The Billionaire Murders

by Kevin Donovan

  The younger doctor told Chiasson he wanted to be helpful. Physically, the two men were polar opposites. Pickup was young, slender, with dark hair, a big smile, and tortoiseshell glasses. Chiasson was a big man, almost completely bald, with a salt-and-pepper moustache and an almost perpetual scowl. Both men wore sterile medical gloves. Pickup produced a folder containing photos and diagrams and spread them out on a table. The photos showed the scene where the bodies were found as well as pictures taken during the first autopsy. Chiasson looked them over, and as he worked, he referred to the photos.

  From his conversation with Pickup, and from the police news release, Chiasson knew ligature neck compression had been determined as the medical cause of death. He was curious to see the condition of the horseshoe-shaped hyoid bones in both necks he was going to examine. Though not conclusive, the condition of the hyoid bone would inform his determination. There were those in the forensic pathology world who believed that to make a ruling of murder by strangulation it was imperative that the hyoid bone be fractured. But twenty years earlier, Chiasson and Michael Pollanen, now the province’s chief forensic pathologist, had authored a study that proved this was not the case. They found the bone was fractured in only one-third of the cases of homicide by strangulation. In the other two-thirds, an intact hyoid was found to be related to several factors, including the pressure that was used on the neck, the condition of the hyoid bone to begin with, and the type of ligature that was used. The softer the ligature wrapped around the neck, the less likely the hyoid bone was to fracture. Compounding this, and creating further confusion, was how age factored in. In the two-decade-old study, Chiasson and Pollanen had found that the older the victim, the more likely the hyoid bone was to fracture in a homicidal strangulation.

  Barry Sherman’s hyoid bone had been removed in the earlier autopsy by Pickup. But through information provided to Chiasson that day, he came to understand that neither Barry nor Honey’s hyoid bone was fractured. Chiasson wondered if that was why police thought it was a murder-suicide. As he had shown with his research years before, a murder with a soft ligature could leave an intact hyoid. Later in the day, Chiasson looked at the death scene photos Pickup had brought to the autopsy suite. The Shermans were in a seated position, legs outstretched away from the pool, with jackets on but pulled down off the shoulder. A belt was looped around each person’s neck, with the end of each belt fed through the buckle and the end then looped or tied around the metre-high railing they were positioned against. The leather belts would qualify as a soft ligature. If pressure was applied firmly but not suddenly, the hyoid would likely not fracture. Chiasson, who would later discuss his findings with Cairns, did not see how the murder-suicide theory could work. While it was theoretically possible that one of the two had strangled the other and then staged the body, the other person could not have died by strangulation simply by looping the belt over the rail and sitting down. There would not be enough weight or downward force. The retired detectives present in the room agreed.

  During the dual autopsies, Chiasson also paid close attention to the wrists. When he began his examination of the bodies, he had noted that skin biopsies had been taken from the wrists, which Pickup had done to determine the age of the markings. It appeared they were fresh, but a laboratory test would narrow the time frame. The bodies had remained undiscovered for two days, however, which might skew the timeline. Chiasson consulted Pickup’s photos. From the abrasions that were present in the photographs, it looked, and Pickup agreed, like some sort of rope or plastic tie had bound the wrists. Checking the police photos of the death scene, Chiasson did not see any indication that there were ropes or ties near the bodies. Others in the room speculated that the Toronto Police were searching the sewers to see if—and this seemed a fruitless task—ropes or ties had been flushed down a toilet and into the sewer system.

  As Pickup had done several days before, Chiasson took fluid samples to check for the existence of drugs, beyond what a seventy-year-old woman and seventy-five-year-old man would be expected to have in their systems. Those samples were rushed to a US lab, and the results were back in forty-eight hours, weeks before the backlogged Ontario laboratory used by the police reported on their results. Chiasson’s samples showed there were no drugs in either body (“on board” is the pathology slang) that would have killed the pharmaceutical mogul or his wife.

