The Billionaire Murders

by Kevin Donovan

  * * *

  —

  “I’ve got bad news.”

  Joel Ulster, Barry Sherman’s oldest friend, was in the empty guest bedroom of his new Manhattan apartment, where he was meeting with contractors. He and his husband, Michael, had just purchased a new spot along the Hudson River, and there was a good deal of work to be done before move-in day. Joel and Barry had met in high school when they were sixteen. They had been business partners, friends, and confidants, and over the years Barry had provided generous advice and support to Joel’s four children from his first marriage and to Joel and Michael’s two adopted children.

  “Barry and Honey were murdered at home,” came the words over the cell phone from Toronto. “They found their bodies.”

  Ulster stepped away from the contractors. He could hear voices in the background at the caller’s end. It sounded like there were several people in the room all talking at once. He heard “murdered” again. A moment ago, he’d been thinking about renovations, where to put their mountain bikes in the apartment, what Broadway or off-Broadway play he and Michael would see next. Now, on the line from Toronto, was Mark Steiner. Mark’s father, Fred, was an old friend of Joel and Barry’s. The three of them had been business partners back when they were all just starting out in the early 1970s and they had remained close friends.

  “What are you saying…?” Ulster said, his voice trailing off. When he first heard Mark stammer he had bad news, he had feared that Fred had died.

  “They have been murdered. They are dead,” Mark repeated.

  Joel and Michael were to fly to Toronto that weekend for a dinner get-together with Barry and Honey. One of Joel’s sons had planned to treat the Shermans to thank them for their generosity in giving him advice and some financial support on his first foray into business. Two days later, when Joel was in Toronto with the grieving Sherman family and the restaurant called to ask if they were keeping the reservation for a large table, he could barely manage a reply. He still couldn’t believe he was in Toronto for a funeral and wasn’t about to sit down to dinner with his friend of fifty years.

  Yellow police tape went up around the entire Sherman property a few hours after the bodies were discovered. One end of it was tied to the large For Sale sign near the curb. On the street immediately to the north, a cruiser pulled into the driveway of the home that backed onto the Shermans’ house and officers got out to check the grounds of that property. On Old Colony, more uniformed officers arrived in marked cruisers, then detectives in suits driving unmarked cars, and finally forensic teams in white CSI-style overalls. Coroner Dr. David Giddens had been notified, and he arrived at the house. So too did a forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Pickup. Police took statements from those present, including a man, a personal trainer, who had a regular Friday afternoon appointment with Honey. He showed up at the yellow police tape and started sobbing when a bystander told him the news. A woman who lived across the street approached the police. Her home had two security cameras trained on her own property, but they picked up the Sherman home in the background. She and her husband had looked at the tape and seen something they thought police needed to have a look at. “We’ll send someone over, ma’am,” an officer said. Two days later, the helpful couple was still waiting, concerned that the seven-day loop on their system would be overwritten by the next week’s footage before police arrived. The Sherman home, like many on the street, lacked outdoor security cameras. There was a security video camera in the pool room, where the bodies were discovered, but it had never been set up.

  * * *

  —

  In an industrial area to the northwest—at a location referred to, in an admiring way by employees and a scoffing way by rivals, as “the corner of Barry and Sherman”—news of the founder’s demise reached the headquarters of Apotex, the generic drug firm that employed six thousand people in Canada. Sherman had built Apotex into a billion-dollar empire starting in the early 1970s with the help of Jack Kay. At her desk, Joanne Mauro was crying. Barry Sherman had hired her as a “girl Friday” for a summer forty-two years before, when she was in Grade 11. That job had become permanent when she graduated high school, and for all those years Mauro had been Sherman’s executive assistant. Honey Sherman’s sister, Mary, who had been looking for the Shermans that morning to arrange the showing of the house, had called Mauro at 9 A.M. She wasn’t overly concerned that she couldn’t track down Honey or Barry, just curious. A little over an hour later, Shechtman called back, her voice shaking. “Joanne, something’s happened. Something’s happened to them.”

  The Sherman family, including Barry and Honey’s four adult children, were informed over the next few hours. One of their children was away in Mexico; one had just returned from a trip to Japan; another had just had a baby; and the fourth was planning a wedding with Honey’s help. Barry’s sister, Sandra, who was with her husband in Palm Desert, California, received a call telling her that her brother was dead.

  Friends in the couple’s business and social circles began hearing whispers that something terrible had happened. Jack Kay, Barry Sherman’s second in command at Apotex for more than three decades, was in New York City with his wife and had just returned to his hotel from a shopping trip on Fifth Avenue when he got the news from Barry and Honey’s daughter Alex. Bryna Steiner, Honey Sherman’s oldest friend, received a call from the wife of Barry Sherman’s main lawyer, Harry Radomski. Bryna called her husband, Fred, at the office and said, “I have terrible news. I am coming over to tell you. Just sit tight.” The Steiners and Shermans had been the best of friends since a chance meeting in Florida in 1970 brought them together. After Bryna delivered the news to her husband, they both had the same thought. Had anybody told Joel Ulster, Barry’s oldest friend? The Steiners asked their son Mark, who was in the adjacent office, to make the call. Unlike the Sherman children, Mark had followed his father into the family business. In another part of Toronto, two women Honey counted among her closest of confidants learned the news. Honey and the two women—they jokingly called themselves Thelma, Thelma, and Louise—had just returned from an epic golf trip to South Carolina. Despite hip and shoulder replacements, arthritis, and other infirmities, Honey had driven most of the way, as she always insisted on doing, in her decade-old gold Lexus SUV.

