In the spring of 1999, San Luis Obispo was a college town that had learned to count its missing. Kristin Smart, a Cal Poly freshman, had not been seen since Memorial Day weekend of 1996. Rachel Newhouse, a Cal Poly student, had vanished on a walk home in November 1998. In March 1999, Aundria Crawford, a student at Cuesta College, disappeared from her own apartment. Three young women, and for a long stretch no answer for any of them.
The answer to two of those disappearances came from an unexpected quarter: a state parole agent who read a newspaper account of the Crawford case and recognized something in it. His parolee was Rex Allan Krebs, a 33-year-old man who had served about half of a 20-year sentence for two sexual assaults and had been back in San Luis Obispo County since the fall of 1997. Krebs was taken into custody on March 20, 1999. By the end of April he had confessed, and the remains of both missing women had been recovered. A jury convicted him of both murders in 2001 and sentenced him to death, and in November 2019 the California Supreme Court upheld every part of the judgment.
Rex Allan Krebs was born on January 28, 1966. His record, as it was reported in 1999, ran back to a pair of crimes committed in 1987 near his home in Grover Beach, in southern San Luis Obispo County. In October 1987 he was sentenced to 20 years in state prison for two violent sexual assaults. Cal Poly’s student newspaper, the Mustang Daily, listed the convictions on his record as including assault with intent to rape and rape by force or fear. One of the residents of a house he later frequented checked his record with the parole authorities and found, besides the sexual offenses, a parole violation and a grand theft in Idaho.
He served about half of the 20 years and was paroled on September 2, 1997; in 1996 he was held at the state prison at Soledad. He returned to San Luis Obispo County as a registered sex offender, under the supervision of a state parole agent, David Zaragoza.
What Krebs did in the months after his release came out after his arrest, when a Mustang Daily reporter tracked down people who had known him. Soon after leaving prison he began seeing a woman in her early twenties who shared a house in San Luis Obispo with friends from her hometown. Krebs was polite and went out of his way to win over her housemates. He was often seen on the Cal Poly campus, where he sometimes ate lunch with her behind the University Union.
Around Halloween of 1997 he began spending much of his time at the house, and she gave him a key. One housemate later recalled that Krebs would arrive at about one in the morning and wait a long time before coming inside, as if he did not want to be heard. He cooked the household’s Thanksgiving dinner that year. In April 1998 his parole agent came to the house and asked about the bedrooms, the residents and whether there were weapons there. A housemate then looked up his record. In May 1998 the residents met and voted to end the arrangement, and the woman moved out. Krebs did not take it quietly. At the video store where two of the housemates worked, he warned them: "If you ever disrespect my girlfriend again, somebody’s going to get hurt."
By the spring of 1999 he had been living for about eight months in Davis Canyon, a quiet, secluded area near Avila Beach, in a small barn apartment he rented from a property owner. He told the owner he had been in prison, but his neighbors said later that no one told them he was a sex offender. He was friendly with them, offered beers, and came to know several of the young women who lived nearby.
Rachel Newhouse was 20 years old and a student at Cal Poly. She lived near a pedestrian bridge that she would cross on the walk home from downtown San Luis Obispo. On the night of November 12, 1998, after an evening downtown with friends, she set out to walk home alone. She did not arrive.
The only physical trace was blood on the pedestrian bridge she would have crossed on her way home. Blood recovered from the bridge and from a nearby parking lot was matched to samples taken from her parents. The find alarmed investigators.
The discovery drew in more agencies. Larry Hobson, then an investigator for the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney, later described a joint effort in which the city police worked with the district attorney’s office, the sheriff’s office and the FBI, which supplied manpower. A Cal Poly student television newscast of the time carried an interview with a San Luis Obispo police captain about the search for the missing student. For months, investigators hit dead ends.
Aundria Crawford was 20, a student at Cuesta College. She came from Clovis, near Fresno, and lived alone in an apartment in the city. She loved driving her Mustang. Her boyfriend of 18 months remembered a contagious laugh; he kept a box of her photographs, birthday cards and letters for twenty years and looked through it for the first time only in the months before the anniversary of her death. Her mother called her a beautiful and kind person. At a remembrance held at Cuesta after her death, mourners learned that her favorite colors had been pale pink, green and metallic silver.
Early in March 1999, according to a neighbor, Aundria had reported a prowler looking into her bathroom. She last spoke with a friend by telephone at 2:46 on the morning of March 11, 1999. Later that day she missed an appointment and did not answer messages. Police began an investigation on March 12. She was not found.
The parallels were plain: two young women of the same age, students at the two colleges in a town of modest size, both gone without a word within four months of each other.
David Zaragoza had more than one reason to think about his parolee. When he read a newspaper account of the Crawford case, he saw similarities between what had happened in her apartment and the crimes for which Krebs had gone to prison in 1987. Krebs had also hurt his ribs, and his explanation for the injury did not add up.
On March 20, 1999, Krebs was taken into custody for violating his parole. The reported violations were possession of a simulated firearm and breaking the alcohol restrictions of his parole. He was held in the county jail. The same day, police told his neighbors in Davis Canyon that he was in custody and asked them to keep the information to themselves. Neighbors noticed investigators searching the canyon in the weeks that followed.
