Arthur Koehler


Arthur Koehler was a chief wood technologist at the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, and was important in the development of wood forensics in the 1930s through his role in the investigation of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Koehler’s particular research interest in the identification, cellular structure and growth of wood gave him the specific training and abilities necessary for the careful examination of the ladder which had been used by the abductor of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., aged twenty months, and the tracing of the ladder to a company in McCormick, South Carolina. Koehler, from there, traced the wood of the ladder to a Bronx lumber yard.