  Like a dark cloud, the news travelled through the inner circles of the Sherman family and friends, but for a few hours it was kept from the public. Then, just before 4 P.M., the story broke in the Toronto media that two bodies had been found inside the home of Apotex founder Barry Sherman. A few minutes later, a tweet went out on social media from Dr. Eric Hoskins, Ontario’s health minister, who had dealt with the Shermans both professionally and as a friend. Television crews, reporters, and photographers rushed to Old Colony Road.

  Hoskins, who had heard the information earlier but waited until it became public, confirmed the identity of the bodies found in the Sherman home. He wrote on Twitter, “I am beyond words right now. My dear friends Barry and Honey Sherman have been found dead. Wonderful human beings, incredible philanthropists, great leaders in health care. A very, very sad day. Barry, Honey, rest in peace.”

  News travelled across the country and internationally. People who knew the Shermans stopped whatever they were doing and listened, then went online to search for information.

  Frank D’Angelo, movie producer, soft-drink maker, restaurateur, and the most unlikeliest of Barry Sherman’s friends, was driving north with his partner, Gemma, to spend a couple of days relaxing in Collingwood when Gemma, who had been idly looking at her phone, began crying in the passenger seat. She told him the news and D’Angelo almost drove into a ditch.

  Judi Gottlieb, the agent with the listing for the Shermans’ house and their friend for thirty years, was just walking into the Saks Fifth Avenue store in Miami when she heard. In the midst of her shock, her mind turned to the dozens of prospective buyers and the curious who had traipsed through the hou
se.

  Kerry Winter and his siblings, who were Barry Sherman’s cousins, had been locked in a bitter and very public legal fight seeking 20 percent of Sherman’s fortune. Winter made a phone call to another relative and raised the possibility that one of his brothers had “done it.”

  For the Sherman children, struggling with the enormity of what had happened, there was suddenly a void. As son Jonathon would say at the funeral service the following week, in the first two days after learning their parents were dead, the four siblings kept expecting them to walk through the door and say, “Everything will be fine.”

  “If ever a crisis would strike, we always had two people to call for help,” Jonathon Sherman would recall. “One would provide calmness, level-headedness, and perspective. And the other would instantly take charge of the situation.”

  The Sherman heirs’ thoughts turned to their own safety and the safety of people at Apotex. A private security company was retained to watch over the Sherman children and their families, as well as key Apotex employees.

  * * *

  —

  The snow continued to fall at Old Colony Road. Early in the evening, television cameras rolled as medical technicians with the coroner’s office wheeled two stretchers with body bags out of the residence, loaded them into black coroner’s wagons, and drove off.

  The bodies gone, two police officers got in front of the cameras to give statements to the media waiting outside the house. Reporters who had been working their sources had the belief, unconfirmed, that a double murder had been committed. The first officer to speak was Constable David Hopkinson, a uniformed officer in the public relations department of the Toronto Police Service.

  “The circumstances of their death appear suspicious, and we are treating it that way,” said Hopkinson, standing outside the home with a heavy police winter coat over his uniform and protective vest. He said police were inside “taking apart the scene right now,” and he invited anyone with information to contact the Toronto Police.

  A few hours later, Brandon Price, a detective from the Toronto Police homicide squad, emerged from the Sherman house to provide a second statement. It was dark, past the dinner hour. Price told reporters that detectives had found no sign of forced entry and were not currently looking for any suspects. His comments raised eyebrows among the reporters. Why would they not be looking for suspects? “I just wanted to alleviate some concerns in the neighbourhood,” Price said.

  Questioned further by reporters, the detective made the same point in a slightly different way. “At this point, indications are that we have no outstanding suspect to be going after.”

  The comments provoked more questions: With the house for sale, were the police looking into who had viewed the property? When were the Shermans last seen alive? How did they die? All Price would do, no matter the question, was repeat what he had already said. No suspects were being sought.

  The reporters were a mix of veterans and interns. The veterans grumbled at how, in the “old days,” police gave out a lot more information. The interns and a few of the veterans went door to door on the street, asking homeowners what, if anything, they knew. As deadlines approached, the reporters left to file their accounts of the mysterious deaths. On Saturday morning, one newspaper’s headline sent a second shock wave through the community and far beyond, to New York, London, Mumbai, Sydney, Hong Kong, and other major cities where the Shermans and Apotex had a connection.

  “Murder-Suicide Suspected in Deaths of Toronto Billionaire and Wife” was the bold headline in the print edition of the Toronto Sun tabloid. As the day wore on, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and all other media—television, radio, and online—had different takes on the same theme. Barry Sherman had strangled his wife and taken his own life, according to police sources.