  It looked to Chiasson as if the Shermans were the victims of a bizarre double murder by persons unknown. In discussions with Pickup and others that day, Chiasson got the impression that the police detectives present at the first autopsies had made up their minds that it was a murder-suicide, with Barry strangling Honey, then hanging himself. That notion—and this became a hotly discussed topic among lawyer Brian Greenspan, the private detectives, and Chiasson over the next few days—seemed, at least on its face, ridiculous. It was quite possible the police had formed this theory because Honey Sherman had injuries to her face and Barry Sherman did not. According to that theory, Barry had struck his wife to subdue her, then strangled her. But Chiasson knew there could be a wide range of reasons why one would have injuries to the face and the other did not. The attackers could have injured Honey Sherman, for example, and for some reason not hit Barry Sherman. As some of the private team speculated, perhaps attackers had demanded something from Barry and beaten Honey to try to convince him. The fatal flaw in that theory was that the wound to Honey’s face occurred either immediately before or after death, as no bruise formed.

  When Chiasson and the private detectives reported their findings to Greenspan, the conclusion was this: it was a professional hit. Some person or persons had murdered both Shermans in a deliberate and apparently professional attack, then had staged the bodies to make it look like they had killed themselves, or like one had killed the other. For some unknown reason, Barry Sherman’s body had been arranged almost as if he were in “repose,” the word one source later used to describe the serene way he was positioned: one leg crossed over the other in a relaxed-looking fashion, glasses not at all askew. If the killers had struck on Wednesday night and intended to make it look like a murder-suicide, one possible reason for doing that, the team decided, was to buy the killers time to escape. The ironic part of this theory was that, due to a perfect storm of inattentiveness on the part of the Sherman family, friends, realtors, and business and charity colleagues, it was not necessary, as other than the few people who emailed or called, nobody had physically checked on the couple for two days.

  Chiasson’s findings from these second autopsies would not be considered by the Toronto Police for almost six weeks. It was the beginning of an awkward relationship between the Sherman family and the police. Though Greenspan and his team offered information to the detectives, the police showed no interest until a Toronto Star story outlining the findings prompted them to contact Chiasson. As a result, the funeral the next day took place under a cloud of very public suspicion that Barry Sherman killed his wife then hanged himself.

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  —

  On the day of Chiasson’s autopsies, Justice Leslie Pringle of the Ontario Court of Justice was presented with a request by the Toronto Police to access telephone records held by Rogers Communications, a provider of cellular telephone, television, and internet service. It was the first batch of at least thirty-five separate requests for judicial authorization for search warrants or production orders in the Sherman investigation. The documents underlying all the requests to Pringle remain sealed by court order, but it is likely that the production order served to Rogers (one of the few made public during three Toronto Star challenges for access to the records where we were allowed to see the target of the production order) was for the cell phone records of Barry and Honey Sherman. Redactions to the document prevented us from confirming this. In Canada, as in the United States and many other jurisdictions, police need a judicial authorization to access private information, including data from cell phones. Modern cell phones c
an yield many clues in a police investigation, not just the obvious history of calls and text messages. The iPhone Honey used and the BlackBerry that was Barry’s constant companion would tell the police, through GPS, where each of them was at specific times of the day and night, or at least where the phone was.

  To obtain the records from Rogers, a judge had to be satisfied that the police had probable cause to access the records. Three kinds of judicial authorizations are available to police: to enter a private property, police require a search warrant; to access phone or, for example, banking records, police need a production order; and a third type of warrant gives police the authority to wiretap a person’s phone.

