Episode 08: The 16-Hour Gap

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. This episode contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners. Murder discretion is advised. Part of the reason that I first got involved with telling the story of Kristen's smart was that things had been too quiet following the excavation of the Cal Poly hillside in 2016. In fact, all of 2017, 2018 and most of 2019, passed with no public updates in the case. Kristen's name appeared in local newspapers, just one time during that three years stretch. When a friend of mine held the 23rd anniversary vigil in May of 2019, at the point of hope in Shell Beach, which was advertised on local news and on social media, only two other people showed up. That all changed in 2020. On January 5, in response to renewed public interest in the case, brand Creative West, a sign shop in a royal grande, replaced the 23 year old billboard in the village, free of charge. The billboard, which I previously described as sunfaded and hard to see, is now bright and vibrant and includes a link to this podcast. On January 18, an article ran in the Stockton record, which quoted Denise Smart as saying that she had recently been contacted by an FBI agent, who had advised her to quote, "Be ready. This is really going to be something you don't expect." I watched all week as theories began to spread on social media, theories which largely disregarded all of the circumstantial evidence that points to what happened to Kristen's smart. Rumors began to spread that Kristen had been found alive in another country, and that she was waiting to be reunited with her parents, or that she had been murdered by a serial killer. One rumor even stated that high-profile celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres were sending coded messages about Kristen's rescue, or that Donald Trump had announced it in a news conference. None of this is accurate. The Smart family has stayed in contact with many investigators over the years, most of whom have long since retired, but continue to offer them friendly advice. In this case, the advice was simply to have a plan in place, since things were obviously heating up in the case again, and you never know when that phone call is going to come. On January 29, I released Episode 7 of this podcast, which ended with a tip that I had received, which brought me to the right place at the right time, to see two trucks in the custody of the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Department. Trucks, which I concluded belonged to the Flores family in 1996. When I confronted Commander Nate Paul with that information, while interviewing him for the podcast, he seemed caught off guard. If I received a tip that told me that you guys had recently recovered one of the Flores family's vehicles, would that be inaccurate? But when the episode aired, the Sheriff's Department took the unprecedented step of putting out a press release that same afternoon. "Although it is generally not our practice to comment on items of evidence in active investigations, in this specific case, we can confirm that the Sheriff's Office currently holds two trucks in evidence that belong to Flores family members in 1996. The Sheriff's Office will not be commenting any further, and no additional information will be released at this time. One week after that press release, headline news. Now to a dramatic FBI raid. New information today in the search for Cal Poly Student Kristen Smart. For 24 years, Flores has been a person of interest. Today, Sir Torrance was served in San Luis Obispo County. As investigators, bag evidence, you can see Susan Flores pacing inside the home. It's her home that also sits just a thousand feet from this billboard. Neighbors of Ruben Flores, Paul's father, tell KSB why they saw investigators search his house in the Royal Grande 2. And L.A. County. Paul Flores woke up to a search warrant at his current home in San Pedro. As well as the location in Washington State. It's believed Paul's sister, Irmelinda, lives there. Home searches of Paul, Susan, Ruben, and Irmelinda Flores. The investigators took away bags of evidence from that home and questioned the man inside. His name is Paul Flores, he's 43. And authorities say he was the last man to have seen that co-ed alive back in May of 1996. Four search warrants served, nearly a quarter century after Stockton's Kristen Smart vanished. Now seeing developments in a missing person's case, this old is significant. Because historically, these are some of the hardest cases for law enforcement to investigate. And Neighbors said they have been told through social media that someone involved in a possible murder lives in that house. She seems to be a friendly guy. She keeps himself shy. He stutters when he talks like his nervous. They served search warrants in California and Washington State in connection to the disappearance of Kristen Smart. But what came of it, we don't know. Four search warrants served simultaneously at the homes of each of the four members of Paul Flores' immediate family. I don't need to explain that this is a huge development. 23 years into a missing person's case, it's not easy to obtain a court order to seize items from a person of interest's house without some significant breakthrough. Let alone to serve his entire family at the same time in three different counties in two separate states. I'll talk more about this in a minute, but more good news is coming. Two days later, on February 7th, Cal Poly responded to a circulating petition by agreeing to remove Kristen's failing grades, which she had received when she went missing and failed to take her finals. The university admitted that this was an oversight and, quote, "immediately instructed the registrar's office to make the necessary changes." Another small victory for Kristen Smart. Three days later, on February 10th, Inosiana resident purchased his own Kristen Smart billboard, identical to the one in the Arroyo Grande Village, and erected it at the entrance to Oceano. On the corner of Highway 1 and Terra Nuevo Lane. Then, on April 22nd, more headline news. We begin with breaking news. A search warrant is being served at the San Pedro home of Paul Flores. He's a person of interest in the 1996 disappearance of Kristen Smart. A real footage captured a green tent and a slew of law enforcement outside the Los Angeles County home of Paul Flores. It's the second time this year. The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office