  Having just landed in Toronto, his head in a fog, Joel Ulster took a call from his son Mark, who was at home looking at the Toronto Sun newspaper. “It’s not good, Dad,” Mark said. “What the newspaper is saying is not good. Are you sure you want to know?”

  TWO

  BEING BARRY

  “HEY, BUTTERBALL!”

  Bernard Sherman slouched low in his desk in the classroom at Forest Hill Collegiate, his black-framed glasses riding low on his nose. The teacher at the blackboard wanted his attention. The unflattering nickname had stuck; teachers and students alike used it. Doughy, round of face and body, with few friends and always tired, that was Sherman, a sixteen-year-old who seemed out of place in the boisterous class. “Sluggish” was another label applied to him by teachers. Sherman answered as briefly as possible and went back to looking down at his desk.

  The high school was located in the affluent Toronto neighbourhood of Forest Hill, north of Toronto’s downtown core. Forest Hill took its name from the summer home in the mid-1800s of a wealthy businessman, before urban sprawl took over, and the area surrounding the school was heavily treed, with winding streets that seemed in some parts to have their own mind and purpose. The houses were big by the standards of the day, with neatly kept gardens and lawns. In 1958, Bernard Sherman was one of about five hundred students in the relatively new, twenty-four-classroom school, built just after the Second World War and boasting a “new electrical sound system” and internal telephones so that teachers could speak to the office from the classrooms. The majority of the students were Jewish, sons and daughters of upwardly mobile parents, reflecting an influx of immigrants to Canada’s largest city and this particular part of Toronto. The school’s motto translated from Latin was “Not for ourselves alone,” and though there is no evidence that Bernard took notice of it during his five years at Forest Hill, many of the remarks Sherman would make about his philanthropy in the future would reflect that thought.

  In those days, Bernard Charles Sherman was only just starting to be called Barry. His mother liked the name but urged him in certain circumstances to use Bernard, because it sounded more distinguished and would serve him better as an adult. In later years, Honey would call him Chuck. Barry was born in Toronto on February 25, 1942, the son of Herbert and Sara Sherman. Sara was a Winter. Her younger brother, Lou, would, for a short time, figure prominently in Barry’s life, and Lou’s offspring would haunt him in and out of courts for the rest of his days. Herbert and Sara were themselves born in Canada, just after the turn of the century, when their own parents had separately fled anti-Semitism in Russia and Poland.

  In a reflective and never-finished memoir called “A Legacy of Thoughts,” penned by Sherman while on a vacation with his own family years later in Africa, he recalled how his “first ten years were unremarkable.” They had a good life but not an exciting life, he and his older sister, Sandra—who Sherman called Sandi—in their modest home in Forest Hill. Father Herbert was the president of the American Trimming Company, a small firm that made zippers. One Saturday morning, when Sherman was ten, his father took him to work, an unusual experience for the lad. Sherman asked his father what he could do. His father sat him at a table with a pile of zippers and told him they had to be counted into boxes of twenty.

  “In order to please him, I worked quickly,” Sherman recalled. So quickly that when his father checked some time later, he was surprised that many more zippers were boxed than could be done by his own paid staff in that amount of time. Herbert Sherman opened a few boxes to check the count, which offended Barry. The counts were all accurate.

  A few weeks later, Herbert went to work and did not come home. He had a massive heart attack in his office and died immediately. The Shermans learned that he’d had a congenital heart defect, which he had elected not to tell his family about. In his later musings, Sherman decided that his father had not informed his mother because he did not want to “burden” her with the concern. “Obviously, he should have told her,” Sherman wrote. Herbert had a small ownership interest in the zipper company but not enough to support two children when the interest was sold. Sara returned t
o work as an occupational therapist to support her family, a job she had given up when her children were born.

  The perpetual tiredness Barry felt at school would dog him his entire life, and no firm diagnosis to explain his lethargy was ever given. An early nickname coined by a Grade 5 teacher was Grandpa, followed by Butterball in high school. None of these taunts seemed to bother him. At both levels of school, Barry was often yelled at for letting his mind wander instead of focusing on the lesson on the board or in the books. For his entire life, he was plagued by insomnia. His close friends in later years said it was because his mind never shut off; he would lie in bed for hours, thinking, dreaming, and scheming. When sleep finally came, it was deep, and as a child he often had a hard time waking for school.

  One day, his homeroom teacher took his side and suggested to another teacher that perhaps they should go a bit easier on the boy. Sherman described the incident in his unfinished memoir. “I do not recall feeling any great sense of loss upon my father’s death. However, some weeks later, I was at school in a class being taught by a specialty teacher, and the teacher began to scold me for daydreaming and being inattentive. Coincidentally, at that moment, my homeroom teacher entered the room, and on hearing what was happening, said aloud to the specialty teacher that I had suffered ‘a recent family tragedy’ and should be excused for inattentiveness.” Sherman was surprised that his teacher even knew his father had died, but he did wonder if there was a correlation between losing his father and how he behaved in class. And a germ of a thought grew. “Although I do not know to what extent, if any, I was affected by my father’s death, a psychologist would likely suggest that the drive to achieve which I later exhibited was caused, at least in part, by a resulting insecurity.”