Minnesota lawmakers set aside $100,000 this year to help the Judy Garland Museum purchase the coveted ruby slippers of The Wizard of Oz fame. Experts expect the shoes could sell for a much higher price. They could sell for $1 million, they could sell for $10 million.
The shoes were on display at Garland's namesake museum in Grand Rapids in the summer of 2005 when a burglar struck. John Kelsch, the museum director at the time, says a man broke in through the back door and snatched the slippers. All that was left behind was a single sparkling red sequin.
It was devastating, Kelsch says. Unfortunately, local people thought that the museum benefited somehow from it, that we got the insurance money, which was not the case at all. Investigators spent years searching for the missing slippers before they recovered them during a sting operation in Minneapolis in 2018.
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