Episode 04: Son Of Susan

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. At 8 a.m. on June 19, 2000, a team of sheriff's investigators knocks on the front door of Susan Flores is East Branch Street home. With them is a group of FBI evidence response team members and a search warrant drafted by an FBI special agent. The 22 page affidavit for the warrant lays out in detail several reasons for focusing their search at this house. First, Paul Flores admits to being the last person with Kristen Smart on the night she disappeared. Then, the stories that Paul told his roommate and the police about the walk back to the dorms didn't match up. He had a black eye and scratches on his hands and knees the same weekend that Kristen disappeared and told three different stories about how he got them. He even admitted to lying to police about the first story so he wouldn't sound like a clutz. Then, Cardi cadaver dogs alerted to the mattress, telephone and waste basket in Paul's Santa Lucía Hall dorm room for the sin of human decomposition. Through all of the three story self-mountain residence halls, which each house about 600 students, Paul's was the only one that the dogs alerted on. Then, Susan Flores is next door neighbors deposed that they saw Paul and Ruben doing construction work in Susan's backyard, not long after Kristen went missing, and afterwards said that they saw a new lattice work and a series of planter boxes which had been cut out of the existing cement in the backyard. After Susan rented the house out to the Lasseter family that fall, Joe Lasseter deposed that one of those planter boxes measured six feet in length and three feet in width, and he says he couldn't get flowers to grow in it because after six inches of soil, he hit a second layer of cement. The warrant lists the earring the Lasseter's found and the dark reddish smudge on it, as well as the cadaver dogs, who reacted to the spot where Ruben's garbage can was kept. Since that last search in March of 1997, a garage has been constructed over the top of this area. A garage that seems to me, unnecessary. It doesn't house any cars that I know of, and it blocks access to the backyard from the driveway. The warrant also includes the findings of the ground penetrating radar search in 1997, in which the geologist said he found anomalies under the concrete and saw evidence that dirt had been piled up alongside the west side of the house for a period of time, and broken pieces of cement which he was told were left by Ruben and Paul Flores in the summer of 1996. In conclusion, the affidavit reads, "Christin Smart is deceased, and either died in Paul Flores his dormitory room, or was placed there for an unknown period of time. Based on the information in this affidavit, Paul Flores is responsible for, or has direct knowledge of Christin Smart's disappearance and/or death. Reasonable cause exists to believe that Christin Smart's body is buried in the backyard of Susan Flores' home on East Branch Street. I've only amended that quote to leave out the actual house number. Armed with the warrant, investigators spend nine hours at the house, where Susan now lives with her 90-year-old grandmother, and her boyfriend, Mike McConville, her former real estate partner at Pradential Hunter. The evidence response team searches a crawl space under the front porch, which is accessible from the side of the house, and the large attic, which is spacious enough to walk around in. The warrant gives them permission to search all rooms and buildings, outbuildings, garages, yard areas, trash containers, storage areas, and containers used in connection with, or within the curtallage of said premises and buildings. For the following property, one, the remains of Christin Smart's body, and two, clothing and personal property of Christin Smart. At 5 p.m., they wrap up the search. Because they're using more advanced ground penetrating radar than the 1997 search, they determine that it's not necessary to dig up the concrete. But the GPR results are ultimately inconclusive, and the moment they leave the property, the search warrant expires, and the property can never be searched again, without a brand new reasonable cause. It's the start of a second nightmare for the Smart family. On the surface at least, law enforcement seems to have exhausted their leads, and with no new developments to report, the rest of the year 2000 passes without any mention of Christin Smart in local newspapers. It seems like the community is starting to move on with their lives and forget about their daughter. Sometimes help can come from the most unlikely candidate, and the candidate is about to pack up his van with everything he owns and drive 2,561 miles across the country to make sure that nobody forgets about Christin Smart, especially not the Flores family. After the second search of Susan Flores' East Branch Street House, things slow down for a while. In May of 2001, the Smart Family hosts a celebration of life for Christin at St. John's Lutheran Church in Arroyo Grande. A reception follows at the shortcliff lodge in Pizmo, which is attended by over 