Stolen ‘Wizard of Oz’ ruby slippers worth at least US$1 million recovered by FBI
The shoes were stolen from a Minnesota museum in 2005; the search took investigators to a collector’s mansion in San Diego and to the bottom of a mine pit
A rare pair of red sequinned slippers that Judy Garland wore in the classic film The Wizard of Oz have been found, nearly 13 years after the iconic shoes were stolen from her birthplace, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation announced on Tuesday.
Prior to the theft, the shoes, estimated to be worth at least US$1 million, had been kept in a Plexiglas case atop a podium inside the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.
On August 28, 2005, a burglar or burglars broke into the museum and smashed the case with a baseball bat. Investigators estimated that the theft took only seconds.
The search for the famous ruby heels, which Garland wore while playing Dorothy, has taken investigators to a collector’s mansion in San Diego, California, and to the bottom of the Tioga Mine Pit, just outside Grand Rapids.
But the slippers reported to have been in the collector’s mansion were phoneys, and divers found nothing at the bottom of the pit.