  For all warrants, a judge or justice of the peace must review an “information to obtain,” or ITO, and determine if the information police have in the document justifies issuing a warrant. An ITO is a police document setting out everything the police have learned to date that would convince a judge to issue a warrant or production order. For example, if the police wanted to obtain records proving that a person had purchased a knife at a particular hardware store, the ITO could include the synopsis of a police interview with the owner of the store saying that, yes, Person X was in their store on a given day and bought a knife. The other piece of information the police are required to put before a judge deals with the type of offence being investigated. Using the knife example, if police believed that someone had been stabbed in a bar fight, police would tell a judge they were investigating a case of attempted murder. While the majority of the thirty-five Sherman ITOs remain sealed at time of writing, enough has been released to show that in the early days, police were seeking Barry and Honey’s medical records. They were also seeking from someone a series of telephone and banking records, and, intriguingly, information from two airline loyalty programs. Other than the medical records, the seal extended to the owner of the other records being sought. Police were interested in someone’s flights and bank records. Whose, they did not want anyone to know. The documents obtained by the Toronto Star in a series of court applications in the months after the Shermans died show that when the police first sought search warrants and production orders, they were investigating only that “Honey Sherman was a victim of a murder.” It would be well over a month before one of the police applications identified both Barry and Honey Sherman as murder victims.

  What was also surprising to anyone taking a hard look at the first days and weeks of the Toronto Police investigation were the many actions not taken by detectives. Police were well aware that Dr. Chiasson, a veteran forensic pathologist, had conducted a second set of autopsies, yet for five weeks they did not contact him to determine his findings and conclusions. In the case of samples and fingerprints taken from the death scene, there was no attempt for many months to obtain DNA samples and fingerprints from people who had recently seen the Shermans or been to their house. That is considered good detective work that helps exclude innocent people so that police can focus on any unidentified DNA found at the crime scene, which in turn could lead to a suspect. For example, the personal trainer who routinely visited the house for Monday and Wednesday morning sessions with the Shermans was not asked for a sample of her DNA until late August, eight months after the police investigation began. Some were never contacted at all. The father of the man Kaelen Sherman was engaged to worked in the elevator repair business and, as a favour to Honey, he had spent dozens of hours at 50 Old Colony Road that fall repairing a mechanical dumbwaiter that had never worked. The small elevator travelled the vertical height of the house, ending in Honey’s closet. “My fingerprints and DNA would be all over and yet they never contacted me,” the father recalled. People who were close to the Shermans were not interviewed for months. Among them was Jeremy Desai—the Apotex CEO who took part in an email exchange with Sherman the Wednesday night just hours before he was killed and would presumably have pertinent information and who was not interviewed for almost two months. Meanwhile, the security camera footage taken from Apotex and footage from two cameras across from the murder scene sat at a police station on a mass storage device for more than one month until it was viewed. Something as obvious as the old-fashioned real estate lockbox looped through the door handle of the Shermans’ front door was only checked several days after the discovery of the bodies because Judi Gottlieb, the Shermans’ agent, called police to ask if the key was inside. “I called the Sunday night and told police. They hadn’t checked it. I gave them the code and they looked and said, yes, the key was there.”

  None of this information regarding the police missteps was known to the Sherman family or the public in the first six weeks following the December 2017 deaths. Toronto Police continued to investigate the case with a strong focus on their original assumption that Barry killed Honey and then killed himself. When the media asked the police for updates between December 15 and mid-January, police would say nothing. The Sherman family and their friends, when asked to comment, said that murder-suicide was not possible. Beyond the general belief that the couple had a good relationship and it would have been completely out of character for Barry Sherman to commit an act of violence, other reasons to dismiss the notion were put forward. Since it was generally understood that Honey was attacked in another part of the house and moved to the pool, down a long set of winding stairs and then across ten metres of floor, friends said that Barry simply lacked the physical ability. Honey weighed 170 pounds, and it seemed impossible that Sherman could have moved her body. In a bit of gallows humour, it was said by close friends who knew of her toughness and inner strength that if anybody had the ability to kill the other and move the body, it was Honey Sherman.

  SIX

  BEGINNINGS

  “BARRY,” FRED STEINER SAID, looking around Sherman’s office, “define exactly what your business is.” To call the place cluttered would be an understatement. Bankers boxes and stacks of papers crowded every surface. Steiner could see that some of the papers were covered with the scrawl of scientific calculations.

