Sheeran and the author locate the Detroit Hoffa murder house

In February 2002, Frank Sheeran and Charles Brandt drove to Detroit to locate the house where Sheeran said James R. Hoffa had been hit. The trip transformed an old description into a specific address: Brandt followed directions Sheeran had given years before, and Sheeran confirmed the house when they reached it. The identification was a consequential step in the book’s search for the site, although the scene establishes it through Sheeran’s recognition and the match with his description, not through independent forensic proof.

The trip and its strain

As the planned Detroit journey approached, Sheeran became especially nervous. He was living alone in an apartment in a Philadelphia suburb and had recently begun experiencing nightmares that mixed war episodes with people and incidents from his life in the mob. He also said that he saw these figures while awake, calling them chemical people and believing medication might address the condition. On the drive west, his distress and criticism of Brandt’s driving made the journey difficult; even so, he laughed when Brandt joked that at least the car kept Sheeran from calling him on the telephone.

The strain gave the search a personal urgency. Brandt could not assume that Sheeran would be able to guide them once they reached Detroit, and the man travelling with him was physically unwell. At the motel, Sheeran’s former fellow inmate John Zeitts stayed in his room and changed the bandage on his bedsore. Brandt later wondered whether he had waited too long to make the trip. The directions, rather than Sheeran’s moment-to-moment guidance, would have to carry much of the search.

Following the old directions

Brandt brought notes from an earlier editorial meeting with Fox News, based on directions Sheeran had given. They were still strikingly useful nearly three decades after the 1975 events. The missing detail was a final left turn onto a street opposite a footbridge. Brandt first had trouble seeing the bridge: it lay within a golf course, and a view from a higher parallel road helped him locate it. A chain-link fence built over the intervening years had made the landmark less conspicuous than Sheeran’s directions suggested.

At a T intersection near the bridge, Brandt got out and looked down the street to the left. At the far end of the block, on the right, he saw the rear of a house with the kind of backyard Sheeran had described. The bridge mattered not as a destination but as the marker for the turn. Brandt drove around to the front of the house, where Sheeran studied it with a tense, steely expression and confirmed the identification with a nod and a grunt. The quiet street and the house’s setting matched the remembered directions; Sheeran’s response made clear that Brandt had found the place he meant.

The apparent mismatch

One detail initially seemed inconsistent. Sheeran had described a house with brown shingles, while the front appeared to be brick. After the trip, Brandt developed the photographs and saw that the upper half of the house was covered in brown shingles on the rear and on the side visible when approaching from the footbridge. The photographs reconciled the apparent discrepancy and supplied a concrete visual match for the earlier description.

Return and aftermath

On the drive back east, Sheeran had settled down. The chemical people and complaints about Brandt’s driving did not recur during the return, and the two stopped to photograph the airport at Port Clinton before completing the journey home in one day. Shortly afterward, Brandt helped Sheeran’s daughters arrange for him to enter assisted living and accompanied him and his daughter Dolores to a doctor, who prescribed medication to control the figures he had been seeing. Brandt says he never heard about them again and never saw Sheeran as distraught and nervous as he had been heading into Detroit. The trip therefore ended with both a claimed location identified and a marked easing of the crisis that had shadowed the search.