Trevor Boelter: Partygoer who kissed Kristen Smart hours before her murder recalls how killer Paul Flores intimidated him
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIFORNIA: A 20-year-old student who kissed Kristen Smart just hours before she was tragically killed has recalled the odd interactions he had with the murderer Paul Flores and another "creepy" stranger at the party where she was last seen alive.
In the late spring of 1996, Trevor Boelter first met Smart at a house party near the campus of Cal Poly Tech University in San Luis Obispo, California. He came across Smart, who was 19 at that time, three times throughout the evening prior to her disappearance in the early hours of May 25, 1996. Flores, the main perpetrator in the murder case was issued a prison term of 25 years to life by the Monterey County Superior Court.
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Trevor's first encounter with Smart
The first of Trevor's three interactions with Smart came while he was standing in a hallway inside the home. Trevor described her as a tall blonde, attractive and flirtatious woman and said she walked over to him and introduced her as "Roxy". He claimed that Smart gave him a "full-on French kiss" just moments after she got to know him. She then grabbed Trevor by the hand, and led him into the bathroom.
What did Trevor say about Smart?
"She was very pretty and seemed extremely outgoing," Trevor, now 47, told The 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?'"
He continued, "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.'"
Trevor added, "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."
Trevor's awkward interaction with Flores
Flores asked Trevor with an "authority" in his voice, "What I'd like to know is what you did with her in the bathroom?" Trevor apparently did not know who Flores was at that time but seeing how infuriated he was, Trevor thought him to be Smart's boyfriend and must have just seen the pair of them kissing.
When Trevor told him that "nothing happened," Flores just 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: 'What the heck is going on?'"
Trevor tried to ignore the tense face-off with Flores and continued on with his night.
GUILTY VERDICT: A jury has found Paul Flores guilty of murdering Kristen Smart, who vanished from a California university campus 26 years ago. Flores, now 45, had long been a suspect but wasn’t arrested until last year. pic.twitter.com/9UwrHkinqI
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) October 18, 2022
Trevor's second interaction with Smart
The next time when Trevor saw Smart, he witnessed a small, pock-faced red-haired teen approaching her boldly and was trying to invade her personal space and making her visibly uncomfortable. Trevor said that he did not know who the individual was but claimed he 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."
Trevor's third interaction with Smart
The final interaction between Trevor and Smart took place shortly before the former left the party, sometime around midnight. She apparently walked over to him when he was smoking in the backyard with his friends, tearily asking whether they could go and speak in private.
Kristen, somewhat dramatically, told Trevor that she was "stupid" and "so dumb" because she believed she'd "screwed over everything" with his friend Ross. He tried to calm her down and said that everything was fine but Kristin was still upset. He asked Smart what her zodiac sign was in an effort to distract her.
Pisces, she said to which he 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."
He added, "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." That was the last time Trevor would ever see her.
"She's missing"
Trevor returned and detailed the series of strange encounters he had with a girl called "Roxy" to his roommate and then went to bed. It was until May 28 of that year that Trevor would think of Smart as he had later learned her real name. 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 that the news came as a big blow to him and immediately he suspected that something terrible had happened to her. Trevor suspected that she may have been drugged at the party for which she behaved weirdly at that time.
"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."
He added, "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."