Kristin Smart murder case: Here’s what happened on Day 4 of the preliminary hearing
Just hours before she disappeared, Cal Poly student Kristin Smart was eager to go out and enjoy a Friday night, a friend and former residence hall neighbor of Smart’s testified Thursday in San Luis Obispo Superior Court.
The pair went together to a small gathering with some other people from their dorm, before the friend decided to return to her room alone and Smart headed in a different direction.
“That was the last time I saw her and spoke to her,” former Cal Poly student Margarita Campos said on the stand Thursday.
Campos said she felt “’demoralized” by the immediate investigation into Smart’s disappearance in 1996, adding that she felt investigators mishandled the initial interviews of Smart’s neighbors and brought bias into their reports.
Witness testimony resumed Thursday for the preliminary hearing in the case of Smart, who prosecutors say was murdered by Paul Flores during a rape attempt more than 25 years ago.
Paul Flores, 44, is the last person known to have seen the 19-year-old Smart alive after walking her back from the party toward the Cal Poly campus residence halls on May 24, 1996. He is accused of raping or attempting to rape Smart in his dorm room before killing her.
Smart’s body has never been found, but investigators believe her remains were buried at the Arroyo Grande home of Paul Flores’ father, 80-year-old Ruben Flores, and “recently” moved, according to a San Luis Obispo County probation report.
Thursday marked the fourth day of testimony in the evidentiary hearing for Paul and Ruben Flores that was originally expected to last at least 12 days before the judge in the case said Wednesday it’s likely to proceed through August.
So far, the prosecution has laid out its case against the father-and-son co-defendants in a mostly linear fashion.
Testimony began Monday with Smart’s parents, Stan and Denise, and continued through Tuesday with several former Cal Poly students who lived with Smart at Cal Poly’s Muir Hall or attended a house party with her in the hours before she vanished.
Wednesday featured legal arguments over admitting a booking photo that showed Paul Flores with a black eye days after Smart’s disappearance. The retired Cal Poly police detective who was the first to interview Flores, Lawrence Kennedy, also recounted his investigation.
The judge in the case also unsealed a defense motion to suppress evidence that speculates about other people the defense says should have been investigated and reveals a few new details about searches conducted by law enforcement in the case over more than two decades.
The preliminary hearing is not being live-streamed and media in attendance are under strict rules prohibiting the use of electronic devices and photographing or recording witnesses in the courtroom.
At the conclusion of the hearing, Superior Court Judge Craig van Rooyen will rule whether prosecutors established probable cause — a lesser standard of proof than guilt beyond a reasonable doubt — to proceed the case toward trial.
Here’s what’s happened at Thursday’s hearing.
10:20 a.m.: Defense discusses retired detective’s notes
Lawrence Kennedy, the retired Cal Poly police detective, resumed testimony Thursday morning, a day after Paul Flores’ defense attorney, Robert Sanger received more than 500 pages of handwritten notes and other records from Kennedy’s investigation from the prosecution.
Sanger said in a court motion unsealed Wednesday that investigators focused their attention on his client, Paul Fores, following a meeting on May 31, 1996, and ignored other possible leads due to “confirmation bias” — also known as tunnel vision.
Sanger said the notes included information that Smart’s friend, Campos, received three phantom phone calls early in the morning of May 29, 1996, five days after Smart’s disappearance.
According to Sanger, Kennedy had written that Campos received a phone call between 2:30 and 3 a.m. in which a female caller mumbled something indecipherable before hanging up. Campos received two subsequent hang-up calls, Sanger said in court, citing the notes.
Kennedy did not recall Campos’ statements, he said.
Sanger said that Campos told Kennedy the calls were significant because Smart had made similar early morning calls to her in the past.
Sanger also went down a list of other people of interest who Kennedy never followed up on. Prosecutors have said in the motions unsealed Wednesday that those individuals were either ruled out as suspects or were not considered suspects.
Sanger asked about a May 31, 1996 meeting Kennedy had with San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office investigators, after which point “the focus of (the Smart) investigation changed.”
Kennedy’s notes showed that Cal Poly investigators had planned a meeting with mental health professionals that was canceled following that meeting.
“Pretty much from May 31 on, the focus was Paul Flores?” Sanger asked Kennedy on Thursday.
The retired detective said the DA’s Office was to focus solely on Flores while Cal Poly investigators would continue to focus on the missing persons case.
Kennedy said he “continued to follow up on any lead he received” even after the meeting, but admitted that the “perception” was that Flores was the only suspect.
12:45 p.m.: Kristin Smart’s friend recounts hours before her disappearance
Campos, the tenth witness to take the stand, was a freshman at Cal Poly when she met Smart in December 1995, she said. The two were next-door neighbors in Muir Hall.
Campos testified that Smart did not get along with her roommate and would often come hang out with Campos in the latter’s room. There they would chat about “families, travel, changing our majors,” Campos said.
“We talked about activities we liked, complaints — you know, life,” Campos said.
On May 24, 1996, a Friday, the university campus was quiet, Campos recalled. Many students had already left campus in advance of the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
Campos said she and Smart were in Campos’ dorm room listening to music when Smart suggested Campos had “studied enough” and encouraged her to join her to do something with their Friday evening.
