It has been almost ten years since the famous ruby shoes worn by Judy Garland in the film The Wizard of Oz were stolen from a museum in Minnesota. The shoes made famous by Judy’s character  and usually associated with the scene when Dorothy click their heels three times and with eyes closed said “there is no place like home”.

Every year the shoes were loaned to the museum by its owner, collector Michael Shaw, who disagreed to the proposal to put them on a safe every night. In August 2005, someone broke a window of the museum with a baseball bat and the shoes were taken, with the police estimating the theft took less than a minute to run.

The shoes were insured for 1 million US dollars and the he perpetrator was never caught. The museum administration offered a reward of 250 000 US dollars and some police investigations were run, but the mystery wasn’t solved. Now an anonymous fan of the movie is willing to pay one million dollars (roughly 910 000 euros) to anyone able to identify the whereabouts of the shoes and the name of the perpetrator.

The shoes were designed by Adrian Greenberg, MGM’s chief costume designer in the 1930s. They were planned to be silver, but scriptwriter Noel Langley is appointed as the one who decided they would be instead red, with an aim to provide visual contrast for the scene when Dorothy is taken from black-and-white Kansas to the Technicolor World of Oz.

Several pairs were made for the film, but only four remain in circulation. They are kept at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, and have only left the US once when they were shown at the V&A Museum in London in 2012.