100 friends and family members dressed in Hawaiian attire and sharing memories of a girl who loved the ocean and traveling the world. The Smart's release 5 doves for the 5 years that Christin has been missing. The focus is on Christin Smart as a person, rather than Christin Smart as an unsolved case. The Sheriff Patrick Hedges speaks last, and assures the audience that they won't give up on solving it. When I hear stories like this, it frustrates me to know in that I'm in the future, with the knowledge that Hedges will be the second sheriff to retire without closing the case. A baby born on the day of Christin's celebration of life in 2001 would have headed off to college this fall. In the 852 here in New York, I'm Brian Dumbled. We understand that there has been a plane crash on the southern tip of Manhattan. You're looking at the World Trade Center. We understand that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We don't know anything more than that. We don't know if it was a commercial aircraft. We heard it, and because I was just like standing there, pretty much looking at the window. I didn't see what caused it or if there was an impact. So you have no idea where to write that out? Another plane just hit. Oh my god, another plane has just hit. Another building. We'll write into the middle of it. Explosion. Four months later, the entire world watches on television as the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapse and disappear from the lower Manhattan skyline. In Charlotte, North Carolina, a 6-foot 5-inch healthcare supplies delivery driver named Dennis Mann is watching the broadcast on a small black and white TV in his empty apartment. Everything he owns is in the back of his delivery van. He's about to head to San Luis Obispo with the blessing of his employer to look for Kristen Smart. After sitting to absorb the shock of what's just happened in New York, he unplugges TV and sets out across the country. Dennis isn't an investigator. He's not in law enforcement or forensics. He's not even a psychic. Dennis is just Dennis. Oh, no. I had a long day of travel and I got home and I said, "Oh, man, I need to sleep some." So I just woke up like half hour ago. Dennis's interest started with another case. A girl from his hometown named Kristen Moda-Fairy, who moved to San Francisco for college where she disappeared on June 23, 1997. Dennis looked at her parents in the Charlotte phone book and asked their permission to go to California to look for her. At the time, he had no investigative experience. I always wanted to do something big in my life. I was independent contractor for Aparia Healthcare. They would deliver hospital beds and oxygen tanks to their patients. But it was so busy that they just said, "Dennis, just show up here every single morning." And I ended up working for them for a couple of years just making deliveries. And then when Kristen Moda-Fairy was abducted, I wanted to go out and look for her. San Francisco, the manager of Aparia, his name is Kevin Bacon. He said, "Dennis, go find that girl." And we know. You come back, you have your job day one, so you just go and find a girl. I still have my job waiting for me." After spending some time in San Francisco and forming a relationship with the Modifairy family, Kristen's mother Debbie introduced Dennis to Denise Smart after they appeared together on an episode of Sally Jesse Raphael about their missing daughters. Dennis quickly got involved in both cases, and in May 1998, he traveled down to Irvine to try to talk to Paul Flores. Paul's sister, Irmelinda, answered the door and told Dennis to get off of the property. But instead, Dennis sat at the front door, reading a paperback book. "The reading is later. I see this kid riding a bicycle. It was Paul." I said, "Your Paul?" He goes, "Yeah, hi, I'm Dennis. I was very nice to him. He shook my hand. As soon as he did that, Irmelinda had opened the door again and grabbed Paul. She'd get in there and Paul, and she'd yank him in the house and she slammed the door again. And then about 10 minutes later, the cops were there, and they said, "I had to leave the property." But that was my very first thing I did for the smarts. Now, three years have passed, and Dennis has decided to make a serious effort to get answers out of the Flores family. "It was a day after 9/11, and I'm driving across country in an unmarked 16-foot white van. It was on his last leg, and it actually broke down." He buys a 1991 Buick's Century to finish the trip, which rumbles and groans when he makes turns. "I was in Utah, and I bought another car in Utah. Yeah, I think it was beautiful. Yeah, how did you know that?" When he gets to San Luis Obispo a week later, he applies for a job at Adomenos on Foot Hill Boulevard. It's staffed by a handful of Cal Poly students, and a 41-year-old Dennis, who asks his co-workers on his first shift, "Hey, you guys know about Kristen Smart?" "And not only that, every time I had a delivery to the dorms, it wasn't only peach delivery, I was also asking the kids if they were learning about Kristen Smart." As soon as he settled in, he