said, with the help of the LA County Sheriff's Department, they went to look for specific items of evidence. We searched the home of Paul Flores for the second time this year. Investigators were looking for specific items of evidence today. Today's search warrant only involved Flores' home. Authorities say the warrant is sealed so they can't say what they're looking for or what they found. A helicopter circled over Paul Flores' San Pedro home. A forensic's tent was set up on his front lawn. It's not easy to get a search warrant. Evidence has to be presented to a judge who must conclude that it's reasonable to believe that new evidence will be found. So how does this relate to the February search warrant? What did investigators find? Why go back a second time? And why did they only return to one of those four houses? In photos and videos published by local news stations, it's not hard to determine which specific items of evidence investigators seized. Right on the front page of the New York Times, a photo of sheriff's detectives and FBI agents carrying out boxes filled with computer towers, cell phones, laptops, and tablets. All of the Flores family's digital devices. I've seen lots of comments on articles and videos about these searches asking, what do they expect to find after all this time? Why would the family still have computers from 24 years ago? Which may be missing the bigger picture here. Digital devices like phones, computers, and laptops, they say there could be evidence there that didn't exist nearly 24 years ago. So what kind of new evidence did they expect to find? I have a guess. Because just four months before the search warrants were served, a podcast pushed the incident back into the spotlight. Attention has been put back onto this case because of a popular podcast called Your Own Backyard, which has helped generate new leads in this decades old case. The podcast has renewed interest in the case and is putting pressure on authorities to solve it. Ashley, it just seems like the momentum is building at this point. One word, two syllables, pod cast. A podcast which, according to their own friends and family, got the whole Flores family talking about the case again to each other on their computers and cell phones. If I could summarize in one sentence, what I've learned over the past two and a half years of studying this case, I'd put it like this. Investigations don't happen like they do on television. At least not this one. A number of different agencies have investigated the disappearance of Kristen Smart over the years. Since May of 1996, Cal Poly campus police, the District Attorney's Office, the Sheriff's Department, the FBI, civil attorneys, criminal attorneys, insurance companies, private investigators, the California Department of Justice, the California Rescue Dog Association, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children have all contributed, conducting interviews, taking depositions, performing scientific testing, and more. Some of those investigators have long since retired and others were never officially employed to begin with. So as I've had informal conversations with dozens of them, they've been willing to share some of what's gone on behind the scenes, things they discovered or tips they collected. Some of their discoveries are so significant that I can't believe the case wasn't resolved years ago. So I'll ask the next person up the chain. What about this tip from 1997? What about that witness from 1996? Wasn't that enough? And so often, they're just as surprised to hear about it as I was. The District Attorney investigators know what they know, and the attorneys know what they know, and the retired private investigator knows what he knows. But they're not always sharing all of their information with each other. It's like someone poured out a 10,000-piece puzzle onto the floor, and each agency grabbed a few handfuls, huddled in their own corner, and started to build their own version of the whole picture. One of them has a horse's head, the other has just a tail. One of them just got a bunch of blue tiles that are either the sky or the water, but it's hard to tell when they don't know they're supposed to be a horse in their somewhere. Now, add 24 years to that. Regardless of how scattered the pieces got, everyone building their separate puzzles, at least all the ones I've talked to, unanimously agreed on one thing. Paul Flores knows what happened to Kristen's smart. The most comprehensive of all of the puzzle builders has been the smart family. They kept a notebook next to the phone in Kristen's bedroom, and every time they received new information, they would write it down and date it. When Stan Smart traveled to San Luis Obispo in June of 1996 to look for his daughter, he brought a notebook with him and kept track of everything. From the locations he searched to the people he received tips from, to the amount of money he spent on water and coffee for the volunteers who helped him search. It's so much information, which has come from sources they trust are pursuing these leads, that they haven't necessarily taken the time to go back through every page over the years. So, I offered to do it for them. For weeks this summer, I spent every single day hunched in my office chair, pouring over words until my eyes were blurry, trying to decipher the occasional hasty chicken scratch, pausing to admire Denise's doodles, probably drawn whenever a phone call with a rambling investigator dragged on, or how Kristen's sister Lindsay, who was still in middle school in 1996, would write notes to her mom in the margins. Good night, I love you. Sometimes, the most generic entries contain the most interesting information, so I spent weeks checking every tip and contact number against a reverse telephone directory, calling people to clarify what they had said back in 1996, and mapping address is alongside known locations. There's a timeline I've been compiling for two years now with any piece of significant information organized by date. As of now, it's 37 full pages and still expanding, which makes it fairly easy to fact check times and places. When someone came forward earlier this year to tell me that they had seen Paul at a prom party the night after Kristen's disappearance, a party where several women said he offered them a strange homemade drink which he brought in a Tupperware container. I appealed on social media and within hours a handful of Rio Grande High School students had emailed me scans of