It looks like an old man will bring the iconic “there’s no place like home” line into a prison cell.
An old man from the U.S. has been charged with theft for nearly 20 years. That man stole a pair of red slippers that appeared in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
Those pair of slippers were worn by Judy Garland when she starred in the film as Dorothy. She used to click them together and then say the iconic line, “there’s no place like home.” Before it got stolen in 2005, it used to be on-display at the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the actress’s hometown.
In 2018, those red slippers were recovered in an FBI sting, but no charges have been filed. The agency then offers a million-dollar reward for those who will provide any information regarding the suspect in the crime.
But on May 17, a man named Terry Martin was arrested by a grand jury and then charged with theft of a major artwork, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s North Dakota office.
However, the announcement that the department made did not mention any details about Martin or about the details of the authorities’ declaration that he was a suspect in the slipper heist. Martin is currently 76 and lives just 12 miles (20 kilometers) away from the Garland Museum.
When the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper reached Martin, he was quoted as saying, “gotta go on trial. I don’t want to talk to you.”
Those slippers are among the four pairs that Garland wore during the production. According to the Justice Department, those two are ” widely viewed as among the recognizable memorabilia in American film history.”
After the pair’s 2018 retrieval by the FBI, it was then brought to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
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