With the anniversary of Robert Redford’s death only weeks away, two questions tied to his daughter Shauna remain unanswered: what she stands to inherit, and whether the murder case that first put her name in the news will ever be solved.
Shauna Redford has never given an interview. She has been photographed beside her father, Robert Redford, since 1966, when she was a young child in New York’s Central Park, and as recently as 2017, at a film premiere in the same city, but she has never once said anything on the record about her own life. That held true again after his death last September: her sister spoke to national press about his legacy in the months that followed, and Shauna did not.
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Family and background
- Born 15 November 1960, in Utah
- Second of four children of Robert Redford and historian Lola Van Wagenen
- Graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a degree in art in 1985, the same year she married investigative journalist Eric Schlosser
- Two children, Mica and Conor Schlosser
- Has never had a gallery show, and no interview has ever described her work as a painter
Her older brother, Scott, died as an infant in 1959, before she was born; her younger brother, James, a documentary filmmaker, died of cancer in 2020; and her younger sister, Amy, works as an actress, director and podcast host.
The original New York Times wedding announcement records the ceremony taking place on 5 October 1985, on the lawn of her parents’ home in Provo, Utah, performed by Utah State Supreme Court Justice Michael D. Zimmerman. Schlosser went on to write Fast Food Nation. Their daughter is now a copywriter and illustrator; their son has worked as a producer, including an earlier stint at the Sundance Institute.
The Boulder murder case that has never been solved
Shauna met Sid Wells at a Navy ROTC dance at CU Boulder in March 1980, and the two dated for three years. On 1 August 1983, days before Wells was due to start his final year, he was shot in the back of the head with a shotgun inside the Boulder condominium he shared with his brother and a housemate, Thayne Smika. His brother found the body. Robert Redford halted filming on The Natural in Buffalo, New York, chartered a plane, collected Shauna’s mother in Utah, and flew the family to Colorado for the funeral.
The case sat unsolved for almost thirty years. Boulder County prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Smika in December 2010, unsealed the following month, after new ballistics tests matched shotgun pellets from the scene to shells found at his family’s home. Smika has not been seen since his car turned up abandoned in Beverly Hills in 1986. Boulder Reporting Lab reported in September 2025 that Robert Redford’s death had brought fresh attention to a case Shauna’s family had followed for more than four decades, with the arrest warrant for Smika still outstanding.
What she stands to inherit
Robert Redford spoke about who would take over Sundance more than once before he died. In a 2018 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, he named Shauna directly:
“I’ve been spending a lot of time bringing my children, Shauna and Amy and Jamie, into the picture, and now they’re there and they’re in a position to run the show… They’re inheriting what I started.”
His estate has been estimated at roughly $200 million by outside financial trackers; no will has been made public. Reports since his death describe it as likely to pass to his widow, Sibylle Szaggars Redford, his two surviving daughters, and the two children of his late son James. No source has confirmed what any of that means for Shauna’s own finances. A figure of $2 million, sometimes quoted as her personal net worth, appears only on unsourced celebrity-bio sites, with nothing behind it.
Where things stand now
In November 2025, Amy Redford addressed AI-generated images of her father’s funeral that had spread online. Two months later, in January 2026, Sundance held its final festival in Park City before the event’s planned move to Boulder, Colorado. The festival marked the occasion with a new prize carrying Robert Redford’s name, given for the first time to Ed Harris and Gyula Gazdag.
As the anniversary of Robert Redford’s death approaches, only one of his children is speaking publicly about the institution he said belonged to them all. The estate remains unaccounted for, and the murder case in Boulder has stayed open for more than four decades.