  “Well,” Sherman said, “it’s very simple. I’m a counterfeiter. I take other people’s pills and I make them cheaper.”

  Steiner laughed, running his fingers through the thick, wiry hair he proudly called his “Brillo pad.” He was not yet sure what to make of Sherman. When they first met, the previous year, he’d thought, Well, he seems okay. Bright guy. But he would never be one of my best friends. He was wrong.

  The road that led Steiner into business with Sherman, and to one of his closest friendships, started with the death of Steiner’s first wife. Born to parents who fled Austria in 1938 and settled in Detroit, Steiner married at an early age. He and his wife had two children. In her early twenties, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died a few years later. By December 1970, Steiner was feeling lost. He had two children under seven years old, a boy and a girl, and was struggling to find his niche in a variety of restaurant ventures. He had a teacher’s certificate and was a substitute teacher at several Detroit schools, which helped pay the bills.

  During the winter holidays, Steiner took his children to Florida for a break, where they checked in at the Newport Beach Hotel. He was a thirty-year-old man who’d had modest financial success but was still looking for his big break. One afternoon by the pool, his four-year-old daughter had to go to the bathroom. He felt she was too old to take her into the men’s room, and he certainly could not go into the women’s. He spotted two attractive young women—“nice, cute girls”—and asked if they could help him out. The women were Honey Reich and Bryna Fishman, on one of their getaways. They helped Steiner’s daughter, after which the three adults spent a pleasant afternoon lounging around the pool. Reich mentioned that her boyfriend, Barry—she called him Chuck, because his middle name was Charles—was flying down later in the week, the four had several dinners together, and got to know each other.

  “I looked at Barry and thought, interesting guy, nice guy,” Steiner recalls. “But he wasn’t my ty
pe. You could see he was more of an academic. I was more of a streetwise guy. School was never my thing.”

  Back in Detroit, Steiner was at a family get-together with his children and his late wife’s family, and one of his in-laws was looking at photos from the Florida trip. “Who is this?” she asked, seeing Bryna Fishman’s face appear throughout the album. “Just a girl I met down in Florida” was the reply.

  Fred and Bryna were married seven months later, on July 4, 1971. Barry and Honey had been married two days before, at a Toronto courthouse, but they waited for Bryna and Fred’s wedding before leaving on their honeymoon. The two couples remained best friends until the Shermans’ deaths. The Steiners lived for a brief time in Detroit, but they returned to Toronto within two years and have lived there ever since.

  Toronto in the early 1970s was an eye-opener for Steiner. It was quite different from Detroit, where riots and gun violence were commonplace. He was teased when he told his new Toronto neighbours that he locked his doors at night. But Steiner was amazed by the welcome he and Bryna were given, particularly by Barry Sherman. One day, he visited Sherman at Empire and told him he was planning to buy a business but had no idea what it would be. He was looking for a sounding board. Other people had promised to invest with Steiner but one after another dropped off.

  “Fred, if you find a business that’s the right one, then do it. I’ll be partners with you,” Sherman said. Steiner had no footprint in Canada, no credit history north of the US border, nothing more than a stated desire to succeed. As Sherman would do for many people over the next fifty years who showed similar enthusiasm, he provided financial backing. The business relationship with Steiner would prove the most stable Sherman ever had outside of his own company, Apotex. The deal that Steiner eventually made was to purchase a small firm that delivered coffee, water, and soft drinks to offices in downtown buildings. Joel Ulster joined the partnership at Sherman’s suggestion, with each of the three men investing $25,000. It was the early 1970s, and the concept of contracting with an outside company to provide a beverage service to an office suite was becoming big business in the United States, but it was relatively unknown in Canada. The company the trio purchased had 175 accounts. By 2017, when Sherman died, Imperial Coffee had 15,000 contracts across Ontario, supplying product and providing and servicing thousands of high-end coffee machines. All three men were still partners, though Sherman had sold the majority of his shares to Steiner’s son Mark at a generously low price. Mark Steiner eventually became president of his father’s company.