Student who kissed Kristin Smart before her murder reveals his chilling link to Scott Peterson and a bloody abduction

A CLASSMATE of Kristin Smart's who was among the last people to see her alive shared chilling links to two other high-profile murder cases during his time studying at Cal Poly Tech University.

Trevor Boelter, now 47, revealed to The U.S. Sun the encounter he shared with convicted killer Scott Peterson and the time he was interviewed by the FBI concerning the disappearance of two other students in San Luis Obispo, California, in the late 1990s.

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Boelter was 20 years old when he met Kristin Smart, 19, at an off-campus party in May 1996.

Kristin, who had introduced herself to him as "Roxy", kissed him twice that night but Trevor rebuffed her advances.

She would disappear mere hours later after being walked home by Paul Flores.

It's believed Flores killed the teen during an attempted rape and later disposed of her body.

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He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison last week after being found guilty of first-degree murder.

Trevor said that while the tragic case has never been far from his mind over the last two and a half decades, his encounter with Smart "isn't even the weirdest thing" that happened to him in college - "and that's already pretty high up on the list of weird," he said.

"I feel like I'm the Forrest Gump of weird happenings," added Trevor with a laugh.

"I kissed Kristin Smart at the party, I met Scott and Laci Peterson in their home, and then when two students went missing, the FBI came right to my door because I lived near a bridge where one of them was abducted.

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"I think I was probably on some list at one point.

"But other than that I had a pretty idyllic college experience."

ENCOUNTER WITH ANOTHER KILLER

In 1997, roughly a year after the disappearance of Smart, Trevor was working for Cal Poly's student newspaper, The Mustang Daily, where he sold advertising space to local businesses.

One day, he said he received a call from a woman who told him that she and her husband had just opened a new restaurant in the town called The Shack and they were wondering if he could stop by their home to discuss advertisement rates.

Trevor obliged the request and was greeted at the door by the woman, Laci Peterson, who he remembered as "gorgeous and incredibly nice."

Laci invited Trevor inside and introduced him to her husband Scott.

Unlike the warm and welcoming Laci, Trevor said Scott was hostile, condescending, and "totally douchey."

He said: "I go inside and her husband is in there cooking hamburgers, and he's just the complete opposite of her.

"I remember meeting Laci and thinking, 'wow, she's so pretty, so nice and so friendly.'

"But he wasn't like that at all, he was totally douchey. He kept saying to me 'Are you going to make us millionaires bud by putting little ads in your paper?'

"He was just really dismissive and kind of rude. But I thought, 'whatever, a sale is a sale.'"

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Trevor agreed on a rate with the Petersons and started advertising The Shack regularly in the paper.

Several weeks would pass before Trevor received a call from his manager informing him that the Petersons haven't been paying their invoices.

He called Laci, who said she wasn't sure what had happened because Scott handled all of their finances. She then gave him Scott's cell phone number and told him to call him right away.

When Trevor got ahold of Scott he was driving in his car.

He calmly assured Trevor that the "check's in the post, buddy," - but no such payment ever arrived.

As consequence, advertisements of The Shack were pulled from The Mustang Daily without warning.

A short while later, Trevor had just come out of a class when his manager called him again.

"Hey, do you remember that couple whose ads we stopped running because they weren't paying? Well, the husband just came here looking for you and he looked pretty mad," Trevor recounted the manager telling him.

The manager told Scott that he "had to pay his bills and the issue wasn't Trevor's fault," but it did little to calm Scott Peterson's anger.

"My boss told me I should watch myself," recounted Trevor.

"He said, 'I just don’t want him to come up here and hit you because he was complaining his business had dropped off.'

"But eventually I forgot about it, I didn't care about it anymore and I graduated and moved to LA.

"Then all of a sudden I kept seeing this guy's face all over the TV but I couldn't place who he was."

Eventually, the penny dropped: It was Scott Peterson, who in April 2003 was arrested for murdering his wife Laci and their unborn baby boy.

Laci's dismembered remains and the body of their unborn son were found washed up along San Fransisco Bay. She was reported missing months earlier having vanished on Christmas Eve 2002.

Peterson, despite protesting his innocence, was found guilty of murder by a jury in 2004 and sentenced to death by lethal injection the following year.

His death sentence was later overturned on automatic appeal in the Supreme Court in 2020 but his conviction was upheld.

