Not sure why you are skeptical of that...sure, there are people who would think doing a copy of the contents of a hard drive by dragging and dropping it from one location to another is good enough, but there is no shortage of people out there who understand that.
If someone came to me with a laptop of that origin and value, I would absolutely know how to get that data off. I have zero doubt that was done. After all, how can you do a forensic analysis of it if you don’t?
I’m skeptical because one of the very first things I would do is run undelete sw. The fact that this guy seems to be saying he just did something like that makes me skeptical.