Bloomfield Township Police Department

The Bloomfield Township Police Department enters the account through forensic testing of the house where Frank Sheeran said he killed Jimmy Hoffa. Its examination produced a qualified result: human male blood was present in the flooring, but the DNA did not identify it as Hoffa’s, leaving the confession neither confirmed nor disproved by that test.

Forensic Testing and Its Limits

After reading portions of I Heard You Paint Houses, the department removed sections of the house’s floor and sent them to the FBI Laboratory for analysis. On February 15, 2005, Chief Jeffrey Werner announced that the laboratory had found human male blood in the flooring, but that the DNA did not match Hoffa’s. At the press conference, Oakland County prosecutor David Gorcyca stressed the distinction between a failure to corroborate Sheeran’s account and evidence against it: the finding did not corroborate the confession, but it did not refute it either.

The Earlier Luminol Search

Just before the first edition of “I Heard You Paint Houses” was published, Fox News followed leads from an advance copy and obtained permission from the house’s current owners to conduct a forensic search. Specialists sprayed Luminol, a chemical agent used to detect traces of blood, on the floorboards. They found eight tiny indications in a trail running from the vestibule down the hallway toward the kitchen—the route that matched Frank Sheeran’s account. The test revealed traces consistent with blood, but did not establish whose blood they were; the broadcast search thus supplied a striking spatial correspondence, not an identification of the victim.

Place in the Corroboration Chain

The department’s examination came after other details had begun to align with Sheeran’s account. In 2001, the FBI announced that a hair recovered from the rear passenger-side headrest of the maroon Mercury was Hoffa’s; in February 2002, Sheeran and Charles Brandt located the house, whose exterior matched Sheeran’s description. Those findings supplied separate points of comparison, but the Bloomfield Township Police Department’s floor samples did not identify the blood as Hoffa’s and therefore could not independently establish that he had been shot there.

The result also left room for competing explanations: after nearly twenty-nine years, human male blood in a house could have come from an unrelated injury or another use of the property. Medical examiner Michael Baden nevertheless considered the forensic evidence supportive of Sheeran’s account of the killing, while acknowledging that the later DNA finding did not itself identify Hoffa as the blood’s source. The department’s role in the narrative is thus precise but limited: it helped turn a claimed murder scene into a testable one, and its inconclusive laboratory result sharpened the distinction between a clue consistent with a confession and proof of the victim’s identity.

What the Blood Could Not Establish

The remaining uncertainty was not merely whether the blood belonged to Hoffa. After nearly twenty-nine years, it could have come from something as ordinary as a boy’s nosebleed, or from another killing in a house used by organized crime; the book invoked the Gambino family’s so-called house of death as a comparison. The floor samples could establish human male blood, but not when it was deposited or what event had left it there. That gap kept the department’s finding from settling the identity of the victim, even as forensic pathologist Michael Baden regarded the evidence as supportive of Sheeran’s account.