Terry Jon Martin had been out of federal prison for 10 years when the call came about stealing the ruby red slippers.
They were on display in the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a joint whose security “leaked like a sieve,” Terry was told. It didn’t matter to Terry that the ruby slippers were the most famous shoes in movie history, worn by Judy Garland as Dorothy in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. Terry had never seen the movie. All he cared about was that the slippers were covered in real rubies, or so he was told by the “old Mob associate” who offered him the job. Given the size of the rubies, he said, they could be worth a fortune.
So Terry, clean for a decade, succumbed to the lure of thieves eternal: one last score. “He hoped to steal the slippers, remove the rubies, and sell them on the black market through a jewelry fence,” his attorney would later write in a sentencing memorandum.
The Judy Garland Museum sits way up in Minnesota’s “North Country,” as Bob Dylan, who was born in nearby Duluth, called it. It’s also crime country, made famous by the black comedy Fargo, directed by the Minnesota-born-and-bred Coen brothers and believed to have been inspired by an infamous 1963 Minnesota murder-for-hire case in which St. Paul lawyer T. Eugene Thompson paid a friend $3,000 to murder his wife for insurance money, throw her in her bathtub, and make it look like an accidental drowning.
In the late summer of 2005, Terry Jon Martin drove about 15 minutes from his trailer home on the south side of Grand Rapids to the Judy Garland Museum and Birthplace at 2727 South Pokegama Avenue—where the 13,000-square-foot museum sits next to the restored white clapboard house in which Garland was born, in 1922. Martin cased the joint and immediately concluded it was a joke. The museum’s lack of security was laughable.
Returning with a sledgehammer on the evening of August 27, the career thief and all-purpose criminal, whose long rap sheet included vandalizing churches and schools, raiding drug stores for controlled substances, possessing illegal firearms, and once lifting 52 fur coats from a clothing store, broke a hole in the glass of an exterior door and stepped inside to the sound of … blissful silence.
No alarm!
Then, amid the Garland artifacts and Wizard of Oz displays, he saw them, glowing blood-red in a Plexiglas box “within arm’s length of an emergency exit.”
The ruby red slippers.
He smashed the Plexiglas case, grabbed the slippers, and got out clean—except for an errant ruby, which became dislodged from the shoes and fell to the floor during his escape.
Only it wasn’t a ruby. It was a cheap sequin. “The rubies on the slippers were not real,” the fence told Martin after the theft. “They were replicas.” Which meant the shoes, priceless to a collector, were essentially worthless to a thief.
Forty-eight hours later, Martin angrily gave the ruby red slippers to the Mob associate who had recruited him “and told the man that he never wanted to see them again.”
Then, Terry Jon Martin vanished—until 13 years later, when the shoes, which possessed the power to transport the wayward Dorothy Gale home to Kansas from Oz, along with, some would say, the ability to curse those who dared cross them, arose in a fury.
Seeing Red
“They’re gone!”
At 9:30 A.M. on August 28, 2005, the morning after the burglary, the phone rings in museum director John Kelsch’s home.
He’s just stepped out of the shower, and when Kathy Johnson from the museum’s front desk tells him, “They’re gone,” he doesn’t have to ask what “they” means.
“I threw some clothes on and drove straight to the museum at 80 miles an hour,” he says.
Kelsch arrives to heartbreaking carnage. The back door ajar. Glass strewn across the floor. The Plexiglas case that held the precious shoes smashed.
The cops roar up, sirens blazing, taking the only evidence left behind—that single sequin—and embarking upon what will be 13 years of rumor and recrimination: Who stole the world’s most famous shoes? And why?
Soon, Kelsch makes a call he dreads: to the owner of the shoes, the Hollywood memorabilia collector Michael Shaw. A former child actor and Universal Studios tour guide, Shaw, at this moment in 2005, is the ambassador of the ruby slippers. But when he answers the phone in his Los Angeles home, where Dorothy’s blue gingham dress fights for floor space against the Wicked Witch’s hat and a Maltese Falcon or two, he goes from generous benefactor to unwitting crime victim.