Peterson's name was also floated by Paul Flores' defense team ahead of his murder trial in the death of Kristin Smart, suggesting he may somehow be involved.

He was also a student at Cal Poly in 1996 and theories were touted that he may have been at the party the night Kristin vanished.

The claims were never proven to be true and Peterson's attorney's called the move desperate, suggesting Flores' team was pulling a "publicity stunt to take the attention away from the defendant."

Trevor said he couldn't believe it when he realized it was Peterson who had threatened to harm him over the pulled newspaper ads.

Though, still, that wouldn't be the end of the strange coincidences during his time at college.

DOUBLE STUDENT MURDER

On November 18, 1998, Cal Poly junior Rachel Newhouse, 20, disappeared while walking home from a party at a local Mexican restaurant.

Then, almost five months later on March 11, 1998, Aundria Crawford, a 20-year-old sophomore at Cuesta College, vanished from her apartment in San Luis Obispo.

The disappearance of the two young women was feared for a time to be linked to Kristin Smart's vanishing. Locals were terrified a serial killer may be on the loose in the buzzy student town.

Trevor said it was only after the disappearance of Rachel Newhouse that it dawned on some of his classmates that something nefarious had likely happened to Smart just over a year earlier.

"People were like, 'Oh geez, something bad is happening here,'" he said.

"Before that, there was a lot of talk on campus that maybe Kristin had run off to Hawaii or someplace.

"People didn't want to think that someone had been murdered on campus and her body hidden."

After Newhouse and Crawford's cases were linked, Trevor said he received a knock on the door from the FBI after some of Newhouse's blood was found under a bridge close to his home.

"I remember I opened my door early on a Saturday morning. I was like 22 and this guy from the FBI was waiving his badge in my face," recounted Trevor.

"And he asked me where I was on such-and-such night when Rachel disappeared and I told him, 'well, I actually have an alibi. I was on the radio,' because I was part of the college radio station.

"He doubled check I was there that night but it was all just so strange.

"I had those three occurrences all during my time at Cal Poly and it's just bizarre to think about.

"Over the years I can imagine that - even though Paul Flores was always the most probably and obvious culprit - they must've seen my name on all these lists and thought, 'maybe we should talk to Trevor again. We can't rule anything out.'"

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Rex Allen Krebs - the so-called Sadist of San Luis, as he became known - was found guilty of the abductions of Newhouse and Crawford in 2001.

He was ruled out as a suspect in Smart's disappearance because he was in jail at the time severing a decade-long sentence for rape.

FATEFUL ENCOUNTER

Trevor appeared as a witness during Paul Flores' trial and called it "surreal" to look him in the eyes again after all these years.

He testified to the jury about three separate interactions he'd shared with Smart on the night of the fateful party, remembering her as an attractive and flirty teen who had introduced herself to him as "Roxy."

After getting acquainted, Boelter recalled how Smart gave him an "open mouth kiss," grabbed him by the hand, and led him into the bathroom.

But once inside, Smart's confidence waned suddenly.

Boelter testified that Smart asked him twice if she was ugly, to which he responded "no" both times. She then asked him who at the party he thought she should spend the night with.

Boelter left after Smart said she needed to use the bathroom. Waiting outside the door was Paul Flores who, with an "authority" in his voice, demanded to know: "What happened in there?"

When Boelter replied "nothing," Flores just laughed.

Smart's path would cross with Boelter's again a short while later after he noticed that she appeared to be uncomfortable by the presence of another man, who was not Flores.

Boelter intervened and shooed the man off. He carried on with his night and would see Smart for a third and final time as he was leaving the party.

Smart, as he was exiting, grabbed his hand for a second time that night, Boelter told the court, and led him into the backyard where she said she wanted to speak with him.

Again, she kissed him, but this time Boelter shunned her advances.

He remembered noticing Smart stumbling as she walked away from him in tears.

LAST MOVEMENTS

Several other witnesses who were at the party that night offered similar testimony about Smart's visibly inebriated state - with Flores accused by some of leering around her.

Among them was Steven Fleming, a basketball star at Cal-Poly Tech who had bonded with Smart over the fact that they were both tall.

Breaking down in tears at one point during his testimony as he looked at a photo of his slain friend, Fleming testified that it felt like Flores was "kind of following Kristin" throughout the night.