drives his Buick to a Royal Grande on October 25, 2001, and pulls up to Susan Flores as East Branch Street House for the first time. "This is naive, but I didn't have any contact with the Flores before this. My initial thought was to go dock on the door and sit down and see if I could just talk to it." He knocks on the door, and Susan's boyfriend, Mike McConville, answers. "Mike answered the door and I said, "Hi, my name is Dennis and I don't have to talk to you about Kristen. Let me see some ID. At the time, I just got in a new driver's license in Charlotte, and so I gave Mike my old one. Can I make a copy of this?" I said, "Sure." He was up right back, and so he was gone from about five minutes and he came back, gave my license back so we don't want to talk to you and he closed the door. The denial isn't enough to dissuade Dennis, and he goes back five days later. This time, Susan is home, and she calls the Royal Grande Police Department. Two officers show up and ask Dennis to leave. While they're standing on the sidewalk next to Dennis' car, Ruben Flores shows up and goes into Susan's house. He comes out a minute later holding a camera and starts to take pictures of Dennis. Dennis asks the officer to stop Ruben, but he's told that what Ruben is doing is not illegal, because they're standing on a public street. This is the exact moment that an idea starts to form for Dennis. As long as he remains on public property, he can take pictures of the Flores family, too. And he does. Every day he parks at the curb in front of Susan Flores' house and waits to get a good picture ever. I would build a website in my car, and then I would drive up to San Jose, and I was a pistol to the Internet cafe up there on foot in a boulevard. This one had a plug that you had to compete with the cable into the wall there, and then I would upload to the server. He launches a website, which he calls sonofsusan.com. I named the son of Susan because it was Susan Flores, her son with Paul, and the son of Sam was that famous murderer in New York, so it was a takeoff of that. And he starts to write a book with the same title, which he posts on the website one chapter at a time. Right in the middle of a paragraph, he'll insert a parenthetical that breaks the fourth wall. I've been here for an hour so far, and no police cars, which is a bit surprising. A royal grande police just showed up again. The officer was very sympathetic, but did ask that I consider the wisdom of sitting right in front of the Flores residents. I told him I plan on staying right here, right square in front of their home. I will be here a lot in the coming months. Dennis also travels down to Orange, California over Thanksgiving, and hands out flyers in the neighborhood where Paul is now living with his sister and her husband, to inform neighbors that Paul is a person of interest in the disappearance of a girl. The Flores family and their attorneys call it harassment. It raises some interesting questions about vigilantes. Where is the line? If you're not actually taking the law into your own hands, but simply annoying people, is it okay to do? What if the agency who's supposed to be investigating the family is moving very slowly, losing potential evidence, and publicly tipping off the only suspect that as long as he refuses to talk, he'll never be tried. Then is it okay to bother his family? I don't know the right answer, and I think my mind would change based on whether I was the parent of the missing person, or the parent of the person who was accused of knowing what happened to her. But Susan Flores finally has enough. On April 27, 2002, she calls the police on Dennis again. When an officer arrives, Susan comes out to talk to him, and because she's in public, Dennis starts to take photos over, the same way Ruben did to him months earlier. Susan rages and tackles Dennis' 6-foot-5-250-pound frame to the ground. She pushed in the signs, she jumped on me, so I went right down to the ground, you know, and he quickly had her up and handcuffed her for assault. Sorry, I took photographs of Sergeant Sanchez, handcuffing Susan Flores. They're posted on his website hours later. But while the cops are talking to each other across the street, Dennis has one last exchange with Susan. It's confirmation that the Flores' are paying close attention to Dennis' website. In May of 2002, Paul Flores is sentenced to 8 months in jail for violating his probation by drinking alcohol in a bar in Costa Mesa. The terms of his probation require him to abstain from alcohol for three years, now that he's been pulled over for drunk driving at least three times since 1996. He's set to begin serving his term on May 31, so Dennis shows up at the Santa Barbara County jail with his camera to get more pictures for son of Susan.com and to hand out flyers to other prisoners. When he's informed by a guard that Paul checked himself in one day early, specifically to avoid Dennis. So the website is working. In July 2002, Susan Flores finally files a restraining order against Dennis. The declaration reads, quote, "Defendant Dennis Man is an individual who has taken