Henry Lee

Henry Lee’s role in the book is tied to a forensic question about a purported letter from Jimmy Hoffa: could the document authenticate itself as a genuine 1974 letter, or would examination reveal a falsehood? Lee’s laboratory was first approached to test the signature and seek latent prints; its eventual examination instead exposed a forgery that had been kept as potential insurance by Frank Sheeran.

The letter and the proposed examination

Two nights before a meeting at which Sheeran would describe the house where he said he killed Hoffa, he handed the author a typewritten letter purportedly signed by Hoffa in 1974. Some of its contents repeated Sheeran’s account; other passages could support a version of events he had promoted with John Zeitts. The author said he would check whether it was authentic.

The author then contacted the forensic laboratory associated with Lee. The lab said it could determine whether Hoffa’s signature was authentic and could seek latent Hoffa fingerprints, but it would need reference prints and handwriting exemplars from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Because the book had not yet been written or acquired by a publisher, the author did not want to alert the agency and risk a leak. He set the examination aside.

The forgery exposed

After a publisher became involved, the author shared his correspondence with Lee’s laboratory. The publisher contacted the lab and sent it the letter. The examination did not require fingerprint or handwriting exemplars: under special light, the document proved to be a forgery. The paper had been manufactured in 1994, not 1974, and the signature had been inked over a faint photocopy of an authentic Hoffa signature.

The result mattered beyond the document’s physical defects. Although the letter was not central to the book and could have been removed, the publisher canceled the project. The author’s editor still believed Sheeran had killed Hoffa, but the forged letter compromised confidence in the material surrounding that claim. Lee’s laboratory thus supplied a concrete test of a document that threatened to contaminate the larger account, rather than a forensic verdict on Hoffa’s killing.

A document as insurance

When confronted, Sheeran conceded that the letter had given him insurance: if pressure became too great or a grand jury was convened, he could expose the forgery and try to discredit the rest of the book. The finding therefore altered the meaning of the letter. It was not simply an unreliable piece of purported corroboration; in Sheeran’s explanation, it was a contingency he could use to retreat from his account.

The book distinguishes this examination from its other forensic claims. The later blood testing at the house and DNA identification of a hair recovered from a Mercury were separate inquiries, not work attributed to Lee or his laboratory. Lee’s documented contribution is narrower but consequential: the laboratory’s examination established that the purported Hoffa letter was materially inconsistent with its claimed date and bore a copied signature, exposing a means by which Sheeran could undermine his own confession.