Police did not name him publicly as a suspect for another month.
Larry Hobson took on the questioning. He interviewed Krebs about ten times, he told KSBY in 2018, before the scientific evidence came back. In 1999, Hobson recalled, DNA testing took weeks rather than days. When the result arrived, it was decisive: blood found in Krebs’s truck belonged to Rachel Newhouse.
Confronted with that evidence, Krebs confessed. In Hobson’s words, "he eventually confessed to kidnapping, raping and killing both Rachel and Aundria." He was questioned on April 21, 1999, and confessed on April 22; the handling of that questioning would become a central issue on appeal. When detectives asked whether he was responsible for the disappearance and deaths of Rachel Newhouse and Aundria Crawford, he answered yes. On April 22 police named Krebs as their suspect, and San Luis Obispo Police Chief Jim Gardiner announced that investigators had "identified Rex Allen Krebs as the person responsible."
The next day, April 23, 1999, investigators recovered the remains of Rachel Newhouse and Aundria Crawford near Avila Beach, in San Luis Obispo County. The county sheriff-coroner identified both women through dental records on the afternoon of Saturday, April 24, and police announced the identifications at a news conference. Police Captain Bart Topham, who had led the investigation, said, "I have mixed feelings. I’m immensely sad, and at the same time very relieved." He said that both families were holding up very well, considering all the circumstances.
Police also said that Krebs was not a suspect in the disappearance of Kristin Smart. When she vanished in May 1996, he was in prison at Soledad.
Television crews came from Los Angeles, San Francisco and Fresno; one news van stayed parked outside the city and county library for more than 18 hours. Because Aundria Crawford had lived in Clovis, the Fresno media followed the case closely, and "America’s Most Wanted" covered the case. At Cal Poly, sororities, fraternities, student government and the Women’s Center organized a week of events under the name "Remember": a self-defense workshop, a candlelight walk, a Take Back the Night march and the dedication of a plaque. Volunteers sold pepper spray and T-shirts and raised more than $2,500. At gatherings at Cal Poly and Cuesta that Tuesday morning, students remembered Rachel Newhouse, Aundria Crawford and Kristin Smart together. Cuesta held its own remembrance for Aundria, attended by about 500 people, and planted a rose bush in her memory.
Cal Poly President Warren Baker praised the work of law enforcement and urged students to keep looking after their own safety. Juan Gonzalez, the university’s vice president for student affairs, said students felt relief and great sadness at once.
Grief turned quickly into anger at the system that had released Krebs. In Davis Canyon his neighbors called their own news conference. One said that Krebs had taken the lives of the two young women and damaged the lives of everyone around him; another said the parole system was releasing violent offenders into rural areas. A woman of 23 who lived nearby recalled that he had offered her and her boyfriend beers and remarked on her being alone when her boyfriend was away.
In town, residents told reporters that such offenders were beyond rehabilitation and should be imprisoned for good. The sheriff’s department counted 619 registered sex offenders in San Luis Obispo County, 115 of them in the city itself. A community activist asked Captain Topham why so many offenders lived in the county. Topham’s answer was that the police were not able to be everywhere and that citizens had to look to their own safety. In a letter to the Mustang Daily, a Cal Poly senior criticized the parole system for releasing Krebs early and argued that serving the full 20 years might have prevented the deaths.
Krebs declined interview requests from the Mustang Daily and other outlets.
The trial was moved out of San Luis Obispo County, north to Monterey County. No other San Luis Obispo County trial was moved out of the county until the Kristin Smart case in 2022, which also went to Monterey County.
Krebs stood trial in 2001 for the murders of Rachel Newhouse and Aundria Crawford. The jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder and of related crimes, including the kidnapping and rape of both women, and in the penalty phase it returned a verdict of death. He was sentenced to death for each murder. He was taken to San Quentin State Prison in July 2001.
His appeal, People v. Krebs, No. S099439, was decided by the California Supreme Court in November 2019, when the court affirmed the judgment in its entirety. Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye wrote the unanimous opinion, which ran to 126 pages.
The defense raised many claims, and the court rejected every one as a ground for reversal.
The court also addressed a development that came while the appeal was pending. In March 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom had imposed a moratorium on executions. The court held that the moratorium did not compel it to reexamine its earlier rulings that long delay before execution does not violate the Eighth Amendment and that the rarity of executions does not make the outcome of a death sentence arbitrary.
The moratorium had already put San Luis Obispo County’s district attorney at odds with the governor. When word broke in March 2019 that Newsom would sign an executive order granting a reprieve to the 737 people on California’s death row and withdrawing the state’s lethal injection regulations, District Attorney Dan Dow wrote that the governor was "unilaterally refusing to enforce the will of the People of California." The death penalty, Dow said, was reserved for "the worst of the worst." He named the three men from his county on death row: Michael Whisenhunt, Richard Benson and Rex Krebs.
