A man from Minnesota has been indicted for stealing the iconic, ruby red slippers Judy Garland wore in “The Wizard of Oz” film.
The slippers were allegedly stolen by now 76-year-old Terry Martin from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, back in 2005, according to ABC News.
“It’s a break in the case, which is good,” executive director of the Judy Garland Museum, Janie Heitz, said, per The New York Times. “We are excited, speechless, anxious.”
How were the ruby slippers returned? The shoes, famously associated with Garland’s character Dorothy clicking her heel three times while saying the phrase “There’s no place like home,” were recovered and returned by the FBI in a sting operation that took place in 2018, according to NBC News.
“The FBI said that the slippers were recovered when a man told the shoes’ insurer in 2017 that he could help get them back. After a nearly yearlong investigation, the slippers were nabbed in Minneapolis,” NBC reported.
How were the ruby slippers stolen? The New York Times reported that the iconic slippers “were stolen by someone who had broken in through a back entrance and smashed the plexiglass display case holding the shoes. With no fingerprints or security camera footage to go by, the police were left with few clues.”
Heitz told The Associated Press that “she was surprised the suspect lived nearby but said no one who works at the museum knows him.”
Quotes to note: When Martin was approached by The Minneapolis Star-Tribune for a comment, he told the paper, “I gotta go on trial. I don’t want to talk to you.”
Editor-in-chief of the Atavist Magazine, Seyward Darby, reportedly said this is an “exciting day for those of us who’ve been following this story since 2018,” and that “there was a strong suspicion that there was a local connection to the crime — someone with knowledge of the museum, the fact that the slippers were on loan there in the summer of 2005, and how easy they were to steal.”