MANNERS & MORALS: Detective Story

MANNERS & MORALS

On a trip to Richmond, Va. last spring, Edmund R. Dewing, the district attorney of Norfolk County, Mass., heard about Lady Wonder, the “Talking Horse.” He drove out to Lady Wonder’s stable, paid her mistress one dollar (for three questions) and was escorted into the Presence.

Lady Wonder, a 27-year-old mare, can’t talk a word. By pushing rubber disks with her nose, however, she can make letters pop into view on a special alphabetical board. Dewing asked her to tell him his father-in-law’s first name. She tapped out: MARION, the correct answer. Dewing was happily astounded. But it wasn’t until he got home that he realized he had overlooked a great opportunity.

He commissioned a Richmond-bound friend to ask Lady Wonder where he could find the body of Danny Matson, a four-year-old boy from Quincy, Mass., who had been missing for two years. The mare tapped out: Pittsfield water wheel. Dewing sent a detective to Pittsfield, Mass. The investigator found two water wheels but no body.

Then Quincy’s Acting Police Chief William Ferrazzi got into the act. One night as he was lying in bed he decided that Lady Wonder had just gotten her words a little garbled in transmission. She had really meant Field & Wilde’s water pit, an abandoned local quarry. It all came to him, said Ferrazzi later “just like a boot in the rear end.” He hurried to tell Dewing. So last week the quarry was drained and the boy’s body was found.