Dorothy's Ruby Red Slippers: Found, Lost, Sold, Stolen, and Recovered

MGM made several pairs of ruby red slippers for the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. That wasn't widely known until 1970, when MGM sold one pair at auction and ordered the others destroyed. The pair that was auctioned off was later donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. But the other shoes weren't destroyed. MGM costumes worker Kent Warner took them home, and over the years they were sold and landed in private collections and museums.

One pair of the ruby slippers was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, (Garland's home town) in 2005. They were recovered by the FBI 13 years later in Minneapolis in 2018. The Smithsonian was consulted, and their conservators studied the stolen property and compared them with the cleaned and preserved shoes the museum owned, and determined they were original. But who stole them? Another five years went by as the FBI investigated the case. Now, 76-year-old Terry Jon Martin of Minnesota has been indicted in the theft.

Read what we know about the case so far at Smithsonian. One interesting part of the saga is the values involved. The shoes that MGM auctioned off in 1970 went for $15,000. The collector who owns the stolen shoes bought them from Warner the same year for just $2,000. A woman who won an original pair in a contest in 1940 sold them in 1988 for $165,000. The pair recovered from the FBI is now valued at $3.5 million. Not bad for a $2,000 investment.

(Image credit: National Museum of American History)