A Decade Later, a $10,000 Ring Finds Its Owner

Keri Campbell’s daughter Juliette almost had her first car.

Instead, her mom has a boatload of good karma coming her way.

Campbell, who moved to Mill Valley three weeks ago from Bear Valley Springs, was in the midst of making a series of donations to the when she spotted a pair of purses she decided to buy for her daughters. She planned to give Juliette, who attends nursing school at Seattle University, a Coach handbag.

When Campbell brought the bag home – she just moved near Sycamore Park with her fiancée – she noticed a bump in it. The bump turned out to be a gorgeous diamond ring with a triangle-shaped Tanzanite stone on top. It was inside a pouch from Deleuse Jewelers in Tiburon.

Campbell brought the ring to Jeff Deleuse, who didn’t recognize it. She then asked Discovery Shop employees if they knew the bag’s donor. They eventually connected her to a woman named Karen, who lives in Tiburon and declined to give her last name. The two women spoke on the phone and agreed that Campbell had likely found Karen’s ring, which had been missing for at least 10 years.

“It fit my finger perfectly,” Campbell says with a laugh. “We were either going to find the owner or else my youngest daughter was going to get her first car. But I'm glad I was able to find the rightful owner.”

Campbell, who plans to set up a parent-teen consulting business in Mill Valley, brought the ring to Karen’s home last Friday afternoon.

“Her eyes welled up with tears as soon as I pulled out the ring,” Campbell says.

“I started crying right away, and then my husband got emotional,” Karen adds. “It founds its way home.”

In an odd twist, the missing ring had been right under Karen's nose. She had received the ring from her husband Lindsey on a trip to Singapore in 1989. At least 12 years ago, Karen had Deleuse set the Tanzanite stone on it. He didn’t recognize it initially because it had been so long.

Deleuse hasn’t done an exact appraisal of the ring but estimated its value at around $10,000.

Karen says that her housekeeper 10 years ago began hiding small valuable items around the house in the hopes that she wouldn’t miss them. That apparently included hiding the Tanzanite ring inside the Coach bag. Karen says she fired the housekeeper but never found the ring, she says.

“I was so angry about it, but it had been so long that it slipped my mind,” Karen says. “Keri was so sweet and cute about the whole thing. Just a real person, a really good person.”