No Place Like Home

In 2010, if you had told Dane DeKrey that 13 years later, he would be involved in a legal case surrounding the theft of the fabled ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, he never would’ve believed it. Back then, DeKrey was just a couple years out of college and worked for U.S. Rep. Earl Pomeroy in Washington, D.C.—a job he loved.

“Honestly, if he wouldn’t have lost in 2010, I likely would still be working for him,” DeKrey says. “I got to go back to North Dakota many weekends with him. He’s from the same hometown that my family is from. So it was a truly Hallmark movie political story.

“When Earl lost, a lot of people who were working for him went and found new jobs with different congressmen or women,” he continues. “I was there for Earl, and not for the D.C. scene, so I asked him, ‘What do you think I should do?’ He had practiced law before he became a congressman, and he said, ‘You should go to law school. Even if you don’t end up practicing and you come back to D.C., it’s always something great to have on your résumé, or just in the way that helps you think.’”

DeKrey took his mentor’s advice and went to law school at the University of Minnesota. After graduating magna cum laude, he worked at a class action firm in Minneapolis before finding his stride as an assistant federal public defender in Fargo. DeKrey eventually became the director of the ACLU of North Dakota. “It was like the epitome of Sisyphus,” he says. “But it gave me tough skin, and sharpened my reasoning because it’s easy to get like-minded people to agree with you and hard to do the opposite.”

When COVID-19 hit, he found himself in a position to do something unusual—use a just-passed law and a client’s medical condition as a means to free the man from incarceration.

“I saw that there were temporary laws being passed that were letting people out of jail and prison in certain situations that they wouldn’t have, but for the pandemic,” he says. “I just happened to have a client who had this very rare form of sickle cell anemia, called sickle beta thalassemia. Then it just became convincing the court that, one, this was real, two, that this was serious, and three, that the court should apply the law.”

“It was like the epitome of Sisyphus. But it gave me tough skin.” —Dane DeKrey on heading up the ACLU of North Dakota

In 2021, DeKrey and Bruce Ringstrom Jr. co-founded the defense firm Ringstrom DeKrey across the river in Moorhead. Soon after, the combination of his new location, his rep, and a fortuitous conflict of interest netted him the case of the ruby slippers.

His client, Terry Martin, 76, had been contacted by an “old mob associate” about a possible score involving the famed Wizard of Oz footwear—the idea being to steal them from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, remove the stones from the tops of the shoes and fence them on the black market. The score didn’t pan out. Martin didn’t count on the rubies being made of glass.

DeKrey got involved after being approached by the head of the Office of the Federal Defender in Minneapolis, Katherian Roe. “She basically called me up and said, ‘I can’t tell you anything as to why any of us are conflicted out, but would you like to take a case that’s probably going to be the biggest of your career so far, and at least the most media-driven one?’” he recalls. “When she asks, she’s not really asking. You don’t really say no. So I agreed, and it has turned out to be probably the wildest legal ride of my career. I became Terry’s free lawyer.”

At press time, Martin, whose health is poor, had been spared prison after pleading guilty to one count of theft of major artwork in October 2023. The case itself reentered the limelight in March when the second man, Jerry Hal Saliterman, was charged.

DeKrey’s experience in politics has helped him deal with the barrage of media. The story his 76-year-old client was telling—that he had never seen The Wizard of Oz nor knew of the shoes’ significance—seemed difficult to swallow, even if Martin’s rough childhood prevented him from going to see movies, as he alleged.

“Is it pretty stupid that this man didn’t know The Wizard of Oz or what the ruby slippers were? Maybe,” DeKrey says. “But if you’re going to get a sense of where he came from and his formative years, if you believe that he never saw it, and if you believe that the man that he worked with [on the crime] had been right in the past … it’s still hard to accept. But it’s almost like a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction situation. To me—and I said this to Terry—it’s so stupid that it almost has to be true.”