A student who had a romantic encounter with Kristin Smart just days before she was murdered has revealed a chilling connection to the murderer Scott Peterson and a brutal abduction.

One of the last people to see Kristin Smart alive was a classmate of his at Cal Poly, and he has chilling connections to two other high-profile murder cases.

After 47 years of hiding it, Trevor Boelter told Americans. Talk about his time spent being interviewed by the FBI about the disappearance of two other students from San Luis Obispo, California, in the late 1990s, and his chance meeting with convicted killer Scott Peterson.

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In May of 1996, at an off-campus party, Boelter, then 20, met Kristin Smart, then 19.

Twice that night, Kristin, who had introduced herself as “Roxy,” tried to kiss Trevor, but he rejected her.

Hours after being escorted home by Paul Flores, she vanished without a trace.

Flores is suspected of killing the teen during an attempted rape and then hiding her body.

Last week, he was given a life sentence or 25 years in prison for his role in a first-degree murder case.

Even though the tragic case has haunted Trevor for the past 25 years, he claims that meeting Smart “isn’t even the weirdest thing” that happened to him in college, and that’s saying something considering that it ranks pretty high on the list of weird things that have happened to him.

“I feel like I’m the Forrest Gump of weird happenings,” Trevor said with a chuckle.

When two students went missing, the FBI came straight to my door because I lived near a bridge where one of them was abducted. I kissed Kristin Smart at the party; I met Scott and Laci Peterson at their house.

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

But aside from that, my time at university was essentially perfect.

ENCOUNTER WITH ANOTHER KILLER

About a year after Smart vanished in 1997, Trevor was working as an advertising salesman for The Mustang Daily, Cal Poly’s student newspaper.

He claimed that one day a woman called him up and told him that she and her husband had opened a restaurant in town called The Shack, and that they wanted to meet with him at their house to talk about advertising.

He complied and was greeted by Laci Peterson, whom Trevor described as “gorgeous and incredibly nice.”

Laci welcomed Trevor into her home and introduced him to her husband, Scott.

Scott, according to Trevor, was rude, condescending, and “totally douchey,” in contrast to Laci’s friendly demeanor.

He said, “I go in there and her husband is making hamburgers, and he couldn’t be more different from her.

When I first met Laci, I thought, “Wow, she’s so pretty, so nice, and so friendly.”

But he was nothing like that; in fact, he was the epitome of douchebaggery. The guy kept asking me, “Are you going to make us millionaires bud by putting little ads in your paper?”

Simply put, he was rude and dismissive. The thought crossed my mind, “Eh, a sale’s a sale.”

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The Petersons and Trevor settled on a price, and Trevor began running consistent ads for The Shack.

After a couple of weeks of the Petersons not paying their bills, Trevor got a call from his boss.

He reached out to Laci, but she was unsure of the situation because Scott managed their money. She then provided him with Scott’s contact information and instructed him to get in touch with him immediately.

Scott was behind the wheel when Trevor called him.

The “check’s in the post, buddy,” he assured Trevor coolly, but the money never arrived.

As a direct result, The Shack’s ads in The Mustang Daily were suddenly removed.

Some time later, after Trevor had finished his class, he received another call from his manager.

In other words: “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 recalled the manager telling him.

The manager tried to calm Scott Peterson’s anger by explaining that Scott “had to pay his bills and the issue wasn’t Trevor’s fault,” but this did not work.

Trevor related that his boss had warned him to be careful.

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

But I graduated and moved to Los Angeles and soon after that I forgot all about it.

Then, “I couldn’t put a name to this guy’s face that kept popping up on TV,” he said.

At some point, people put two and two together and realized it was Scott Peterson, who had been arrested in April 2003 for the murders of his pregnant wife Laci and their unborn son.

The body of their unborn son and pieces of Laci’s body were discovered floating in San Francisco Bay. She had been missing since Christmas Eve of 2002, when her disappearance was first reported.

Peterson, who maintained his innocence throughout the trial, was found guilty of murder in 2004 and sentenced to death by lethal injection the following year.

In 2020, after an automatic appeal to the Supreme Court, his conviction and death sentence were overturned.

While preparing Paul Flores’ defense for his murder trial in the death of Kristin Smart, his legal team also brought up Peterson’s name, implying that he may have been involved.

