In the weeks after the student’s 1996 disappearance, a dog handler testified that her cadaver dog made a beeline towards the bed in suspect Paul Flores’ dorm room.
The trial for the murder and disappearance of Kristin Smart, a 19-year-old student at California Polytechnic State University who was last seen with Paul Flores, 45, and his 81-year-old father, Ruben, is now underway.
The dog handler Adela Morris spoke in court on Monday in Monterey County after being called in to help with the police investigation in the weeks after Smart’s disappearance.
The border collie search dog “immediately performed a U-turn” and “become extremely systematic and sluggish,” according to the witness who testified in court, when she let go of K9 Cholla at Santa Lucia Hall. It then sought entry into room 128—Paul Flores’ room.
Morris said that Cholla alerted her handler by springing to her hip as soon as she entered the room, “very concentrated” and “quite obviously in smell,” with her attention only on the left side of the space, where Flores was sleeping.
I had no doubts that she delivered her alert—which is a very powerful alert—that she provides when she locates human remains, Morris added. She was quite clear.
More than 20 years after Smart’s last sighting, Paul Flores is now on trial for both her murder and disappearance.
Due to allegations that he assisted his son in concealing Smart’s corpse, his father is accused of being an accomplice after the fact.
Four months is the anticipated trial duration.
Morris said in court on Monday that she and Cholla were asked to take part in the’very extensive search’ at Cal Poly that was conducted after Smart vanished.
They first checked reservoirs close to the school before moving on to the Santa Lucia dorm.
The search was conducted in the dark, so neither the handlers nor the search crew were informed of any prior searches or their findings.
We just have the dog’s nose because we want to search in the dark, she remarked. She continued by saying that she subsequently learned that the dormitories had already been examined by another handler.
Morris said that she let Cholla off the leash during her search of the resident hall so that she could look for her target smell.
Cholla then rushed down the corridor, ‘very instantly’ performed a U-turn, and started focusing around three-fourths of the way down the hall.
Morris observed, “She’s practically poking her nose around door knobs and gaps.” She ran back to me to jump on me after reaching one of the doors, alerting me that she had found the source of her target’s stench of human remains.
Morris told the court that the dog then brought him to room 128 and started banging on the door.
Paul Flores was sleeping in room 128.
The dog became “very concentrated” and “quite obviously in smell” when Morris, the dog, and a different officer entered the room, according to Morris.
Paul Flores slept on the left side of the bed, where Cholla sounded the alarm.
She expressed her opinion with great fervour and eloquence. She remarked, “She was really clear.”
Although the customary alarm was at her thighs, Morris said Cholla notified her by leaping to her hip.
The dog was solely interested in the left side of the room, despite her best efforts to get it to gaze to the right. Morris said, “When she leaped harder and higher, she truly wanted to communicate.”
This is a highly emphatic warning: “She would physically use my body to bounce off of, push off of.”
Morris stated that while the dog kept sniffing and woke him up about a dozen times, it never appeared to focus on one particular area of the bed.
The two left the room to check other places, but Morris said that Cholla did not alert to any additional dorm rooms or locations.
Morris confirmed that she was a volunteer and unpaid when defence attorney Robert Sanger questioned her about it on Monday during cross-examination.
He also asked her about a letter she sent to a different K9 professional, from whom she said she wanted guidance on how to answer to questioning from investigators.
The way I write the story is more factual: “I did this, the dog did this,” Morris said to Sanger. It’s not what I think.
The trial will likely centre on the unsolved riddle of how Smart disappeared from the picturesque campus nestled against a lush coastal mountain range since her remains have never been discovered. In 2002, she was ruled deceased.
The 19-year-old was allegedly slain by Paul Flores on May 25, 1996, during an attempted rape in the first-year students’ dorm room at Cal Poly, according to the prosecution.
His father, who is now 81, reportedly assisted in the student’s burial in the adjacent neighbourhood of Arroyo Grande, dug up the body, and then moved it.
Although Paul Flores had been a suspect in the murder for some time, the prosecution didn’t arrest him and his father until the case was reopened in 2021.
Sheriff Ian Parkinson of San Luis Obispo admitted mistakes made by detectives over the years and gave ‘Your Own Backyard,’ a well-known podcast about Smart’s abduction, credit for helping to uncover fresh evidence and motivating witnesses to talk with police.
Archaeologists working for the police discovered a soil disturbance the size of a coffin and the presence of human blood in March 2021 under lattice work beneath the deck of his sizable home on a dead end street off Tally Ho Road, according to the prosecution.
To get a DNA sample from the blood would have been impossible. Although a blood specialist confirmed that it was human blood, the test performed could not completely rule out the idea that it had come from a ferret or ape, even though court documents said that no traces of either species had been seen there.
James Murphy Jr., an attorney who is representing Smart’s parents in a lawsuit against the father and son, laughed aside the notion that it wasn’t human blood.
The extent of the area where the blood was discovered would indicate a dinosaur ferret, according to Murphy.
When was the last time a primate was seen while you were travelling along Tally Ho Road in Arroyo Grande?
Four days after police searched Ruben Flores’ home in February 2020, according to the complaint Murphy filed against him, the father and his accomplices allegedly transported the corpse “under cover of darkness.” Over a year later, investigators finally started to excavation under the deck.