“Someone broke into the museum and stole the shoes!” he is told.
The room around him begins to spin. The oxygen is sucked from his lungs. He feels like he’s been “punched in the gut.” The theft of his prized slippers is, he says, “like losing a member of my family.”
“Get them back!” he tells the museum director regarding his prized possession, which had arrived in his life in something of a celestial occurrence.
Who stole the world’s most famous shoes? And why?
Once lost in the sprawling MGM costume department, the slippers resurfaced in 1970, when the late and now legendary costume designer and Hollywood memorabilia collector Kent Warner was tasked with cataloguing the studio’s massive collection of costumes and props. Once considered surplus, much of the inventory had originally been set for incineration. But the studio, in need of both space and money, decided to auction off what remained, and decades of Hollywood history would soon go on the block.
“There was rack after rack of shoes,” Warner would tell Los Angeles Times reporter Rhys Thomas in 1977, who expanded his two-part series on the slippers into a book, The Ruby Slippers of Oz. “Everything was covered with cobwebs,” he said. Then “a ray of sunlight picked up the glimmer of a sequin … ”
“Oh, God! It can’t be!” he thought. “I didn’t touch them. I blew the dust from them, the sequins appeared, and I knew they were the ruby slippers.” Not just one pair, but, because the physical demands of the role for the 16-year-old Garland required frequent footwear changes, multiple pairs!
A pair went to auction, where it sold for $15,000. The rest supposedly went into Kent Warner’s duffel bag.
One would eventually go to the Smithsonian, where it remains on display today. Another went to the Hollywood star and memorabilia collector Debbie Reynolds. Yet another would find its way to a woman in Memphis, Tennessee—she would auction them off in 1988 for $165,000, to be auctioned off again in 2000 for $666,000—while a fifth, initially owned by Kent Warner, was sold to a collector in 1981 and eventually purchased by Leonardo DiCaprio, Steven Spielberg, and others for display in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum in Los Angeles. But the most famous pair would go to Michael Shaw for, well, a price he declines to divulge.
The slippers, along with Dorothy’s blue gingham dress, arrived in Shaw’s life in 1970, when he received a call from his friend Kent Warner, saying he was “bringing something over.”
“He brought the shoes, and I just stood there with an ear-to-ear grin with tears coming down my face,” Shaw remembers. “I would get up during the night, and I would turn on the light and just look at the shoes. I just couldn’t believe I had them.”
Shaw immediately began sharing his shoes with the world. In what he called “Michael Shaw’s Hollywood on Tour,” he would arrive at shopping malls, children’s charities, and special events with his “beautiful carrying case,” from which he would extract the magical slippers with white gloves before the mystified multitudes. Hence, Shaw’s pair were endowed with the name “The Traveling Shoes” by the writer Rhys Thomas.
Shaw first took his shoes to Grand Rapids in the summer of 2001 for the annual Judy Garland Festival, which featured marching bands and a crowd of thousands, many in Oz costumes, along with a reunion of the surviving Munchkins from the movie. But the slippers were the star, radiating, hypnotizing, convincing one blind girl who traveled from afar that if she could just touch them she would be able to see.
“I had those wonderful shoes for 35 years, having them on display all over the country, using them to raise money for charities,” says Shaw. Now, he and his shoes are at the center of a crime.
He immediately flies to Grand Rapids, but as the years stretch on and on, and the shoes are not found, his agitation turns to anger.
“When I got the shoes from Kent Warner, he said, ‘If you put your finger inside the shoe you can see where the wardrobe women put tissue paper into the toes right after Judy took them off to preserve the shoes,” Shaw says. “I never took that tissue paper out. So for the 35 years that I had the shoes, nobody had worn those shoes but Judy Garland. That’s why they were in such beautiful, pristine condition. Now, God only knows how many filthy feet have been in them.”
Slipper-Mania
Cut to a solitary man sitting in an empty house in the Minneapolis suburb of Chaska, just down the road from Paisley Park, the estate owned by the rock star Prince.