There were rumors that he, too, was a Cal Poly student in 1996, and that he was at the party where Kristin disappeared.

There was never any evidence to back up the allegations, and Peterson’s lawyers called the move “desperate,” suggesting Flores’ team was engaging in a “publicity stunt to take the attention away from the defendant.”

When Trevor found out it was Peterson behind the threats to harm him, he was shocked by the removed newspaper ads.

Nonetheless, that wasn’t the end of the bizarre coincidences that plagued his college years.

DOUBLE STUDENT MURDER

Rachel Newhouse, a 20-year-old junior at Cal Poly, vanished on her way home from a party at a local Mexican restaurant on November 18, 1998.

Aundria Crawford, a 20-year-old sophomore at Cuesta College, went missing from her San Luis Obispo apartment on March 11, 1998, nearly five months later.

For a while, it was believed that the disappearance of the two young women was associated with that of Kristin Smart. The residents of the bustling college town were terrified that a serial killer was among them.

Trevor claims that some of his classmates didn’t start suspecting foul play in Smart’s disappearance a year ago until after the disappearance of Rachel Newhouse.

“Oh geez, something bad is happening here,” he said, describing the reactions of the locals.

Before that, there was widespread speculation among students that Kristin had disappeared to Hawaii.

“No one wanted to believe that someone had been murdered on campus and her body buried.”

After the FBI discovered Newhouse’s blood under a bridge near Trevor’s house, they allegedly came knocking on his door to question him about the connection between Newhouse and Crawford’s cases.

Saturday morning, I woke up and let myself out of the house. Trevor said, “When I was about 22, some FBI agent came up to me and started waving his badge in my face.

He then said, “Well, I actually have an alibi for the night Rachel went missing, and here it is: I was at such-and-such a party. I can say “I was on the radio” because I participated in the radio program at my university.

I was there, he made sure, but the whole thing was so odd.

It’s crazy to think that all three of those things happened to me while I was a student at Cal Poly.

They must have seen my name on all these lists and thought, “maybe we should talk to Trevor again,” over the years, even though Paul Flores was always the most probably and obvious culprit. Nothing is out of the question.

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In 2001, a court found Rex Allen Krebs, by then known as the Sadist of San Luis, guilty of kidnapping Newhouse and Crawford.

Given that he was serving out a decade in prison for rape at the time of Smart’s disappearance, he was immediately eliminated as a suspect.

FATEFUL ENCOUNTER

At Paul Flores’ trial, Trevor testified as a witness and said it was “surreal” to finally meet his eyes again after so long.

He told the jury about three different times he had talked to Smart at the party, describing her as a “flirty and attractive” teenager who had introduced herself to him as “Roxy.”

After they had introduced themselves, Boelter recalled, Smart kissed him on the mouth, took his hand, and ushered the two of them into the restroom.

Unfortunately, Smart’s self-assurance took a sudden nosedive once he entered the building.

At trial, Boelter stated that Smart asked him twice if he thought she was ugly, and that both times he said no. She continued by asking for his advice on who at the party she should sleep with.

When Smart excused herself to use the restroom, Boelter left. Paul Flores was waiting outside and asked, “What happened in there?” with a tone of “authority.”

Flores roared with laughter at Boelter’s “nothing” response.

A short time later, Smart would run into Boelter again after seeing that she was unnerved by the presence of a man who wasn’t Flores.

Boelter took action and ushered the guy out. He continued on with the rest of his evening, and as he was leaving the party, he saw Smart for the third and final time.

Boelter testified that as he was leaving, Smart grabbed his hand for the second time that night and ushered him into the backyard, where she insisted on having a private conversation with him.

After another attempt at a kiss, Boelter rejected her.

He recalled seeing Smart stagger as she sobbed past him.

LAST MOVEMENTS

Several other partygoers testified that Smart appeared to be intoxicated that night, and some even claimed that Flores had leered at her.

Basketball star at Cal Poly, Steven Fleming, became fast friends with Smart because the two men shared a physical characteristic: their height.

Fleming testified that he felt like Flores was “kind of following Kristin” throughout the night, and he broke down in tears as he looked at a picture of his murdered friend.

