The police may be closing in on finally finding Kristin Smart after 30 years.

The California college student—who went missing in 1996 when she was 19 years old—was declared legally dead in 2002, though it wasn’t until 2022 that a jury found Paul Flores guilty of first-degree murder in her case.

Now, authorities believe they may have found human remains on a property belonging to Paul’s mother Susan Flores in Arroyo Grande, Calif. Soil tests showed that human remains either are or may have once been on the property, San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson said in a May 8 press conference.

“We believe that…human remains were there at one time or still there,” he told reporters. “I’m not going to go into the details, other than just to say with soil tests, it’s about the compounds in the soil that are related to a human, decomposing body.”

Authorities have not determined if the remains may have belonged to Kristin.

“I think it’s safe to say that we have not recovered Kristin yet,” the sheriff said. “But our search goes on, and I don’t know how long we’re going to be there.”