LOS ANGELES (AP) — The final man seen with Kristin Good was convicted Tuesday of killing the school freshman, who vanished from a California campus 25 years in the past.
Jurors unanimously discovered Paul Flores responsible of first-degree homicide, the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported. A jury in a separate trial discovered his father, Ruben Flores, not responsible of costs of being accent to homicide after the very fact for allegedly serving to to hide the crime.
The conflicting verdicts had been learn moments aside in the identical courtroom.
Good disappeared from California Polytechnic State College over Memorial Day weekend in 1996. Her stays had been by no means discovered.
Prosecutors keep the youthful Flores, now 45, killed the 19-year-old throughout an tried rape on Might 25, 1996, in his dorm room at Cal Poly, the place each had been first-year college students. He was the final individual seen with Good as he walked her dwelling from an off-campus social gathering the place she turned intoxicated.
His father, now 81, allegedly helped bury the slain scholar behind his dwelling within the close by group of Arroyo Grande and later dug up the stays and moved them.
Monterey County Superior Court docket Decide Jennifer O’Keefe thanked the jurors for his or her service after the responsible verdict within the homicide case was introduced.
“I want to specific to you the appreciation and that of the events in your service on this case,” she stated. “It’s a nice private sacrifice to function a juror. … You will have been very attentive and conscientious all through this case.”
The son’s protection legal professional, Robert Sanger, had tried to pin the killing on another person — noting that Scott Peterson, who was later convicted at a sensational trial of killing his pregnant spouse and the fetus she was carrying — was additionally a Cal Poly scholar on the time.
Throughout his closing arguments, Sanger informed jurors that no tried rape occurred and he forged doubt on testimony from witnesses, together with a scholar who was in Good’s dorm who testified to seeing Flores in Good’s room.
He additionally referred to forensic proof provided by the prosecution as “junk science.”
“This case was not prosecuted for all these years as a result of there’s no proof,” Sanger stated. “It’s unhappy Kristin Good disappeared, and he or she could have gone out on her personal, however who is aware of?”
Paul Flores had lengthy been thought of a suspect within the killing. He had a black eye when investigators interviewed him. He informed them he received it enjoying basketball with pals, who denied his account, in response to courtroom data. He later modified his story to say he bumped his head whereas engaged on his automobile.
Nonetheless, the daddy and son had been solely arrested in 2021 after the case was revived.
Investigators carried out dozens of fruitless searches for Good’s physique over twenty years however previously two years they turned their consideration to Ruben Flores’ dwelling about 12 miles (20 kilometers) south of Cal Poly locally of Arroyo Grande.
Behind latticework beneath the deck of his giant home on a lifeless finish avenue, archaeologists working for police in March 2021 discovered a soil disturbance in regards to the measurement of a casket and the presence of human blood, prosecutors stated. The blood was too degraded to extract a DNA pattern.
The trial was held in Salinas, 110 miles (177 kilometers) north of San Luis Obispo, after a decide granted a protection request to maneuver it. The protection argued that it was unlikely the Flores’ might obtain a good trial with a lot a lot notoriety within the metropolis of about 47,000 folks.