His wife has just left him after 12 years of marriage, taking practically every stick of furniture in the house with her. “Those stupid slippers,” he remembers her saying as she departed, referring to her soon-to-be ex-husband’s obsession with the storied shoes.
“I wrote that off as nonsense,” says the man in the empty house. “But in hindsight, I know: anyone who gets remotely close to the slippers case, they get so immersed, so involved, almost to the point of fanaticism.”
His name is Rob Feeney, and the slippers are both his legacy and his loss. Partly because of his unpaid service as a volunteer, the “Stolen Shoes” would become the most famous ruby slippers of them all.
Back in 2015, laid off from his corporate sales-and-marketing job, Feeney cold-called the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids.
“Your timing is perfect,” the director John Kelsch told him. “The 10-year anniversary of the theft is coming up, and we were looking for a way to publicize it.”
Soon Feeney was in touch with the money behind the museum: Jon Miner, whose mantra is “Life is one giant promotion,” which he proved in stoking his many businesses, including his brainchild, Mello Smello, which entranced kids around the world in the 1980s with its famous scratch-and-sniff stickers.
A Grand Rapids native, Miner, who says, “My grandmother used to babysit Judy Garland,” showed his devotion to his hometown through his wallet: first buying Garland’s white clapboard birthplace (adjacent to the museum he co-founded), then purchasing one of the dresses Garland wore as Dorothy as well as the carriage that ferried Dorothy and her three Yellow Brick Road travelers to the Emerald City (which also carried President Abraham Lincoln through the streets of Washington during the Civil War and, according to Miner, was “in 100 different movies”), and, finally, helping to bring Michael Shaw’s ruby red slippers to the museum in the summers of 2004 and 2005. “Paris has the Mona Lisa, and we have The Wizard of Oz,” says Miner.
Now it was 2015, and the shoes, whose theft had left Miner bereft—“Oh my god, we were sick, we cried, I’ll tell you”—were still missing.
“Paris has the Mona Lisa, and we have The Wizard of Oz.”
Rob Feeney, meanwhile, smelled an opportunity. “This is the ultimate mystery! The greatest whodunit! With the holy grail of missing artifacts!” he told Jon Miner.
Over lunch in an Olive Garden, they decided to stage what Miner called a “Promotion Commotion,” following Feeney’s idea to dispatch divers into the Tioga Mine Pit—one of over 1,100 bodies of water around Grand Rapids—where the slippers had long been rumored to have been thrown. Feeney enlisted five divers for four separate dives. But the slippers were not there.
Four weeks later, Feeney had another brainstorm: “A million-dollar reward!” he told John Miner, who agreed to put up the money. A press conference was held in the museum on the very spot where the shoes once stood. “The news went global,” says Feeney. “Four thousand different media outlets … from CNN and the BBC to Conan O’Brien, who did an opening monologue on his late-night talk show.”
Leads poured into the Grand Rapids Police Department. Everyone in the city of 11,268 citizens felt they had inside info: they were burned, buried, sealed in a tin can and discarded. A psychic predicted that they were deep beneath the ground near the Grand Rapids Police Department. The Minneapolis Star Tribune added, “It was an inside job. It was teen pranksters. The shoes ended up nailed to the wall of a restaurant in Missouri. The shoes were buried in concrete in a building foundation somewhere in Grand Rapids.”
“Inside job! No question!” the last surviving Munchkin, Lollipop Kid Jerry Maren, told Minnesota Post reporter Tim Gihring.
Every individual with a police record in Grand Rapids was considered a potential suspect. The comedian Louie Anderson’s late felonious brother, Kent Anderson of Minneapolis, whom Louie called “the safecracker,” was at the top of the list; Kent’s son, Scott, is still convinced that he was involved. (“He would’ve told the guy, ‘These rubies are real.’ And when he got the slippers he said, ‘Oh they’re fake, I’ll get rid of ’em for you.”)