a personal interest in the disappearance of Kristen Smart and has conducted a self-styled investigation into the matter and has done so with increasing aggressiveness and hostility. As is evident by his efforts and a website he maintains, the defendant is simply consumed with his investigation, notwithstanding the fact that he apparently has no official capacity. The defendant reportedly, A, bears no relationship with the family of Kristen Smart, never knew her and in fact lived 3,000 miles away from San Luis Obispo and the Smart family at the time of the disappearance. B, works for no law enforcement agency and C, possesses no license, education, nor specialized training to conduct investigations. The defendant is a physically imposing person. His persistent appearances in the lives of my family members and myself, his attempts to incite physical action against us, either involving others or himself, and his threats of continued harassment and escalating efforts in that regard, has placed us in a state of vigilance and created great distress in our personal lives. A month later, a judge orders Dennis to stay 50 yards away from Susan Flores, Paul, Ruben, Susan's boyfriend Mike McConville, Paul's sister Irmellinda, and her husband. And deterred, Dennis moves his campaign north to the Cal Poly campus where he marches with a huge sign that reads, "Dig up Susan Flores as Yard" and a notebook to collect signatures for a petition. Local news doesn't know what to make of him. He's referred to as an amateur sleuth and a strange Samaritan in articles. Reporters can't seem to make sense of Dennis, with one piece in the slow tribune describing him as "crazy" and "bizarre" and he's regarded with strong suspicion because he hasn't asked the smarts for any money, and no one can figure out why he's doing this all, in the name of a girl he never even knew. His methods are certainly unorthodox, hosting treasure hunts for buried cash, and drawings that use the name of Paul's gas station co-workers. but it's effective. His Facebook group, Fine Kristen Smart, currently has 96 hundred members who still discuss the case regularly. Dennis becomes a thorn in the Sheriff's Department side too, particularly Steve Bolts, who is the lead detective on the case and will later be named under Sheriff. When Dennis questions Bolts about why Susan Flores' backyard wasn't dug up in 2000 to fulfill the warrant, Bolts apparently tells him that investigators took a vote. And while he voted in favor of a dig, the majority decided that digging up the concrete would be too costly. I say apparently because once Dennis shares this information on son of Susan.com, Bolts denies ever having said it, so you can decide who you believe. Bolts claims that the search warrant didn't authorize a dig and the vote taken was whether or not to apply for a second warrant to do so. So Dennis emails the FBI agent who wrote the warrant and the agent's response, which Dennis proudly displays on his website to this day, reads quote, "The first warrant authorized a dig. I know this because I provided most of the info for the warrant. I forced the warrant on a skeptical police force. I was told the officer's present did not want to pay for repairs in case the search turned up nothing. That was a lost opportunity." "That was a lost opportunity." Meanwhile, for every year that passes without the case being closed, Paul Flores is continuing to live a fairly normal life and meeting women in Southern California who have no idea who he is. One woman who I spoke to recently even dated Paul for a few years and might be the only real girlfriend he's ever had. Looking back now, she feels like all of the signs were right in front of her and on more than one occasion that Paul was on the verge of confessing something big. "My dated Paul early in my 20s, he seemed like a nice person in the beginning. There was something always odd about him and his family. There was always lots of lots of secrets. He didn't have very many friends. He drank too much. He was physically and verbally abusive. Just not somebody you want to be around. His parents were paying all his bills. His dad said, "So this is the girl that you're spending all your money on and paying for dinners. Why don't you make her pay?" And that was the first time I met his dad. There was times where he was obviously intoxicated and he very often would tell me he had something he has to say but he was so intoxicated that I couldn't really never got an answer. He always said he had something to tell me. I thought it was like he was being unfaithful. He was just like, "What do you have to tell me?" And then he would always just pass out and never tell me. There was a couple instances when he was drinking and stuff like we were horse playing once and then he took it to the next level and he had like a butter knife and he held it to my neck and I was screaming and my roommate actually kicked down the door to make him stop. And seeing and experiencing the things that I experienced, I very much thank he is capable of it. He's a liar. He's an alcoholic. I know he never did it in front of