FBI announces $10,000 reward to find suspect who disappeared after Sid Wells was fatally shot in 1983
The recent death of Robert Redford brought renewed interest to an unresolved search for a murder suspect – the one accused of killing the boyfriend of the acclaimed actor’s daughter in Colorado decades earlier.
As local outlets recounted in the aftermath of Redford’s death, his daughter Shauna was attending the University of Colorado Boulder when her boyfriend and fellow student, Sid Wells, was fatally shot in his apartment. Redford was gearing up to film his classic The Natural at the time of the 1 August 1983 murder, yet he was at his daughter’s side in the wake of Wells’ death and was present for his funeral.
Wells’ roommate, Thayne Alan Smika, was ultimately arrested in connection with the slaying. But the district attorney of Boulder county, Colorado, later declined to file formal charges against Smika, citing insufficient evidence. And Smika then disappeared in 1986, as the Denver Post noted.
In 2009, a successive Boulder district attorney, Stan Garnett, began weighing whether to process certain cold murder cases through new DNA tests, including that of Wells. That effort led to authorities obtaining a warrant in 2010 to arrest Smika again for the murder of Wells.
