Around the time of the Chicago search, the Grand Rapids police received a letter asserting that Shaw had commissioned a high-end pair to look like his real pair. Within days of the #KeepThemRuby campaign going live in 2016, more than 5,300 people from around the world had donated, meeting the museum’s $300,000 goal. Multiple pairs. Judy Garland's ruby red slippers from "The Wizard of Oz" have found their way home with a … Many now credit the MGM auction of 1970 — and the ruby slippers specifically — with launching the market for movie memorabilia. Wallace remained professional on the phone even as she stood and frantically waved to get the attention of her boss, Richard Barden, mouthing, “The ruby slippers! “I said, ‘Should we go in and just get them now?’ ” But the FBI held tight and waited for the planned meeting. Debbie Reynolds purchased these at auction for her Hollywood museum, which never got off the ground. Several pairs of white pumps were bought from the Innes Shoe Co. in Los Angeles and painted or dyed red. They were all watching back in Minneapolis. “Can you show me where they’re at?” Mattson asked. Shaw had required the museum to carry a policy for the shoes as a part of the rental agreement, so he wasn’t even out the premium. Most of what he works on is drug-related. “We got them.”, Stein had been waiting “on pins and needles” all morning for that call, he told me, “and when Brian said we recovered the slippers, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is for real now. At 1:44 p.m., Bennett sent out a BOLO (be on the lookout) alert across the region, asking law enforcement to watch for shoes that are “dark ruby red in color … and valued at $1 million.”, “Can you imagine getting that BOLO?” says investigator Brian Mattson. Jody Hane, a writer and researcher at the historical society, says her colleagues were impressed — at first. The letter writer claimed to have sequins “identical to those used to make a pair of replica ruby slippers” for Shaw, which he enclosed in the envelope. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune via AP) More than the return of the … “Friedberg asked the State Professional Responsibility Board if it was ethical to do what the caller proposed,” Rubenstein wrote. Most come in summer, when the museum hosts its annual Judy Garland Festival and pleasant weather makes the nearby lakes a popular tourist destination. Schaar has a different take. Maddalena assures me that should the recovered slippers hit the auction block today, they would be valued between $2 million and $5 million. Now They’ve Been Found. He said a guy he knew had the ruby slippers. “There were floppy disks” — containing the original crime scene photos — “and I had to hunt down a floppy disk player,” he says. She sends her winged monkeys to attack them; they capture Dorothy and Toto. But within the first 2 days of wear, a lot of sparkles came off. It also didn’t record, so there was no opportunity to scrutinize visitors from the weeks leading up to the theft. The company sued the Judy Garland Museum for the theft, saying that its lack of security was a breach of contract, but that suit was eventually dropped. She is a witness to magic that holds unending power. Nothing came of the dive, and the reward expired before it could be claimed. Only when she surrenders the ruby slippers to the Wicked Witch to save Toto does she sacrifice herself to the witch’s mercy. “They hired the thieves to get the Renoir,” Rubenstein says. Friedberg told the board that the art might be destroyed, which is a common threat made in art crime extortion: Give me the money or the painting gets it. Many of Mattson’s sources are addicted to narcotics, and he gets them to consider working with the police by asking: “Could you imagine how different your life would be if someone had never introduced you to drugs?”. “I explained to him that the Grand Rapids police never offered a reward. If a prominent Minnesota criminal-defense attorney was the one returning the slippers, it suggests a whole category of theories about the theft — that it was simply the work of local miscreants — was always going to be a dead end. Soon, I was pulled into the mystery, too. Mattson continued to negotiate a safe return of the shoes with the lawyer, but by October, weeks had gone by without a word. He quickly copped to the fact that he’d lied to his friends. They are the most iconic shoes in all of Hollywood. "Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz—the ones bought at the 1970 auction—are a mismatched pair. The producer went to a garage in Brentwood and saw slippers he believed were authentic, but when haggling over the exorbitant price went awry, the producer got angry and went to the police instead. When the FBI took the case from the local police in the fall of 2017, Mattson says, the department had handed over the single sequin found at the scene along with the envelope of sequins that had been sent there in 2010 and had reportedly been used in Shaw’s replica pair. The police kept an eye on them, knowing that this crew always “ratted each other out eventually,” Schaar says. Maybe the Middle Man was testing their market viability overseas. Conspiracy theories abound in the world of Oz fans that people are sitting on the other numbered pairs of slippers and waiting for the right time to admit they exist. The alarm did not sound to a central dispatch system and no fingerprints were left behind – only a single red sequin. My granddaughter was so excited to receive her ruby slippers and wears them every day. Mattson went home and told his wife, Stephanie, “I’m going to find the slippers. Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers Were Stolen 13 Years Ago. Maddalena sold these in 2012 to a group of Hollywood investors including Leonardo DiCaprio, and they will go on display this year when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences opens its museum in Los Angeles. The conservation team had conducted several studies, including one to count the number of photographs taken of the slippers on nine days during the busy summer months. “Anything beyond recovery was just icing on the cake.”. Rubenstein soon got a call from a source “with a distinctive gravelly voice, a film noir criminal voice,” and that man told him everything about the Rockwell burglary. Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers are on display at The Smithsonian National Museum of American History. A pair of red sequined slippers from the classic 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz” has been found, 13 years after they disappeared from a Minnesota museum, law enforcement said Tuesday. She and Barden also found that the shoes had sequins and threading consistent with an original pair. The prosecutor “was retired, and my understanding was that it was an avocation, the ruby slippers case,” Rubenstein told me. … I say it’s a stinkeroo.”) “Gone With the Wind” won that year’s Academy Award for best film, but it would be “The Wizard of Oz” that went on to become one of the most beloved movies of all time. They had to review historical water levels to determine where the shoreline of the lake had been eight years prior. After Mattson’s call to Dudley, the FBI had taken charge of the ruby slippers case. In Walt Disney's film Return to Oz, Dorothy's slippers are ruby just like the 1939 movie. The interior door to the gallery where the slippers were being displayed was only a few feet away. “Then he told me he was in, 100 percent.” (The FBI declined to comment for this story because the case is ongoing. Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli is an honorary member of the museum’s board. This magic is a prophecy for Dorothy to meet and to uphold. Others claimed they’d been sealed inside an empty paint can or in a Tupperware container weighted down with rocks and then dropped into the Mississippi. The news conference had been announced only hours before, so in Grand Rapids there had been no time to plan proper viewing parties. In the 1930s, “the entire nation’s attention was on Hollywood because this had become such an American industry,” says Ryan Lintelman, entertainment curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The first few times I watched the film was on a black & white TV, okay, so I’m truly giving away how ancient I am. Mattson later asked for the case file and was handed a cardboard box filled with loose papers and old VHS and Dictaphone tapes. The universe seemed to have a sense of humor about Oz references. The guy beamed. I'll take care of you now instead of later. At the house, you get to inhabit the quaint family homestead where a 2-year-old sang for the first time to the stunned silence of her family. In the 1982 movie, no mention of the magic slippers is made after Dorothy uses them, but she can still be seen wearing her red magic slippers even when she is back in Kansas. Pulling clean prints is hard enough, he says, let alone getting those prints to pull up a viable suspect. They were put on a wooden pedestal topped by a plexiglass case and placed behind a simple silk-rope barrier. Glinda the Good Witch of the North arrives via magic bubble and shows Dorothy the dead woman's two feet visibly sticking out from under the house wearing the ruby slippers. In the MGM film, an adolescent farm girl named Dorothy Gale (played by Judy Garland), her dog Toto, and their farmhouse are swept away from Kansas by a tornado and taken to the magical Land of Oz. “Yip” Harburg, hit upon this contrast in “Over the Rainbow.” His lyrics were “built around his reaction to the ‘grayness’ of Kansas,” according to Fricke, because he “felt the only color in Dorothy’s life would have been a rainbow.”, “The Wizard of Oz” endures, Fricke says, despite the fact that “it doesn’t have car chases or guns or sexual allusion. After watching the FBI news conference, I couldn’t get the question of what had happened to the ruby slippers out of my mind. Two California collectors bought the Roberta Bauman pair in 2000 for $666,000 at a Christie’s auction. So the bells and whistles were going off at the museum when the door was breached, but the signal was not sent.” Kelsch believes that the alarm wouldn’t have made “any difference at all because they were in and out in less than a minute.”