A few months ago, Chris Lambert sat in the crowded Monterey County Courthouse with a laminated media pass around his neck and a notepad in his lap. It was early in the afternoon and he hadn’t had breakfast or lunch—he had a feeling today would be the day the verdict would be announced and he didn’t want to leave and lose his spot. As the line of jurors filed in, he leaned over and whispered to the reporter next to him, “The jury is dressed really nice today. Is that typical?”

Lambert then watched the jury foreperson pass the judge a sealed envelope. The judge opened it and looked through the papers and passed the envelope to the clerk, who read the verdict. 

Paul Flores was guilty of the first-degree murder of 19-year-old Kristin Smart in 1996. 

“It started to hit me in waves, and I just started crying,” Lambert told Vanity Fair in his first interview since the verdict was announced. “I was thinking about where this started, was thinking about my relationship with the Smart family.” 

Lambert started covering the disappearance of Kristin, a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo student originally from Stockton, California, nearly four years before that day in court. He was only eight years old when Kristin disappeared without a trace after an off-campus party. Lambert didn’t know Kristin or her family. He isn’t a journalist; he’d never made a documentary; he had almost no interest in true crime at all. But his podcast about Kristin helped crack open a case that seemed like it might never be solved. 

It’s not the first time a podcast has helped bring closure to the crime it covered—Serial, the granddaddy of all true-crime podcasts, had an enormous impact on its first season subject, Adnan Syed, who was recently released from prison and cleared of charges after spending 23 years fighting a murder conviction. And the investigative podcast In the Dark helped free Curtis Flowers, a man tried six times for the same crime. And don't forget Netflix's Making a Murderer and the resultant legal action. When a podcast—or a documentary or news article or book or any medium with a large audience—draws new attention to a crime, it reaches a whole new group of people to put pressure on investigators and those who might have information with which to come forward.

Usually, though, these projects employ a team of experienced reporters well-versed in the art of interviewing and investigation. Lambert was just a guy with a cheap microphone and the image of a fading missing-persons billboard from his childhood haunting him.

“How did I get here: making a documentary about this case myself? I don’t know. I just checked and I’m a musician and a recording engineer, according to my LinkedIn profile,” Lambert says in the first episode of his podcast. “At least once a day I ask myself, What are you doing?”

Lambert is a soft-spoken, bearded 34-year-old who grew up in the small town of Orcutt in Santa Barbara County, California, where he was voted “Most Bashful” in junior high school. He lived about half an hour from the campus of California Polytechnic State University—or Cal Poly, as it’s called—and he remembers driving by a billboard with the smiling face of a college student with a reward of $75,000 advertised for information that would help the case. 

The Kristin Smart story was on the local news for a while, sandwiched between coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial and the JonBenét Ramsey story. But then, eventually, the story went away. Nobody was talking about it anymore. There hadn’t been any big new breaks. But that billboard remained, Kristin’s picture fading each year. 

Whenever Lambert passed the billboard, he wondered what had happened to that girl. He went on with his life—going to a community college and starting a career in music. He recorded 11 albums and started a little-listened-to podcast called Are We Okay? described as “weekly conversations about creativity, positivity, and purposeful living.” It was in May of 2018, when he’d just finished another album and he was in a rut, unsure of what to do next, when he started googling around absentmindedly. He remembered that old billboard and wondered what ever happened. “Kristin Smart,” he typed. He clicked on a 2006 Los Angeles Times story: A Cold Case, a Haunting Mystery. It was long. He kept the tab open and kept coming back to it over the course of two days. When he got to the end, about the latest failed search for Kristin’s body, he searched around for an update or a documentary about Kristin. He went onto iTunes to look for a podcast about her case. There was nothing. A crazy idea popped into his head, What if I made a documentary? He’d never made a documentary, had no formal training, had no idea where to even start. But he emailed his girlfriend a link to the LA Times story and wrote, “I’m going to solve this case.”

It was a joke. But he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. He started printing up articles and putting them into a thick binder separated by year with tabs. Nothing really happened with it however until he mentioned the idea to a writer friend of his at a party. She told him she remembered the Kristin Smart story from growing up too. Then, the next day, she emailed Lambert:

“I can’t believe I didn’t tell you; I went to school with the guy who walked her home that night. I went to high school with him.”

Lambert asked what she remembered about him. 

“We all called him Scary Paul.” 

“And that was like, boom,” Lambert remembers. “That was really the moment it went from being an idea in a notebook, to being like, Wow, there’s some actual legs here. And I have an in.”

Lambert interviewed his friend, who introduced him to other people who knew Flores, who was the prime suspect in Kristin’s case. Lambert set up his microphone on his kitchen table and started cold-calling other people mentioned in those old news clips who were connected with the case or who knew Kristin. He took what he’d learned from listening to This American Life over the years and downloaded an online class on storytelling and podcasts by one of that show’s producers, and off he went. 

