Paul Flores, who was the last person to see 19-year-old Kristen Smart alive while she was intoxicated has been convicted of first-degree murder by a jury on Tuesday.
Kristen Smart was a college freshman, who vanished from a California campus more than 25 years ago, but Paul Flores’s father was acquitted of helping him conceal the crime.
Smart disappeared from California Polytechnic State University on the state’s scenic central coast over Memorial Day weekend in 1996. Her remains have never been found, but the father and son weren’t arrested until 2021.
He was the last person seen with Smart as he walked her home from an off-campus party where she became intoxicated.
Prosecutors asserted that the younger Flores, now 45, killed the 19-year-old during an attempted rape on May 25, 1996, in his dorm room at Cal Poly, where both were first-year students.
Jurors unanimously found Paul Flores guilty of first-degree murder. A jury in a separate trial found his father, Ruben Flores, not guilty of charges of being an accessory to murder after the fact.
The conflicting verdicts were read moments apart in the same courtroom.
His father, now 81, was accused of helping bury the slain student behind his home in the nearby community of Arroyo Grande and later digging up the remains and moving them.
Paul Flores’s defense attorney, Robert Sanger, didn’t immediately respond to calls requesting comment on the verdict.
Sanger had tried to pin the killing on someone else — noting that Scott Peterson, who was later convicted at a sensational trial of killing his pregnant wife and the fetus she was carrying — was also a student at the campus about 200 miles (320 kilometers) up the coast from Los Angeles.
During his closing arguments, Sanger told jurors that no attempted rape occurred and he cast doubt on testimony from witnesses, including a student who was in Smart’s dorm who testified to seeing Flores in Smart’s room.