their dated prom invitations, which they dug out of boxes. I've spoken to former GTE employees who worked alongside Ruben Flores for years and collected a map of payphones he was in charge of servicing in 1996. Information that the smart family's attorney had trouble getting out of him during his deposition. May of '96, what would be the most rural phone, our phones that you would service as a technician? Where would they be physically located? Do you understand the question? Yes, okay. But the most valuable information came from the smart family's notebooks, kept contemporaneously and left untainted for years. So sifting through them was a chore with substantial rewards. At one point I remember something Stan's smart told me the first time we met about spending four days in the river with his son searching for gold before finding a quarter ounce. With all of the information I've collected and organized from various sources, I've now got a pretty definitive timeline of events which I fact checked against official records. But the period I want to scrutinize is the most important period of all. The three days between when Kristen's smart was last seen with Paul Flores around 2 a.m. on May 25th and when campus police finally took a missing person's report at 11.40 a.m. on May 28th. In those three days, Kristen's smart disappeared and while her dorm mates struggled to get authorities to take it seriously, the perpetrator had ample time to get rid of the evidence. So I'm going to try to shade in the known areas in order to get a better look at the unknown. Before I get to the walk home from the party on Krandelwe, I want to talk about how Paul Flores got to that party. In his interview with campus police on May 30th, Paul says he was hanging out in his room at Santa Lucia Hall that Friday. His roommate Derek had left town for the weekend and Paul spent the evening drinking beers alone. Specifically, a 20-ounce Sapporo and a 22-ounce Mickey's malt liquor before he decided to walk to his sister's house. His sister, Irmelinda, lived in a house just one and a half miles away from Santa Lucia Hall with her boyfriend Brett. Before moving into his dorm on November 17th 1995, Paul had lived with them for a few months at the beginning of his freshman year. He tells police he tucked another 22-ounce beer into the pocket of his sweatshirt and then started the walk to his sisters when he passed Krandelwe and noticed the party. One puzzling thing from that interview with campus police is that he tells them he didn't call his sister before starting to walk to her house. They ask him directly. But in a log of phone calls place from Paul's dorm room provided by the telephone administration manager at CalPoly, it shows a call placed at 8.59 pm Friday, May 24th to Irmelinda's house. What is the purpose of lying about something like this? Is it even a big deal whether he called his sister or not? Did he just forget? Either way, he never made it to Irmelinda's house that night because he passed the Krandel house on the way and around 9.30 pm he knocked on the door and asked if he could join the party. Inside, Paul tells campus police that Kristen was acting "overly flirtatious" going up to every guy at the party and introducing herself as Roxy. In fact, when campus police first located Paul on Tuesday, May 28th to ask if he was the person who walked Kristen's smart back to the dorms. He claims that he didn't even know who they were talking about, because it was the first time he had heard her referred to as Kristen, and not Roxy. After midnight now, on Saturday, May 25th, we'll fast forward through when Kristen was found lying down in the lawn next door, helped up by Tim Davis, and started walking with Sheryl Anderson and Paul Flores toward the dorms. When they reached the corner of Grand Avenue and perimeter road, Sheryl says she asked Paul if he could take Kristen the rest of the way. Once her dorm building, Sierra Madre Hall, was up Grand Avenue, which meant she needed to turn right after the crosswalk. This is when she says Paul asked her for a kiss, and then a hug. After being assured by Paul that he could get Kristen back to her dorm on his own, she turns right and walks up Grand without ever looking back. She estimates in her deposition that this was around 2 a.m. In May 30th, Paul tells campus police that he has no idea what time it was. But that after Sheryl left, he immediately separated from Kristen, walked up perimeter road alone, and entered the front door of Santa Lucia Hall. He says he never saw Kristen pass Sequoia Hall, the red brick dorm building closest to the crosswalk where Sheryl left. Investigators have a hard time buying this story. After starters, they have a number of girls from the party, who have told them that Paul was aggressively flirting with them that night, groping them and trying to kiss them even after they told them they had boyfriends. Then Sheryl says he asked to kiss her at the crosswalk. And just seconds later, he's left alone with the girl he describes as overly flirtatious, who's too drunk to walk on her own, and he decides to just leave her there. His police call him out on this, but he's insistent. Once DA investigators step into assist though, they let him know that they're not even remotely buying it. We know you were somewhere else with her. We know that that wasn't the last place you had someone last place, that's all right. Well no, we know that's not true. And then they tell him why. If we have somebody who wasn't at the party who didn't know you, didn't know Roxy, but happened to be in that area, and he contacted us and said, "She saw a guy sitting here in the description. He doesn't know your name, doesn't know you from that." And a girl that was taller than him, walking up that way together, with that he accurate, with that he wants to walk and wear. Passed for you last time. Exactly. No. It's there after that. Okay. You know that photo line up is? Yeah. You know where you get a picture and you put five other pictures in there. What if we did a photo line up and somebody picked your picture out of six, and then they saw you with Roxy at a location other than where you said you were at. Why would they say they saw you someplace other than right there? I have no idea. And they picked your picture out, and they picked Roxy out, just took out of the line up. See, and that's why we're trying to find out why you don't want to tell us about whatever else happened. Just for my curiosity, what else was I seeing at