Student who Kristin Smart kissed hours before murder reveals chilling Paul Flores interaction and stranger mystery

A STUDENT who kissed Kristin Smart hours before her murder has recounted the strange interactions he shared with Paul Flores and another “creepy” stranger at the party where she was last seen alive.

Trevor Boelter was 20 years old when he first met Kristin at a house party near the campus of Cal Poly Tech University in San Luis Obispo, California, in the late spring of 1996.

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Throughout the course of the evening, Trevor would cross paths with 19-year-old Kristin three times before she would vanish in the early hours of May 25, 1996, never to be seen again.

On Friday, the man convicted of killing her, Paul Flores, will be sentenced in Monterey County Superior Court, where he is facing 25 years to life in state prison or life without parole.

The first of Trevor’s three encounters with Kristin came as he was standing in a hallway inside the home.

Remembering her as attractive and flirtatious, Trevor said the tall blond walked over to him and introduced herself as “Roxy.”

Seconds after getting acquainted, he said she gave him a “full-on French kiss,” grabbed him by the hand, and led him into the bathroom.

But once inside, Smart’s confident demeanor quickly gave way to one of insecurity.

“She was very pretty and seemed extremely outgoing,” Trevor, 47, told The U.S. Sun.

“She was a little bit out there and she didn’t really seem to have anyone with her.

“I mean, she came up to me right away and kissed me. I’d never met this girl before, and I was thinking to myself, ‘what’s going?'”

“When she pulled me into the bathroom, right away she changed and it was like I got to see the real girl, not the extremely outgoing one that had walked over to me seconds earlier.

“She started doing her make-up in the mirror and she asked, ‘Do you think I’m ugly?’, and I told her, ‘no, you’re beautiful.’

“She then asked me who at the party did I think she should sleep with and then named two people, one of them being my friend Ross.

“I joked that she should pick me, but she said, ‘yeah…yeah…no’ and laughed it off, asking me who seriously she should pick.

“I told her I think she should choose Ross because he’s a nice guy. She then asked me to leave the bathroom and I walked out the door to a guy standing directly in my face.

“It was Paul Flores.”

With an “authority” in his voice, Flores demanded of Trevor, “what I’d like to know is what you did with her in the bathroom?”

Trevor didn’t know who Flores was at the time. Judging by how incensed he seemed, he presumed he must be Kristin’s boyfriend and had just seen the pair of them kissing.

When he told him that “nothing happened”, Flores just apparently laughed in his face.

“It was so weird, it was almost as if he thought he owned this girl or something,” said Trevor.

“Then he let out this really dumb and dorky laugh, and I’m then I realized he was just some dumb goofy kid.

“But all this happened in like 90 seconds, and I said to my friends, ‘like, what the heck is going on?'”

‘REALLY CREEPY’

Trevor brushed off the tense stand-off with Flores and the otherwise bizarre interaction with Kristin and continued on with his night.

The next time he caught a glimpse of Roxy she was being accosted by a small, pock-faced red-haired teen who was invading her personal space and making her visibly uncomfortable.

Trevor said the individual in question – whom he did not recognize -was being “really creepy towards her.”

“I could just see she felt uncomfortable so I walked over there quickly to check and see if she was doing okay and the kid skedaddled,” he said.

“He was really creeping on her. I remember mentioning him to police for years after, telling them to look into this guy, whoever he was, but obviously it turned out to be nothing.

“I never did see him again.”

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His third and final run-in with Kristin came shortly before he left the party, sometime around midnight.

He had been standing with friends smoking in the backyard when she walked over to him, tearily asking whether they could go and speak in private.

Somewhat dramatically, Kristin apparently told him that she was “stupid” and “so dumb” because she believed she’d “screwed over everything” with his friend Ross.

Trevor attempted to comfort her, insisting everything was fine but Kristin was still upset.

In an effort to distract her, he asked her what her zodiac sign was.

Pisces, she responded, to which tried replied, “Me too.”

“I was like, well what’s your birthday?’ and she said February 20th, which is the same date as mine,” he said.

“I then turned to her and said, ‘Roxy, do you know we have the same birthday as [Nivana lead singer] Kurt Cobain?

“She then grabbed the side of my head, right by my ears, and pulled me in for a kiss.

“It really seemed to me like a really uncomfortable, almost desperate kiss and I was really not into it.

“I realized I was done for the night, so I gently pushed her back and told her we don’t have to do that.

“Of course by that point, she was now more upset because I’d just rejected her as well.”

WAS SHE DRUGGED?

With that, Kristin got up from the ground and staggered back inside via a side door of the home.

That was the last time Trevor would ever see her.

He returned home, told his roommate of the series of strange encounters he shared with a girl called “Roxy”, and then went to bed.

He awoke the next day, completed a paper he had due for the following week, and enjoyed the Memorial Day weekend, which saw the buzzy town of San Luis Obispo fall uncharacteristically quiet as students flocked home in droves to spend time with their families.

It wouldn’t be until May 28th that Trevor would think of Roxy – or Kristin, as he’d later learn her name to be – again.

A friend of Trevor’s walked up to him on campus and said, “Hey man, do you remember that girl Roxy? Well, the police were at her house today, she’s missing.”

Trevor said the news came as a gut punch and immediately he suspected that something terrible had happened to her.

With the clarity of hindsight, Trevor suspected that Kristin may have been drugged at the party, which would account for her – at times – strange seeming behavior.

“I definitely got the impression she was on something rather than drunk,” he said.

“Something investigators would ask me years later is, could I smell alcohol on her breath? And I didn’t think I could, but how would I remember that really?

