Surrender Dorothy’s shoes! A pair of the famed ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland‘s Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz have been missing for years, and now a $1 million reward has been offered up for the return of the iconic kicks.
According to the Associated Press, an anonymous donor put the seven-figure amount on the line nearly 10 years after the piece of movie memorabilia was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn. To earn the reward, an informant must provide “the exact location of the slippers and the perpetrator’s name,” unveiling a mysterious theft a decade in the making.
The thief made away with the ruby slippers in August 2005, seemingly entering the Judy Garland Museum through a window and making off with just the shoes, which were on loan to the museum from collector Michael Shaw.
“It’s the worst nightmare for me,” Shaw said at the time, according to The Guardian. “The theft is not only a crime against me, but against children. Those shoes have been used to raise money for AIDS, for helping get kids off the street, reading programs, and for children with Down’s syndrome and autism.”
Shaw’s stolen pair is one of four in existence, with one set of ruby slippers residing in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. As Dorothy Gale, Garland wore the shoes (on permanent loan from the late, house-smushed Wicked Witch of the East) during her journey through Oz in the 1939 classic. After escaping from and vanquishing the Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy used the magical footwear to bring herself back home to Kansas as she famously repeated “There’s no place like home.”