them? I'm just curious. Well, we can't go into a line up. I'm not sure how many witnesses the investigators are referring to. But if even one person saw Kristen and Paul together, passed the crosswalk at Grandin Perimeter. It pokes a hole in the Flora's family's two-decade. He went that way. She went that way, defense. And I went up to my dome. This is the walkway, goes that way, towards my dome, and then she started walking that way. They parted ways. You know, his dorm was here, and hers was there. He went that way, and she went that way. Is there anyone who saw something after 2am? Two years ago, when I walked into the San Luis Obispo Courthouse and requested any public documents on the Kristen Smart case, I was given a 29-page privilege log, dated July 1997. I've since learned that this log was the result of a legal battle, where the smart family's attorney, James Murphy, fought for the Sheriff's Department to turn over their investigative materials to be used in the family's wrongful death suit against Paul Flores. The Sheriff's Department resisted, and the case ended up in San Luis Obispo Superior Court, wherein April of 1997, Judge Paul Coffee appointed an independent attorney to quote "peruse investigative records" to determine what could and could not be disclosed to the smart family. The privilege log, which I described in Episode 1 as resembling a table of contents for the boxes and boxes of investigative documents, lists every report and every interview conducted by campus police, the Sheriff's Department, and the DA investigators up to that point, followed by the words "disclose" or "do not disclose." One of these items, which was never disclosed to the smart family, is titled "report of contact" with Australian student. I never knew the significance of this report, until I found this entry in Stan Smart's 1996 notebook. Thursday, June 27, 420 PM, Australian Exchange student, saw a boy and girl struggling in front of the dorms. I spent a few weeks looking for information about an Australian Exchange student, who attended Cal Poly in 1996. I searched by technical trades, engineering or agriculture or architecture, linked in pages and blogs, until I found a name. Neil Van Est was a 30-year-old Cal Poly Exchange student from Canberra, Australia, and studying landscape architecture in May of 1996. Today, he lives in Norway. I found a listing online for the architecture firm he works for now, and on a whim, I send him an email. I do this a lot, by the way, when I'm trying to track people down, and most of the time I never get a reply. But just a couple hours later, I received a response. "Hi, Chris. Firstly, yes. You found the right Neil Van Est, and secondly, wow. This is really amazing. I got cold shivers reading your email. We schedule a time to talk, and he sends me the longest phone number I've ever seen. It's been 24 years, and Neil was told that investigators believed that the incident he had witnessed that night was probably unrelated to this case. So he hasn't given it much thought in the years since. My first question for you is when is the last time that you were contacted about this?" That would have been in '96. Have they ever followed up with you again? No. But luckily, with his information, I was able to track down some of the original reports on Neil's story, which were briefly disclosed in 1997 before the Sheriff's Department filed their objection to the release. The story in 1996 was as follows. It wasn't until the end of June when police learned that Neil may have been a witness that night. A female exchange student he was studying with on May 25th told detectives that when the news broke about a girl who had gone missing from campus, Neil shared with her what he had seen on May 25th. He said he wasn't sure if he wanted to mention this to the police, though, since he was scheduled to fly back to Australia and was afraid that getting involved would hold up his travel plans. The female went to investigators later that month and told them what she had heard. By then, the Sheriff's Department had taken over the case. So with help from the FBI, they tracked down Neil in new South Wales and asked him to come into his local police department to give a statement. I'm going to summarize this statement for clarity. On June 2nd, on May 25th, Neil Van asked was studying in the Dexter building, the building next to the library, which now houses an art gallery and a subway. When he left, he got on his bicycle and started his ride home to 1090 Grove Street, a 10 minute bike ride according to Google Earth, he turned left on to North Polyview Drive, right on to via Carter, which took him past the engineering building, and then left on perimeter road, the road toward the red brick dorms. In front of Sequoia Hall, he turned right on to Grand Avenue, the same direction Cheryl Anderson had headed, likely just several minutes earlier. He passed the newly built performing art center on his right, and Vista Grande, the dining complex on his left. Just past that building, on the left hand side of Grand, he noticed a ground floor building with bright fluorescent lights on which caught his attention because it was the only building with lights on. He says it wasn't a dorm room, it looked like some kind of common room, or lounge, with Florida ceiling windows that faced the street unobstructed, inside the building, just behind the glass doors, were a male and female, engaged in some kind of physical struggle. Backlit by fluorescent lights, he couldn't make out all of their features, but in 1996, he was able to describe the male as young, average height probably around 5'10". Liam build, short hair, clean shaven, and a typical looking university student. He describes the female as fairly tall for a girl, closer to six feet, several inches taller than the male, slim to medium build with shoulder length hair. He says the pair were facing each other with their arms and the air over their heads and their hands locked together. The male appeared to be forced backwards as the female tried to push him away. He says he got the impression that the struggle was aggressive and not playful. The female looked like she was trying to get away. "It appeared quite physical. It looked more than just as if they were a boyfriend, girlfriend, like having a little bit of an argument or something like it looked more serious than that, I guess." As he's riding his bike, he only sees them for about five seconds and by the time he processes what he just saw, he's