GRAND RAPIDS, Minn. — The Minnesota hometown of Judy Garland, the actress who wore a pair of ruby slippers in “The Wizard of Oz,” is raising money to purchase the prized footwear after it was stolen from a local museum and then later turned over to an auction company.
Ruby slippers once worn by Judy Garland in the “The Wizard of Oz” are displayed Sept. 4, 2018, at the FBI office in Brooklyn Center, Minn. The Minnesota hometown of Judy Garland, the late actress who wore the ruby slippers in the 1939 classic, will raise funds this weekend to recover the prized footwear.
Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where the late actress was born in 1922, is fundraising at its annual Judy Garland festival, which kicked off Thursday. The north Minnesota town is soliciting donations to bring the slippers back after an auction company takes them on an international tour before offering them up to prospective buyers in December.
“They could sell for $1 million, they could sell for $10 million. They’re priceless,” Joe Maddalena, Heritage Auctions executive vice president, told Minnesota Public Radio. “Once they’re gone, all the money in the world can’t buy them back.”
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The funds will supplement the $100,000 set aside this year by Minnesota lawmakers to purchase the slippers.
Dallas-based Heritage Auctions received the slippers from Michael Shaw, the memorabilia collector who originally owned the iconic shoes. Shaw had loaned them in 2005 to the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.
That summer, someone smashed through a display case and stole the sequins-and-beads-bedazzled slippers. Their whereabouts remained a mystery until the FBI recovered them in 2018.
The man who stole the slippers, Terry Jon Martin, 76, pleaded guilty in October to theft of a major artwork, admitting to using a hammer to smash the glass of the museum’s door and display case in what his attorney said was an attempt to pull off “one last score” after turning away from a life of crime. He was sentenced in January to time served because of his poor health.
In March, a second man, 76-year-old Jerry Hal Saliterman, was
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