'Wanna go skinny dipping?': Woman reveals Paul Flores asked her out after admitting to Kristen Smart murder
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIFORNIA: Paul Flores, who has now been convicted in the mysterious and chilling murder of Kristen Smart in 1996, reportedly asked a woman out for skinny dipping days after confessing to Smart's murder to her at a party.
Jennifer Hudson, 44, met Paul Flores in the backyard of a home in San Luis Obispo, California, in the summer of 1996 not long after Kristen Smart mysteriously vanished. Hudson, then 17, was watching her boyfriend skateboard when she heard a public service plea on the radio asking anyone with information about Smart's disappearance. That is when Hudson claims Flores told her, "That b***h was a d**k tease and I got sick of her s**t." He allegedly told her that he either "buried her" or "put her under a skating ramp at his place in Huasna," according to a report by The Sun.
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At that time, Hudson was so startled by the remark and even more disturbed by the deadened look in Flores' eye that she left the party and asked her boyfriend to accompany her. Hudson also lived in Huasna and was scared of running into Flores alone until one day when she agreed to offer a group of her neighbors a ride to a nearby private skate ramp. "I drove my friends down to the main road and this white truck pulled up and they told me to follow it," she recalled. "The truck started leading us down a dirt road, around half a mile from my house, and suddenly the white truck stopped and this group of guys jumped out with their skateboards," Hudson added.
"And then I looked up and I saw Paul. He was walking towards my car," she said, adding that she had one foot in the car and one outside when she realized he was coming toward her. Flores, then 19, reportedly asked Hudson, "Do you want to go skinny dipping with me?" She said she was so disturbed by his invitation that she felt physically ill. "I just vomited," she said, adding, "All over my car and all over my foot."
"I just got back in my car, shut the door, put that thing in reverse, and just bailed," Hudson recalled. Soon after, Hudson said she realized that the skate ramp where she had driven her friends was the same ramp where Flores claimed to have buried Smart's body at the party but by then Hudson was consumed by fear that she could "be next."
"[When he confessed to killing Kristin] His eyes were just empty, he had dead eyes," Hudson claimed. "That's what I remember the most, the expression on his face, and just how serious he was. I knew he wasn't joking or lying; he was 1,000% serious," she added.
"I knew he'd done this to Kristin, and I thought to myself that if he did that to this girl who was older than me, in what was assumingly a well-populated campus area ... what was he capable of doing to me," Hudson said. She further added, "I was not going to entice this monster to come after me by going to the police."
Kristen Smart, 19, was last seen alive walking home from an off-campus frat party near Cal Poly Tech University on May 25, 1996. After a heavy night of drinking, Flores insisted on walking Smart back to her dorm after he found the drunk and unsteady teen passed out on a lawn. Witnesses over the year recounted seeing Flores "stalking" and "following" Smart around the party that evening. Flores was considered the prime suspect in her disappearance. However, police long held the theory that Flores murdered Smart during an attempted rape and later disposed of her body.
After six years, Hudson first broke her silence and told her boyfriend Justin Goodman in 2002 about her conversation with Flores. "We were both drunk, but somehow, or in some way, Paul Flores or Kristin Smart came up in conversation and I trusted Justin and I knew he was the guy I could tell anything to, and that he’d take it to the grave," Hudson recounted.
"We never spoke about it again. I didn't tell anyone else anything for another 17 years," she added. Over the years, Hudson said she was terrorized by the thought that she was contributing to the Smart family's pain and it wasn't until she had her own son she realized the depth of her inaction.
Two years after Hudson told Goodman about Flores' remarks, he reported the tip to the FBI and a local blog tracking the investigation. Goodman's tip led to Hudson receiving a phone call from Chris Lambert, the creator of the 'Your Own Backyard' podcast, and San Luis Obispo County sheriff’s detective Clint Cole in 2019, according to the report.
Hudson for the first time recounted what Flores had told her to the police. The following year police conducted a search at a property in Huasana but sadly police did not find any human remains. After years of Smart's family's quest for justice, Flores, 45, was finally arrested in April 2021, exactly around 25 years after the disappearance of Smart, and charged with her murder. He was first arrested on firearm charges in February 2021 and investigators conducted a search of his home.
(San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office)
The following month a search warrant was actioned for his father Rueben Flores's home where cadaver dogs and a ground-penetrating radar were deployed on the property. Archeologists found a soil disturbance around the size of a casket and the presence of human blood in the soil, prosecutors said. He was accused of moving her body in 2020 in which Flores's father was also arrested as an accessory but was later acquitted.
Hudson testified against Flores during his three-month murder trial while emotionally breaking down many times. "On some level it was it was vindicating to be able to sit up there and look him in his dead eyes and for him to have to sit there and listen in silence," she said. Paul Flores is now facing 25 years in prison.