already passed the building and talks himself out of turning around for another look, proceeding home instead. He says the campus was silent and he didn't see a single person for his entire ride home, except the male and female in the window. After our call, I spent some time on Google Earth following Neil's path home that night. Investigators did the same, walking the route with a video camera and mailed the tape to Australia. "They took a film of where they thought I had explained where I had seen this struggle, but when we got the video, it was in a different part of the campus, like I think it was around the corner, couldn't quite see the unit where I had seen this struggle. So they filmed the wrong area, basically." In Neil's memory, the building was hard to identify from the tape because investigators didn't turn on to Grand Avenue, which meant he was only given a side view. Still, slow sheriff's detective Henry Stewart concludes that the building was likely Sierra Madre Hall, Cheryl Anderson's dorm. Sierra Madre Hall consists of six residence towers where students live and a standalone lounge not attached to any of the towers. This lounge has a large floor-to-ceiling window and glass double doors, which face Grand Avenue, unobstructed. It's also my conclusion that this is the only building that Neil could have been describing in that area. Frustratingly, Detective Stewart terminates his investigation of Van Est's sighting after this point, because he doesn't think it was related to this case. This is likely because his operating theory at the time was that since cadaver dogs had alerted to Paul Flores' dorm room, that Kristen was taken to Santa Lucia Hall and not Sierra Madre. But I've never seen any conclusive evidence that leads me to believe that Kristen couldn't have been taken somewhere else first, or even that she was never in Santa Lucia, only the scent that someone brought back to room 128. And I don't think detectives have concluded this either. This is best evidenced by the excavation of Paulie Hill in 2016, an undertaking that implies that investigators were considering that Kristen was taken up the hill alive, since it seems implausible that someone would have risked carrying her body up there, out in the open where anyone could see them. Therefore, if they think Kristen could have been taken up Paulie Hill, it's just as reasonable that she could have been struggling with Paul in the lounge of Sierra Madre, just 300 yards from the spot where Cheryl Anderson left them. What I was meant to believe was that it wasn't related, so the police never folded it up anymore. I think it would be more of a stretch, to say that Neil saw another male and female. The male around 5-10, the female closer to 6 feet, engaged in a physical struggle, just after 2am, near the corner of grand and perimeter roads. More of a stretch than it would be to reason that Neil was possibly the last person besides the perpetrator, to see Kristen's smart in the moments before she became a missing person. Next on the timeline, Paul Flores says he goes back to his Santa Lucía dorm room alone, and goes to sleep. He doesn't know what time it was. In his interview with campus police on May 30, they asked if he stayed in his room all night, and Paul volunteers that he vomited at one point, and then got up to shower in the communal dorm bathroom sometime around 5am. The shower is just 3 doors down from room 128. He says he thinks someone saw him in there, because he heard a stall door close. Police tell him to rack his brain for who that person could have been, because they may be the only alibi Paul has for that morning. They ask him to provide them with the name by the following week, but Paul never locates a witness. On May 25, 1996, the sun rises in San Luis Obispo, at 5.51am. The Cal Poly campus is quiet, and Paul Flores is not seen by anyone for another 12 hours. He doesn't make a single phone call from his dorm room all day. For context, 20 calls were placed from Paul and Derek's room phone, on Tuesday, May 21st. 8 calls were placed on Wednesday, May 22nd. 4 calls on Thursday, May 23rd, and 12 calls were placed on Friday, May 24th. The last one, at 8.59pm, to Paul's sister, Irma Linda's house, before he left his room to walk there and stopped instead at the Crandoway party. But on May 25th, Paul doesn't call anyone from his room. No one sees him in the communal restroom, shared by the occupants of 18 other dorm rooms, on the first floor of Santa Lucia Hall. And worse, Paul is never asked to account for this time. Campus police on May 30th ask him about his 5am shower. DA investigators on June 19th ask him about the shower, and his whereabouts on Saturday night. But no one ever asks Paul Flores where he was, between 5am and 6pm, on Saturday, May 25th. He says that he only left his dorm room to shower, because of a bad taste in his mouth. And then it's implied that he returned to bed afterwards, but he doesn't mention when he woke up again. He does say directly that he didn't go home to Arroyo Grande until Sunday morning. But the window between his shower, and his first sighting by another student, is 13 hours. If we take into account the fact that the only thing putting Paul in the shower at 5am is his own story, without a witness to confirm this, the last person to see Paul Flores before 6pm on Saturday, is Cheryl Anderson, at the corner of Grande in perimeter, walking toward his dorm with his arm around Kristen, around 2am, an inexplicable 16 hour gap. For context, that's enough time to drive from San Luis Obispo to Mexico, and back. Because Paul has refused to answer questions about this case, since walking out of his interview on June 19th, 1996, to the best of my knowledge, this gap has never been filled in. Where was Paul for 16 hours that day? What was he doing? Who was he with? And where did they go? The gap is officially closed, around 6pm on Saturday, when Paul Flores enters the lighthouse, a cafeteria on the Cal Poly campus, and has dinner with his friends Javier and Mike. Javier and Mike are described by Paul's roommate, Derek Say, as the only two friends Paul has at Cal Poly. According to Derek, no one else seemed to like Paul. In 1996, Mike, whose last name I am intentionally leaving out, lived on the second floor of Santa Lucia Hall, above Paul's room, and was four years older than Paul. On February 3, 1996, when Paul was arrested for driving under the influence, he was jailed overnight, and then released at 4pm into Mike's custody, according