On December 7th, 2024, a pair of red shoes worn by actor Judy Garland, who played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, was sold at auction for $28 million. In The Wizard of Oz, a young girl named Dorothy gets lost in the land of Oz— a fantasy kingdom of Dorothy’s imagination. Along the way, she acquires a pair of special red “ruby slippers.” At the end, Dorothy returns home by clicking the heels of her shoes together three times, and saying, “There’s no place like home.” During the movie, Judy Garland used many pairs of slippers. Some for close-ups, and others for dancing. After the movie was made, the shoes were stored away and forgotten. In the 1970s, someone found and sold them.

Michael Shaw bought a pair of the close-up shoes for $2,000. He made money by renting the shoes out to museums. In August 2005, Shaw loaned the shoes to the Judy Garland Museum, in Minnesota, for the fourth time. At night, thieves smashed the glass of a side door with a handheld sledgehammer and walked in. The door’s alarm had been disabled because children kept tripping on it. There were no security cameras recording and no motion detectors in the gallery. When John Kelsch, the Museum Director at the time, arrived the next morning, all that was left was a single sequin on the floor. And all the museum’s credibility for borrowing other artifacts was destroyed.

In 2018, 13 years after the heist, the shoes were recovered by the FBI in Minneapolis. The thieves were two male criminals, named Terry Martin and Jerry Saliterman, who were both in ill health and old by the time they went to court. Terry Martin claimed they initially thought the shoes were made of real rubies. After they realized they were made out of fake rubies, Martin and Saliterman thought the shoes weren’t worth the risk to move back. And so, the slippers sat in Jerry Saliterman’s backyard, near Minneapolis, buried for years in a box.

In March, the stolen pair was reunited with Michael Shaw, who decided to sell them. The auction was in Dallas. Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota, promised 24/7 security for the shoes. The slippers were estimated to be worth $3 million. The price rose past $3 million immediately. For 15 minutes, the price continued to climb, as people offered more and more money. In the end, the slippers sold for $28 million. With extra fees of the auction company, the total came to $32.5 million. The name of the buyer has not been publicly announced yet.

The slippers are the most expensive movie item ever sold. The previous record came in 2011, when the white dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch sold for $5.52 million.