Mr. Wilson won't be happy to hear this, but Dennis the Menace may finally be back home.
A bronze statue of the rambunctious cartoon character was stolen in October, 2006 from a city park in in Monterey, California, the home town of its creator Hank Ketcham.
No one knew what happened to the 3 1/2-foot, 200-pound statue until last month when it was found at Brothers Scrap Metals in Orlando, Florida.
"Dennis" was menacingly close to being melted down until a relative of the scrap yard's owner recognized the cartoon character and learned of the statue's theft via the Internet, according to SFGate.com.
The statue arrived at City Hall on Tuesday and officials plan to award $5,000 to the scrapyard for recovering it. "Dennis" is valued between $25,000 and $30,000, according to KION TV.
However, Monterey Police first want to determine if the "Dennis" statue is real or a duplicate.
It seems a different "Dennis" statue in front of the Arnold Palmer Children's Hospital in Orlando also went missing several years ago, KSBW TV reports.
Monterey City Community Services Director Kim Bui-Burton told the Monterey County Weekly that officials are looking for a specific mark made by the statue's artist Wah Ming Chang to determine if they have the real McCoy.
Police Dept. Lt. Jeff Jackson told the paper that if the statue isn't the right one, it will either be returned to Florida or simply kept.
“We might not to be able to ever confirm,” Jackson told the paper. “We can't take a DNA test, but we can take fingerprints.”
