DULUTH, Minn. — A dying thief who confessed to stealing a pair of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in “The Wizard of Oz” because he wanted to pull off “one last score” was given no prison time at his sentencing hearing Monday.
Terry Jon Martin, 76, stole the slippers adorned with sequins and glass beads in 2005 from the Judy Garland Museum in the late actor’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. He gave into temptation after an old associate with connections to the mob told him the shoes had to be adorned with real jewels to justify their $1 million insured value, his attorney revealed in a memo to the federal court ahead of his sentencing in Duluth.
Martin showed little emotion as the judge handed down the sentence and was physically unable to fully rise from his chair as the judge adjourned the hearing. He declined to address the court. But defense attorney Dane DeKrey said the resolution of the case should bring a measure of closure to the government, the museum, the slippers’ owner and to Martin himself.
The government was able to hold one person accountable, DeKrey said, while the museum and the collector who owns the slippers got to find out what happened. And Martin was able to close this chapter in the final months of his life instead of taking his secret to his grave.
“They will never be made whole in this case,” the attorney said of the victims. “But they’re more whole than they had been in the last 18 years.”
The FBI recovered the shoes in 2018 when someone else tried to claim a reward. Martin wasn’t charged with stealing them until last year. Prosecutor Matthew Greenley said in court Monday that investigators used phone records to zero in on Martin, and used his wife’s immigration status as leverage to search Martin’s home and get him to confess.
He pleaded guilty in October to theft of a major artwork, admitting to using a hammer to smash the glass of the museum door and display case to take the slippers. But his motivation remained mostly a mystery until DeKrey revealed it in a court filing this month.
Martin, who lives near Grand Rapids, said at the October hearing that he hoped to remove what he thought were real rubies from the shoes and sell them. But a person who deals in stolen goods, known as a fence, informed him the rubies weren’t real, Martin said. So he got rid of the slippers.
DeKrey wrote in his memo that Martin’s unidentified former associate persuaded him to steal the slippers as “one last score,” even though Martin had seemed to have “finally put his demons to rest” after finishing his last prison term nearly 10 years earlier.
“At first, Terry declined the invitation to participate in the heist. But old habits die hard, and the thought of a ‘final score’ kept him up at night,” DeKrey wrote. “After much contemplation, Terry had a criminal relapse and decided to participate in the theft.”
Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz accepted the recommendation of both sides that he sentence Martin to time served because he is housebound in hospice care and is expected to die within the next few months. He requires constant oxygen therapy for chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and had to be brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair. The loud hum of his oxygen machine echoed through the courtroom.
Schiltz told Martin he probably would have sentenced him to 10 years in prison if it was still 2005. The judge also accepted the recommendation from both sides that Martin should pay $23,500 in restitution to the museum and ordered him to pay $300 a month.
“I certainly do not want to minimize the seriousness of Mr. Martin’s crime,” the judge said. “Mr. Martin intended to steal and destroy an irreplaceable part of American culture.”
According to DeKrey’s memo, Martin had no idea about the cultural significance of the ruby slippers and had never seen “The Wizard of Oz.” Instead, DeKrey said, the “old Terry” with a lifelong history involving burglary…
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