Chris Lambert would love to get back to music, but he can’t stop thinking about the ghost that has haunted him for nearly 25 years.
A roadside sign in California took him out of his music career three years ago, prompting him to create a podcast about the disappearance of a college student, Kristin Smart, in 1996. Suddenly, his life began to turn upside down. case.
“I can only keep thinking about it for a few days,” said Lambert, a singer-songwriter who plays multiple instruments and has released multiple albums. “I feel attracted again. I like to solve things ”.
It was an unexpected turn of events for someone who describes himself as shy, “someone with a beard,” but it has produced results he could never have imagined.
On Tuesday, San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson announced arrests and said Lambert had obtained valuable witnesses with his work.
Paul Flores, 44, who has always been suspected, was charged with murder for the death of the 19-year-old when he tried to rape her in his bedroom on the campus of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, where they both studied. prosecutors said. Smart had taken too much at a party and Flores went home with her. He was the last to be seen with her.
His father, Rubén Flores, 80, was charged with complicity. Authorities said he helped his son hide the body, which was never found.
Paul Flores’s lawyer declined to comment on the charges. A lawyer for Rubén Flores confirmed that his client is innocent.
Lambert is in the spotlight after the arrests. His eight-episode series “Your Own Backard” registered 7.5 million downloads Thursday and was the second most watched podcast on iTunes. Lambert says he is overwhelmed by the messages from fans, people who wanted to give directions and journalists.
“I’m going crazy,” he remarked. But he maintained his concentration, patience and composure during a 45-minute interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday.
All the care you receive will not earn you any money. Lambert does not advertise the podcast, which he produces himself, but accepts donations.
Theirs is one of many podcasts that have contributed to solving crimes.
Up and Vanished enabled the confession of a person who murdered a beauty queen in Georgia. “Serial” helped a convicted murderer get a retrial, although a higher court overturned that decision. “In the Dark” has uncovered new evidence in a case prosecutors dropped without seeking a seventh trial against a Mississippi man who spent decades on “death row” awaiting execution.
Lambert, 33, was just eight when Smart disappeared a short distance from his home in the small town of Orcut, about 140 miles northwest of Los Angeles. It scared him that someone would disappear and no one would know what had happened.
For more than two decades, a poster featuring a photo of Smart advertised a 75,000 reward for anyone who helped find it. He was in a town near Flores’ mother’s house in Arroyo Grande.
Lambert passed that poster many times, until one day he decided to investigate the matter.
“I thought I could try to do something, get people talking,” Lambert said. “I just had to get over my shyness and start calling people and asking very personal questions.”
He bought equipment to record high-quality calls and started calling people. He encountered witnesses who had been overlooked or refused to speak, who had not spoken to the police. He let those who did speak tell him what they had said. He got old police reports, court records and newspaper clippings on the subject.
People liked him, who told him everything they knew, and he encouraged these witnesses to talk to the police. Investigators began to put him in touch with the people he had spoken to.
“With his podcast, Chris asked all over the country for new information,” Parkinson said, without revealing what the news consisted of. “It provided information that I find valuable.”
With a mix of interviews, a spooky sound created by Lambert and a story in his own voice, warm and full of conviction, the podcast offers relevant clues and reveals the flaws in the investigation that prevented the case from being solved.
A former colleague of Paul Flores’ mother, Susan Flores, told her that her husband told her one day in 1996 that he had not slept the night before because he received a call in the middle of the night and drove his car away. car.
“It has always been speculated that Paul called his father in the middle of the night and that his father came to help him get rid of Kristin’s body,” Lambert said.
A tenant who had lived in Susan Flores’s estate for a year told her he heard an alarm clock every day at 4:20 am. Smart had worked as a lifeguard at a pool called Cal Poly at 5:00 a.m., so it’s possible what he heard was her alarm clock, set to wake up at that early hour.
“That seems to be the podcast moment that shocked people the most,” said Lambert. “This could be data indicating that Kristin was buried in the garden or that her belongings were buried in the garden.”
Susan Flores, who hung up when she got a call from the AP, told KSBY-TV in March, in the only interview she’s ever given, that she could reveal “some holes in a lot of lies” from Lambert.
She claimed that Lambert never contacted her. He says he did it through an intermediary and that Susan Flores threatened to call the police. His attempts to talk to Paul Flores were also unsuccessful.
Lambert spoke to an Australian who was studying at Cal Poly and said he had seen Flores and Smart wrestle near where Smart was last seen. Lambert said the researchers initially did not attach any importance to that data.
Lambert is now very close to the Smart family, who made a statement praising their skills and ‘selfless dedication’.
“For most of my life, Kristin Smart was a face on a poster,” said Lambert on Instagram. “Now I know Kristin the daughter, Kristin the older sister, Kristin the boyfriend, the neighbor, the roommate. The swimmer, the dreamer. And I have learned that you can miss a person you did not know ”.