DeLong Star Ruby
100.32-carat star ruby
The DeLong Star Ruby, a 100.32-carat (20.064 g) oval cabochon star ruby. Discovered in Burma in the 1930s, it was sold by Martin Ehrmann to Edith Haggin DeLong for US$21,400, who then donated it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 1937.
History
On October 29, 1964, the DeLong star ruby was one of a number of precious gems stolen in a notorious jewelry heist by Jack Roland Murphy and two accomplices. In January 1965, nine of the stolen gems, including the Star of India and the Midnight Star, were recovered in a bus depot locker; however, the DeLong ruby was not among them. After months of negotiation, the unknown holder of the ruby agreed, through third parties including Dick Pearson, to ransom it for $25,000. The ransom was paid by wealthy Florida businessman John D. MacArthur and he was present on September 2, 1965, when the ruby was recovered at the designated drop off site: a phone booth at a service plaza on the Sunshine State Parkway near Palm Beach, Florida. Months later Dick Pearson was arrested burglarizing a jewelry store in Georgia and was found in possession of $100 bills with serial numbers matching the ransom money. He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for his involvement in the DeLong Star ruby case.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1830137. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1937, 1964 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “DeLong Star Ruby” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.