Others suspected the owner of the shoes, Michael Shaw, erroneously believing that he had staged the theft—perhaps even substituting replica slippers—to collect the insurance money. “I’m two thousand miles away!” says Shaw. “And the insurance company, they investigated me 10 days till Sunday. They realized I had nothing to do with it.”
“What have you got in the car: bombs, al-Qaeda, red ruby slippers?” suspicious motorists were asked on routine traffic stops, according to Grand Rapids Police sergeant Bob Stein.
“Thirteen years of being told one story after another including that they had been burned, they had been thrown into a river, they were destroyed, I mean you cannot believe the aggravating stories that I was told,” Shaw recalls. “And then my anger continued to grow … ”
Because the trail had gone dead.
Following the Money
Finally, after 13 years of false leads and dead ends, the slippers would eventually be unearthed by the very power that made them disappear: the quest for cash. Only it wasn’t black-market cash—it was the reward money.
A condominium swimming pool in Jensen Beach, Florida. Two old friends and residents sit vacationing poolside one sunny day in 2017: the famed defense attorney Joe Friedberg, a legend in the Minneapolis legal community, and retired Secret Service agent Michael Rocco Insabella, who had protected Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan as a member of the White House detail.
Friedberg tells Insabella a story about a client who had recently come to his office. He was accompanied by “a woman … [he] was trying to impress,” according to Jeff Keene II, author of Under the Rainbow, which chronicles his father-in-law Michael Insabella’s involvement in the recovery of the slippers. The client then told the attorney Joe Friedberg something astounding: He knew who stole the ruby red slippers.
The person who possessed the shoes was threatening to destroy them if he or she couldn’t reap the reward upon their lawful return. So Insabella, who had once served on a security detail for Garland’s daughter, Liza Minnelli, said he would make some calls. Soon he was in touch with Grand Rapids Police investigator Brian Mattson, who called in the F.B.I. By then, the insurance company had paid Michael Shaw $800,000 for his loss.
A deal was struck: deliver the slippers and collect the reward, which had been reduced to $200,000.
With the upcoming release of the movie Judy, starring Renée Zellweger as Garland, the holder of the shoes felt the reward should be increased to $500,000. He and the insurance company soon settled on $400,000.
At 10 A.M. on July 5, 2018, Joe Friedberg brought the shoes in a brown paper bag to a Minneapolis coffee shop to collect the $400,000 check for his client.
The insurance-company representative and someone identifying themselves as an “authenticator” arrived. The $400,000 check was presented, and the shoes were slid across the table. Then, suddenly, the insurance agent pulled the check back.
He wasn’t an insurance agent—he was an F.B.I. agent. “Once the holder of the shoes asked for more than the $200,000 reward, the F.B.I. contended, it was now deemed extortion,” says Keene. The attorney had walked into an F.B.I. sting.
At that same moment, “20 F.B.I. agents, many heavily armed, entered and swarmed Insabella’s home in Florida,” according to Keene. “They had a search warrant. Michael Insabella told me that somebody must have lied and said the shoes were there.”
Friedberg and Insabella were neither charged nor exonerated. And the shoes merely moved on to an even greater spotlight, this time in a lavish ceremony orchestrated by the F.B.I.
“We have them!” Detective Brian Mattson told Sergeant Bob Stein. Then … pandemonium.
“What have you got in the car: bombs, al-Qaeda, red ruby slippers?”
The news of the recovery rocked Grand Rapids, which erupted in a chorus of “They’re back!” Motorists honked their horns while passing the museum. But the shoes were not there. They were in a box—with their own assigned seat between two F.B.I. agents on a Delta flight from Minneapolis to Washington, D.C.—to be authenticated at the Smithsonian. Once deemed genuine, they returned to the F.B.I. field office in Minneapolis, where they were re-united with the world.
At a grand press conference at F.B.I. headquarters in Minneapolis, Special Agent Jill Sanborn theatrically lifted a green drape unveiling the glistening ruby slippers in all of their pristine glory.
