Minnesota’s man accused of hiding Ruby ‘Wizard of Oz’ shoes has died; Their positions have been retired

Minneapolis – A federal judge on Monday, March 17, dismissed the charges against a Minnesota man accused of hiding a couple of ruby ​​shoes used in “The Wizard of Oz” and stolen from a museum in 2005, after prosecutors said the man died.

Jerry Hal Saliterman, 77, from Crystal, Minnesota, had previously been

Scheduled to declare yourself guilty

For the charges, but the judicial procedures were postponed in January after their lawyer said that his health made him extremely difficult to appear before the court.

Saliterman died on Sunday, according to a request for a dismissal page covered by a federal prosecutor to the United States District Judge, Patrick Schiltz, Monday. Saliterman’s lawyer, John Brink, confirmed the death of his client, but did not offer more details.

A judicial presentation of Brink on February 28 said that Saliterman had been previously hospitalized and included a note from his doctor who lists “serious chronic medical conditions” of which he was suffering, including Parkinson’s disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which required that he was in complementary oxygen.

Saliterman was

accused in March 2024

In the Federal Court in Minneapolis, accused of theft of a large work of art, the shoes, and the manipulation of witnesses. He was also accused of threatening a woman who provides information about him to the FBI.

Saliterman’s death not only ends his prosecution, but marks another turn in a crime saga that seems stripped of the plot of a Hollywood thriller.

The shoes, one of the various couples that Judy Garland used in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz”, was

stolen from the Judy Garland Museum

In August 2005. Garland had passed

Part of his childhood in Grand Rapids

Before making it big in Hollywood.

It would be another 13 years to the FBI

announced in 2018

He had recovered the shoes, showing them with pride in Minneapolis, and declared that the nameless thieves had tried to extort and disappoint the company that had secured the shoes. He also said he had executed search warrants in Minnesota and Florida, but asked the public with the case.

Then another five years would pass until Terry Jon Martin, a resident of the Grand Rapid area, was

accused of stealing the shoes

in an accusation of May 2023.

Later that year, in October 2023,

Martin confessed

To have broken into the museum and steal the shoes. His lawyer, in a judicial presentation, said that Martin, who had a criminal record as a thief, tried to steal the shoes as part of “a last score” after a suggestion of an “old associate of the old mafia.”

The presentation said Martin thought that the shoes were adorned with real rubies, until this notion was deactivated by a “name” without a name or an intermediary for the sale of stolen items.

Martin, 76 at that time and of poor health, made the confession as part of a guilt agreement in which he would not face prison time for crime. Instead, he faced supervised release and had to pay $ 23,500 in restitution.

Tom Olsen / Duluth News Tribune

In July 2024, months after Saliterman’s accusation, the Crystal Police Department issued

A press release that provided more details

On Salitermana research.

He said the department had recovered stolen articles and accounting books that documented a “ring of retail crimes” in which he said Saliterman had played a role for years. He also confirmed that the shoes “had been buried in the backyard of a residence in Crystal,” presumably Saliterman’s house, for years.

In December, the prosecutors of Saliterman’s procedures told the Court that they feared that a potentially delayed trial could have the risk that Martin could not testify, due to his health in decline.

The recovered shoes were

Sold for $ 28 million in an auction in December

to an unleashed buyer.

It is not clear what follows for the matter of the ruby ​​shoes, which includes mysteries still turned like who had the Ruby shoes all those years, and where they were, if with someone who is not Saliterman. The US assistant district prosecutor, Matthew Greenley, wrote in an email that his office did not have additional comments at this time.

Jeremy Fugleberg is the editor of The Vault, Forum Communications Co. Home for Midwest History, Mysteries, Crime and Culture. She is also a member of the company’s editorial advisory board.