to the police report. I don't know his relationship to Paul or why he was called that day. Javier is a civil engineer. Naring Major, lives in Diablo Hall, one of the North Mountain dorms at Cal Poly, and is eight years older than Paul. Investigators learn about him from Paul's interview on June 19, and two days later, they contact him at his residence in Bakersfield, two hours east of Cal Poly, where he's moved following the end of the spring quarter. According to police reports, which were unsealed and released to the media back in 1996, Cal Poly campus detective Mike Kennedy called Javier at 9am on Friday, June 21, and requested to meet face-to-face to speak to him about a missing person. Javier says he doesn't know of any missing person, and requests a phone meeting instead. But Kennedy insists on meeting in person, and asks for his address. They arrange a meeting for 4pm that same day. About two minutes after hanging up, Javier calls back and tells Kennedy that he didn't know Kristen's smart. Detective Kennedy notes in his report, "During the first conversation, I did not mention the name of the missing person." When detectives Mike Kennedy and Ray Barrett arrive at Javier's house after 4pm, he's not home, and they're told by a neighbor that he just left. They return an hour later to find a car in the driveway, and call his house from a cell phone. Javier answers and tells them that he's busy, and has to leave again in 15 minutes. But they insist that this is very important, and he lets them inside. They ask him when he first saw Paul over Memorial Day weekend, and he says it was Saturday night around 6pm at the lighthouse cafeteria. After that, he says they got a ride from Mike to downtown center cinemas, the movie theater on Marsh Street next to Juice Club, what's now called Jamba. The story Javier tells about Saturday night is identical to the story Paul told investigators two days earlier. Mike drops them off at downtown center cinemas, and then leaves to go hang out with his girlfriend. Javier and Paul see a 940 showing of mission impossible, and then sneak in to see the end of Twister. Javier says that after the movies, they walk to tortilla flats at 1051 Nepomo Street, a Mexican restaurant and cantina that hosted dance parties at night to look for his friends. When they don't find them there, Javier says they walk to Taco Bell on Santa Rosa - coincidentally, right across the street from where Paul's sister, Irmelinda, was living at the time. They ate at Taco Bell, and then walked back to campus around 2am. At the conclusion of their interview, Javier tells the investigators that Paul is quote, "really annoying," but that he does not think he could do something like this. Sunday, May 26th, Paul Flores calls home from his dorm at 947 AM. It's the first call he's made from the phone in his room, since calling Irmelinda's house on Friday night. According to Ruben Flores' 1997 deposition, he picks up Paul from Cal Poly around 10 or 11 AM. Can you pick your son up at 10 or 11 at the Cal Poly, where did you pick him up in front of the building at the front door? Did you go into his room? No. Did he have any objects with him at the time that you picked him up, the duffel bag? Bag of goodies. Do you know what's in the bag? Cupcakes, cookies. Like a paper bag full of cupcakes? Paper, plastic, something. Do you know why he had a bag of goodies? Yes, he always brought home my bag of goodies. When he's asked the same question during his 2007 deposition, "Did he bring anything with him when you picked him up on Sunday?" He answers, "Londry." Question. Just some laundry? Answer. Yes. Did he take it home and do his laundry? Answer. Yes. This response is interesting for two reasons. One, it's something that he left out when asked in 1997 what Paul brought home that morning. And two, the fact that he brought home laundry to wash could be important. Ruben answers that he doesn't recall whether Paul usually brought laundry with him when he would come home to Arroyo Grande. And it's worth noting here, "The clothes that Paul Flores wore the night he walked Christen home have never been found. They were described by multiple people at the party that night, including Cheryl Anderson, and investigators looked for them when they served a search warrant at Ruben's house in July of 1996 after Paul had moved back home from Cal Poly, but they weren't there. It's part of the reason that James Murphy asked what Paul brought home with him that Sunday morning. So was Ruben lying in 1997 when he left out the part about Paul having laundry with him? Did he forget that he had lied by the time he was asked about it again in 2007? Or did his memory of events get better over the span of 10 years? According to that same deposition in 1997, Ruben says that after he picked up Paul from Cal Poly, they went to the Arroyo Grande strawberry festival together, a yearly celebration held in the village, which features vendors, carnival rides, and other attractions. After this he says they went back home, where Paul took a nap and stayed home for the rest of the afternoon. But according to Paul's friend Jeremy, who's interviewed by DA investigators on June 7th, he picked up Paul from Ruben's house that day. He says Paul was wearing a baseball cap, which seemed unusual. But that when he took it off, Jeremy noticed he had a black eye. Jeremy says he asked, quote, what happened to you? Did you get rat-packed at a party? Paul says he doesn't know how the black eye happened, that he just woke up with it. I've already talked about the importance of this black eye, but it's worth getting into just how much deception surrounds the whole thing. In Cal Poly police interview Paul on May 30th, they explained to him that this situation quote is as serious as you can get. She hasn't surfaced, we haven't found any sightings of her. At this point, you're the last person that saw her. Paul agrees, yeah, yeah, that's serious. Detective Kennedy tells him, quote, I can't impress upon you how important it is that you're completely honest here. Just minutes later. Paul will tell police for the first time that he got his black eye and scratches in a basketball game on Monday the 27th, which he'll later admit was a lie. So even after investigators explained to him how serious this situation is, Paul decides that the source of his black eye shouldn't matter. Here's a clip from his DA interview on June 19th, where he defends this lie. So from the start of the investigation, Paul is picking and