SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The murder trial for the men accused in connection with the 1996 disappearance of Kristin Smart continued Monday with testimony from a cadaver dog handler.
Paul Flores is accused of killing Smart after leaving an off-campus Cal Poly party in May 1996. His father, Ruben Flores, is accused of helping hide her body. The two were arrested in April 2021 after 24 years, despite Smart’s body never being found.
The trial moved to Salinas after San Luis Obispo Superior Court Judge Craig van Rooyen ruled the Flores men were unlikely to receive a fair trial in San Luis Obispo. Monterey County Superior Court judge Jennifer O’Keefe is presiding over the case.
On Monday, James Camp, assistant chief investigator for the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office, finished his testimony from the previous week where he confirmed the layout of the red brick dorms and more specifically, the routes Smart, Paul Flores and Cheryl Anderson, who walked home together after the party, could have taken to their dorms.
San Luis Obispo County Deputy District Attorney Chris Peuvrelle then called Adela Morris to the stand. Morris is a dog handler who specializes in human remains detection.
Human remains detection dogs ‘are not pets,’ handler testifies
Morris has been a search dog handler since 1986 and has specialized in human remains detection dog handling since 1987.
She has had six dogs certified in human remains detection and is currently training a seventh, Morris testified, and has trained but decided to not certify about five other dogs after she found the dogs did not have traits to be successful in human remains detection, like having a high prey drive.
“A search partner is definitely not a pet,” she said.
Morris began her career as part of the California Rescue Dog Association, or CARDA, a volunteer organization that works with county offices of emergency services. While it is not state-run, there are state standards to certify both handlers and dogs in human remains detection.
During her testimony, Morris described those standards, noting that California was one of the leading states in drafting statewide standards, versus jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction.
Dogs and handlers are certified as a team and must be re-certified each year, Morris said.
She also described how cadaver dogs are trained to find human remains, saying they use real human remains such as bones, teeth and pieces of the body in different stages of decomposition to help the dogs focus on those scents.
They use other items like baby diapers, animal bones and carcasses, and food and food wrappers as “negative scents” to teach the dogs to not focus on those items.
The dogs also are “blood trained,” she added.
“Blood is an extremely powerful scent item,” Morris said. “You could take a drop of blood and fill a room. The scent of blood is very overwhelming, so it takes very little blood to pick that up.”
Morris explained a change in dog behavior can give more information than an alert itself. The alert, she testified, signaled the source of the scent or where it was the strongest.
“Our observation of the dog is everything,” she said. “We are watching for that change of behavior which is characteristic when they are with their target scent.”
Change in behavior can vary by dog, but general behavior changes when a dog finds its target scent include slowing down, deep breathing and “vacuuming,” which is a term handlers use when the dog is smelling intensely, according to a news release.
Handler describes cadaver dog brought in to help in Smart search
After describing her credentials and further aspects of training, Morris began to speak about Cholla, a border collie and certified search dog who was called in to help with the Smart investigation in June 1996. Her other certified dog, Cirque, also joined the 1996 search.
At the time, Cholla was the first dog to have been certified under the new, more complex state standards for human remains detection, Morris said.
She helped to find the remains of a young girl who had been kidnapped in Santa Barbara County, found remains following an explosion and helped in Calaveras County to find 10-year-old remains, Morris said. The dog helped locate at least 11 notable crime scenes or human remains between 1996 and 2000.
“I would say Cholla was more than reliable for finding human remains,” Morris said. “She had at that time probably one of the most extensive certifications and trainings that were available. I would say she was very advanced, and at the time state of the art.”
Morris said she and Cholla were called in as part of the “very large search” at Cal Poly following Smart’s disappearance. They first searched reservoirs near the campus, Morris said, before being assigned to search the Santa Lucia residence hall.
Morris said the search was done blind, meaning she and other handlers were not told if another team had already searched that area or what the results of those searches might have been. She also didn’t know any specifics of suspected locations.
“We want to search knowing nothing, so all we have is the dog’s nose,” she said.
On that day, another handler had previously searched the dorms, but Morris did not know that until later, she testified Monday.
During her search, she let Cholla off the leash into the dorm building and allowed her to begin smelling the area, searching for her target scent, Morris said. Morris stayed where she was at the southwest entrance of the hall.
According to Morris, Cholla ran down the hall and “almost immediately” made a U-turn and began concentrating on odors about three-fourths of the way down the hall.
“She’s literally going nose around cracks of door, door handles,” Morris said. “She got to one of the doors and she came running back to me to jump on me, which is her alert that she had located her target odor of human remain scent.”
Morris asked Cholla to show her where, and the dog went to room 128 and began scratching on the door, she said. Room 128 was Paul Flores’ room.
An officer opened the door after Morris told them her dog wanted to go inside, and when Cholla entered the room she was “extremely focused” and “very clearly in scent,” Morris testified Monday.
Cholla began vacuuming the left side of the room, and alerted at the bed on the left side — Paul Flores’ bed. After the first alert, Morris allowed Cholla to continuing sniffing and alerting to see if the dog could settle on a specific spot on the bed for an alert, Morris said. Though the dog alerted Morris about a dozen times, she never seemed to settle on a specific part of the bed, Morris testified.
“She was very emphatic and enthusiastic about it. She was very clear,” she said.
To alert Morris, Cholla would find her and jump on her. Morris said she felt Cholla would jump with more force if the scent was more clear and would jump with less force if the scent wasn’t as potent.
“She really wanted to communicate when she jumped harder and higher” Morris said. “She would literally use my body to jump off of, push off of — that’s a very enthusiastic alert.”
During the search of Flores’ dorm room, Morris said Cholla was alerting by jumping to her hip, though the normal alert was at her thighs.
She said she directed Cholla to look at the right side of the room, but the dog was only interested in the left side of the room.
“I had no doubts that she gave her alert that she gives when she detects human remains and it was a very strong alert,” Morris said. “She was very clear.”
The pair soon left the room and continued to search the residence hall, but Cholla did not alert to any other rooms or areas of the dorm building, Morris said.
Handler describes searching Flores room with other cadaver dog, plus Smart dorm
Morris said outside she was asked to have both Cholla and her other search dog, Cirque, search the dumpster, though she cautioned she was “not confident” in what would be found there because it was “a very contaminated place.”
Both the dogs gave interest alerts while searching the dumpster, but they were not strong alerts, she said.
“At this time there was almost nothing in the dumpster, just some garbage stuck to the bottom,” Morris said.
Morris then did a second search of the residence hall with Cirque, who she described as her “secondary dog.”
“Cirque was very reliable, but I had more connection with Cholla,” Morris said. “Cholla had more training than Cirque, but Cirque met all the standards.”
She said Cirque also alerted to Flores’ room and specifically to the left side of the room as well. Cirque did not alert to any other area of the residence hall, Morris testified.
Morris said she was then asked to take the dogs to Smart’s dorm. She said she was not sure if she used both dogs during that search, but she did know she used Cholla, who did not alert to anything at the new location.
They then went back to the Santa Lucia dorm one more time, where Cholla once again alerted, this time to the bed frame on the left side of room 128, Morris said.
The mattress had been removed from the room by then, she added.
Peuvrelle concluded his questioning of Morris at 2:30 p.m., and cross examination by the defense began soon after.
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