. Garland was put on a regimen of speed followed by chemically induced sleep. They came up with a lounge chair and tires and what appeared to be a pipe bomb, but no slippers. The edges of the bows are white and there are a lot of bare spots around the toes. She put them on at 11:30 a.m. when they arrived and pretty much has not taken them off since. The day I went to Washington to talk with Dawn Wallace, an objects conservator with the Smithsonian, I got turned around and wound up standing at the back entrance of a loading dock. The man asked if the police cared about getting the slippers back. We looked at a small landing, large enough for a toddler to use as a stage. The morning the FBI arrived with the shoes, Wallace informed the guards at the front desk not to search the white box that they carried in public, to keep the contents secret. Bauman had won hers in a 1939 MGM promotion. He passed. He had information on the whereabouts of the slippers. Rubenstein says it wouldn’t surprise him to learn that one or more were connected to the slippers theft that occurred 27 years later. Dorothy’s stolen ruby slippers eventually caught the eye of the authorities, and the slipper napper was captured. Michael Shaw’s shoes coming to a small museum in northern Minnesota with minimal security must have seemed an easy mark. As he pored over the material, something about the case hooked him, something that wouldn’t let him go. Later, when it was understood that there were multiple pairs, rumors circulated that Reynolds never bid on the shoes because Warner had promised her a pair from his stash.). It’s the FBI!”. The Grand Rapids police didn’t participate because, in their mind, “there was no credible evidence that the shoes were in the Tioga,” Mattson says. Grand Rapids Police Detective Brian Mattson received information about the stolen slippers last summer that led the department to team up with the FBI, as the tip involved investigating outside the state. “I’m going to get them back.”. On Feb. 16, hundreds of guests arrived at the gallery. Missing from the group was Gene Bennett, the investigator who first handled the case in 2005. “Well, that’s odd.” The event ended with the FBI calling upon the public to help identify those involved in the theft. And that’s part of the fun sometimes, the pursuit. At the castle, the Witch is refrained by magic when she tries to get the ruby slippers off Dorothy's feet, then remembers that she must be dead first. “There were so many interesting people along the way,” Mattson says. “There’s just something mystical about them.”, John Kelsch, senior director of the Judy Garland Museum, was just out of the shower at home when his phone rang. As the nex... Jump to content. Her father was amazed. Other police departments across Minnesota also got anonymous tips over the years, and all of them were funneled to Morgan. This meant taking the shoes off display for an indefinite amount of time. Because Mattson had ascertained that the Middle Man “lived in a Southern state” — and in early September people were being evacuated in advance of Hurricane Irma, set to make landfall in Florida — Mattson called the lawyer and said he was worried about the shoes. Maddalena knew Warner in the 1970s, and over the years he has sold pairs of original ruby slippers to wealthy collectors. “I would go to museum conferences and I’d say, ‘Yes, I’m from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, birthplace of Judy Garland, and no, they have not found the slippers yet,’ ” Crowe recalls. "Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz—the ones bought at th... e 1970 auction—are a mismatched pair. Over the course of several calls, Mattson got the Middle Man to admit that he’d been promised a percentage of any reward money that might come from the slippers’ return. From left: A portrait of Garland and other items at the museum, which restored her home to what it might have looked like when she lived there. The witch never did get the red sequined slippers, as fans of the 1939 cinema classic know, but someone eventually did—a burglar who stole them … “This is an ongoing investigation, so we will not talk about the facts,” he told the reporters. The story eventually explains that when she clicked her heels, she accidentally lost the Ruby Slippers on the way back to Kansas. Of course we do,” Mattson remembers saying. A pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and stolen from the actress’ namesake museum in Minnesota more than a … Ruby and Dorothy go to collect the last ingredient, a poppy. She claimed she had her own pair of original ruby slippers. “People make pilgrimages to this museum and to Washington, D.C., just to see the slippers, so they’re gutted if they aren’t here,” Lintelman explains. But this cold case team didn’t give up on them. On the rare occasions that the slippers have been taken off display at the National Museum of American History, there are angry and desperate calls. Then, in the south corridor connecting the galleries, fresh summer air blew in where it shouldn’t have, through the jagged mouth of a shattered emergency-door window. 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