“Under the rainbow,” said the special agent.
That she mistakenly said “under” instead of “over” was fitting, because the scoundrels who stole the shoes were still at large in the underworld.
“I Won’t Look Any Further Than My Own Backyard”
The press conference left one enormous, lingering question: Who stole the shoes?
Investigators would soon zero in on two prolific Minnesota criminal habituals, Terry Jon Martin and Jerry Hal Saliterman.
Both now in their mid-70s, they feebly arrive at court appearances in wheelchairs with respirators. But in their prime, and between stints in prison, they blazed a trail.
Now 77, Saliterman made his media debut in a local newspaper as a burglary suspect at 19, handcuffed and “being hustled into a squad car at 4 A.M.” From there, he hurtled into a life of crime, culminating with the police arriving at his door with a warrant in Crystal, Minnesota, on December 20, 2023, after being alerted by the F.B.I. that the famed ruby slippers of Oz may have somehow found their way to this suburban neighborhood, five miles from downtown Minneapolis.
“I haven’t been doin’ nothing for years,” Jerry Hal Saliterman had told the F.B.I. once they arrived for a search in the ruby-red-slippers investigation. “Whatever’s down there is so fuckin’ old.”
“Down there” in the entrails of his home, was a trove of stolen goods from what police would call an 18-year “organized theft ring and fencing operation,” worth a minimum $270,000. The loot ranged from art to weapons, from new Weber grills to Coravin Elite wine pourers, along with $30,000 in cash and “boosting coats,” shoplifter apparel with concealed pockets and security-tag blocking protection.
In this unlikely setting, the dirty destiny of the ruby red slippers would be at long last revealed.
According to an indictment, Saliterman received the stolen shoes on August 28, 2005, one day after the burglary. He’d known the thief, Terry Jon Martin, for more than 50 years. If the slippers were meant to be their crowning achievement, a priceless artifact surely fencible to “someone into Hollywood memorabilia,” says Grand Rapids-based writer Pam Dowell, they quickly discovered otherwise. “They got a pig in a poke.”
So, Jerry Hal Saliterman allegedly buried them.
Arriving at Saliterman’s home on December 20, 2023, and again on March 14, 2024, a Crystal, Minnesota police investigator found the stolen items. The investigator and two F.B.I. agents soon interviewed a “cooperating defendant,” whom The Minnesota Star Tribune would call “a woman with ties” to an 18-year retail organized theft ring. “The cooperating defendant stated that they [were] present during hundreds of thefts, including but not limited to Williams-Sonoma (500 times), Gabberts (50 times), Apple (250 times) and several other stores hundreds of times,” reads the warrant.
She also recalled the day that Saliterman showed her a grocery bag, and when she peered inside she saw … red. The ruby red slippers.
Return them … anonymously, she pleaded.
“[She] did not want them in the home,” according to the warrant.
Instead, Saliterman and an “associate” placed the shoes in an ultraviolet sanitizer cabinet, “to remove their DNA from the slippers,” according to the cooperating defendant. Then they put the shoes in a clear plastic container with a white lid “and buried [them] in the yard near the shed … for approximately 7 years.”
From beneath the ground of a career criminal in a Minneapolis suburb, the slippers worked their dark magic, cursing all who crossed them, especially Jerry Saliterman and Terry Jon Martin, who seemed to believe they could keep the world’s most famous shoes—and the theft of them—secret.
As for a woman who had apparently seen the slippers and knew details about the theft, Saliterman would, according to his indictment, “knowingly intimidate, threaten and corruptly persuade [her] that if she did not keep her mouth shut, he would take her down with him and distribute sex tapes of her to her family with intent to hinder, delay and prevent [her] from communicating information to the F.B.I. relating to the theft, concealment and extortion of the ruby slippers.”
From beneath the ground of a career criminal in a Minneapolis suburb, the slippers worked their dark magic, cursing all who crossed them.
The F.B.I. was soon tailing attorney Joe Friedberg, according to a source. He had delivered the shoes to the coffee shop, and the feds were able to connect him to his longtime client, Jerry Hal Saliterman.
