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“Today, our criminal and victim justice system has finally delivered justice for Kristin Smart, for the Smart family, and for our San Luis Obispo County community,” San Luis Obispo County district attorney, Dan Dow, said in a written statement released Friday evening. “Today, justice delayed is not justice denied.”
“After nearly 27 years of unspeakable anguish, the Smart family has finally seen their daughter’s killer sentenced,” deputy district attorney Christopher Peuvrelle, who prosecuted the case, said in the same statement. “Their strength and determination serve as an inspiration to us all.”
A jury found Flores guilty of Smart’s murder in October last year. His father Ruben Flores, who had been accused of helping to hide the body, was acquitted by a separate jury of charges of being an accessory to murder.
San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson announced the arrest of Flores and his father in 2021 — a quarter of a century after Smart was last seen alive — and credited a true crime podcast for producing new evidence.
Chris Lambert, the freelance journalist who revisited the case in his podcast “Your Own Backyard,” brought the case “out nationally to bring in new information,” Parkinson said at the time, without offering further details, according to the AP. “It did produce some information that I believe was valuable.”
Smart’s family delivered impact statements on Friday ahead of the sentencing. According to the San Luis Obispo Tribune newspaper, her father, Stan Smart, said: “This is a parent’s worst nightmare — the disappearance and death of their child … we shared her hopes, her dreams, her aspirations as she became a beautiful young adult, and now she will never be able to have a full life.”
Paul Flores’s attorney, Robert Sanger, did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment following the sentencing. He previously told The Washington Post that his policy is not to comment on his cases.
During the trial, the jury heard that Smart was last seen walking toward her dormitory with Flores after a party in May 1996. He later gave differing accounts of how he had sustained a black eye to investigators looking into the disappearance, the AP reported.
Following an interview with a new witness in 2019, detectives obtained a court order to intercept and monitor Flores’ cellphone and texts. They also carried out searches at the homes of Flores and his family the following year.
During a further search in March 2021, archaeologists working for the police found a soil disturbance about the size of a casket, together with human blood, under the deck of Flores’ father’s home, according to the AP. The blood was too degraded to extract a DNA sample, however. Prosecutors said they believed the “clandestine grave” had once held Smart’s remains.
During Friday’s sentencing hearing, Monterey County Superior Court Judge Jennifer O’Keefe told Flores he was “a cancer to society” and ordered him to be registered as a sex offender for life, according to the Associated Press.
“You deserve to spend every day you have left behind bars,” she said, adding that Flores had “lived free in the community” for more than two decades and had a history of “predatory behavior” against women.
Smart’s mother on Friday described her daughter’s disappearance as “gut-wrenching” and said Flores’ refusal to reveal the location of her daughter’s body was “a cruel and visceral pain that no one should ever have to bear,” the San Luis Obispo Tribune newspaper reported.
The authorities have pledged to continue investigations to recover Smart’s body. After Flores’ conviction last year, Sheriff Parkinson said in a statement that there could be “no true justice until Kristin is reunited with her family. This investigation will not be closed until we find Kristin.”