me or in the presence of me but I knew in the past there might have been drugs. Drugs and alcohol mixed together I absolutely think something happened and he was a very big part of it. From experience there was many incidents where he got intoxicated around family and friends and would just exhibit really odd behavior. He was really inappropriate with a lot of my friends and family when intoxicated. Whether somebody helped them or not, I don't know. I think maybe the parents do play a part in it. They are pretty active in his life. They pay for everything for him. But I do think that the parents know something and they're very close-lipped with the information that they do have. They don't let anybody in. We went to his mom's house and we walked around the neighborhood. I even remember saying, "I don't know why did someone put this huge billboard right next to your mom's house?" The Kristen Smart one and I remember that really. Like, who would do that? That's so rude and I never knew anything until afterwards. Which I didn't know the story but she said that her backyard got dug up because they were remodeling. They never mentioned it was because of a police investigation but that was a very short visit. It was not comfortable at all. When we broke up, I had got my first laptop on my own and I was really excited and I Googled everything and I started googling all my exes and when I Googled his name, all the Kristen Smart stuff came up and kind of everything fell into place and made sense. And when I called my family and told them they earned an agreement with me that something was always like odd about him and off but they respected me enough never to say anything in front of me but they could see the thing that the piece is lining up. It kind of made sense. Even when we broke up, he had called me obviously he was either drinking or had something to tell me he was crying but I heard his mom in the background tell him to hang up the phone. "Paw, hang up that phone!" So I never found out what it was that he had to tell me. In 2005, the Central Coast plays host to one of the biggest media trials in history. When Michael Jackson is charged with molesting a minor and the proceedings are held at the Santa Barbara County Superior Court in Santa Maria. Cameras are on every street corner and Dennis Mann is there for it with a huge banner now held up by two symbolic shovels which reads "Dig up Susan Flores as Yard" "I have to say 50 yards away no problem. I'll just say 60 yards away. So I had a big banner, big signs that "Dig up Susan Flores as Yard" is walking around town and I made sure that I was more than 50 yards away and I got arrested anyway." More than once, he's arrested in February after he walks by the real estate office where Susan is working part-time which he claims not to know. And then he spends 20 days in jail that May during the nine-year anniversary of Kristen's disappearance. Dennis is a pest but a pest with a point. Years are passing and the smart family still doesn't know where their daughter is. Paul Flores hasn't talked and this is just 2005. If you're here in 2019 with me, you know that 14 years later, neither of those things have changed. So what can we as concerned citizens do? Are we supposed to sit idly by as law enforcement assures us that they're actively working on this case even as 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and beyond pass without a resolution? I don't know but it doesn't sit well with Dennis Mann. Good evening, man. Good evening, City Council. My name is Dennis Mann. I'm from Charlotte, North Carolina. I'm a little far away from home tonight and I'm here representing the family interests of Kristen's smart and I assume that everybody here is very familiar with her. For those of you who do not know who Kristen's smart was, she was a Cal Poly freshman in 1996 and in the evening of May 25, 1996, she disappeared and six years later the San Josevista court declared Kristen legally deceased. The police have identified Paul Ruben Flores as the prime suspect in the case and tonight in the Tennessee we have Paul's mother Susan and her boyfriend Mike Maconville. The reason why I'm here tonight is on May 25th is going to be nine years and everybody in this room agrees that nine years is just too long. There's not really anything specific the mayor of City Council can do but I just think it's important for Kristen's memory that her name be spoken in this chamber tonight. In June of 2000, police got a search warrant to get on Susan Flores' property to look for Kristen or items belonging to her. They used ground penetrating radar. The FBI told Mr. Mrs. Martin that there were some anomalies in the backyard and so the results were inconclusive. So the reason why you see me around town right now at the sign says dig up Susan Flores' backyard is I'm hoping that law enforcement can get a second search warrant. The Flores do not like the fact that I'm in town but I have a standing offer. Spent up there for years that if they will wave to fit the amendment and agree to cooperate with the San Josevista Sheriff's Department. Answer