Chris Lambert would love to return to music, but he can’t help but think of the ghost that has haunted him for almost 25 years.
A poster on the side of a California road took him away from his music career three years ago and pushed him to create a podcast about the disappearance of a college student, Kristin Smart, in 1996. All of a sudden, his life began to revolve around this unresolved case.
“I can’t stop thinking about the matter for more than a few days,” said Lambert, a singer-songwriter who plays several instruments and has released several albums. “I feel attracted again. I like to sort things out.”
It was an unexpected twist for someone who describes himself as shy, “any bearded guy,” but it has yielded results he never imagined.
On Tuesday, St. Louis County Sheriff Ian Parkinson announced arrests and said Lambert had obtained valuable testimonies with his work.
Paul Flors, 44, who has always been suspected, was charged with murder by the 19-year-old’s death while attempting to rape her in his campus dorm at California State Polytechnic University. in San Luis Obispo, where the two were studying, according to prosecutors. Smart had taken too much at a party and Flowers accompanied her home. He was the last person 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 Flowers’ attorney declined to comment on the charges. A lawyer for Rubén Flores claimed that his client is innocent.
Lambert is in the forefront after the arrests. His eight-episode series “Your Own Backard” recorded 7.5 million downloads on Thursday and was the second most-watched podcast on iTunes. Lambert says he feels frightened by messages from fans, people who wanted to give clues, and journalists.
“I’m going crazy,” he commented. But he maintained concentration, patience and good manners during a 45-minute interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday.
All the attention he receives does not generate him money. Lambert has no advertising on the podcast, which he produces himself, but accepts donations.
His is one of several podcasts that helped solve crimes.
“Up and Vanished” made possible the confession of an individual who had killed a beauty queen in Georgia. “Serial” helped a convicted killer get a new trial, though a higher court overturned that decision. “In the Dark” brought to light new evidence in a case that prosecutors abandoned, without seeking a seventh trial of a Mississippi man who spent decades on the “death row,” waiting to be executed.
Lambert, 33, was just eight when Smart disappeared near his home in the small town of Orcut, about 225 kilometers (140 miles) northwest of Los Angeles. He was frightened by the idea that someone might disappear and that no one knew what happened.
For more than two decades, a poster with a photo of Smart announced a reward of 75,000 for anyone who helped find it. He was in a village near the house of the mother of Flowers in Arroyo Grande.
Lambert passed in front of this poster many times, until one day he decided to investigate the matter.
“I thought I could try to do something, get people to talk,” Lambert said. “I just had to overcome my shyness and start calling people and asking them very personal questions.”
He bought equipment to record high quality calls and started calling people. He came across witnesses who had been overlooked or did not want to talk, who had not spoken to the police. He made those who did speak tell him what they had said. He got old police reports, court records and newspaper clippings that talked about the subject.
He liked people, who told him everything they knew, and he encouraged these witnesses to talk to the police. Investigators began calling him to contact the people he had spoken to.
“With his podcast, Chris asked the whole country to provide new information,” Parkinson expressed, without revealing what the news consisted of. “It produced information that I consider valuable.”
With a mix of interviews, a ghostly sound created by Lambert and a story with 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 resolved.
A former colleague of Paul Flors’ mother, Susan Flors, told her that her husband had told her one day in 1996 that he had not slept the night before because he had received a call in the middle of the night and had gone in his act.
“It was always speculated that Paul called his father in the middle of the night and that his father was and helped him get rid of Kristin’s corpse,” Lambert expressed.
A tenant who lived a year on the property of Susan Flowers told her she had heard the alarm on a clock every day at 4.20am. Smart had been working as a lifeguard at 5 a.m. in a pool called Cal Poly, so it’s possible that what she heard was her alarm clock, scheduled to get up at this early hour.
“This seems to be the time of the podcasts that shook people the most,” Lambert said. “This may be a fact that indicates that Kristin was buried in the courtyard or that her belongings were buried in the courtyard.”
Susan Flores, who hung up when the AP called her, told KSBY-TV in March, in the only interview she has given, that she could prove “a number of holes in a bunch of lies” by Lambert.
She maintained that Lambert never contacted her. He says he did it through an intermediary and that Susan Flowers threatened to call police. His efforts to speak with Paul Flowers were also unsuccessful.
Lambert spoke with an Australian who studied at Cal Poly who said he had seen Flowers and Smart struggle near the place where Smart was last seen. Lambert stated that the researchers did not give importance to this data at first.
Lambert is very close today to the Smart family, which issued a statement praising his skills and “selfless dedication.”
“Most of my life Kristin Smart was a face on a poster,” Lambert said on Instagram. “Now I know of Kristin the daughter, Kristin the older sister, Kristin the friend, the neighbor, the roommate. The swimmer, the dreamer. And I learned that you can miss a person you didn’t know.”