Nearly five months after an ailing man with a history of theft admitted to stealing the shining shoes worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, a second person has been charged in the caper, according to the Associated Press.
Jerry Hal Saliterman, 76, of Crystal, Minnesota, was charged with theft of a major artwork and witness tampering. He did not enter a plea when he first appeared on Friday in a US district court in St Paul, Minnesota. He was released on his own recognizance after the hearing.
In a recently unsealed indictment, the government claims that from 2005 to 2018 Saliterman “received, concealed, and disposed of an object of cultural heritage” – specifically, “an authentic pair of ‘ruby slippers’ worn by Judy Garland in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz”. The indictment adds that he knew they were stolen, and threatened to release a sex tape of a woman and “take her down with him” if she did not keep her mouth shut about the slippers.
Saliterman’s attorney, John Brink, claims that his client is not guilty.
“He hasn’t done anything wrong,” Brink told the AP outside the courthouse on Friday.
The shoes, which are covered in glass beads and sequins, were originally stolen from a museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, Garland’s home town, in 2005. They were found by the FBI in 2018 and four years later Terry Jon Martin, 76, confessed to stealing them as part of his “last score”. He claims to have used a hammer to smash the glass enclosure the famed shoes were in and tried to sell what he believed were the rubies that encrusted the footwear.
But a person who deals in stolen goods, known as a fence, informed him the rubies were sequins and glass beads, Martin said. So he got rid of the slippers. At the end of the ordeal, he got no prison time because he was already homebound and in hospice care.
• This article was amended on 19 March 2024. Judy Garland’s home town of Grand Rapids – and the museum about her – is in Minnesota, not Michigan as an earlier version said.