all their questions to their satisfaction. Then I will ship my website down. I'll shred that banner and I'll go back to North Carolina the same night. But by and large I just the name of Kristen Denise smart needs to be spoken in this chamber. There's nothing specific you guys can do but you are the powers that be in this community and it means a lot to Mrs. smart just to say her name in front of you. That's about all I have and I thank you for giving the opportunity to speak here tonight. Thank you for your comments. And then after the town hall was over I said I want to say I need to go get my sign and this surprised me. They didn't and they just court me back to it. They said, oh, just go back there and get it, no problem, just go back there. So I walked back down that hallway by myself and I walked into the conference room in the back and guess what I see? I see the police chief that I was just talking to. I see another guy and then I see Mike Macondo. But here's the thing, they weren't sitting at the desk. They were leaning back, one of those, you know, 500 hour government chairs that leaned back and had to speed up on the chair next to the room on the table and they had a toothpick in them out. They were back there shooting the shits. And as soon as I walked in, they saw me and I also snapped to attention. And I just looked at them and said, "Oh, this explains a lot." And I got my sign and I walked in right back outside. That's a true story. Dennis continues to update son of Susan regularly until August 2005, when in the turn of all turns, Susan Flores and Mike Maconville file a lawsuit against Stan and Denise Smart. The suit charges that Dennis is acting at the behest of the smart family and that Stan and Denise are therefore legally and financially responsible for the Flores family's severe emotional distress and lost income. It's a devastating blow to the smart family who still don't know where their daughter is and who have no agency over Dennis' man. But there's a small silver lining. As part of the discovery proceedings, the suit opens up Susan Flores and Mike Maconville to having their yard searched again, to prove whether or not Dennis' harassment is actually unwarranted. The smarts attorney, Mark Connelly, negotiates with the Flores as attorney without the involvement of the Sheriff's Department. They fly in a ground penetrating radar expert from Denver, Colorado and on March 31, 2007, he meticulously combs the concrete. He finds a few anomalous features that he can't identify and notates the locations. When he's finished, he flies back to Denver and a few months past before the smarts attorney is able to negotiate, having a small portion of the concrete excavated to follow up on some of the anomalies. On May 22, a crew digs up the concrete and the next day the Santa Maria Times runs an article that begins 11 years after Cal Poly freshman Kristen's smart disappeared. Her family has finally ruled out one of the long rumored locations of her body. When I read this article last fall, I almost stopped my research right there. Denise Smart is quoted as saying there's a sense of relief that the backyard is now crossed off. But what Denise doesn't know at the time is that the excavation crew wasn't given permission to dig up certain parts of the yard, including. - There was a six foot by three foot planter that was filled with plants and rocks. Based on our agreements with the attorneys, we could not alter or get into that planter so that was not able to be searched by GPR. And that was of some concern to us. - That's Brenda Gillan, a journalist who is present for the entire ground penetrating radar search in March 2007 and who took meticulous notes for an article she was writing about Professor Lawrence Connures, the radar operator. Notes, which she's kept. - If you don't mind, I'll just kind of read through these. This is kind of the rundown of what I thought were the salient details. We spent all day in Susan Flores' yard. The people present there, according to my notes, were me, Larry Connures, Mark Connally, a videographer whose name I do not know, and to help her. Also present were Susan Flores, her boyfriend, and Ruben Flores. It was a tiny yard on a hill that the yard was nearly completely covered and concrete. The yard was very cluttered with tools, furniture, and debris. All of that had to be moved multiple times throughout the day so that the ground penetrating radar search could get a clear view of what was underneath. Initially, there were three areas of interest that Larry found that he called anomalous features and two features of higher interest, one near the planter. And one nearby. There is no conclusion on whether a body is buried there. I think it's possible that it could have been missed. Investigation was bungled so badly that I believe it was a month before any real law enforcement was brought in. It was 2007, which was 11 years after her disappearance, that Professor Connures and I were there. In that time, I think it might be reasonable to assume that had a body ever been in that location, it could have been moved. The other