The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office finished searching a home in Arroyo Grande tied to Paul Flores and announced Saturday that investigators did not locate the remains of Kristin Smart. Smart was a 19-year-old student at California Polytechnic State University when she went missing in May 1996. Her body has never been found, and her disappearance has remained one of California’s most sustained missing-person cases for three decades.
The search centered on the property of Susan Flores, Paul Flores’s mother, in the Central Coast community roughly 150 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Authorities said earlier in the week that evidence indicated human remains might be present there and brought in scientists who specialized in human decomposition and soil analysis to collect ground samples. The Sheriff’s Office declined to offer additional detail about what led them to the property or what the samples showed.
“The Sheriff’s Office remains fully committed to finding Kristin and bringing her home to her family,” the agency said in a statement after concluding the search.
Prosecutors argued that Smart was killed during an attempted rape, and that Paul Flores — a fellow Cal Poly student — was the last person seen with her. Flores was convicted of Smart’s murder in October 2022 after a trial that drew national attention. He was sentenced the following year to a term of 25 years to life in prison. Smart was declared legally dead in 2002, six years after she vanished.
The case has held public interest in part because of the “Your Own Backyard” podcast. Host Chris Lambert began investigating the disappearance in 2019, and his reporting brought forward new witnesses who cooperated with law enforcement. Lambert first reported the search of the Flores property this week, before the Sheriff’s Office issued its public statements confirming the operation.
Saturday’s announcement closed one line of inquiry without producing the recovery the Smart family has sought for three decades. The Sheriff’s Office has not said whether it has additional leads, only that its commitment to locating Smart’s remains is unchanged.