Movies
There's No Place Like Home: The Stolen Ruby Slippers
One of only four surviving pairs of Judy Garland's ruby slippers vanished from a Minnesota museum in 2005. Thirteen years and an FBI sting later, they came home — and sold for a record $32.5 million.
It was like a reunion with a long-lost friend.
Only four pairs of the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz are known to survive. In August 2005, one pair — owned by collector Michael Shaw and on loan to the Judy Garland Museum in Garland''s Minnesota hometown of Grand Rapids — vanished overnight. Someone smashed the museum''s door and display case with a hammer and walked out with the most famous shoes in film history.
For 13 years, nothing. Theories multiplied; a persistent rumor held they''d been thrown in a mine pit. Then, in summer 2018, a sting operation by the Grand Rapids police and the FBI recovered the slippers, and the Smithsonian''s conservators verified them against the pair in their own collection. The thief turned out to be Terry Jon Martin, an aging ex-mobster looking for "one last score" — he''d believed the slippers were studded with real rubies because they''d been insured for $1 million. He wasn''t publicly identified until his 2023 indictment; an alleged accomplice was said to have kept the slippers sealed in a container buried underground.
In February 2024, the FBI returned the slippers to Shaw, who compared it to a reunion with a long-lost friend. That December, they sold at Heritage Auctions for $32.5 million including fees — the most valuable piece of entertainment memorabilia ever sold, nearly six times the previous record.
The lo.st takeaway: Thirteen years of federal resources to recover two shoes — because once separated from their documentation, even the most famous objects on earth go dark. Identity that travels with the item is the difference between a 13-year investigation and a same-day return.