It's blood, but it's not from Hoffa



DNA proved the blood was not from the missing Teamsters leader.
DETROIT (AP) -- Blood found on the floor of a Detroit home is not that of Jimmy Hoffa, investigators said Monday, ruling out what had looked like one of the most promising recent leads in the disappearance of the Teamsters boss 30 years ago.
Authorities had ripped up floorboards last May at a house where Delaware Teamsters official Frank Sheeran said he shot Hoffa to death.
Police in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Township received a report from the FBI crime lab Monday concluding that human blood from a male was on the floorboards but that the blood was not Hoffa's.
Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca said that it was not known whose blood it was, but that the DNA would be entered into a national database.
"It really would be nice to put some closure on this case," Gorcyca said.
Skeptical of the lead
Police Chief Jeffrey Werner said investigators and prosecutors were skeptical of the lead from the beginning but were obligated to pursue it after Fox News Channel claimed that its own investigation had turned up blood on the floor.
"I feel like we're exactly where we were the day before we got the tip," Werner said.
Hoffa was last seen on July 30, 1975, at a restaurant in Bloomfield Township. Sheeran died in 2003, and his claim was detailed in a book titled "I Heard You Paint Houses," published months later by biographer Charles Brandt.
Forensics
Brandt said Sheeran's version of events is corroborated in other ways. He said forensic experts hired by Fox News found "a pattern of blood, indications of blood, exactly matching what Frank Sheeran said he had done to Jimmy Hoffa."
He said the blood tested by the FBI must have been from another incident. But Werner said the FBI tested the exact spots that Fox's experts had pinpointed.
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