As he began making calls, he thought about how he would eventually reach out to the Smart family. He wrote them a letter, but he never mailed it. He looked up their phone number but never called. Then, on an overcast day in February 2019, the same day he hit publish on a YouTube teaser about Your Own Backyard, his new podcast about the Kristin Smart disappearance, he went to a beach memorial being held by some of Kristin’s friends to honor what would have been her 42nd birthday. It ended up raining and most people scattered to go home but Lambert stayed, sitting in his car for a while. When the rain slowed down, he walked out to the beach with his recording equipment to capture some field audio of the rain and ocean. Someone walked up with a balloon. He realized it was Denise Smart, Kristin’s mother. Lambert introduced himself, and they talked. Denise invited him to a dinner for family and close friends, thinking he’d probably decline. But he said yes and from that point on, Lambert and the Smart family were in constant communication. He hadn’t known Kristin, nor did he consider himself to be a true-crime fan or any kind of amateur sleuth—he just couldn’t stop thinking about the story. He couldn’t let it go. The coincidences and connections nagged at him.

“If I had not been in this spot at this time, I don’t know that I ever would have reached out to this family. It was just too daunting after all this time I had spent to reach out and say, Hi, can I tell your daughter’s story?”

Denise says she immediately felt like she could trust Lambert. In a particularly poignant point in the podcast, the Smart family hands over to Lambert a notebook they kept by their phone for decades marking any progress in the case.  

“I’m sure you’ve met people before that you just trust,” Denise tells Vanity Fair. “Your alarm bells aren’t going off. I sensed in him someone with a big heart, who was obviously so humble but yet engaging. He’s not the conversation manipulator. He listens. And that’s what stuck with me.”

Denise credits Lambert’s storytelling style in helping reposition her daughter’s story and igniting interest in the case once again. Early reports about Kristin focused on the fact that she’d been drinking the night of her disappearance and on the short shorts she’d been wearing. 

“It was that victim shaming,” Denise says. “People don’t want to connect with that, because it’s like, Oh, it’s that girl with the shorts going to a party getting drunk? Oh, well, that’s what happens when you do that. And my kids would never do that. Sharing the real story is so important. My friends and I call Chris an angel in disguise.”

Over the original six episodes of Your Own Backyard, Lambert interviews Kristin’s family and friends, as well as the people who were with her on the last day of her life, when she went to a party the Friday of Memorial Day weekend in 1996. That night, Kristin left the party with a female friend and another Cal Poly student named Paul Flores—the one Lambert had been told by his friend was called “Scary Paul.” Though Lambert explored the possibility of other suspects in his research, by episode two, the podcast mostly focuses on Flores. 

The podcast took off immediately. By the end of the first day the first episode was posted, about 75,000 people had listened, according to Lambert. As more people listened, more reached out to Lambert about their memories of Kristin, that party, and Flores. As the podcast goes on, a clear picture is painted of Flores as a man who, multiple sources allege, took advantage of and violated inebriated women. Several women accused Flores of sexual assault, allegations that would come up in the trial as well. (Flores’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment regarding these allegations.) But by the end of episode six, Your Own Backyard ends like all of the other stories about Kristin: unsolved. 

Then, a couple of days after the sixth episode aired in November 2019, Lambert got an email from the sheriff’s department in San Luis Obispo County. He’d reached out to them while he was recording the podcast but had never been granted an interview. The investigators had been impressed with his work, and they were ready to talk.

“So the podcast…It was so well done in terms of the production quality and clearly you’re an excellent researcher so, for lack of a better way to put it, it was neat to listen to because you had obviously done your homework,” Nate Paul, who was the lead investigator on the Kristin Smart team from 2014 to 2017, says to Lambert in episode seven. “Officially, I think the greatest benefit to the podcast is the renewed interest it has cultivated in the case. You can’t ask for anything else for a case that is older to have a vehicle that drives new interest because you never know when that interest will lead to additional information, maybe blow something wide open. So I think your podcast is extremely beneficial to the case.”

Beyond the interview, Lambert began a working relationship with the sheriff’s department, telling them about sources who’d reached out to him through the podcast and offering to let law enforcement interview the sources first. Suddenly, the Smart case was moving again, quickly. In April of 2020, Lambert’s sources told him to get to the Flores home immediately—the street had been blocked off and was flooded with police officers. A search warrant had been issued for the home of Paul Flores and the sheriff’s office confirmed they were looking for “specific items of evidence.” 

In April of 2021, Paul Flores was arrested on suspicion of murder along with his father, Ruben, who was suspected of helping his son dispose of Kristin’s body and was charged with being an accessory after the fact. 

Your Own Backyard was back and updated nearly in real time, with a new episode months after the arrest. Interest in Lambert and the podcast reached a fever pitch—he began getting calls from producers wanting to turn the podcast into a streaming series.  

“There were producers who flew in and met with me and they had printed out like a PowerPoint presentation, I think they call it a deck—I’m not familiar with any of this terminology—for what each episode of the Netflix series was going to be,” Lambert says. “And it was basically just a retelling of what I had already done in the podcast but with cameras.”

