Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (37 page)

E R A S E D

cards, no car. She had not contacted any of her friends or loved

ones.

There was, however, plenty of reason to suspect foul play. Paul

Flores told police he left Kristin about fifty yards from the safety of

her dormitory at 2:30 in the morning as he went toward his own,

yet she never made it to her room. He denied speaking with Kristin

at the party prior to walking her home, although other students saw

him not only talking to her but also sprawled on top of her. (He later

told a friend that Kristin was flirting with him.) He didn’t tell police

about pressing Cheryl Anderson for a kiss and a hug as the three of

them walked home.

Most disturbingly, Flores showed up for classes on Tuesday

sporting a black eye. He initially told police he was elbowed in

the face while playing basketball on Monday with his best friend,

Jeromy Moon. After Moon told detectives that Paul already had the

injury when he saw him on Sunday, the day before the basketball

game, Flores changed his story and said he bumped his head while

installing a stereo in his car. He had told Moon, however, that he

couldn’t remember how he got the black eye—‘‘I just woke up

with it.’’

Flores told Moon something even more troubling. He claimed

to have gotten a ‘‘blow job from some slut in the bathroom’’ that

weekend at a Cal Poly party. Flores said that afterwards the girl started

hanging on a bunch of other guys at the party.

Moon considered those words an empty boast. He believed that his

socially awkward friend was actually a virgin. But the angry contempt

toward women Paul’s comment displayed should have sent up some

red flags with law enforcement, particularly in connection with his

mysterious injury, his inappropriate behavior toward Cheryl, and

other disturbing information in his background.

In fact, Flores had a reputation at Cal Poly for making unwelcome

advances toward girls at parties. Some students had taken to calling

him ‘‘Chester the Molester’’ after a cartoon character depicted in

a pornographic magazine, who hung around playgrounds hoping

to lure children into his clutches. Flores’s modus operandi, they

said, was to hang around until the end of a party and offer the

most intoxicated girl a ride home. Five months before Kristin’s

disappearance, a woman reported him to police after she found a

drunken Flores on her apartment balcony. Another student claimed

she found him peeping in her bedroom window an hour after he left

Seeds of a Plan

2 3 5

a Halloween party at her house. He was known to drink heavily and

was on the verge of flunking out of Cal Poly with a 0.7 GPA at the

time Kristin went missing.

A mother told the Smarts that when Paul was in middle school

he used a choke hold to render her son unconscious and then kicked

him in the head while he was prone on the ground. Paul’s father,

Ruben Flores, contends that his son was jumped by other students

and was only defending himself. Court records show that he and his

wife paid $5,000 to the boy’s family to settle a civil suit.

The university police didn’t know many of these facts, though,

because they didn’t bother asking. They distributed fliers and searched

the campus grounds, but they never investigated Flores, who as the

last person to see Kristin would have been the first person any good

detective would have checked out.

Instead of profiling potential suspects, they profiled Kristin, and

not very accurately. In their eyes she was at best a flaky teenager who

decided to blow off finals (she had that incomplete on her transcript,

after all), at worst a deliberate runaway, but never a victim. They

asked the FBI to check airline records to see if Kristin had used her

passport, and passed on false sightings to her family.

‘‘They would tell us this harebrained stuff,’’ Denise recalled.

‘‘ ‘Kristin probably went camping.’ ‘She was seen at a drug store in

town, so she must be staying with a friend.’ I told them that would be

totally out of character for her, that she is very close to her family, that

she always calls. But you want to hang onto any thread, so whatever

they say you try to believe them.’’

The incident report, prepared by the campus police on May 31

after only the most cursory investigation, reeks with condescension

toward Kristin and specious psychologizing. Oddly enough, in a

section of the form clearly intended for explaining how a bicycle was

stolen, the investigating officer summarized the case thusly: ‘‘Victim

attends party and does not return home afterwards, does not contact

friends or family, and skips school.’’