choosing when to be honest with the police and even with his friends. His friend Javier tells the police that he too asked about Paul's black eye on Tuesday and he was also told the basketball story, but Jeremy, who saw the black eye before the basketball game, was told that Paul just woke up with it. There are consequences to decisions like this. When the Flores family complains that their son was unfairly pursued by investigators, it's important to remember who hung those red flags. And it's not just Paul who tries to justify lying to investigators about this. Did your son ever tell you that he admitted to lying to the police about how he got his black mark on his face? I understand by lying. Did your son ever tell you something to the effect that when they first asked me how I had a lie, I had a black eye, I told them that I got elbowed in a basketball game. Jeremy says he and Paul went back to the apartment where he was living with another friend at the time, and he and Paul made small talk about what they'd been up to lately. According to the DA investigators' notes, we've found out that he was a bad guy. which were unsealed in August of 1996 and widely printed in local newspapers. Paul told Jeremy he had attended a Cal Poly party on Friday night and "got a blow job from some slut in the bathroom there." He says the girl then started hanging all over every other guy at the party. Remember Trevor Belter, who says Kristen pulled them into the bathroom at Crandelway? And then, when Trevor came out a few minutes later, "I shut the door and immediately this guy steps in front of me and he goes what I'd like to know is what you did with her in the bathroom. And I was like, oh god, like thinking this is your boyfriend or something. I'm like, oh what did I get into? I have no idea what I'm doing. And I go, nothing man. And then this like relief washed over his face? It was weird. He started laughing like, and I was like, oh you're just some idiot. That was him. It was Paul Flores. It was totally him. So Paul was clearly under the impression that something sexual was going on in the bathroom. Is it a coincidence that this exact detail comes out in the story he tells his friend two days later? Or that he mentions the girl hanging on other guys at the party, which he told campus police Roxy was doing? It sure sounds like Paul is talking about Kristen's smart. While less explicit, Javier also tells police that Paul told him the missing girl was quote, flirting with him at the party. Jeremy tells investigators that he assumed this story about what happened in the bathroom was nothing more than macho bragging because he believes that Paul is a virgin. Here's another point where Paul decides that he doesn't have to be completely truthful with investigators. In his interview with campus police on May 30, Paul admits to detective Kennedy that he is a virgin. He's never done more than kiss a girl. But then two weeks later, when DA investigators ask him the same question, according to Jeremy, after hanging out at his friend's apartment for a little while, he and Paul went to see a movie with a group of friends. But according to Ruben Flores' 1997 deposition, Paul stayed home that whole day until he and Ruben went to dinner together at splash cafe and pizmo. So someone is not telling the truth here. Also according to Ruben Flores' 1997 deposition, sometime after midnight, Paul removes the stereo of his 93 Ford Ranger, which is parked in the Garajit Ruben's house, getting his black eye in the process. Why did you want him to remove the stereo equipment from the car? How soon after Paul's alleged to have removed the stereo equipment, did the car get put for sale? It did not get put for sale. After he took the stereo out of the car that Sunday, and allegedly suffered this injury to his face, where did he put the stereo? In a garage. And where is the stereo now? Stolen? Stolen. Paul's clothes, Paul's truck, Ruben's truck, Paul's stereo, all of it, starts to disappear. Monday, May 27, 1996, is Memorial Day. According to Susan Flores' 1997 deposition, she visits Ruben's house that morning and first notices Paul's black eye. When she asks him what happened, he says Ruben chimed in, "and then they both were talking, and I didn't pay much attention to it." Something about he was working on his car, and he said, "Yeah, he was. He was under the steering wheel and messing around with his stereo equipment." As I pointed out in episode 7, this seems to me like a pretty good indication that Susan was in the dark about what was going on that weekend, though Ruben and Paul were clearly not on the same page yet. From this point on, though, everyone's stories are the same. According to everyone, that afternoon, Ruben drops off Paul to hang out with Jeremy again, and the two of them join a pickup basketball game with two other guys at Harlow Elementary School. That evening, in a Royal Grande Police Officer Noxon Ruben's door, with an outstanding arrest warrant for Paul not showing up to court for a DUI hearing. When Paul comes home later that night, Ruben takes him immediately to the police station, where he's photographed with his black eye and several scratches on his hands and taken into custody. According to Ruben's 1997 deposition, he calls ABC bail bonds and bails Paul out around midnight. Afterwards, he says they go to Susan's house on Branch Street to talk to her, after which he drops Paul off at Cal Poly, around 2 or 3 a.m. It's unclear what they were talking about. Tuesday morning, May 28th, is significant for several reasons. First, a missing person report is finally filed on Kristen's smart at 11.40 a.m. Ruben Flores, who works for GTE and Santa Maria and car pools on Tuesdays, arrives to pick up his co-worker in Paul's Ford Ranger, rather than his own car. According to his co-worker, Ruben explains that he's driving Paul's truck because he's going to get Paul a new bedliner for his birthday. I've talked about this bedliner previously, the plastic that lines the inner bed of a pickup truck, and how Ruben's insistence that he never changed the bedliner on either truck suddenly changes when James Murphy confronts him with the fact that someone with first-hand knowledge gave his office this information. And then, Ruben suddenly doesn't know what a bedliner is and asks for a definition. More puzzling is that Paul's birthday is in October. Susan Flores, who works at Oceano Elementary School, tells a co-worker that morning that over the weekend, Ruben received a phone