Soil testing at a property linked to the man convicted in the murder of California college student Kristin Smart, who disappeared in 1996, turned up evidence of human remains, a state sheriff announced on Friday.
“We can’t call it Kristin, but there’s evidence to support human remains – there at one time,” the San Luis Obispo county sheriff, Ian Parkinson, said at a news conference.
Smart went missing from California Polytechnic State University in May 1996 after returning from an off-campus party. Prosecutors alleged she was killed during an attempted rape and that the last person she was seen with was Paul Flores, a fellow student.
Flores and his father, Ruben Flores, were arrested in 2021.
Prosecutors alleged Smart’s remains were buried on Ruben Flores’s property and later moved. He was acquitted of accessory charges.
The younger Flores was convicted in October 2022 and ultimately sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
In 2024, a judge ruled that he must pay just over $350,000 to Smart’s family for costs they incurred after her death.
Smart’s remains have never been found. She was declared legally dead in 2002.
This week, law enforcement officers searched a home in the central coast town of Arroyo Grande occupied by Flores’s mother, Susan Flores, according to public records and reporting by a podcast that has closely followed the case.
The Your Own Backyard podcast, which helped investigators crack the case by bringing forward additional witnesses, first reported the search and said the home belonged to Flores’s mother.
Parkinson said on Friday: “Until we have Kristin, everything is still wide open.”
“Even if we’ve searched it once, we might have missed an area 10ft away from it,” he said.
He urged the public for patience amid the investigation.
“It will continue until we absolutely have no where to go.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting