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Early one Saturday morning nearly 25 years ago, Kristin Smart left a college party near the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus and never returned to her dormitory.

Investigators’ suspicions centered around Paul Flores, a classmate who was the last person seen with Smart . But for decades, despite multiple rounds of interrogations and searches using radar and cadaver dogs, Smart’s body was never found. Without sufficient evidence to implicate him in Smart’s disappearance and presumed death, authorities would only describe Flores as a suspect.

That changed Tuesday, when San Luis Obispo County sheriff’s detectives arrested Flores, 44, on suspicion of murder and booked him into the San Luis Obispo County Jail, according to law enforcement sources and jail records. Also arrested Tuesday was Flores’ father, Ruben Ricardo Flores, 80, on suspicion of being an accessory after the fact, according to booking records.

San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson has called a 2 p.m. press conference to announce “major developments” in the case, which has maddened investigators and haunted Smart’s family for decades.

Flores and his family have steadfastly maintained his innocence, with his mother telling a television reporter as recently as last month, “we have no responsibility for her disappearance and what happened to that young woman.”

Smart was a 19-year-old freshman when she vanished on Memorial Day weekend, 1996. She had gone to an off-campus party and was making the roughly 10-minute walk back to her dormitory with two other students when, the students later told the police, Flores appeared and promised to see her back to her room.

Smart was never seen again.

From the start, investigators focused on Flores. In interviews, he told them he had walked Smart to her dormitory, then returned to his room. He explained a black eye first by saying he took an elbow in a pickup basketball game, then admitted he had lied and said he’d in fact hit himself while working on a truck at his father’s home.

In one videotaped interview, as investigators stressed that Smart had last been seen with him, Flores “pulled his arms into his T-shirt, scrunched over at the waist in his chair and lifted his feet off the floor, as if moving toward a fetal position,” The Times reported in 2006, citing people familiar with the tape.

In the end, though, Flores called their bluff. “If you are so smart,” he said, “then tell me where the body is.”

The investigators had no answer for him and still do not today. Several attempts have been made to find Smart’s remains. Federal agents once dug up a hillside near the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus. Sheriff’s detectives have scoured the Arroyo Grande homes of Flores’ estranged parents with dogs trained to sniff out human remains, and used radar to probe the ground beneath the houses.

Last month, after refusing to speak with reporters for years, Susan Flores told a local television station she was tired of the enduring “harassment” by detectives who had treated her son as a “scapegoat.” She spoke with the KSBY news station a day after investigators came to her home with another search warrant and carried off her beloved Volkswagen.

“They keep trying to find the answers with us and they keep failing because the answers are not here,” Susan Flores said. “It is very simple.”

Investigators have long pursued the theory that Paul Flores killed Smart, but that he alone could not have disposed of her remains. For the last four years, they have focused on methods that they allege could have been used to move the body, sources said. In the last year, investigators have scoured vehicles owned by Flores and his father in 1996 for DNA and other evidence. They recovered one truck that had been sold and another that belonged to Paul Flores that was reported stolen. Last month, an older VW Golf Cabriolet was taken from Ruben Flores’ garage.

After speaking with investigators in the weeks after Smart’s disappearance, Paul Flores refused to discuss the case when he was called to testify before a grand jury and again later in a deposition for a civil suit brought by Smart’s family. Both times Flores invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. He has consistently denied allegations raised in the Smart family’s lawsuit that he was involved in Smart’s disappearance.

Los Angeles police arrested Flores in February on suspicion of being a felon in possession of a firearm. The arrest stemmed from information obtained by the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office, which searched Flores’ home in April 2020, accompanied by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies. Flores has a previous felony conviction for driving under the influence.

Last month, San Luis Obispo sheriff’s detectives used cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar to search Ruben Flores’ Arroyo Grande home. It is unclear what new evidence detectives had unearthed to prompt another search of the property, which was first scoured 20 years earlier, as an affidavit seeking a judge’s sign-off on the warrant remains sealed.