Stolen wedding gowns found

About half of the 2,000 wedding gowns stolen in Scottsdale, Ariz., five months ago before they could reach a California fundraiser have been seized at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers.

The gowns were discovered last week in a tractor trailer re-entering the U.S. at Nogales after attempting to go into Mexico, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said Tuesday.

The driver of the 40-foot-long big-rig was arrested and the rig impounded at the port of entry, authorities said.

Fran Hansen, director of the Making Memories Foundation, said 1,024 of the donated gowns were recovered.

In November, the tractor trailer and cab carrying the gowns were stolen from the parking lot of a Scottsdale hotel.

The gowns were on their way to a fundraiser in West Hollywood with the money going to grant the last wishes of women dying of breast cancer.

After the theft, the fundraiser went on with new donations.

Among those donations were two wedding dresses that were in the shed of Benjamin Noll’s Malibu backyard.

One, a silky pink flapper number, had been worn by his late mother, Isabelle, when she married his father in 1926. The other, a flowing white satin gown, was worn by his late bride, Marianne, when she told Noll “I do” 36 years ago.

The dresses, sheathed in layers of tissue paper and tucked in their white boxes, went untouched for decades until Noll roused them after reading about the theft of the more than 2,000 wedding dresses en route to the charity sale. Noll decided to donate them to a cause related to the disease that killed his wife three years ago: breast cancer.

The two dresses were among the more than 2,000 donated by individuals, bridal salons and national retailers so that the Brides Against Breast Cancer charity benefit could take place.

The proceeds fund the dying wishes of women with metastasized breast cancer, such as video cameras to record tributes to children, trips to Disneyland with loved ones, computers to join Internet support groups and sewing machines to make gifts for loved ones.

Hansen drove a 40-foot trailer full of gowns and accessories from Washington, D.C., and stopped at the Arizona hotel last year. During the night, the foundation’s pickup and trailer disappeared. The truck was insured, but the dresses weren’t.

The disappearance sparked a national outpouring of dress donations. TheKnot.com, a website that caters to brides, sent an e-mail to its designer clients, who offered hundreds of samples and discontinued patterns. David’s Bridal, a national chain, donated 500 dresses; bridal designer Demetrios donated another 500. Several Arizona salons pitched in with about 1,200 dresses.

The mother of one salon owner, who donated three dresses, had her dying wish fulfilled by the foundation two years ago: to have her relatives from Italy visit.

More than 500 individuals donated used dresses. A truck company loaned two vehicles for transportation.

Hansen, who owned a bridal salon, created the foundation in 1998 after twice being diagnosed with breast cancer after mammograms and biopsies. She joined Internet support groups and started to research the disease before learning that her tests had been false positives and that she was cancer-free. But the letters and concerns she read on the support sites saddened her, particularly a posting by one young woman who was heartbroken because she couldn’t buy presents for her children for what probably would be her last Christmas with them.