A man has been indicted for major artwork theft nearly two decades after an original pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in the movie “The Wizard of Oz” was stolen.
Shoes swiped from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapid, Minnesota, August 2005 recovered in 2018, No arrests were made at the time, although the FBI said they had several suspects.
Terry Martin was indicted on Tuesday. Officials have not said what led investigators to file the charges.
The ruby slipper allegedly taken by Martin is one of the four remaining pairs existed, said the US Attorney's Office for the District of North Dakota. One of the other pairs is at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, while the other was acquired by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 2012.
According to the Judy Garland Museum, the stolen pair of slippers are currently in the custody of the FBI. They are owned by an insurance company.
“Unless there are court cases, nothing can be done with them,” the museum wrote on Facebook.
Federal prosecutors said the ruby slippers were insured for $1 million at the time of the theft. The dazzling artifact of film history is valued at $3.5 million at the latest fair market valuation. The slippers are white pumps, according to the Smithsonian. They paint their ruby-colored red clothes, dark red sequins, and soles red to match.
The shoes were worn by Garland's character, Dorothy Gale, in the 1939 film. Dorothy taps her heels together while wearing them and tells him to leave Oz and go back to Kansas, saying “there's no place like home”.
While Dorothy was from Kansas, Garland herself was born in Grand Rapids, the city where the shoes were stolen. At the time of the theft, the slippers were on loan to the museum as part of a special tour.
According to CBS News, a thief made off with the slippers after breaking a window in the museum's back door. previously reported, No alarms went off and no fingerprints were left behind.
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