On January 7, 2020, Dow announced the Supreme Court’s decision. "Mr. Krebs surrendered his right to live when he senselessly raped and murdered these two young women," he said, and he called on the governor to carry out the sentence: "It is now time for our Governor to implement the jury imposed death penalty." With the moratorium in place, an execution was not expected soon. In January 2020, Krebs remained at San Quentin.
The case that had hung over San Luis Obispo before Krebs was never his. Kristin Smart was 19, a freshman at Cal Poly, when she disappeared on May 25, 1996, during Memorial Day weekend. She was last seen after an off-campus party, walking toward her dormitory with a fellow student, Paul Flores. She never reached her room. In 1999 police were explicit that Krebs, then in prison at Soledad, had no part in it.
The Smart investigation went on for a quarter of a century. She was declared legally dead in 2002. The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office did not classify the case as cold. Detectives and the FBI searched the hillside overlooking the Cal Poly dormitories in September 2016. In September 2019 a podcast by Chris Lambert, "Your Own Backyard," brought the case to a new audience. In February 2020 investigators served search warrants at properties connected to the Flores family, and in March 2021 they searched the Arroyo Grande home of Paul Flores’s father with cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar.
On April 13, 2021, Paul Flores was arrested and charged with Kristin Smart’s murder; his father was arrested and charged as an accessory. Their lawyers asked to move the trial, and in April 2022 Judge Craig van Rooyen of San Luis Obispo Superior Court sent it to Monterey County, the same county that had tried Rex Krebs. After a three-month trial in Salinas, a Monterey County jury unanimously found Paul Flores guilty of first-degree murder in October 2022. A separate jury found Paul Flores’s father not guilty of being an accessory.
On March 10, 2023, Judge Jennifer O’Keefe sentenced Paul Flores to 25 years to life in state prison and called him "a cancer to society." Kristin Smart’s remains have not been found; the sheriff said that day that the case was not over and that his office would keep working to recover them. The Second District Court of Appeal affirmed the conviction in an unpublished opinion on October 24, 2025, and in January 2026 the California Supreme Court denied review, leaving the judgment final. In October 2025 Paul Flores was held at Corcoran State Prison.
The case of Rex Krebs did not fade from San Luis Obispo. In November 2018, twenty years after Rachel Newhouse disappeared, Larry Hobson sat down with KSBY to describe the investigation and asked people to lock their doors, windows and cars. The case was featured that year on the Oxygen series "Buried in the Backyard," with a now-retired parole officer among those credited with breaking it.
In March 2019, twenty years after Aundria Crawford’s death, her mother and her former boyfriend began raising money for a scholarship in her name for survivors of sexual assault, with a first goal of $5,000. "Through the scholarship we are creating she will never be forgotten," her mother said. A memorial to Aundria stands on the Cuesta College campus.
Rachel Newhouse and Aundria Crawford were 20 years old. Their killer was a man the state had released after he served about half of a twenty-year sentence, and he was found because the officer assigned to watch him read the newspaper and did not like what he saw.
• January 28, 1966: Rex Allan Krebs is born.
• October 1987: Krebs is sentenced to 20 years in state prison for two sexual assaults committed that year in the Grover Beach area.
• May 25, 1996: Kristin Smart, 19, a Cal Poly freshman, disappears after an off-campus party in San Luis Obispo. Krebs is in prison at Soledad.
• September 2, 1997: Krebs is paroled after serving about half of his sentence and returns to San Luis Obispo County.
• April 1998: His parole agent visits a San Luis Obispo house where Krebs has been staying; in May the residents end the arrangement.
• November 12, 1998: Rachel Newhouse, 20, a Cal Poly student, disappears while walking home from downtown San Luis Obispo. Blood later confirmed as hers is found on a footbridge on her route.
• March 11, 1999: Aundria Crawford, 20, a Cuesta College student, speaks with a friend by telephone at 2:46 a.m.; she misses an appointment later that day. Police open an investigation on March 12.
• March 20, 1999: Krebs is taken into custody for violating parole.
• April 21 and 22, 1999: Krebs is interrogated; on April 22 he confesses, and police name him as their suspect.
• April 23, 1999: The remains of both women are recovered near Avila Beach, San Luis Obispo County.
• April 24, 1999: The sheriff-coroner identifies Rachel Newhouse and Aundria Crawford through dental records.
• 2001: In a trial moved to Monterey County, a jury convicts Krebs of two counts of first-degree murder, with kidnapping and rape counts, and returns a death verdict. He is taken to San Quentin State Prison in July.
• March 2019: Governor Gavin Newsom orders a moratorium on executions in California.
• November 2019: The California Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, affirms the judgment in its entirety.
• January 7, 2020: District Attorney Dan Dow announces the ruling and asks the governor to carry out the sentence. Krebs is held at San Quentin.
• April 13, 2021: Paul Flores is arrested and charged with the murder of Kristin Smart; his father is charged as an accessory.
• October 2022: A Monterey County jury convicts Paul Flores of first-degree murder; his father is acquitted.
• March 10, 2023: Paul Flores is sentenced to 25 years to life.
• October 24, 2025: The Second District Court of Appeal affirms Flores’s conviction.
• January 2026: The California Supreme Court denies Flores’s petition for review.