To go home again, click 3 times

The recovery of Judy Garland’s sparkly, ruby red slippers in early September by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Minneapolis, Minn., has sparked a renewed interest in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.”

Garland played Dorothy Gale, the young girl from Kansas. A tornado struck the farmhouse where she lived with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry and carries it off to who-knows-where.

The adventure begins as Dorothy skips merrily along the yellow brick road with her dog Toto, a frisky Cairn Terrier, to find the Wizard. He is the obstinate know-it-all who can get her back to Kansas.

Dorothy’s famous red shoes were covered in about 2,300 sequins, which were dazzling in Technicolor, a revolutionary filmmaking innovation at that time.

In the movie, the slippers originally belonged to the Wicked Witch of the East, but she was crushed when the twister dropped the farmhouse on top of her. When the Wicked Witch of the West came to retrieve her dead sister’s slippers, she discovered that the Good Witch of the North (Glinda) had beat her to the scene and magically transferred the slippers to Dorothy’s feet.

Britta Arendt, editor of the Herald-Review newspaper, which is published twice a week in Grand Rapids, Minn., has been following this case ever since the theft was reported in 2005 to the Grand Rapids Police Department (GRPD).

She said, “the slippers, one of three other known existing pairs used in the filming” of the classic movie “were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, the birthplace of Frances Gumm, whose stage name was Judy Garland.”

“The slippers were on loan to the museum by a private collector as part of a 10-week traveling tour when they were stolen,” Arendt wrote.

“Sometime between 5:45 p.m. on Aug. 27 and 9:45 a.m. on Aug. 28 (in 2005), a burglar broke a window in the museum’s back door and entered,” Arendt continued. “The thief smashed a Plexiglas case in the museum’s gallery and made off with the slippers that were insured for $1 million. The alarm did not sound to a central dispatch station. No fingerprints were left behind.”

Dagnabbit; it seemed like the perfect crime. The GRPD had no evidence and no clues to work with. Police Sgt. Robert Stein said: “All we had was a single sequin that had fallen off one of the slippers.”

As of press time, the FBI would only confirm that its “sting operation” is related to insurance fraud allegations, and its roundup of persons of interest is ongoing.

“The FBI transported the slippers to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., where conservators were able to conduct an in-depth examination and analysis, including evidence of wear and details unique to their use in the 1939 film,” Arendt reported.

Erin Blasco, writing from Smithsonian.com, picked up the story from here. She said that Dawn Wallace, an objects conservator, spent more than 200 hours examining the museum’s long-cherished pair of ruby slippers that had been contributed by an anonymous donor in 1979.

Could Wallace help solve the 13-year-old Grand Rapids mystery?

“Wallace checked every inch” of the shoes the FBI brought in,” Blasco said. “Her expertise with the Smithsonian’s ruby slippers made her uniquely qualified to spot any minute clues the shoes may offer. The conservation work was a ‘sequin by sequin sequence,’ she likes to joke.”

One explanation about the dislodged sequin could be the wear and tear on the shoes caused by multiple takes of Dorothy clicking the heels of the slippers together three times and repeating the phrase, “There’s no place like home.”

Blasco reported a bizarre revelation in the Smithsonian laboratory. She said: “The museum’s pair is not identical. The heel caps, bows, width and overall shape do not match; the shoes were brought together from two separate sets.

“But in examining the recovered shoes, conservators found the left to the museum’s right and the right to the museum’s left,” she wrote. “When reunited, the four shoes created two matching pairs – twins.”