A Heist for Glass: Dorothy's Stolen Ruby Slippers Sold for $32.5 Million

They are the most recognizable shoes in cinema history - and in 2005, someone smashed into a small Minnesota museum and walked off with them, certain he was holding a fortune in real gemstones. He was wrong about the rubies. He was very wrong about the price they would eventually carry.

The Heist That Almost Worked

On the night of August 27, 2005, Terry Jon Martin broke through a door at the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota - the late actress's hometown - and smashed open the display case holding one of the original pairs of ruby slippers from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

He used a hammer. What drove him there was a tip from an old mob associate: with a $1 million insurance value, the shoes simply had to contain real jewels. Martin, a reformed mobster looking for one last score, believed it.

He was wrong. A fence examined the shoes and told Martin the "rubies" were glass sequins - each shoe is covered in roughly 2,400 red sequins with a cellulose nitrate coating, dyed and sewn by MGM costume craftspeople in 1938. Martin got rid of the slippers less than two days after stealing them.

Thirteen Years in the Dark

The theft remained unsolved for over a decade. The slippers had been on loan to the museum from collector Michael Shaw, who had acquired them in 1970.

In 2018, the FBI Minneapolis field office ran a sting operation and brought the slippers back. They were authenticated by researchers at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and confirmed to be in pristine condition.

Martin was not charged until 2023. He pleaded guilty to theft of a major artwork and was sentenced in January 2024 - at 76 and seriously ill - to time served, one year of supervised release, and $23,500 in restitution to the Judy Garland Children's Museum.

A second man, Jerry Hal Saliterman, was separately charged with concealing the stolen property.

The Record Sale

In December 2024, Shaw consigned the recovered slippers to Heritage Auctions in Dallas. Bidding opened at $1.55 million. Heritage had estimated the pair would go for around $3 million.

The hammer fell at $28 million. With the buyer's premium, the final price came to $32.5 million - the highest sum ever paid for a piece of movie memorabilia at auction, eclipsing the $5.52 million paid for Marilyn Monroe's white halter dress in 2011.

Only a handful of the original production pairs survive today. The Smithsonian holds one pair in its permanent collection. The slippers that spent 13 years missing turned out to be worth far more than any real ruby could have justified.

Not Actually Rubies

The slippers were not in L. Frank Baum's original novel - Dorothy's shoes were silver. MGM's Technicolor team switched them to red for the 1939 film to make full use of the new color process.

MGM's chief costume designer Gilbert Adrian oversaw production of multiple pairs for Judy Garland to wear. Each shoe has about 2,400 sequins with a cellulose nitrate coating over a gelatin core - fragile enough that conservation at the Smithsonian has been an ongoing challenge. The "rubies" are a color, not a material.