From the famous to the infamous, San Pedro has always been a place people come to blend in and disappear — writers, artists, gangsters, fraudsters, accused war criminals and apparently, accused murderers.
Paul Flores didn’t exactly have the luxury of anonymity when he escaped to San Pedro trying to flee the cloud of suspicion over the disappearance of Kristin Smart 25 years ago. Flores arrived to find the telephone poles hung with wanted posters that featured side-by-side photos of him and Smart and a $75,000 reward for information about Smart’s disappearance or Flores’ involvement.
Jason Herring saw the posters and recognized Flores as a nearby neighbor. Concerned, he kept his distance. “I mean the guy is two doors down,” Herring said, “so [the flyer] really doesn’t want you to welcome someone to the neighborhood, right? Who knows what’s going on in his head.” Prompted by that uncertainty, Herring responded to the email address on the poster. In reply, he was told to stay aware and keep a lookout for anything unusual.
Herring never got to know Flores, deciding he’d rather mind his own business than play detective in a potential murder investigation.
Being friendly with Flores struck him as problematic.
“Maybe he is a nice guy, you could become biased, so I just maintained a disconnected [distance],” Herring said.
Nonetheless, Herring and Flores occasionally crossed paths. “He’d say hello. He was always pleasant,” said Herring. “He was never a crazy, never a bad kind of seeming person. Just kind of quiet. He would walk his dogs in the trails behind the houses here. That’s it.”
When Cal Poly University student Kristin Smart disappeared in 1996, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff considered Paul Ruben Flores merely “an avenue of investigation.” In a story about the case, the Five Cities Times Press Recorder published what looked like a high school yearbook photo of Flores during his senior year of high school — a fresh faced, bright-eyed teen with a bright future ahead of him. This was a complete contrast to the drunken, misogynistic creature with a reputation of preying on women he was portrayed as by those who encountered him in the years that followed.
A team of sheriff’s investigators searched Flores’ rural Arroyo Grande home. Flores initially cooperated with campus police during the early stages of the investigation. He was also questioned by investigators at the county’s district attorney’s office.
During the second interview, Flores walked out before investigators from the district attorney’s office finished questioning him.
People who attended Arroyo Grande High with Flores remembered him as a friendly student, and one girl who said she knew him only casually mentioned that he always greeted her by name.
Those same students doubted Flores had anything to do with Smart’s disappearance. One girl noted the physical differences between them — that Smart was 6 feet-1 inch tall and weighed 145 pounds while Flores was 5 feet-10 inches with a slight build.
But Flores was apparently witnessed showering at 5 a.m. on the morning of Smart’s disappearance and campus police noted he was sporting a black eye and cuts on his knee.
Flores reportedly told investigators he received the injuries while playing basketball but admitted he lied when confronted with his friends’ recollections that he had those injuries when he arrived to play.
About a month after Smart’s disappearance, detectives searched Flores’ dorm room with two cadaver dogs. Two dogs led police to a corner of Flores’s mattress indicating a dead body had been there. Authorities said at the time they didn’t know if Smart died there or if she was placed there for an undetermined period of time.
This was enough to get a warrant to search Flores’ Arroyo Grande home. Investigators were looking for evidence that would allow them to arrest Flores, perhaps Kristin’s dorm key or bloodstained clothing. Instead, the items they recovered included a police baton, three copies of the San Luis Obispo Telegram Tribune containing articles about Kristin’s disappearance and a receipt for Flores’ dormitory room.
In October 1996, Flores was called before a grand jury to answer questions regarding Kristin Smart. He remained as tight-lipped as he’d been since walking out on an interview with sheriff’s department investigators. When the Smart family filed a $40 million wrongful death suit in November 1997, Flores invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. The suit was not allowed to move forward until Smart was declared legally dead in 2001.
But without a body or enough evidence to directly connect Flores to Smart’s disappearance and presumed murder, investigators ultimately turned to psychics. The psychics didn’t seem to agree on the location of Smart’s body at the time, but they all agreed that Smart was sexually assaulted by a young man on the night of her disappearance and was killed.