“But at the same time, I never saw her with a drink in her hand. I’m fairly positive I didn’t see her drinking at all and other people have said the same thing over the years.

“I spoke with the Smart family’s lawyer in 2012 and I told him I feel like she was roofied that night because there was a problem with drugging at Cal Poly at the time.

“There were various stories I was hearing about girls being roofied at predominantly frat parties.

“I had a personal experience where I was roofied too.”

THE RUMOR MILL

In the days, weeks, and months that followed Kristin’s disappearance, Trevor said there was a “bunch of terrible” rumors abound about what may have happened to her.

The most popular of fables was one of optimism: that Kristin had simply run off somewhere or gone hitchhiking up the West Coast and would soon return.

Word began to spread that she was a wild child from a troubled home who ran off seeking to start life anew, but the unfounded claims made little sense to her friends and family.

Unwilling to buy into the theory, too, was Trevor, who often thought about Kristin and where she may have gone after the party whenever got a quiet moment to himself.

“My immediate thought was something terrible had happened to her and it was just such a gut punch,” he said.

“And I just remember feeling [immitates shivers] I felt horrible. I knew nothing good could come from it. It was just a punch in the gut and I said it right away, I said I think she’s dead. 

“I spent so much time thinking about her, wondering ‘where did she go? Where could she be?’

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“I just remembered back to that night, when that little dude was creeping on her, I felt like I needed to protect her a little bit.

“I felt like I should be an advocate for her in some way. And the fact she went missing after that was, for me, just really scary. It was a scary time. 

“But after a while, there were no updates and no answers, we just had to move on and get on with college. 

“As heartless as that sounds that’s what we had to do and that’s what we did.”

A TRAGIC LOSS

Kristin Smart was last seen alive walking home in the early hours of May 25, 1996, with Paul Flores.

Flores had insisted on walking the teen home – alone – back to her dorm after she was found passed out on a lawn.

Witnesses, over the years, recounted seeing Flores “stalking” and “following” Smart around the party that evening.

He was also purportedly renowned for stalking and harassing women on campus – so much so that classmates commonly referred to him as “Chester the molester.”

Smart didn’t make it back to her dorm room and she was never seen again.

However, police long held the theory that Flores murdered Smart during an attempted rape and later disposed of her body.

Kristin Smart wouldn’t be reported missing for another three days. It was a holiday weekend and her friends and roommate presumed she’d gone home to see her family, failing to notice anything untoward.

Almost as soon as the investigation began, Paul Flores was considered a potential suspect.

But years would pass without any leads or concrete evidence, and Kristin Smart’s family’s quest for justice would rumble on, fueled only by optimism and determination.

KILLER CAUGHT

Flores’ arrest wouldn’t come for another 25 years, until April 2021 when he was charged with first-degree murder.

Credited with helping police make a breakthrough in the case was Chris Lambert, the investigative journalist behind the true-crime podcast, Your Own Backyard.

San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson said that Lambert help to unearth several witnesses for his show that police previously had not spoken with. Trevor was among many of the people Lambert spoke to.

Flores was first arrested on firearm charges in February 2021, and investigators conducted a search of his home.

The following month, a search warrant was actioned at Ruben Flores’ home, and cadaver dogs and a ground-penetrating radar were deployed on the property.

Beneath the decking of the home, forensic archaeologists found a soil disturbance around the size of a casket and the presence of human blood in the soil, prosecutors said.

Then, that April, the Smart family filed a lawsuit against Ruben Flores, alleging that “under the cover of darkness” the father and unnamed accomplices moved Smart’s body from the home in 2020.

Paul Flores was eventually arrested at his home in San Pedro, California, on April 13, 2020. His father was taken into custody shortly after and charged as an accessory to murder.

Authorities revealed that they had linked two other sexual attacks on women in Los Angeles to Paul Flores.

The two women, who both claimed they were drugged, raped, and gagged by Flores, would later testify against him at trial.

‘A GRAVE INJUSTICE’

After a three-month trial that began in July 2022, Paul was found guilty of the murder of Kristin Smart last October.

He has unsuccessfully filed for mistrial nine times since then and entered a tenth attempt last week in tandem with a motion of acquittal, which asked the judge to overturn Flores’ murder conviction because the evidence presented during his three-month trial did not prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Superior Court Judge Jennifer O’Keefe will hear the motions on March 10.

If the motions are denied, Flores will be sentenced immediately after.

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Trevor appeared as a witness during Flores’ trial and called it “surreal” to look Paul in the eyes again after all these years.

He called it a great relief that Flores is now behind bars and called for the presiding judge to impart the harshest possible sentence.

Trevor also pleaded with Flores to finally fess up to his crimes and reveal where he left Smart’s remains so that her family can finally find closure.

“Every day that you don’t tell her family where she is, is a grave injustice,” he said, addressing Flores.

“The wound continues to bleed but you can stop it now.

“Stop the bleeding and tell investigators where she is and accept your punishment.”

Trevor said he hopes the Smart family gets some form of closure from Flores’ conviction and sentencing, though he recognizes the case will never truly be closed for them until Kristin’s remains are found.

“That family is a model of strength, they really are,” he said.

“And I think the greatest injustice of it all is that Paul will probably never talk.

“That’s the horrible thing, that no matter how long you give him she will still be missing.

“My hope is that he negotiates with the court.

“My hope is that there’s still a piece of her somewhere, but [Paul] lives near the ocean so I don’t know how likely that is, which is just maddening and upsetting.”