Chris Lambert would love to make music again, but he can’t stop chasing a ghost that has haunted him for nearly 25 years.
A billboard on the side of the road on California’s Central Coast took him on a detour three years ago from his career as a singer-songwriter and recording engineer. He created a podcast about the 1996 disappearance of freshman Kristin Smart and it has taken over his life.
“I can’t stay off it for more than a few days,” said Lambert. “I just get sucked back in because I want to fix things.”
It has been an unlikely turn of events for someone who calls himself a shy, “random boy with a beard,” and it has produced results he could never have imagined.
On Tuesday, when San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson announced arrests, he gave Lambert the credit for helping to bring the case to global attention and bring several key witnesses to the fore.
The longtime suspect, Paul Flores, and Smart were freshmen on the campus of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Now 44, Flores was charged with murder in the 19-year-old’s murder while attempting to rape her in his dormitory, prosecutors said.
His father, Ruben Flores, 80, was charged as an accomplice after authorities said he helped hide the body, which was never located.
Paul Flores’s attorney has declined to comment on the charges. A lawyer for Ruben Flores said his client is innocent.
Lambert has been put in the spotlight with the arrests. His eight-part series, “Your Own Backyard,” was downloaded 7.5 million times on Thursday and was the second podcast on iTunes. Lambert’s phone was bursting with messages – from fans, tipsters and news reporters. He appreciates the attention but is overwhelmed.
“It drives me crazy,” he said, but remained focused, patient and polite on Wednesday during a 45-minute interview with The Associated Press.
All the attention doesn’t make money – Lambert doesn’t promote the podcast and relies on donations.
He is the latest in a series of true-crime podcasts to play a role in an arrest, a court appeal, or even an exemption.
“Up and Vanished” led a man to confess that he murdered a Georgia beauty queen, while “Serial” helped a convicted murderer win a retrial in Maryland. “In the Dark” has uncovered new evidence in a case prosecutors dropped in lieu of seeking a seventh trial against a Mississippi man who spent decades on death row.
Lambert, 33, was just eight when Smart disappeared on a short drive up the coast from his own home in the small town of Orcutt, about 140 miles northwest of Los Angeles. It scared him that someone had disappeared and no one knew what had happened.
For more than two decades, a billboard with a photo of a grinning Smart advertised a $ 75,000 reward. It is located in the town of Arroyo Grande, where Paul Flores grew up and his parents still live.
Lambert passed it many times and it eventually motivated him to investigate.
“I thought I’d give it a try and see if I could get some people talking,” said Lambert. “All I have to do is get over my shyness and call these people out of the blue and ask very personal questions.”
He bought high-quality recording equipment and started calling. He found overlooked or reluctant witnesses who had not spoken to the police, he said.
People opened up to Lambert and he encouraged them to reach out to researchers with relevant information. Delegates began calling him to put them in touch with people he had interviewed.
“What Chris did with the podcast was distributed nationwide to bring in new information,” Parkinson’s said without elaborating on the new evidence. “It did provide some information that I thought was valuable.”
A former colleague of Paul Flores’ mother, Susan Flores, told him that Ms. Flores came to work after Memorial Day weekend 1996 – when Smart went missing – and said she wasn’t sleeping well because her husband got a call in the middle of the night . the night and left in his car.
“There has been speculation all along that Paul called his father in the middle of the night and that his father was helping him get rid of Kristin’s body,” Lambert said.
A tenant who had lived with Susan Flores for a year told him she heard a watch alarm every morning at 4:20 a.m. Smart had worked as a lifeguard at the Cal Poly pool at 5:00 a.m., so it’s possible she set her watch to wake up. to be at that early hour.
“That seems to be the moment in the podcast series when most people are just completely shaken up,” he said. “This could be evidence to indicate that Kristin was buried in that backyard or that her belongings were buried in that backyard.”
Susan Flores, who hung up when she got a call from the AP, told KSBY-TV in March in the only interview she got that she could “shoot a lot of holes in a lot of (Lambert’s) lies.”
She said Lambert never contacted her. He said he had sent a middleman to her house and Susan Flores threatened to call the police. His attempts to talk to Paul Flores were also fruitless, he said.
Lambert spoke to a former Australian exchange student at Cal Poly, who said he saw Flores and Smart wrestle near where Smart was last seen. Lambert said researchers dismissed that report in the probe’s early years.
Lambert has developed a close relationship with the Smart family, who issued a statement after the arrest praising his skills and “unselfish dedication”.
He is grateful that he has become close to the family. He feels like he got to know Kristin Smart, but wishes he had the chance to meet her.
“For most of my life, Kristin Smart has been a face on a billboard,” he wrote on Instagram. “I’ve heard about Kristin the daughter, Kristin the big sister, Kristin the boyfriend, the neighbor, the roommate. Kristin the swimmer. Kristin the dreamer. And I’ve learned that you can miss a person you’ve never met. “