LOS ANGELES (AP) – Chris Lambert wants to make music again, but he doesn ‘t seem to stop chasing a ghost that has haunted him for almost 25 years.
A billboard along the road on the central coast of California took him three years ago on a turn from his career as a singer-songwriter and recording engineer. He created a podcast about the disappearance of first-year student Kristin Smart in 1996 and it took over his life.
“I can not walk away from it for more than a few days,” Lambert said. “I’m only being sucked in again because I want to fix things.”
It was an unlikely twist for someone who referred to himself as a shy, “random boy with a beard” and it yielded results he could never have imagined.
Tuesday, when San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson announced arrests, he attributed to Lambert that he was helping to establish the case worldwide and bring forward several key witnesses.
The longtime suspect, Paul Flores, and Smart were fellow freshmen on the California Polytechnic State University campus in San Luis Obispo. Now Flores is charged with murdering the 19-year-old while trying to rape her in his dorm room, prosecutors said.
His father, Ruben Flores, 80, was charged with aiding and abetting after authorities said he had helped hide the body, which had never been located.
Paul Flores’ lawyer declined to comment on the criminal charge. An attorney for Ruben Flores said his client is innocent.
Lambert was put in the spotlight with the arrests. His series of eight parts, “Your own backyard, Downloaded 7.5 million downloads on Thursday and was the number 2 podcast on iTunes. Lambert’s phone is blowing up with messages – from fans, tipsters and news reporters. He appreciates the attention, but is overwhelmed.
“It makes me crazy,” he said, but he remained focused, patient and polite on Wednesday during a 45-minute interview with The Associated Press.
All the attention does not lead to money – Lambert does not advertise the podcast and relies on donations.
His is the latest in a series of true crime podcasts that have played a role in an arrest, a court appeal or even an acquittal.
‘Up and Vanished’ led to a man confessing to killing a beauty queen from Georgia, while ‘Serial’ helped a convicted murderer win a new trial in Maryland. “In the Dark” has charged new evidence in a case where prosecutors went down instead of seeking a seventh trial against a Mississippi man who spent decades on the underworld.
Lambert, 33, was just 8 when Smart disappeared from his home in the small town of Orcutt, about 225 miles northwest of Los Angeles. It scared him that someone had gone missing and no one knew what had happened.
For more than two decades, a billboard with a photo of a grinning Smart has been advertising a $ 75,000 reward. It is located in the city of Arroyo Grande. where Paul Flores grew up and his parents still live.
Lambert passed it many times and it eventually motivated him to start investigating.
“I thought I would try it and see if I could get some people talking,” Lambert said. “All I have to do is overcome my shyness and start calling these people out of the blue and asking really personal questions.”
He bought high-quality recording equipment and started calling. He found misguided or unwilling witnesses who did not speak to police, he said.
People opened up to Lambert and he encouraged them to contact investigators with relevant information. Deputies started calling him to connect with people he was interviewing.
“What Chris did with the podcast was bring it out nationally to bring in new information,” Parkinson said without elaborating on the new evidence. “It did provide information that I thought was valuable.”
A former colleague of Paul Flores’ mother, Susan Flores, told him Mrs Flores came to work after Memorial Day weekend in 1996 – when Smart went missing – and said she did not sleep well because her husband got a call in the middle of the night and left in his car.
“The speculation was all the time that Paul called his father in the middle of the night and that his father came forward and helped him get rid of Kristin’s body,” Lambert said.
A tenant who lived at Susan Flores’ home for a year told him she heard a clock alarm every morning at 4:20 p.m. Smart worked as a lifeguard at the Cal Poly pool at 5 p.m. It is therefore possible that she had her watch guarded. at that early hour.
“It’s apparently the moment in the podcast series that most people were just completely shaken,” he said. “It could be evidence that Kristin was buried in that backyard or that her belongings were buried in the backyard.”
Susan Flores, who was turned off when she was called by the AP, said in the only interview with KSBY-TV in March that she could “shoot a lot of holes in a lot of (Lambert) lies.”
She said Lambert never contacted her. He said he sent an intermediary to her home and Susan Flores threatened to call police. His efforts 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 struggling near where Smart was last seen. Lambert said investigators dismissed the report in the early years of the investigation.
Lambert developed a close relationship with the Smart family, who issued a statement after the arrest and praised his skills and ‘selfless dedication’.
He is thankful 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 was a face on a billboard,” he wrote on Instagram. ‘I learned from the daughter Kristin, the big sister Kristin, the friend Kristin, the neighbor, the roommate. Kristin the swimmer. Kristin the dreamer. And I learned that you can miss a person you never even had to meet. ‘