Some other women in Muir Hall invited the friends to a small get-together in a residential neighborhood toward the end of California Boulevard, Campos said, and Smart and Campos traveled with them in a truck to the house.
There, Campos and Smart had one beer, Campos said, but the pair felt they were imposing on an intimate gathering.
When the other women in the group decided to leave, Smart and Campos were dropped off near the intersection of Foothill and California boulevards at about 10:30 p.m.
Smart “wanted to see what was going on” on Crandall Way, while Campos wanted to return to their dorm, which locked its doors at midnight, Campos recalled.
Campos said Smart was wearing black board shorts, a gray tank top and red sneakers. She didn’t have a purse with her.
Smart also didn’t have her key — or any pockets in the clothes she was wearing — so Campos lent her her key, which she put in her shoe, Campos said.
Campos then started walking back to Muir Hall.
“She said, ‘Please, come with me,’ and I didn’t want to go,” Campos testified. The two then split up, with Campos continuing north on California Boulevard and Smart turning up Crandall Way.
Campos said she’s replayed the mental image of Smart walking alone up Crandall Way in her head “so many times.”
“I thought if I looked back and she looked back, maybe she would come back with me,” Campos said.
3:30 p.m.: Friend of missing student recalls investigation into disappearance
Following the lunch recess, Campos testified that she and Smart vaguely knew of Paul Flores and “minimally” had contact with him at the campus grocery store where he worked.
Asked by Deputy District Attorney Christopher Peuvrelle whether he was ever caught staring at her or Smart on campus, citing a police report, Campos was prevented from answering due to an objection from Sanger.
Van Rooyen ruled that she could only answer whether Flores ever stared at Campos specifically. Campos said, “No.”
“He stared at everyone,” she added, glancing at Flores.
Campos recounted waking up before noon on May 25, 1996, and finding Smart’s room “exactly as it looked” the night before.
“Nothing had been moved,” she said. “Nothing.”
As Campos’ fellow dorm residents began to stream in that Saturday, they all expressed concerns about their missing classmate.
The next day, May 26, “was the most serious day,” Campos said.
“That’s when things started getting surreal,” she said. “This was not like Kristin (to be gone for 24 hours).”
Looking back, Campos said she’s frustrated because, after the dorm mates reported Smart missing, Cal Poly police officers took all their statements in a group setting, with people spitballing off each other.
She added that the detectives who initially worked on the case were “demoralizing” in their questions and in what they chose to put in their reports.
“They shamed me for being friends with someone like Kristin,” Campos said. “There was so much defamation of character. ... There was a lot of unconscious bias in the case.”
She said that changed when San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office Det. Clint Cole took over the case.
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Campos said she emailed county Sheriff Ian Parkinson to set up a meeting with the most recent investigator because “some of the details might not be there (in past detectives’ reports).”
“I felt that (Cole) had a very unbiased approach to the case,” she said. “I knew that my voice and the voice of other students were going to be heard like never before. ... I felt like I was being listened to.”
Under cross examination, Campos denied making several statements that the defense quoted from various investigative reports. She attributed those alleged misstatements to the biases of past investigators that interviewed her.
Deeply affected by her friend’s disappearance, Campos said that she left Cal Poly in her sophomore year, enrolling in an abnormal psychology course elsewhere.
“(Smart’s disappearance) was pulling me and drawing me in,” she said. “I took classes because I wanted to understand the psychology about Paul.”
Campos said she would be awoken at night by scary sounds outside her window, and would be afraid to look because “I was afraid it would be Kristin and she would be mad because I abandoned her.”
Smart, she noted, went missing with her dorm key.
Campos described her friend as being goal-oriented and “not a follower.” Smart was “at the time in her life when she wanted to find love and a partnership,” she said.
Asked by Sanger about once calling Smart a “tease” to a detective, Campos said her friend was “very determined. She was a very determined woman.”
Asked by defense attorney Harold Mesick if she has any idea where Smart may be, Campos took a long pause.
“Kristin’s no longer alive,” she said.
Paul Flores, father accused of killing Cal Poly student, hiding body
After a decades-long investigation, Paul and Ruben Flores were arrested in connection with Smart’s disappearance on April 13 in San Pedro and Arroyo Grande, respectively, and the San Luis Obispo District Attorney’s Office announced the criminal charges against the men the following day.
Paul Flores, a San Pedro resident, is charged with one count of murder. Ruben Flores, who lives in Arroyo Grande, is charged with felony accessory after the fact.
Paul Flores and his father pleaded not guilty at their arraignment on April 19, when van Rooyen ordered Paul Flores be held without bail.
Paul Flores remains in San Luis Obispo County Jail, where he’s being held without bail for the remainder of proceedings.
Ruben Flores was released from County Jail on April 22, hours after Superior Court Judge Craig van Rooyen significantly lowered his bail because he is not a flight risk or a risk to public safety.
Ruben Flores remains out of custody.
Paul Flores faces a sentence of 25 years to life if convicted of first-degree murder.
Ruben Flores faces a maximum of three years if convicted of the accessory charge, though it is not clear if that sentence would be served in County Jail or state prison.
This story was originally published August 5, 2021 at 11:01 AM.