Lambert decided not to do a series—he didn’t see the benefit in rehashing what he’d already revealed in his podcast, and thought cameras might make his sources, some of whom were anonymous, uncomfortable. Not only that, but there was also the ethical issue of making money off of the Smart family’s tragedy. He’d quit his job at a production studio early on in the podcast, battling career burnout and looking for something new, and he’d decided not to include ads in the episodes because they interrupted the narrative flow, not to mention the thorny issue of profiting off the worst thing that could happen to a family. A TV deal felt lurid, a blatant grab for cash. He’d been living on savings and the financial support from his mother and girlfriend until a friend insisted he give his audience a chance to donate to him—he reluctantly placed a donate tab on his website below a Kristin Smart Scholarship fund. He says each new development in the case leads to a flurry of modest donations—but it adds up to more than what he made in his previous job. 

It’s hard to tell just how much Your Own Backyard kick-started the investigation which had been ongoing since Kristin’s disappearance—it was never officially a cold case, though, to the public, investigators didn’t seem to be making much progress until Lambert came along. If you ask the investigators, however, they insist that things were moving behind the scenes all along. 

“When I first met the Smart family in 2009, I made a promise to them to do everything I could in my power as sheriff to bring justice for Kristin,” San Luis Obispo County sheriff Ian Parkinson says in a statement. “I am appreciative of Chris Lambert and his podcast for helping bring national attention to the case which resulted in people coming forward to share their stories, tips, and insights about what happened to Kristin. Chris was able to fill in a part of the puzzle along with the dedicated members of the sheriff’s office who worked this case over the years and the district attorney’s office who successfully prosecuted this case.”

Lambert’s piece of the puzzle became more obvious when the trials for Paul and Ruben Flores began in July. In the pretrial, it was revealed that in a wiretapped phone call between Paul and his mother, Susan, she told her son to start listening to the podcast so they could start “punching holes in it.” And in the first weeks of the trial, the defense attempted to use the podcast to cast doubt on the prosecution’s story, saying Paul and Ruben wouldn’t have moved Kristin’s body when the prosecution suggested because it was “after the podcast came out,” when attention to the case was heightened. In week seven, the defense explored the sheriff’s department’s strategy of leaking information to Lambert’s podcast. 

In fact, Lambert himself was subpoenaed to testify twice—once during the pretrial and once during the trial. Paul’s defense attorney alleged Lambert inadvertently made himself a witness while interviewing key witnesses for his podcast. Lambert’s attorney argued successfully both times that California’s Shield Law and the First Amendment protected his privileges as a reporter—and allowed him to cover the trial. Though Lambert always positioned himself as someone who wasn’t quite media, he was now officially classified as such and would sit with the other reporters during the trial, taking extensive notes to later read for a new season of his podcast focused on the trial. 

On the last day of the trial, Lambert lined up with the rest of the reporters to wait for his badge to enter the courtroom. Media passes were given out by number based on when each reporter arrived. Lambert was fourth or fifth that day, but when he got there, the other reporters covering the case agreed: Chris Lambert should get number one. While most of the other journalists would come and go throughout the trial, juggling other assignments from their editors, Lambert was there nearly every day. He demurred when they offered him the first badge. But then the group parted, making a path for Lambert to walk up to the front. 

“He didn’t come in ready to compete with everybody. He didn’t, you know, bully his way into the courtroom. He just collected his information to tell his story in his own unique way. And I think everybody sort of was okay with that and left him alone,” says Richard Gearhart, a reporter and news anchor with local-news channel KSBY. “[The podcast] is a different vehicle, a different way to get information out. And I think everybody respected that. There was no competition with him.”

After the verdict was announced, Denise Smart came over to give Lambert a hug and pin a purple ribbon on his shirt. Purple was Kristin’s favorite color. Then, Lambert made his way outside of the courtroom to tweet the verdict, his hands trembling so much he said he struggled to type out the letters. 

Lambert still has not released the final episode of his podcast—the one that will summarize that final day in court—though he has been flooded with emails and DMs from listeners asking him when he will finally give his reaction to the verdict. He is waiting until after the sentencing on March 10—Paul Flores faces 25 years to life in prison and will be able to appeal the verdict after the sentencing. (Ruben was found not guilty.) And Lambert is in no rush. He’s been working on his first music album in years and talking to people involved in the trial, including the Smart family, who he now considers close friends. 

He’s not sure what will happen next for him. He has more of Kristin’s story to tell—the behind-the-scenes details of the trial process, including interviews with some of the jurors, and the continued search for her remains. There’s more closure in her story than before, but it’s not complete. There may be more podcast episodes—he says last time he checked more than 24 million people had downloaded the podcast before the verdict was read—and he’s mulling the possibility of a book. But for now, he wants to take a breath for the first time in four years. 

“[The podcast] just doesn’t feel like a priority right now—real life is the priority right now,” he says. “I have a girlfriend and we have a dog, and I’ve been away from home for so long [covering the trial]…. So we really haven’t had a lot of time together. It’s been a lot of just, let’s order in some food and watch some garbage TV and try not to think about anything else.”