Chests, cabinets, conference tables, and century-old desks make up what is considered the third most extensive collection of American furniture in the United States after those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. Hoadley is also a sleuth. Dr. Henry Lee, head of the Connecticut State Police Forensics Laboratory, considers Hoadley to be among the world's leading experts on wood. Lee, who gained notoriety when he testified in the O.J. Simpson trial, has called on Hoadley a dozen times. His investigators take seminar classes with Hoadley.
Somebody smashes in a door or breaks a window sash or rubs up against a packing crate.
When people have an altercation, they usually break something. The evidence becomes stronger if bits of paint or varnish match up with fragments on the perpetrator. Take the wood chipper murder, an appalling case in Newtown, Connecticut. Helle Crafts, an airline flight attendant, disappeared just before Christmas in 1986. Her husband, Richard Crafts, an airline pilot, told neighbors that she had driven off after an argument.