![]() ![]() The trial is expected to last about four months.Your email address will not be published. Separate juries were selected to weigh the evidence against each defendant. Trial Judge Jennifer O’Keefe - who is a year younger than Kristin Smart would be today - however, has barred suggestions of alternate suspects unless Sanger can provide evidence of their direct involvement. Sanger has tried to pin the killing on someone else - noting that Scott Peterson, who was later convicted at a sensational trial of killing his pregnant wife and the fetus she was carrying - was also a Cal Poly student at the time. “The evidence then and now is based on speculation and not proof of facts,” Sanger said in court documents. The case was moved 110 miles (177 kilometers) north to Salinas, a small city in the agricultural region where John Steinbeck set some of his best-known novels.ĭefense lawyer Robert Sanger previously said the evidence remained the same as it did in the 1990s when Paul Flores was the prime suspect but never charged with a crime. Van Rooyen ruled in favor of a defense request to move the trial out of San Luis Obispo County because it was unlikely the Flores’ could receive a fair trial with so much much notoriety in the city of about 47,000 people. He downplayed his interactions with her when he first spoke with police three days later, saying she walked to her dorm under her own power, though other witnesses said that she had passed out earlier in the night and Flores helped hold her up as they walked back to campus. Paul Flores was the last person seen with Smart on as he walked her home from an off-campus party where she got intoxicated. “If we even call it evidence, it is so minimal as to shock the conscience.” “It was a hot mess because it’s been previously excavated,” Mesick said. He said that soil under the deck had been dumped there after being excavated to lay a foundation nearby. Prosecutors, defense lawyers and San Luis Obispo sheriff’s deputies are constrained by a court order prohibiting them from discussing the case.Īttorney Harold Mesick, who represents Ruben Flores, previously said the evidence unearthed was ambiguous. ![]() San Luis Obispo Superior Court Judge Craig Van Rooyen ordered the pair to trial after a 22-day preliminary hearing in which he found a “strong suspicion” the father and son committed the crimes they were charged with, that a grave existed under Ruben Flores’ deck and it once held Smart’s remains. Investigators didn’t conduct their dig beneath the deck until more than a year later. The lawsuit Murphy filed against Ruben Flores alleged that “under cover of darkness,” the father and unnamed accomplices moved the body four days after investigators searched his house in February 2020. “When was the last time you drove down Tally Ho Road in Arroyo Grande and saw a primate?” “The size of the area in which the blood was found would make it a prehistoric ferret that would be in Jurassic Park,” Murphy said. Murphy, who has sued the father and son on behalf of Smart’s parents, scoffed at the idea that it was anything other than human blood. San Luis Obispo Sheriff Ian Parkinson acknowledged missteps by detectives over the years and he credited a popular podcast about Smart’s disappearance called “Your Own Backyard” for helping unearth new information and inspiring witnesses to speak with investigators. Paul Flores had long been considered a suspect in the killing, but prosecutors only arrested him and his father in 2021 after the investigation was revived. His father, now 81, allegedly helped bury the slain student behind his home in the nearby community of Arroyo Grande and later dug up the remains and moved them. The younger Flores, now 45, killed the 19-year-old during an attempted rape on in his dorm room at Cal Poly, where both were first-year students, prosecutors said. Opening statements are scheduled Monday in Monterey County Superior Court in Salinas in the trial of Paul Flores and his father, Ruben Flores, who is charged as an accessory. ![]() This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
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