After a 12-week trial, 45-year-old California native Paul Flores was unanimously found guilty by the jury, a Monterey court spokeswoman told AFP.
He was accused of killing Kristin Smart, a 19-year-old student whose disappearance from the University of San Luis Obispo campus in 1996 traumatized that region of central California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
His body was never found and his face has long been plastered in public places. A podcast was even dedicated to the mystery of this “cold case”.
At the time of the disappearance, Paul Flores was also a student at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo. He was the last to see Kristin Smart and explained that he dropped her home on his way to her dorm ten minutes after a party.
According to prosecutors, the killer either raped or attempted to rape the young woman before hiding her body under the terrace of her father’s house before taking it to another location.
The latter, suspected of helping hide the body, was found not guilty on Tuesday, the spokesman said.
During the trial, prosecutors stated that Paul Flores had been following his victim closely for months. Accordingly, he is said to have poured drugs into his drink at the student party on the night of the murder.
After more than two decades without a result, the investigation had bounced back in 2019, when a witness asserted that Paul Flores had confided in him that he had committed the murder.
The man now faces life imprisonment. His sentence, which has yet to be determined, is due on December 9th.
Contacted by AFP, his attorney Robert Sanger was not immediately available. The verdict “is pending,” he told the San Luis Obispo Tribune, declining to comment further.