thing that is not in my notes, but I recall very clearly, is that Susan Flores wanted to make it known that she wasn't afraid that we were going to find anything. But Ruben Flores was quite frightening to me. He was watching us very intently the entire day. We could see him looking at us from inside the house. And my gut feeling is the people who know where Kristen's Mark is are Paul Flores and Ruben Flores. After our conversation, Brenda emails me literally hundreds of photos that were taken that day, which shows Susan's backyard in detail. After a year of research, it's a level of insight that I never thought I would have. I send an email to Professor Lawrence Connures, the ground penetrating radar operator, just to see if he'd be willing to talk. And to my surprise, he tells me he'd love to. What should I call you? Are you Dr. Lawrence? Oh, Larry, you can call me Larry. And so why did they reach out to you as well? Because I, the guy who wrote all the books on it. Larry's not speaking figuratively. He's the author of several textbooks on ground penetrating radar and has degrees in geology, geophysics, and anthropology. He separated the patio into grids and then scanned the sections in 2D, before rendering them in 3D on a portable monitor. We'd be like mowing the lawn back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, with a radar antenna that is very high resolution. And there was a port patio, as I recall. And I've got some pictures in the map of it someplace. And there was some planting beds. And not much else. So essentially, every bit of area in the backyard that was open enough for us to move around in, we collected radar data. Except he wasn't able to search everywhere. Remember the side of the house where it meets the driveway? The spot where the Lasseter family kept their trash cans, where cadaver dogs reacted in March of '97? Susan Flores had a garage built on top of that spot in 1999. There was a supposition that the garage floor had been poured since the abduction, or since the disappearance we'll call it. And so we attempted to get the mother to clean a bunch of the trash out of the garage. And as I recall, it was a trailer of some sort. And we actually pulled the trailer out of the garage. But then it was stacked up with boxes and other stuff like that, that we couldn't get them to move. And so I did collect radar data inside the garage. And what we found was that when they poured the concrete in the garage, they put wire mesh in as reinforcing in it. And that really distorted radar waves. We were getting nothing substantial through that wire mesh. So he wasn't able to read through the garage floor. And he wasn't able to search the soil planter boxes, the ones that were cut out of the concrete in the summer of 1996 before the Lasseter family moved in. Because they were up against the retaining wall and surrounded by brick scalloping that made it impossible to fit his antenna in them. And Susan wouldn't give permission to alter them. He also explains to me that ground penetrating radar can't exactly see through concrete like an X-ray. And it certainly can't image something like a skeleton. I mean, you don't get reflections up bones. I've never seen anybody ever show any results where bones themselves would produce radar reflections. Because the bone chemistry and the bone mineralogy and the way it retains water is not that different than the surrounding ground. And therefore, it does not give contrasts like we would hope. What it does is show where parts of the soil have been disturbed, spots where the earth was dug down into and then refilled. And he does find a few spots like that under the concrete. And so up against that retaining wall, we found a trench that was small. It wasn't the size of a human body. It was maybe two feet long and half a foot wide or something like that. And we found one or two little point sources that would have been buried pieces of junk. I don't know what, beer cans or who knows what. And that was all we found in the backyard. Larry used a 900 megahertz antenna. And when I tell him that the first search of Susan's yard used 200 megahertz, he's a pulp. The first radar operator might as well have been using a lawnmower. the west side. of the house where the first radar operator noted pieces of broken concrete and dirt stains against the wall in the fence? Larry wasn't able to search there for some reason, which he can't recall. Actually, you know what? I think I, well you know, if you're really into this, we should just hang up and call me back in 10 minutes and let me pull out my notes. Absolutely. I know where to find those. Okay. We're going to hang up and let me go down to my archive and find those field notes. Call me back in 10 minutes. You got it. Thank you. Okay. All right. Okay. Yeah, I found my notes. This was March 31st, 2007. East Branch Street, which is the address. You probably know this already. That's right. I'm looking at the map of the backyard. On the north side of the house, there was a closet built onto the north side of the house. And then it was a, also a kind of a ramshackle laundry room