In one instance, Fleming stated that he saw Paul standing a few feet inside the door of a study area and that Kristin was “back by, like, where the desks were.”

He testified that her body language showed “she was not OK" with him standing there.

Similarly, Cheryl Anderson remembered Smart being "very intoxicated, her speech was slurred, and she was having trouble standing up.”

After discovering Kristin passed out on the lawn of a neighboring home, she and party host Tim Davis attempted to wake her up.

Flores, Anderson testified, "came out of nowhere" and offered to walk her home.

Anderson, Davis, Flores, and an unsteady Smart all headed back in the direction of the dorms together.

Davis eventually turned back home and left Flores to walk the two women home by himself.

Anderson testified that she parted ways with Smart and Flores once they were all back on campus, as she lived in a different dorm.

Before she left them, she made Flores promise that he would accompany her friend all the way home.

"I didn't think anything horrible was going to happen," she testified.

That was the last time anyone other than Flores would ever see Smart again.

DECADES-LONG INVESTIGATION

Kristin Smart wouldn't be reported missing for another three days. It was a holiday weekend and her friends and roommate presumed she'd gone home to see her family, failing to notice anything untoward.

Trevor said as soon as he learned that Kristin was missing he was overcome with a feeling that something horrible had happened to her.

"I just remember feeling [immitates shivers] I felt horrible," he said.

"I knew nothing good could come from it. It was just a punch in the gut and I said it right away, I said I think she’s dead."

Almost as soon as the investigation began, Paul Flores was considered a potential suspect.

But years would pass without any leads or concrete evidence, and Kristin Smart's family's quest for justice would rumble on, fueled only by optimism and determination.

KILLER CAUGHT

Flores' arrest wouldn't come for another 25 years, until April 2021 when he was charged with first-degree murder.

Credited with helping police make a breakthrough in the case was Chris Lambert, the investigative journalist behind the true-crime podcast, Your Own Backyard.

San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson said that Lambert helped unearth several witnesses for his show that police previously had not spoken with. Trevor was among many of the people Lambert spoke to.

Flores was first arrested on firearm charges in February 2021, and investigators conducted a search of his home.

The following month, a search warrant was actioned at Ruben Flores' home, and cadaver dogs and a ground-penetrating radar were deployed on the property.

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Beneath the decking of the home, forensic archaeologists found a soil disturbance around the size of a casket and the presence of human blood in the soil, prosecutors said.

Then, that April, the Smart family filed a lawsuit against Ruben Flores, alleging that "under the cover of darkness" the father and unnamed accomplices moved Smart's body from the home in 2020.

Paul Flores was eventually arrested at his home in San Pedro, California, on April 13, 2020. His father was taken into custody shortly after and charged as an accessory to murder.

Authorities revealed that they had linked two other sexual attacks on women in Los Angeles to Paul Flores.

The two women, who both claimed they were drugged, raped, and gagged by Flores, would later testify against him at trial.

'A GRAVE INJUSTICE'

After a three-month trial that began in July 2022, Paul was found guilty of the murder of Kristin Smart last October.

He unsuccessfully filed for mistrial 10 times and also put forward a motion of acquittal earlier this week, which asked the judge to overturn Flores' murder conviction because the evidence presented during his three-month trial did not prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Superior Court Judge Jennifer O'Keefe refused to issue Flores a new trial on March 10 and sentenced him to 25 years to life in prison.

O'Keefe called him a "cancer to society" and stressed the importance of keeping him behind bars.

Trevor said Flores's incarceration comes as a great relief.

However, he acknowledged that Kristin's family and friends will never truly find closure until Paul Flores tells them where he left Kristin's remains, which have still not been found.

"Every day that you don't tell her family where she is, is a grave injustice," he said, addressing Flores.

"The wound continues to bleed but you can stop it now.

"Stop the bleeding and tell investigators where she is and accept your punishment."

Trevor said he hopes the Smart family gets some form of closure from Flores' conviction and sentencing, though he recognizes the case will never truly be closed for them until Kristin's remains are found.

"That family is a model of strength, they really are," he said.

"And I think the greatest injustice of it all is that Paul will probably never talk.

"That's the horrible thing, that no matter how long you give him she will still be missing.

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"My hope is that he negotiates with the court.

"My hope is that there's still a piece of her somewhere, but [Paul] lives near the ocean so I don't know how likely that is, which is just maddening and upsetting."