Robert Redford was getting ready to shoot The Natural in 1983 when he found out his daughter’s boyfriend Sid Wells had been murdered.
Shauna Redford, a 22-year-old student at University of Colorado Boulder, was “convulsed with confusion, in a terrible state,” the actor recalled to biographer Michael Callan. So he immediately left the set of his film in Buffalo, N.Y., to be with her, chartering a jet and picking up wife Lola Van Wagenen from their home in Utah along the way.
Wells had been found dead from a .22-gauge shotgun wound to the back of his head in the living room of his Boulder condo on Aug. 1, 1983.
Shauna started dating Wells during their freshman year of college after he asked her to a Navy ROTC dance, unaware at the time she was the daughter of a movie star.
And while she was devastated, her father was also shaken by the tragedy.
Redford was “always somewhat retiring, but he became reclusive after that,” All the President’s Men director Alan Pakula told Callan. “I often wondered was it some natural paranoid response, some recognition that he and his family were higher-profile targets than the rest of us.”
After attending Wells’ funeral at Christ Congregational Church in Longmont, Colo., Redford had to get back to work in Buffalo.
But when cameras started rolling on The Natural, his concentration was “obviously dented,” the Oscar winner told Callan. “I was thinking of my daughter’s dilemma, not any fictional scenario.”
When he was killed, Wells had been renting a room to Thayne Smika, a 24-year-old college dropout who, according to police, had fallen behind on his payments.
Investigators found a note from Smika at the scene saying he’d gone to visit his parents for a few days, according to a 2010 arrest warrant obtained by People. When police went to his family’s home to inform him of Wells’ death, Smika said, per the warrant, he was there to have his hair permed and do his laundry, but authorities found out Smika got a perm a week before Wells was killed and confirmed that the condo complex had laundry facilities.
Smika was arrested Oct. 6, 1983, but he was released from custody weeks later after then-District Attorney Alex Hunter determined there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him in Wells’ death.
“The evidence pointed to Thayne,” Wells’ mother June Menger told NBC’s Dateline in 2013. “The police department felt that way, his friends and roommates felt that way. We couldn’t understand why they let him go.”
A grand jury also refused to indict Smika in 1985 and, according to the FBI, he vanished a year later.
Menger told Boulder Reporting Lab’s Silvia Pettemin 2012that, after initially worrying her son’s memory was being overshadowed, she “finally realized that I need the Redford connection to keep the case open.”
Shauna stayed in touch with Menger, and her dad was still following the investigation when the Boulder County District Court issued a warrant for Smika’s arrest for first-degree murder in December 2010. (A federal warrant was also issued on a charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.)
“One day, I was in my office and my secretary said, ‘Robert Redford’s on the phone. Do you want to talk to him?’” former Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett told 9News after the actor’s death Sept. 16 at the age of 89. “I said sure.”
He and Redford “had a brief, but very cordial conversation,” the lawyer, now in private practice, recalled, “in which he thanked me and the Boulder Police and my office for continuing to pay attention to the case and work toward getting a warrant eventually.”
Garrett said that his call from Redford years ago reflected the star’s “concern about his daughter and about this young man who’d lost his life very tragically.”
A day after Redford died, the FBI’s Denver field office posted information about Wells’ murder and the search for Smika, as well as age-progression illustrations of the now-66-year-old suspect, on social media.
According to the FBI, the last known trace of Smika was when his car, sporting a stolen license plate and scrubbed clean of fingerprints, was found abandoned in Beverly Hills, Calif., in October 1986. Police next received tips of alleged sightings of Smika from California and Mexico in 1998 after the case was featured on 48 Hours.
The arrest warrant issued under D.A. Garnett on Dec. 2, 2010, was spurred by new ballistics tests conducted on shotgun pellets found in Wells’ body, Boulder Deputy Police Chief David Hayes told the Daily Camera after the warrant was unsealed Jan. 13, 2011. Investigators believed the pellets matched shotgun shells found at the Smika family home in eastern Colorado, according to Hayes.
“There hasn’t been a national or international hunt for Mr. Smika,” Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner saidat the time. “There will be now.”
The FBI is still offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to Smika’s arrest and conviction, and asks that anyone with info call their local FBI office or nearest American embassy or consulate.
As Hayes put it on Dateline in 2013, “This is not a whodunit, but rather a ‘where is he?’”