that was built on the north east side of the house. And then there was a little area in between the laundry room and the garage that was a poured concrete patio. The story was that it had been there ever since the house was built. And then there was the garage. And the garage was to the east of the house and it projected all the way to the north right up to the property line. In the backyard, there were four planters. There were up against the north wall. Along that north wall, there was a long planter. And then there were three smaller planters that were about a foot and a half square or so that had stuff growing in them. But there were right up against the concrete wall. But these antennas are such that you, you know, you can't go right against the wall because the antennas are wide themselves. For some reason, we never collected data on the west side of the house between the wood fence and the house. And I can't say why. And by the way, my notes also show that that garage, I only went right down the middle of the garage. This is what my memory was that you were, you know, I were talking about. But my memory was right that we couldn't do the side of the garage because it was just stuffed packed in there. So in answer to your question, did we do the whole thing? The answer is no. We didn't do the west of the house. The west side of the house was definitely not surveyed. And the whole garage, I'm still interested in. And if people really are wanting to take another stab at it, the way to do it would be to actually move all that crap out of the garage and then to use the equipment that actually looks through the wire mesh and the floor, which has only been invented in the last few years. Anyway, I hope that helped. So the west side of the yard where the Lassiter family heard a watch alarm beeping every night was not searched. The six foot by three foot planter box couldn't be searched. And the east side of the yard where Mary Lassiter found an earring and where a metal trash can had been stored by Ruben Flores until he came and removed it, the same spot where cadaver dogs showed interest in 1997. There was a garage built right on top of it, which also could not be properly searched. In a follow-up email, I ask Larry to clarify his professional opinion on the status of Susan's backyard and he replies with this. I have learned much about GPR interpretation and complex areas, such as the backyard and garage with all the metal. And looking at my report, I can now see some other things that perhaps could be investigated based on what I have learned about GPR in the last five years or so. I found the report and all my original data just in case something moves along on this. He also reminds me in our phone call that the only reason that any of this happened is because Susan Flores and Mike McConville sued the smart family. The only reason we were able to do anything there was because of the loss of that opened them that up to discovery and that's what allowed us into the backyard. The Flores family suing the smart family led to a partial dig of Susan Flores' backyard. The Flores family sued the smart family because of an unrelenting pizza delivery driver from North Carolina. To this day, Susan Flores' backyard on East Branch Street has never been completely dug up or officially cleared. In 2012, sonofsusan.com goes offline and Dennis Man's new website is even more direct. Dig uptheyard.com, which he still runs today. And Dennis' argument for doing so is simple. Sheriff's investigators had a warrant written by the FBI to search anywhere they suspected Kristen's body or her belongings could be. And by choosing not to dig up the concrete, whatever their reasons might have been, they disobeyed the order and allowed the warrant to expire. He wants it dug up on principle. The cops are to reasonably surged anywhere there's a reasonable expectation that evidence may be okay. I've got an email from the FBI who wrote the warrant telling me the first warrant authorized a dig. They didn't want to do it because they'd have to pay for repairs if Kristen wasn't seeing. That's from the FBI who wrote the warrant. I'm supposed to ignore that. I can't do it, Chris. I can't ignore that. I'm getting emotional now. They got to go do it. They don't get to do it. But I don't think she's there. You've been listening to your own backyard. Episode 4. Son of Susan. 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 Claire, Sandy Arnold, April Cole Worley, Carrie Quimby-Zennich, Alissa Brigham, Kaelin Pope, Sydney Brant, Olivia DeGenero, Dallas Bronson, Javana Sardakola, and Matthew Frank. If you feel that you have information that could help law enforcement with their investigation, you can directly contact San Lucipis Boscheraf's detectives at 805-781-4500. Want to reach out to us directly? Send an email to your own backyard podcast at gmail.com or visit our website at 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. Want to help keep Kristen's memory alive? You can donate to the Kristen Smart Scholarship at christensmart.org. A 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.