This photo provided by the Fulton County (Ga.) Sheriff’s Department shows Leslie Edwards Fields. 
This photo provided by the Fulton County (Ga.) Sheriff’s Department shows Gary Donald Crouse. ATLANTA — Stolen oboes, trumpets and ornate, hand-crafted violins, valued all together at more than $100,000, have been recovered thanks to the keen observations and collaboration of music shop employees in Georgia and North Carolina.
Investigators recovered the instruments at a Studio 6 hotel in the Atlanta suburb of Roswell on Wednesday — the same week the Violin Society of America had sent an urgent bulletin about the thefts to its members nationwide.
Leslie Edwards Fields, 52, and Gary Donald Crouse, 60, were apprehended after one of the suspects showed up at a Roswell shop seeking violin cases, Roswell Police spokeswoman Lisa Holland said. Both men are charged with theft by receiving stolen property. It was unclear if they had attorneys; their names were not yet listed in county court records Friday night.
Fields and Crouse had sold violins to a shop owned by John Montgomery in Raleigh, North Carolina, in recent months, but the manner in which they presented the instruments and the stories they gave made Montgomery suspicious. When he researched the violins, which are hand-crafted and have unique characteristics, he determined they had been stolen from Atlanta-area shops.
Montgomery contacted Atlanta Violin in Roswell and office manager Megan Hallam said they worked together to reclaim the stolen instruments and alert police.