Fire up your text editing software, aspiring screenwriters: We’ve got a good pitch for you. In 2005, a man named Terry Jon Martin stole one of the pairs of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard Of OzMartin is facing sentencing this week after pleading guilty to stealing them.
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But the interesting bit in all of this is that Martin has explained why he stole the shoes and why they didn’t turn up for so long, and it has a lot of the hallmarks of a good crime movie. As reported by Variety, Terry Jon Martin was an old career criminal who hadn’t broken the law at all in “nearly 10 years” after his last time in prison, but an unnamed “former mob associate” convinced him to steal the slippers after telling him that they contained real rubies.
According to Martin’s attorney, the idea of pulling off one “final score” kept him away at night, and though he initially refused to do the heist, he had a “criminal relapse” and decided to do it anyway. Martin says that he took the shoes to a fence and was told that the rubies were actually made of glass, so he says he ditched the shows as soon as he could. At some point after that, the FBI found out who had the shoes and recovered them, implying that there’s more to the story that we don’t even know.
So you’ve got a retired criminal reluctantly agreeing to one last heist, you’ve got the hook of the thief targeting an iconic piece of movie history, and you have the twist where the thief finds out that the score is effectively worthless. And if the Wizard Of Oz rights holders don’t want to play ball, you could substitute the ruby slippers for any number of other iconic film props: A plastic Maltese Falcon, a glowing Marsellus Wallace briefcase with nothing inside, a lightsaber missing the crucial kyber crystal that makes it function. Any of those could be stolen!