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

To paraphrase his testimony, “she was not OK” with him being there.

In a similar vein, Cheryl Anderson recalled Smart as “very intoxicated, her speech was slurred, and she was having trouble standing up.”

When Tim Davis, the party’s host, and Kristin found her passed out on the lawn of a neighbor’s house, they did their best to revive her.

Anderson testified that Flores “appeared out of the blue” and offered to walk her home.

All four students—Anderson, Davis, Flores, and a wobbly Smart—returned to the residence halls together.

In the end, Davis went back inside, leaving Flores to guide the two women home alone.

Since Anderson lived in a different dorm than Smart and Flores, she testified that they eventually lost touch once they returned to campus.

Before she left, she insisted that Flores walk with her friend all the way back to her house.

“I didn’t think anything horrible was going to happen,” she said under oath.

Aside from Flores, no one else would see Smart again after that.

DECADES-LONG INVESTIGATION

Before Kristin Smart’s disappearance was reported, three days would pass. Friends and her roommate probably assumed she had gone home to see her family for the holiday weekend, not realizing anything was amiss.

As soon as Trevor heard that Kristin had gone missing, he had a horrible feeling that something terrible had happened to her.

“All I can think about is feeling [imitating shivers] terrible,” he said.

“I was sure that nothing beneficial would result from it. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach, and I immediately said, “I think she’s dead.”

Paul Flores was a prime suspect almost from the moment the investigation started.

Despite the passage of time and the lack of any tangible evidence, Kristin Smart’s family never gave up hope in their search for justice.

KILLER CAUGHT

It took another 25 years, until April 2021, for Flores to be arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Chris Lambert, the reporter behind the true-crime podcast Your Own Backyard, has been credited with helping authorities solve the case.

The sheriff of San Luis Obispo County, Ian Parkinson, has said that thanks to Lambert, the department was able to interview several people who had previously been unreachable. Among the many people Lambert talked to was Trevor.

In February of 2021, police searched Flores’s home after he was arrested on firearms charges.

The following month, cadaver dogs and a ground-penetrating radar were sent to Ruben Flores’ house after authorities executed a search warrant.

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Prosecutors claim that forensic archaeologists discovered human blood and a soil disturbance beneath the home’s decking roughly the size of a casket.

The Smarts sued Smart’s father, Ruben Flores, in April of 2020, claiming that Flores and some unnamed accomplices had secretly removed Smart’s body from the house.

By April 13, 2020, Paul Flores had been tracked down to his San Pedro, California, residence and had been apprehended there. His father was apprehended soon after and charged with being an accessory to murder.

Two other sexual assaults against women in Los Angeles have been linked to Paul Flores, authorities said.

Both women would later testify against Flores in court, claiming he drugged them, raped them, and gagged them.

‘A GRAVE INJUSTICE’

Paul was found guilty of murdering Kristin Smart in October 2022 after a trial that lasted three months, beginning in July.

He asked the judge to overturn Flores’ murder conviction earlier this week by filing a motion of acquittal, arguing that the evidence presented during the three-month trial did not prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. His requests for mistrial were denied ten times.

On March 10, Superior Court Judge Jennifer O’Keefe upheld Flores’ 25-to-life sentence and denied his request for a new trial.

O’Keefe referred to him as a “cancer to society” and emphasized the necessity of incarcerating him.

The fact that Flores is behind bars, according to Trevor, is a huge weight off of their shoulders.

Nonetheless, he conceded that Kristin’s loved ones will not be able to rest easy until they learn the location of her remains, which have yet to be discovered.

Every day that goes by without you telling her family where she is is a grave injustice,” he told Flores.

You can stop the bleeding now, but it’s still happening.

Accept your punishment and stop the bleeding by telling the police where she is.

Even though the case will never be truly closed for the Smart family until Kristin’s remains are found, Trevor said he hopes they get closure from Flores’ conviction and sentencing.

Those folks are an inspiration, he said.

In my opinion, the worst part is that Paul may never open up again.

That’s the terrible part: however much time you give him, she will still be gone.

“My hope is that he negotiates with the court.

It’s frustrating and upsetting that I don’t know how likely it is that there’s still a fragment of her somewhere, but my hope is that there is.