Soil testing at California house turns up evidence of human remains in Kirstin Smart case | California

The county sheriff announced Friday that soil testing at a property linked to the man convicted of murdering California college student Kristin Smart, who disappeared in 1996, turned up evidence of human remains.

“We can’t call it Kristin, but there is evidence to support that there were once human remains there,” San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson said at a news conference.

Smart disappeared from California Polytechnic State University in May 1996 after returning from an off-campus party. Prosecutors claimed she was killed during an attempted rape and that the last person she was seen with was fellow student Paul Flores.

Flores and his father, Ruben Flores, were arrested in 2021.

Prosecutors alleged that Smart’s remains were buried on Ruben Flores’ property and later moved. He was acquitted of the 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 Smart must pay his family just over $350,000 for expenses they incurred after his death.

Smart’s remains were never found. He was declared legally dead in 2002.

This week, law enforcement searched a home in the central coastal town of Arroyo Grande where Flores’ mother, Susan Flores, lived, according to public records and a report from a podcast that closely followed the case.

The Your Own Backyard podcast, which helped investigators solve the case by bringing in additional witnesses, first reported the search and said the home belonged to Flores’ mother.

“Everything is still open until we get Kristin,” Parkinson said Friday.

“Even if we looked for it once, we might have missed an area 10 feet away from it,” he said.

He called on the public to be patient during the investigation.

“This will continue until we have nowhere left to go.”

Associated Press contributed reportenglish