Nearly 30 years to the day that she disappeared, and almost four years after Paul Flores was convicted in her killing, the body of Kristin Smart has still not been found, and authorities in San Luis Obispo County continue their search for it.

A new search warrant was served this morning, Wednesday, May 6, at the Arroyo Grande home of Paul Flores's mother — whose property has figured largely in the narrative of the case as presented by the journalist and podcaster Chris Lambert, who has been credited with helping bring the case to justice.

Paul Flores was convicted in October 2022 of Kristin Smart's murder, despite her remains having never been found. Flores and Smart were both freshman at Cal Poly when, over Memorial Day Weekend 1996, they were seen together walking back to the campus dorms after an off-campus party where witnesses said Smart was acting very intoxicated. Investigators believe that Flores, who was widely regarded as "creepy" by women on the campus, lured Smart back to his dorm room and assaulted her, possibly strangling her to death in a struggle.

Prosecutors were able to convince a jury, based on a preponderance of circumstantial evidence and some physical evidence, that a murder had occurred and Flores was responsible, and that he likely had help from his parents in hiding the body.

Lambert appears to have gotten wind of the new search warrant and either he or an associate was at the home of Susan Flores this morning snapping photos of her being served the warrant at her front door — and also a photo of her flipping off the camera.

Lambert's Your Own Backyard podcast played a pivotal role in the case against Paul Flores, and in reviving interest in the Kristin Smart case overall. Witnesses that Lambert found and spoke to, who were never before interviewed by the sheriff's department, ended up offering key testimony that helped put Flores behind bars.

One chilling detail that gripped podcast listeners, but which was never entered as a piece of evidence when the case went to trial, was also uncovered by Lambert in his review of case files.

That involved a person who was a tenant of Susan Flores who lived in the home where she now resides in the spring of 1997, a year after Smart went missing. That former tenant found a turquoise earring in the backyard that was apparently collected by the sheriff's department and later lost. And the tenant reported hearing a digital watch alarm going off somewhere underground in that same backyard every morning at 4:20 am, though it stopped after several months.

As Lambert discovered, while attending Cal Poly in the spring of 1996, Kristin Smart worked as a lifeguard at the campus pool and had a shift that began at 5 am, and it's possible she had a watch alarm set to wake her up at that early hour — and that her watch was still on her body when she was buried, or her belongings could have been buried there.

A former colleague of Susan Flores also spoke to Lambert, saying that he remembered her coming into work after Memorial Day Weekend 1996 complaining of lack of sleep and a middle-of-the-night phone call that led her husband to leave the house.

Susan and Ruben Flores separated or divorced during the first year after Smart disappeared, and she evicted her tenant and moved back into the house she's in now with a boyfriend in March 1997.

It's long been suspected that Ruben Flores, Paul's father, helped him dispose of Smart's body that weekend, transporting it either to his own house — where forensic investigators found evidence of human blood around a six-foot-by-four-foot void under his back deck — or to the house where Susan Flores now lives. The body may also have been moved in the winter of 2021, just as authorities were preparing to serve a search warrant at Ruben Flores's home.

On Wednesday, according to Lambert, sheriff's investigators were in fact searching the backyard once again.

"Tarps are up in the backyard and the neighbor’s backyard," Lambert writes on Instagram. "Ground penetrating radar is still being performed and soil samples are being collected."

The new search warrant is likely based on some new evidence in the case, and the implication is that new charges could ultimately be pending against Susan or perhaps Ruben Flores. The sheriff's department had said earlier that it was not able to get another warrant for Susan Flores's property in 2021 because it had exhausted the evidence it had in a warrant 20 years prior.

Ruben Flores, who was tried alongside his son in 2022, was found not guilty of being an accessory to murder by a separate jury.

Paul Flores, who is serving a sentence of 25 years to life, continues to appeal his case, and he filed a second petition for appeal last July citing evidence of errors at trial.  That petition was denied in January.