Man indicted for theft of Wizard of Oz ruby slippers 18 years after museum heist | CBC Radio

John Kelsch still vividly remembers the day the ruby red slippers were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Ripids, Minn, nearly two decades ago. 

It was a Sunday morning in 2005. He’d just hopped out of the shower when the woman who worked at the museum’s admissions desk, Kathe Johnson, called him and said: “They’re gone.”

“I knew exactly what she meant,” Kelsch, a curator and founding director of the museum, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

“My heart was racing. Adrenaline kicked in. I drove like almost 90 miles an hour to the museum. I was there in, like two minutes. And then Kathy showed me the crime scene.”

An emergency exit door was smashed in. Glass was strewn all over the museum floor where the slippers — one of four pairs worn by Garland in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz — were missing. A single sequin remained on the ground amid the shards.

“It felt like a complete violation of our museum,” Kelsch said. “Everyone was just crushed.”

But now — 18 years after the slippers disappeared, and five years after they were recovered in an FBI sting — someone has been indicted for the crime that haunts Kelsch’s memory.

Terry Martin, 71, was indicted Tuesday with one count of theft of a major artwork, prosecutors announced Wednesday. The indictment did not provide any further information about Martin, and online records do not list an attorney for him.

Terry Van Horn, spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department in North Dakota, said he could not provide any information beyond what was included in the one-paragraph-indictment.

When reached for comment by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the accused said, “I gotta go on trial. I don’t want to talk to you.”

Janie Heitz, executive director of the museum, told The Associated Press the museum’s staff were “a little bit speechless” that someone had been charged all this time later.

Dive teams, big rewards and an FBI sting

The search for the famous sequined ruby slippers has had a lot of ups and downs over the years, garnering international attention and the interest of documentary filmmakers.

And the longer they remained unaccounted for, the more valuable they became. 

When they were stolen, the slippers were insured for $1 million US. But the current market value is about $3.5 million, federal prosecutors said in a news release.

Law enforcement offered a $250,000 US reward for information about the slippers’ whereabouts early in the case, and an anonymous donor from Arizona put up $1 million in 2015.

Meanwhile, rumours swirled in Grand Rapids, Kelsch said. Some people theorized a couple of local teens were responsible for the smash-and-grab, and that they’d tossed the iconic shoes in an iron ore mine pit.

In 2015, dive crews searched the lake that formed in the abandoned mine pit, to no avail. 

Other people, Kelsch said, thought it was an inside job.

“They mistakenly believed that the museum collected the insurance money, which was not true,” he said.

When they were stolen, the slippers were on loan from Hollywood memorabilia collector Michael Shaw, who received an insurance payment seven years after the theft, according to the museum. 

A big break in the case happened in 2017, when a tipster contacted the shoes’ insurer in 2017 and said he could help get them back. After a nearly year-long investigation, the FBI nabbed the shoes in a sting operation in Minneapolis in July 2018.

Kelsch says none of this would be possible were it not for the fact that local police officers — especially Det. Brian Mattson, who co-ordinated with the FBI on the investigation — never gave up on the case.

The exact details of how it all unfolded aren’t yet clear.

“I’m sure the FBI has much more to reveal eventually, so the book can’t be written yet,” Kelsch said, adding that he is, in fact, planning to write said book himself. 

WATCH | 1965 interview with Judy Garland:

Judy Garland speaking with Laurier LaPierre in 1965

In Toronto for performances at the O’Keefe Centre, the singer also appeared on CBC television.

The stolen shoes, as far as Kelsch is aware, are still in the FBI’s possession. But when the legal case is complete, he thinks they should come home to the museum.

After all, Garland grew up in Grand Rapids, he said, and “there’s no place like the home town.”

“We’re going to go on record as putting up an all-out fight to get them for Minnesota,” Kelsch said, before clarifying with a laugh: “I don’t know if it would be a fight. But we’re going to make a sustained effort to see if we can have them as part of our state’s legacy.”