call in the middle of the night on Saturday and left in a panic. I've heard this story rumored for years now, but no one has ever been able to find a source for that tip. When I was going through the smarts notebooks from 1996, I came across this tip from the day it came in, and even though it was anonymous, it included some other information that sounded familiar, and I realized I'd possibly already spoken to this person. So I called her to see if my suspicion was correct. Yes, that was me. I worked with her, and the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend, Susan came in to school, and she shared with me that Ruben early, early Saturday morning in the middle of the night had gotten a phone call, and he just, you know, took off, and she was very puzzled by that. She couldn't understand why he did that. She found odd as that he just took off. He just immediately took off. She had no idea, but she knew it would have something to do with Paul, and I don't think they even divulged to her why, even because, you know, I saw every day, there was never like an update of why. So she was confused by it. I absolutely believe she didn't know. At the beginning, she did not know, you know, deep down did she know, you know, probably shortly after that. Back when this story was just a rumor, I saw people debate the logistics of it online. How could Susan know that Ruben had gotten a phone call that night when she was already living on Branch Street at the time of Kristen's disappearance? According to Susan's co-worker, who was close to her at the time, Susan had confided in her that her relationship with Ruben was an abusive one. In fact, Susan had at least two documented hospital trips in the fall of 1996 where she had suffered significant injuries. One, she says followed an argument with Ruben, and another, Ruben claims in his 1997 deposition that she tripped over a bench in a closet, suffering a fractured rib. Rub, Ruben emphasizes to James Murphy when asked about it, not ribs. Susan's co-worker says that because of the nature of their relationship, Ruben and Susan were never really separated, even when she resided at Branch Street in 1996. She would stay at Ruben's for a few days, and then go back to Branch Street whenever she wanted to get away from him. In fact, even when she moved back into Ruben's house full time for a few months, while the last of her family rented her Branch Street home from fall to spring, she listed the rental in the paper, quote, 875 a month, three-bedroom, two-bath, rent outright, or possible share, leaving the door open for a possible refuge, in case she needed it. Susan didn't move into the Branch Street house full time, until the placeters moved out in March of 1997. Back to Tuesday afternoon, May 28th, campus police are waiting outside of Paul Flores' class when he comes out. Kristen Smart has now been reported missing, and they've talked to several people at the party who have led them to Paul. He first tells them he doesn't know anyone named Kristen Smart. Until he confirms that he saw her at the party and walked her home, but only knew her as "Roxie." He says he walked her back to the front of Sequoia Hall where they separated. By this point, they've already spoken to Cheryl Anderson and Tim Davis, who both say Paul offered to take Kristen to her dorm, so leaving her outside of another dorm to walk the rest of the way alone raises some suspicion right away. And then, the last member of the immediate Flores family, Irmolinda and her boyfriend, Brett, are issued a marriage license that Tuesday. The timing is peculiar. It's hard to read too much into it without knowing all the facts surrounding that decision, but later that summer, after Paul's name is released to the media, Irmolinda and Brett will move to Southern California. And years later, when the case starts to get more publicity, she'll move to Amsterdam. Both moves, she later admits in her own deposition, were attempts to distance herself from this case. In October 1996, investigators make their rare decision to call a grand jury in order to subpoena witnesses. The grand jury is not asked to seek an indictment, only to get witnesses to testify under oath. The witnesses they choose to subpoena, are Paul Flores, Ruben Flores, Susan Flores, Irmolinda Flores, and her husband, Brett. It's clear that after five months of investigating this case, the District Attorney's Office and the Sheriff's Department have reached the conclusion that not just Paul Flores, but the entire Flores family may be hiding information about their knowledge of what happened to Kristen Smart. And then, after 23 years of additional investigation, investigators serve search warrants at four separate locations, the homes of Paul Flores, Ruben Flores, Susan Flores, and Irmolinda Flores. People they still feel may have information about the disappearance of Kristen Smart. No one in the Flores family has ever been charged in connection with Kristen's disappearance. But if Paul is responsible for whatever happened to her, or knows more than he's told investigators, then his whole family has spent 24 years protecting this secret at the expense of their own lives, their relationships, and their health. Their biggest punishment, their own tortured thoughts, peeking out from behind their curtains every day of their lives, wondering, is today the day that Paul's secret comes out. All of this, because of something that happened between the hours of 2 a.m. and 6 p.m. on May 25th, 1996. And as investigators told Paul just three weeks after that, "Oh, there is no doubt in our mind that you know what happened to Rocks." Okay, none at all. We know that Paul, this thing isn't going to go away. I know, I understand that. We're not going away. This doesn't go away. Paul doesn't go away, but I understand that. It can mean it really doesn't. And it isn't going to go away, because we've started the conversation all over again. And this time, the puzzle pieces are all in one place. [MUSIC PLAYING] You've been listening to your own backyard, Episode 8, the 16-hour gap. 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, Garrison Claire, Sandy Arnold, April Cole Worley, Carrie Quimby-Zennich, Alyssa Brigham, Kaelin Pope, Sydney Brant, Olivia Dijonaro, Dallas Bronson, Giovanna Sarnacola, 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. 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 KristenSmart.org, a note from the smart family, 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.