South Bay Woman Testifies She Recognized Her Rapist In Her News Feed

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA -- A Redondo Beach woman identified only as 'Ronda Doe' testified in court Wednesday that she was raped by the same man accused of killing college student Kristin Smart.

The woman took the stand in Monterey County Superior Court during the trial against Paul Flores, who is accused of killing Smart, a Cal Poly student, in 1996 and hiding her body with the help of his father, Ruben Flores.

Doe testified that she was raped by Paul Flores in 2008 after she met him outside a bar in Redondo Beach.

When she saw Flores’ photo in her news feed regarding his arrest in connection to Smart’s murder, she said she was shocked.

“I almost couldn’t breathe. I was in disbelief that it was the same person (who raped me),” she testified, according to a report in the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

Authorities long considered Paul Flores a prime suspect in Smart's disappearance. He was a former classmate of hers from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and the last person known to see her alive the night she disappeared in 1996.

Smart has been missing and is presumed dead since she was last seen leaving a get-together with Paul Flores as they walked back to their dorms.

Paul Flores has denied having anything to do with Smart's disappearance. Witnesses reported seeing Flores walking on a path to the college dormitories with her the night she went missing. Law enforcement officers questioned him about Smart's disappearance at the time.

He has lived for more than a decade in San Pedro, where authorities served a search warrant at his Upland Avenue home last April in a quest "for specific items of evidence" related to the investigation into Smart's disappearance, a San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office spokesman said at the time.

In February 2020, San Luis Obispo sheriff's investigators served search warrants in San Pedro, San Luis Obispo County and Washington. Authorities declined to provide specifics about the nature of the searches.

In 2016, federal investigators dug up a hillside near the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus, looking for remains. They also searched the yard of a home.

Smart's family sued Flores in civil court. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before a grand jury and in a civil deposition.

Since 2011, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office has served search warrants, conducted physical evidence searches, submitted evidence items from the early days of the case for modern DNA testing, recovered more than 100 new items of evidence, conducted more than 90 in-person interviews and written more than 360 supplemental reports, according to media reports.

-- City News Service and Patch staffers Ashley Ludwig and Paige Austin contributed to this report.