'My daughter's life was of no value': Mom of Kristin Smart takes stand

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The mother of vanished college freshman Kristin Smart said her daughter fell victim to a spate of police failures in the wake of her disappearance from campus in 1996.

Denise Smart said local police and staff at Polytechnic State University had neglected to find Kristin, 19, forcing the Smart family to spend the past 25 years searching.

Taking the stand at her daughter’s murder trial, which began Monday, a tearful Denise said: ‘I felt like the life of my daughter was of no value to anyone except her family.

‘For the next 25 years, I did whatever I could and looked for answers wherever I could’, reported.

Denise said she contacted police shortly after Kristin failed to call home on Sunday, May 26. Kristin’s cheerful call home was a weekly ritual, she said.

They didn’t know that she had last been seen on Friday, May 24. 

That day, Kristin sent her parents an excited voicemail claiming to have good news. They never found out what it was.

Worried Denise had days earlier called the college president, but was redirected to a residential advisor who refused to give any information about Kristin on ‘privacy’ grounds.

A sheriff at the local San Luis Obispo Police Department then told Denise he had no jurisdiction over the college campus.

Four days after her disappearance, police filed a missing persons report.

Denise showed the courthouse the last letter she wrote to her daughter, dated May 5, in which she warned Kristin not to be financially imprudent.

She advised her daughter to ‘get back on track’, adding: ‘Buckle up, buttercup.’

Denise told the court: ‘I never would have thought it was my last letter to write to my daughter.’

The college freshman was last seen walking back to her dorm by fellow student Paul Flores, now 45, who is being tried for her murder. 

His father Ruben, 81, is charged with being an accessory. The pair are accused of burying Kristin under the decking of their home after Paul allegedly killed Kristin.

Smart was declared dead in 2002. But her body has never been found.

Prosecutors claim the pair did not take part in the search for Smart ‘while her corpse was decomposing under his deck.’

Paul Flores’ defense attorney Robert Sanger began his opening statement Monday afternoon by claiming that ‘there is no evidence what happened to her,’ and that she ‘engaged in at-risk behavior.’

Both father and son have pleaded not guilty in the case. There will be two juries deciding two verdicts: One for Paul Flores and one for Ruben Flores. The trial is expected to last until October.

On the first day of the trial last Monday, San Luis Obispo County Deputy District Attorney Christopher Peuvrelle told the court that evidence would be shown that would prove Smart was murdered by Paul Flores and that both he and Ruben Flores buried her under the elder Flores’ deck, the reported.

‘While the entire community banded together to search for Kristin desperately, Paul and Ruben Flores did not join in,’ Peuvrelle added. 

‘You will hear Ruben Flores would tear down missing posters of Kristin — tore down her smiling beautiful face —called her a ‘dirty sl**,’ all while her corpse was decomposing underneath his deck.’

Prosecutors say Paul Flores killed the 19-year-old during an attempted rape on May 25, 1996 in his dorm room at CalPoly, where both were first-year students.

His father, now 81, allegedly helped bury the slain student behind his home in the nearby community of Arroyo Grande and later dug up the remains, moving them.

Paul Flores had long been considered a suspect in the killing, but prosecutors only arrested him and his father in 2021 after the investigation was revived.

San Luis Obispo Sheriff Ian Parkinson acknowledged missteps by detectives over the years and he credited a popular podcast about Smart’s disappearance called ‘Your Own Backyard’ for helping unearth new information and inspiring witnesses to speak with investigators.

Smart’s remains have never been found and the mystery of how she vanished from the scenic campus tucked against a verdant coastal mountain range is likely to be central to the trial.

Behind lattice work beneath the deck of his large house on a dead end street off Tally Ho Road, archaeologists working for police in March 2021 found a soil disturbance about the size of a casket and the presence of human blood, prosecutors said.

The blood was too degraded to extract a DNA sample. While a blood expert said it was human blood, the test used did not rule out the possibility it was from a ferret or ape, though court records said no remains of such an animal were found there.

Attorney James Murphy Jr., who has sued the father and son on behalf of Smart’s parents, scoffed at the idea that it was anything other than human blood.

‘The size of the area in which the blood was found would make it a prehistoric ferret that would be in Jurassic Park,’ Murphy said. ‘When was the last time you drove down Tally Ho Road in Arroyo Grande and saw a primate?’

The lawsuit Murphy filed against Ruben Flores alleged that ‘under cover of darkness,’ the father and unnamed accomplices moved the body four days after investigators searched his house in February 2020. Investigators didn’t conduct their dig beneath the deck until more than a year later.

On Monday, the prosecutor laid out evidence of the soil analysis from beneath the deck that shows a presence of blood and a recorded conversation between Paul Flores and his mother Susan Flores.

During the call, the mother tells her son he needed to tell her where they can ‘punch holes’ in the ‘Your Own Backyard’ podcast because ‘only you can.’

The podcast, which launched in 2020, is credited with helping spark interest in the case.