Although he had not been charged with a crime, Flores has been living the life of a fugitive, unceasingly trailed by news clippings of Kristin Smart’s disappearance from the Smart family’s supporters. He tried to join the Navy. It said, “No, thanks.” He moved to Irvine and found work at a video store, a restaurant and a fast food joint. He was let go every time when the dark cloud of Smart’s disappearance emerged around him.
In 2006, Paul Flores’ mother, Susan, filed a lawsuit against the Smart family, but that only created an opportunity for the authorities to get a warrant to dig up the backyard of her Arroyo Grande home. If the Smart family and their supporters weren’t able to find peace, they made sure Flores didn’t have peace, either.
An international online community numbering in the tens of thousands has continued hashing and rehashing the details of the Kristin Smart case and keeping tabs on Flores, from his collection of DUI convictions to his latest living quarters in Southern California. One of them, an amateur sleuth with a podcast called In Our Backyard, recently breathed new life into the case by retracing events and interviewing retired reporters, detectives and witnesses, which eventually led to new search warrants. Finally, on April 21, almost 25 years after Kristin Smart disappeared, Paul Flores was charged with her murder and his father, Ruben Flores, was charged as an accessory. Paul was denied bail and had to await trial in a San Luis Obispo jail while his father was released on reduced bail from $250,000 to $50,000.
Kristin Smart’s parents sued the elder Flores accusing him of intentional infliction of emotional distress, alleging that he moved Smart’s body from beneath his deck last year to try to cover up her 1996 killing.
James Murphy, attorney for Stan and Denise Smart, filed the lawsuit within hours of Ruben Flores’ release from San Luis Obispo County sheriff’s custody.
Perhaps, in a twist of fate, Flores charges and potential conviction could lie in three sexual assault cases involving him in which charge were never brought.
Last month the Los Angeles Times detailed a case 14 years ago in which police in Redondo Beach were called to a hospital where a woman had come after waking up in a stranger’s bed, naked and with no memory of what had happened. She believed she had been raped.
“An examination confirmed she’d had sex with a man. Police uploaded his DNA profile to a law enforcement database and, a few years later, it matched to a name: Paul Ruben Flores,” the report stated. The story went on to document Flores’ struggles with alcohol and awkward if not aggressive interactions with women. Flores is being taken down by a narrative formed 25 years ago about how and why Kristin Smart was killed.
San Pedro Reaction
When Flores’ house was raided last year, Herring said it seemed as if everyone in the neighborhood read up on it more and was expecting the other shoe to drop.
“We just assumed they finally have gotten enough evidence to press charges because of last time,” Herring said, likely referring to the Feb. 5, 2020 search that was executed on his San Pedro home. Detectives had also served search warrants on the homes of Flores’ father, mother and sister. They returned to Flores’ home two months later with another warrant. During that search, they found physical evidence “related to the murder of Kristin Smart,” the sheriff said, without elaborating.
“They raided the house, inspected his house, his cars and they held him overnight, then he was back,” said Herring “So all of us in the neighborhood were kind of like, ‘Well, okay. They don’t have enough yet, but when they do, they’ll probably come get him.’ Sure enough, when [they came the next time], we were like, ‘Oh I guess they got it.”
When the authorities came back to arrest Flores, there was no shock, said Herring
“You knew the guy was accused, but without further evidence you know the person’s innocent until proven guilty. You know it was a long time ago. Who knows what really happened?” he said.
“You don’t have the right to imprison a person over innuendo, but when they came and started doing a deeper investigation, you knew there was some trail of evidence they were following.”
Herring doesn’t think there will be any relief until there is a verdict in the case and justice is properly served.
Herring believes Flores’ dogs were taken in by one of the neighbors because they were just left in the house.
“No one was taking care of them,” Herring said. “Last week, someone broke into [Flores’] house. The police came again, we were curious if it was another raid.”
It turned out the police were responding to a report of a break in.
“I guess [I] saw on the news his [house] was empty so it became a target,” said Herring. “[The police] were here for about a half an hour and left.”
Paul and Ruben Flores entered not guilty pleas on behalf of their clients during an arraignment hearing last month. Both defendants waived their right to a speedy preliminary hearing.
A pre-preliminary hearing was set for May 17 at 1:30 p.m. and a preliminary hearing date was tentatively set for July 6.
Arturo Garcia-Ayala contributed to this story.