For nearly 24 years, the disappearance of Cal Poly freshman Kristin Smart has confounded investigators, traumatized her family and eventually spawned a whodunit podcast with a million downloads.

On Wednesday, it appeared San Luis Obispo County law enforcement officers had made a break in the cold case: They served search warrants at the Los Angeles County home of a fellow Cal Poly student at the time who said he walked her back to the dorms the night she vanished as well as his parents’ home in Arroyo Grande and a sister’s house in Washington state.

Kristin Smart, missing Cal Poly student Associated Press

“We’ve been waiting for this day forever,” said Dennis Mahan, who volunteered with searches for Kristin over the years and has become close with the Smart family. “I have a wave of emotions.”

The case of the missing 19-year-old Stockton girl with the big smile and long blond hair is one of a pantheon of missing-persons cases that has captivated Californians and is often mentioned alongside the 2012 disappearance of Morgan Hill teenager Sierra LaMar, who was abducted on her way to her school bus stop. Sierra’s killer is behind bars, but her body has never been found.

Just what Wednesday’s search warrants in Kristin Smart’s case yielded, however, is uncertain. Authorities revealed little Wednesday, and the man they have long identified as a “person of interest,” Paul Flores, 49, was only briefly detained at his San Pedro home by authorities before fleeing back inside to avoid reporters.

At the home of his mother, Susan Flores, police were seen retrieving a computer and other items, but they didn’t appear to dig up the backyard, which has long been speculated by Kristin’s supporters as a possible location for her body.

“Dig her up!” about a dozen spectators chanted Wednesday morning as they gathered across the street, according to the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

Members of the Los Angeles Sheriffs Dept. remove items after a searching a home in connection with a cold case Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2020, in Los Angeles. Search warrants were served Wednesday at locations in California and Washington state in the investigation of the disappearance of Kristin Smart, the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo student who disappeared in 1996. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) 

Marc Klaas, whose 12-year-old daughter Polly was abducted in Petaluma and killed in 1993, knows how difficult the flurry of news can be on anguished parents.

“They’ve been down this road so many times before, and it’s always come to naught,” Klaas said.”They’ve waited so many years and all they want is — they want justice for Kristin, but they also want to recover Kristin.”

A member of the Los Angeles Sheriffs Dept. searches a vehicle during an investigation outside of a home in connection with a cold case Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2020, in Los Angeles. Search warrants were served Wednesday at locations in California and Washington state in the investigation of the disappearance of Kristin Smart, the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo student who disappeared in 1996. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) 

The last time it appeared police were close to resolution on the Smart case was in September 2017 when a group of law enforcement officers with shovels dug up bones on a hillside behind campus dorms. At the time, San Luis Obispo County sheriff’s spokesman Tony Cipolla called it “the most promising lead that we’ve had in a number of years”  but never revealed whether the bones were connected to the case — or whether they were human or animal or could have been from a Native American burial.

Whether that discovery led to Wednesday’s search warrants is far from certain, and police won’t say. The popular podcast “Your Own Backyard,” by Santa Maria native Chris Lambert, may have had an impact.

Although authorities declined to be interviewed for the six-part series last fall, San Luis Obispo County sheriff’s Detective Nathan Paul, who was the lead investigator on the cold case between 2014 and 2017, agreed in January to sit down for an interview with Lambert. He said that the department had received a number of tips because of the podcast.

Paul said that since Sheriff Ian Parkinson took office in 2011 and recommitted to the Smart case, investigators have searched nine locations, recovered 140 new items of evidence and conducted 91 interviews.

Some of that evidence, according to a news release last week from the sheriff’s department, included two trucks that had been owned in 1996 by either Paul Flores or his father, Ruben.

“I think the investigation was cooking at 200 degrees and when he (Lambert) did the podcast, it went up to 480,” said Mahon, who was featured in one of the episodes. “It got the whole town re-energized.”

The original investigation of Kristin’s disappearance on May 25, 1996, was botched from the start, with the detective acknowledging in the podcast that there were “shortcomings and oversights that took place.”

Paul Flores, who lived in the Santa Lucia dorm, gave conflicting accounts in separate interviews with investigators about where he last saw Smart.

Flores also gave investigators different stories about how he received a black eye — from a basketball game or fixing his truck.

With confusion between campus and city police over the case’s jurisdiction, it wasn’t until June 1996, after classes were finished for the quarter and all the dorms had been cleared out, that police searched Smart’s and Flores’s rooms. In Flores’s room, cadaver dogs “alerted” investigators to the corner of his mattress.

Despite years of suspicion, Flores has never been arrested. He dropped out of Cal Poly. Over the years, he worked at restaurants and at the Coca Cola company.

He was home Wednesday morning when police served their search warrant, handcuffing him during the search, then freeing him. A news video shows him running inside his home.

“The big question mark for me is,” Mahon said, “I want to know if what they’re finding out now could have been found out in 1996, and if the Smarts were unnecessarily forced to wait 24 years.”

Klaas said he hopes, for the family’s sake, that not only will the perpetrator be arrested but that Kristin’s remains are found.

“They just need to put this terrible chapter behind them,” he said. “It will be much easier for the family to do that once they know the truth of what happened to Kristin.”