Pulling Saliterman’s phone records, investigators saw that a frequent caller was Terry Jon Martin, “Who happened to live, where?” asks Dane DeKrey, Martin’s attorney. “Grand Rapids,” home of the Judy Garland Museum.
By then, Terry Martin was 76, and living what his attorney would call “a law-abiding life, no new ‘jobs,’ no new nothing.” But the slippers would soon disrupt his peaceful existence.
“They took a pause on Saliterman and started looking into Terry.”
First came garbology—sifting through his trash for evidence. Nothing there. Then they ran license plates, discovering a car registered to Martin’s wife, a convicted felon named Manuela Abraham.
Martin had married her on October 6, 1987, just after she was released from a stint in federal prison, this one for the armed robbery of a restaurant, and just before Terry reported to prison for a pharmacy-related burglary. Now, Abraham had returned to Grand Rapids to care for Martin, who was terminally ill and heading into his dying days.
In Abraham, investigators found a way to get to Martin. A German national who had come to the U.S. at age six, she was an illegal alien. “At the end of her incarceration, because she had no legal status she was deported,” says DeKrey. “She moved back and was on the lam from immigration for all these years.
“So the investigators went to Terry and said, ‘We think you’re involved in this ruby slippers shit, and if you don’t talk we’re going to deport her.’”
Martin felt the stirrings of something rare for an aging career criminal: guilt. The woman he loved was going to be deported because of him. So he made a deal: “Don’t deport her and I’ll talk to you,” he said, according to DeKrey.
He went to the F.B.I. office in Bemidji, Minnesota, and, to keep his wife and caregiver in his home, he confessed—but with one stipulation. “He said, ‘I’ll tell you what I did, but I’m not telling you what anyone else did,’” says DeKrey. “They thought Terry would rat out everybody else. But Terry’s one of the few real wiseguys I know, and Terry didn’t—and wouldn’t.”
Getting to Jerry Hal Saliterman turned out to be easier. Based on information from the F.B.I., the Crystal police obtained the search warrant and found the stolen merchandise from the organized-theft ring. And soon the “cooperating defendant,” who reportedly met twice with Crystal police and F.B.I. agents, told the story of both the crime ring and the backyard burial of the ruby slippers.
“His wife was the cooperating defendant,” says Dane DeKrey. “That’s a great juxtaposition of her and Terry. They caught her with a bunch of stolen goods. She sang like a canary. They said, ‘You’re going to be charged, or you can tell us about Jerry, and that all goes away.’ And that’s what she did.”
Saliterman, charged with the theft of a major artwork and witness tampering, is expected to face trial on January 17. (His attorney has said, “He’s not guilty. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”)
Terry Jon Martin, who pleaded guilty to stealing the shoes, was sentenced in January to time served—which meant no prison time, mostly due to his health issues. “He’s a dying man ready to meet his maker,” his attorney wrote in his sentencing memorandum. He was expected to be dead within months. But as of this writing, he and Abraham remain in his Grand Rapids home.
On March 18 of this year, the shoes were finally re-united with their owner, an emotional Michael Shaw, in a grand ceremony at the Judy Garland Museum. It seemed that the slippers had finally returned home.
But where is home to a pair of vagabond shoes that have survived being lost in a Hollywood studio backlot, abducted in a duffel bag, sold once, stolen, buried, and recovered in an F.B.I. sting operation?
Not with Michael Shaw.
Immediately after the ceremony, he consigned them to Heritage Auctions, which has presently taken them on a “world tour,” with stops in Tokyo, New York, London, and Dallas, in the run-up to a global auction on December 7.
The U.S. Attorney’s office estimated the value of the shoes at $3.5 million. “They could sell for $1 million, they could sell for $10 million,” said Joe Maddalena, Heritage Auctions’ executive vice president. “They’re priceless.”
Mark Seal is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of many nonfiction books, including The Man in the Rockefeller Suit and Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli
