Prosecutors in Fresno County, California, have formally charged the inmate who allegedly stabbed Paul Ruben Flores, 47, the convicted murderer of college student Kristin Denise Smart.
Authorities claim Jason Richard Budrow, 43, who is also a convicted murderer, badly slashed Flores in the neck with a “manufactured weapon” at Pleasant Valley State Prison on Aug. 23. Following the attack, guards secured the yard and medical staff took care of the wound, airlifting Flores to Community Regional Medical Center.
Jason Budrow, pictured left, attacked Paul Flores at the Pleasant Valley State Prison on Aug. 23, 2023, prison officials said. (Mug shot of Budrow: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation; image of Flores: San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office)
Budrow now faces four new charges:
- Attempted murder with enhancements of use of a deadly weapon and great bodily injury
- Assault by an inmate serving a life sentence with an enhancement of great bodily injury
- Assault with a deadly weapon by an inmate with an enhancement of great bodily injury
- Possession of an inmate-manufactured weapon.
If convicted, he faces 27 years to life, plus a 9-year determinate sentence for the enhancements. Such a punishment would be redundant as Budrow was already in the California prison system for life because of separate incidents where he strangled his girlfriend, Margret Dalton, and sexually assaulted a teenager.
Fresno County prosecutors did not suggest why Budrow allegedly tried to kill Flores, but he is serving another life term for murdering cellmate Roger Reece Kibbe, 81, a serial killer known as the I-5 Strangler.
Kibbe was in prison for murdering and raping seven women.
Though himself an abuser of female victims, Budrow reportedly claimed he took it upon himself to kill the elderly inmate to avenge the I-5 Strangler’s victims. In a letter to The San Jose Mercury News, Budrow asserted he sought out becoming Kibbe’s cellmate after seeing a TV special about the serial killer; the self-professed Satanist claimed to carve a pentagram into the 81-year-old’s body.
As for Flores, he was serving a 25-to-life term for murdering Smart back in 1996, when they were both students at California Polytechnic State University. Smart had passed out on a lawn after a party, according to authorities. Flores emerged to wake her up, but he instead raped or tried to rape her, prosecutors said. He killed her and hid the body under the deck at his father’s home in the city of Arroyo Grande, investigators said.
Authorities posited that the remains were moved in 2020 — Smart has never been found. A jury, separate from the one that convicted Flores, acquitted his father of helping hide the body.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
