Suspects in Kristin Smart’s 1996 unsolved murder plead not guilty in California
The former college student charged with murdering Kristin Smart pleaded not guilty Monday while his father denied helping him hide the 19-year-old woman’s body a quarter century ago.
Paul Flores, 44, entered the plea after he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder last week in the decades-old disappearance that rocked the coastal college town where Smart was last seen alive walking home from a 1996 off-campus party.
Dad Ruben Flores, 80, was arrested and charged with being an accessory after murder. His not guilty plea was entered before his son’s on Monday.
Witnesses said Smart was intoxicated when Flores said he would walk her back her own dorm room on May 25, 1996. She was never heard from again.
Investigators announced their big break in the missing persons probe last week, crediting the popular podcast “Your Own Backyard” with leading detectives to a new witness interview that they parlayed into a series of new search warrants.
San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson said the new warrants let them tap Paul Flores’ phone and search Flores family properties on multiple occasions over the last two years.
Recent searches at Ruben Flores’ home about a dozen miles south of the Cal Poly campus have included ground-penetrating radar, cadaver dogs and the use of power tools to disassemble part of a deck.
Smart’s body has not been recovered, Parkinson said last week.
Defense lawyers, meanwhile, have challenged the evidence revealed by prosecutors so far.
“The evidence is so minimal as to shock the conscience,” Harold Mesick, who represents Ruben Flores, has said, according to the Associated Press.
Prosecutor Christopher Peuvrelle countered that “there is substantial new evidence” included in the warrants.
Paul Flores is being held without bail, but the judge overseeing the case in San Luis Obispo County Superior Court said he planned to set Reuben’s bail at a level the now-elderly suspect could afford.
With News Wire Services