He repeatedly writes how people described Kristin as ‘‘very drunk’’

and ‘‘flirtatious’’ at the party and concludes with these observations:

‘‘During the course of my investigation, I have spoken with many

people who have been associated with Smart. They have all told

stories that agreed with each other. The stories have all included

the following information: Smart does not have any close friends

at Cal Poly. Smart appeared to be under the influence of alcohol

2 3 6

E R A S E D

on Friday night. Smart was talking with and socializing with several

different males at the party. Smart lives her life in her own way,

not conforming to typical teenage behavior. These observations are

in no way implying that her behavior caused her disappearance,

but they provide a picture of her conduct on the night of her

disappearance.’’

Three weeks later, campus police still did not believe that any harm

had befallen Kristin. In a story published in the college newspaper

on June 20, 1996, Investigator Mike Kennedy declared, ‘‘There is no

evidence of any criminal activity. It doesn’t look like she was the

victim of a crime so we are pursuing this case as an adult missing

under unusual circumstances.’’ Unusual circumstances?

Cal Poly police were well acquainted with Stan Smart by that time,

as he was on their doorstep virtually every day inquiring into the

progress of their investigation and passing on whatever information

he was able to turn up— such as the number of every pay phone on

campus he thought Paul Flores might have used to call for someone

to help him dispose of a body.

But it wasn’t until a full month after Kristin disappeared that any

officers came up to Stockton to interview Kristin’s mother, siblings,

or longtime friends—people who could give them a more accurate

picture of Kristin than the one provided by strangers at a frat party,

and a clearer sense of whether she was a runaway or the victim of

foul play.

Unbeknownst to Denise, a reporter who had interviewed her

didn’t think she was ‘‘upset enough’’ and reported that to police.

Shortly after their visit to Stockton, police called Mrs. Smart to tell

her she had been eliminated as a suspect.

‘‘They said ‘We just want to let you know that after talking to you

and friends and family we don’t think Kristin ran away or that you

were involved,’ ’’ Mrs. Smart recalled. It was now time to bring Paul

in for extensive questioning, they said.

Now? Denise burned with outrage. ‘‘I know they deal with a lot of

‘possibles,’ people who turn out not to be missing. But you have to

act; you can’t wait.’’

Q

What happens or does not happen during the first few days

of a criminal investigation—when leads are fresh, evidence has

Seeds of a Plan

2 3 7

not been completely destroyed or hidden, and a suspect can be

caught off balance—generally determines whether or not the case is

solved.

Cal Poly police did not speak to Paul Flores until three days

after Kristin disappeared, and then apparently did so only by phone,

because they failed to note in their report that Flores had a black eye.

Two days later a team of investigators did interview Paul in person

and asked him how he sustained the injury, as did investigators from

the district attorney’s office the following day, but none of them

photographed the wound to turn this potentially important finding

into a concrete piece of evidence that could be submitted at trial.

(Under purely fortuitous circumstances, a neighboring city’s police

department did photograph Flores a few days later and preserved a

record of that evidence, but Cal Poly police knew nothing about that

at the time.)

Another huge blunder was not preserving the apparent crime

scene. Campus police did not secure Flores’s dormitory room until

sixteen days after Kristin went missing—after Paul moved out of the

room and cleaned it thoroughly— and did not even enter the room

to look around for another three weeks. The university says it did

not have the right to do so, although campus authorities routinely

inspect dorm rooms for health and safety reasons, such as having a

potential fire source in a room.

Yet the university refused to yield jurisdiction to the county

sheriff’s department, an agency better equipped to handle a potential

homicide investigation, until a month after Kristin disappeared—and

only then as a result of pressure brought by the Smart family. Egos

and jurisdictional turf battles eclipsed common sense, as more time

and potential evidence slipped away.

The biggest opportunity lost by not acting quickly is one that

could potentially have broken the case wide open within hours of

Kristin’s disappearance.

At the time Kristin vanished, Flores had an outstanding warrant

for his arrest on file in an unrelated matter. Paul had been convicted

of drunk driving, and while on probation for that offense had been

caught driving with a suspended license. When he failed to appear in

court for the probation violation, a warrant was issued for his arrest.

