apartment and it's a second story. And we get up there and somehow, when he opened the door, Allison, he just like picked me up, carried me inside. And at this point, like I said, I had no reason to be afraid of him. It was just like, "Oh my gosh. There he goes again." And turned around and he shut the apartment door and locked it. And there was no life on them there. And I'd say, "Paul, you better turn some lights on in here right now." And I'd never been in there before, so I didn't know where the switches were. And he didn't, it was like, there was a good pause, but it was enough for me to go, "Okay, this is really weird. This is not normal even for him." So I said, "You better turn some lights on right now and let me out." Or I'm going to scream. Apparently his sister was home. I don't know. So like I said, it was 3am, so I was swimming, she was asleep. And so he reluctantly, he turned the lights on and then he tried to get me to go into the bedroom. And I was like, "No, I'm leaving. Right now, I told you I would walk you up here, make sure you were safe, and I'm out of here." He's like, "Oh, just come into my room. I want to show you my liquor bottle collection." Or something like that. Many, many bottles. And I'm like, "No, I'm flat out not going into your room. You know, let me out of here." So eventually, he unlocked the apartment door and I left. It was just so strange because I was like, "Okay, that was really uncomfortable." Like I said, he would get drunk and do weird things, but I would just laugh it off. But this one was like, "This was spooky." And then I left and it's funny because I was looking, you know, I was telling you, I was reading my old journal, and I said, "I got home at 330. Paul promised not to touch me anymore." And I don't remember, but it made it, from reading that, it made it sound like he had touched me before. It's really strange how I have a really creepy good memory and I don't remember any touching, but I did write that. So I don't know. In February of 1998, Melinda started dating one of their other co-workers from Outback. And Paul and her new boyfriend decided to move in together. Just two months later, 2020 would air a special about the Kristen Smart case, which prominently featured recent video of Paul in front of the apartment complex where her boyfriend was living with him. Somewhere around February, March of '98 is when they moved into an apartment together. just the two of them. I don't remember a particular reason for it, necessarily, just the fact that they had both, were looking for something at the same time and they found one apartment across the street from our work. Somebody said that there's gonna be a special about it, this case that he was involved with, that he was a suspect and we're all kind of like, "What, I don't remember now that I know all the details, "of course it's easy to say. "I don't remember at the time how much details "were given to us, but I did know that it was going to air." So we were at my parents' house and we were watching the show and we were just like mind-blown, just a couple months previous where he locked the door behind us and his apartment and I thought, "Oh my gosh, I can totally see this happening." That was my first reaction was, "Yep, "like everyone goes, "Oh my gosh, this person would ever do "such a thing, I can't believe it." It was like, "Oh, it makes a lot of sense now." - They were so creeped out by the 2020 episode that her boyfriend didn't want to go home to his apartment that night where Paul was. In fact, he took the opportunity to move into Melinda's apartment so he wouldn't have to be alone with Paul again. Paul was fired from Outback's take house around the same time and investigators came down to Irvine to interview his co-workers. Melinda stopped hanging out with him as much but still had to visit his apartment a few times as her boyfriend moved his stuff out to move in with her. - When I did see him, he would not make eye contact. At all, for good reason. We were in there doing stuff and he was there, but he was just very, very withdrawn. Wouldn't say anything, wouldn't look at me. But I do remember a few times being over there who would be messages from Paul's mom on the answer machine. Just like Paul, and he talked to you, how can we have a call to us? "We really need to talk. Why isn't he calling his mom?" - Melinda and her boyfriend weren't together for long and eventually he moved out and Melinda got a job in another restaurant, five miles south. Paul applied there too and didn't get hired, but that didn't stop him from hanging outside. - He wasn't hired, but he kept cruising by. Every time I would work, he would just circle the place on his bike and just kind of look in the windows. What are you doing other than just talking me or watching me, I don't know, very strange. - And remember all the stories from the last episode about Paul just randomly showing up places he wasn't invited to? He would appear at random places. And I stayed plural because I know that happened more than once, but I couldn't tell you where the first one was. That one my husband, he was my boyfriend at the time, but in '99 we were hanging out at a bar in Costa Mesa and Paul shows up, "Hey, good, like we see him all the time." And he just kind of stood there and I introduced him to, and my husband and it was just kind of like, "Okay." - And that's the last time Melinda ever saw him. But her story is familiar and it helps to establish that Paul Flores, before and after Kristen's disappearance, was crossing boundaries with women, making them uncomfortable, cornering them when he got them alone, and stalking them long after they made it clear that he was not welcome. Back up on the central coast, Sheriff Patrick Hedges has inherited the Kristen Smart Case. And with some outside help from the FBI, things are starting to pick up momentum again. In early 1999, the FBI interviews over a thousand former Cal Poly students, who were attending the college when Kristen disappeared. They comb the campus again and even sift through dirt under the student academic services building after following up on a tip. No new evidence is found. But as the year 2000 rolls around, the FBI and the Sheriff's Department start to go back over the details they've gathered so far. And they see a pretty strong lead, a lead from the first year of the investigation, which has already been checked out, but they think it's still compelling enough to compile into a search warrant affidavit, which reads, "Reasonable cause exists to believe that Kristen's smart's body is buried in the backyard of Susan Flores' home on East Branch Street." Next time. You've been listening to your own backyard, episode three, their own backyard. 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 Vandruplas, Derek Payne, Jamie Lewis, Garenson Claire, Sandy Arnold, April Cole Warley, Carrie Quimby-Zennitch, Alyssa Brigham, Kaelin Pope, Sydney Brant, Olivia Dijonero, Dallas Bronson, Giovanna Cernacola, and Matthew Frank. If you feel that you have information that could help law enforcement with their investigation, you can directly contact San Luis Obispo Sheriff's detectives at 805-781-4500. Wanna reach out to us directly? Send an email to your own backyard podcast at gmail.com or visit our website at yourownvacyardpodcast.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. Wanna help keep Kristen's memory alive? You can donate to the Kristen Smart Scholarship at christensmart.org. A note from the smart family. The statute of limitations in this case has expired on everything except murder. Anyone who comes forward with information will not be charged with any crime. [BLANK_AUDIO]