The police could have arrested him at any time on the outstanding

warrant and taken that opportunity to press him about Kristin. Purely

by coincidence on the Memorial Day holiday, while Paul was out

2 3 8

E R A S E D

with his friend Jeromy Moon, a police officer came to his parents’

home in Arroyo Grande just outside San Luis Obispo to serve the

warrant. That evening his father took him down to the police station

to clear the warrant.

A mug shot taken by the Arroyo Grande police that night captures

not only Paul’s black eye but also scrapes on his hand—injuries that

could have been inflicted by a young, athletic woman fighting for

her life, or that he could have suffered while disposing of a corpse.

When the police interviewed Flores a few days later, they also noticed

that he had red, scraped knees, which an investigator described as

consistent with a rug burn.

Confronted nearly a month later by investigators for the district

attorney’s office about his inconsistent explanations for the black eye,

Paul appeared extremely anxious, writhing in his chair and clutching

at himself nervously. The investigators believed he was on the verge of

confessing when he suddenly ended the interrogation with a mocking

frontal assault.

‘‘If you’re so smart, then tell me where the body is,’’ he said before

getting up to leave. They would never get the chance to question him

again.

One can only wonder what might have happened if police had

gone harder at him earlier on— perhaps in those first seventy-two

hours when a warrant was hanging over his head—about injuries he

still to this day has not adequately explained.

The university police, the agency that would initially have juris-diction because she disappeared on campus, believed Kristin was

heavily intoxicated that night—an opinion that seemed to color

their view of her and every aspect of their investigation. Her par-ents fear she actually might have been slipped one of the so-called

date-rape drugs, powerful sedatives that can quickly incapacitate an

unsuspecting victim.

It is hard to believe that Kristin could have been so drunk that

she not only collapsed to the floor in the middle of a party but also

brought another person down on top of her. She had nothing to

drink before arriving at the party at about 10:30 that night, according

to the girlfriends she was with earlier in the evening. Drugs like

Rohypnol and gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB), modern equivalents

of the old-fashioned ‘‘Mickey Finn,’’ can drop a person like a stone

within minutes of ingestion and make it difficult to resist a sexual

assault.

Seeds of a Plan

2 3 9

The victim may quite literally never know what hit her. Colorless,

odorless, and tasteless, the drugs are undetectable when dissolved

into a drink, and have a powerful amnesic effect. They can also lead

to coma and death, especially when mixed with alcohol: one danger is

that they significantly depress respiration; another is that the victim

may throw up while unconscious and then aspirate vomit.

The drug has been showing up increasingly at college bars and

campus parties around the country since the 1990s. In 2002 a

member of a Cal Poly fraternity—where juice spiked with GHB was

so regularly consumed that it was kept in the refrigerator in Gatorade

bottles—died from an overdose of the drug. The fraternity brothers

dubbed the concoction ‘‘Faderade.’’

Q

Within days of taking over primary investigative duties in the case,

the San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s Department conducted a second search

of the campus—this time with cadaver dogs trained to pick up the

scent of a dead body.

The dogs were certified through the California Rescue Dog Asso-ciation, the same body that provided dogs during the search for

Laci Peterson and establishes training standards for dogs and their

handlers. Dog teams that have passed a series of tests and proven

successful in the field are dispatched through the state’s Office of

Emergency Services.

So as not to bias the handler’s ability to accurately read the

dog’s behavior, the handlers who participated in the search that day

were not privy to any information about the suspect or what areas

of campus might be of particular interest to the investigation. To

further ensure the integrity of the search, detectives followed from a

distance to avoid exerting any influence on either the dog or handler.

Wayne Behrens had already worked his Labrador retriever, Sierra,

through two other dormitories without incident when his dog

‘‘alerted’’ outside the locked door to room 128 in Santa Lucia

Hall—the room occupied by Paul Flores at the time of Kristin’s

disappearance.

A second team of dogs was brought to the dormitory. These two

dogs, border collies named Cholla and Cirque, had previously worked

an infamous abduction case, successfully picking out the car in which

Richard Allen Davis transported the dead body of twelve-year-old

2 4 0