The Billionaire Murders

by Kevin Donovan

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  In the midst of Ulster’s personal crisis, Sherman and his partner continued to steer the company to greater heights. Empire was now profitable. New products and better versions of old products contributed to an increase in sales from $800,000 in 1967 to $2 million several years later. Empire was being noticed as a contender in the generic business, and not just by Canadians. Not long before Ulster was preparing to deliver his news to Cindy, a California-based company sent a representative to visit Empire. International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation (ICN) was in expansion mode and wanted to see if Empire would be a good fit. It had recently purchased Morris Goodman’s Montreal company, Winley-Morris. Goodman was now president of the renamed company, ICN Canada, and ICN wanted to expand by purchasing other firms. Sherman and Ulster were not sure if they were interested. They had spent several years turning around Empire, and they saw the opportunity for future growth if they continued on their own. On the other hand, the five-storey building on Lansdowne was tired. To renovate would be expensive. Improvements to the chipped, uneven floors alone would be an expensive task. The ideal atmosphere for making pharmaceuticals was completely sterile so that the various ingredients were not contaminated. The Lansdowne location might simply need too much of a capital investment. Sherman also believed that the operations in the building, a factory with constantly moving product spread out over five floors, was inefficient. When they received an offer of about $2 million from ICN, they set to work on the final points of the negotiation, and Sherman took a close look at the documentation provided by the US firm.

  “I wanted to be free to go back into the same business,” Sherman wrote in his memoir. Ulster recalls how Sherman devised a plan. ICN was stipulating that the shareholders in Empire would not be able to compete in the generic business for two years. What ICN did not know (apparently they never checked) was that neither Sherman nor Ulster, technically, were shareholders in their company. Instead, they each had a personal holding company that owned shares in Sherman and Ulster Ltd., which in turn owned shares in Empire. Sherman withheld the schedule that listed the shareholders in Empire until “the last minute” in the hope that ICN would not figure it out.

  “This worked out exactly as I hoped,” Sherman recalled. When the dust settled, taxes and debts paid, he and Ulster had each netted about $300,000. Ulster exited the new business, but Sherman stayed on to work as an executive for ICN, until something happened that would occur only once in his life. The ICN Canada president, Morris Goodman, sent Sherman to California for some meetings. The plan was to discuss the future growth of the combined organization. Goodman never heard the details from his American bosses, but it did not go well. Sherman apparently told ICN how to do their work better. “Sherman opened his big mouth,” Goodman says. “I got a call saying, ‘Fire the son of a bitch.’ I don’t know what he said.”

  A few weeks later, Goodman drove to Toronto to meet with Sherman, who, by his own account, knew what was coming.

  “I became the only person who ever fired Barry Sherman,” says Goodman. “When I fired him, I said, ‘You know, I don’t like firing people.’ Barry said, ‘Don’t worry, Morris. I was going to quit anyway.’ ”

  Goodman is now eighty-six and still involved in his own business, Pharmascience. His son David is the chief executive officer, and Pharmascience is the largest pharmaceutical employer in the province of Quebec.

  After he was fired, Sherman packed up his office and went home. Thanks to his sleight of hand on the ICN deal, he was free to start his own firm. He incorporated Sherman Technologies in 1973, which initially provided equipment for other pharmaceutical businesses, then morphed into a generic firm. Sherman invited Ulster to join him in the new venture, but Ulster declined, saying he was ready for a change. At Empire, the two men had shared an office with two desks and a long table between them. Each day, Joel would open his drawer and find a note from Sherman with suggestions as to what he should do that day, what was prudent not to do that day, or just general observations on the best way to handle Ulster’s side of the business.

  “He was a very strong presence to say the least,” Ulster says. “He didn’t know how to stand back and let you do it. He would tell you how to do it.”

  That rankled Ulster. He understood his friend was well-meaning, but he realized from those daily notes and the extreme effort that Sherman put into business, to the exclusion of all other pursuits, that in the long term they were not suited for a partnership. Ulster also found Sherman to be too much of a risk-taker, and that did not sit well with his more financially conservative attitude.

  “We had different objectives,” Ulster says. “I wanted to make money, be successful, and then have a life where I could do what I wanted to do, which was a lot of other things. I realized that I loved him, but it wasn’t for me.”

  Best friends, they would continue as partners in some enterprises, but not Sherman’s new foray into the pharmaceutical world. Ulster and Sherman were still teamed up with Fred Steiner in his coffee service business. Ulster and his future husband, Michael, who had a successful Toronto menswear store, worked in concert with Sherman in reinvesting some of their funds in second mortgages on commercial and residential properties. Those businesses would do well, and that, plus the cautious investment of his nest egg from the Empire sale, has funded a very comfortable but not lavish life for Ulster.

  Ulster’s final official contribution was to help Sherman name his new company. They tossed around some ideas the way they had bandied about monikers in school that combined parts of their names. The suffix tex was one they had always liked. The original word for a drugstore was apothecary, and so it was born: Apo-tex, which eventually became simply Apotex.

  The new business he started in 1974 was on a street off Weston Road called Ormont Drive, in an industrial area in the northwest of Toronto. Sherman built a small factory, taking advice from professionals on the best type of materials for the floors and walls, and ensuring they were sealed so that a sterile environment would be easier to maintain than at the old Lansdowne building.

  Fred Steiner was in the beginning stage of his own business, and Sherman took him aside and made him a proposition. “Why are you looking to lease space? I will never be able to use five thousand square feet. Move in with me,” Sherman said, adding it would be rent free.

  Over the next few years, the two men became close friends. As he did with Ulster’s children, Sherman took a strong interest in Steiner’s son and daughter from his first marriage, and eventually the daughter Fred and Bryna had together. Sherman wanted children of his own one day, but Honey had a series of miscarriages that delayed those plans. Bryna Steiner said she and Honey became pregnant at the same time, when the Steiners were living in Detroit before moving to Toronto permanently. Once a week, they would gab on the phone. Bryna’s pregnancy went as planned, but Honey miscarried. After that, Honey did not tell her friend when she was pregnant. Bryna could always tell when Honey was pregnant over the next few years, though, because she would quit smoking and stop playing tennis, fearful of another miscarriage. In 1975, Honey and Barry welcomed their daughter Lauren into the world. She would remain an only child for close to a decade.

  At the office, Steiner and Sherman discussed their businesses and politics, but never sports. Topics like sports would produce an explosion. Any mention of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto’s professional hockey team, would lead Sherman to opine at length on how ridiculous it was for someone to have an allegiance to a sports club. “That is the stupidest thing I ever heard,” he’d tell Steiner. “They are not Toronto Maple Leafs. Why do you root for them? What makes you root for one team over another? They are not from Toronto; they are a bunch of people from here, here, and here.” So vexed would Sherman get that he would dissect all parts of the allegiance, right down to the name of the team. “And why the ‘Maple Leafs’?” Sherman would shout. “It makes no sense.”
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  Discussions about politics resulted in more civil communication. Sherman taught the new Canadian resident (Steiner eventually became a dual citizen) the difference between the parliamentary system and the political structure in the United States. Sherman was a lifelong supporter of the Liberal Party of Canada, and he and Honey would from time to time host fundraisers at their home for local politicians and aspiring national leaders. He felt that the Liberals’ stated belief in a wide social safety net was most aligned to his own beliefs, though he hated paying taxes to support that net.

  One day, Steiner overheard a conversation that years later he would recognize as the beginning of Sherman’s philanthropy. Steiner had dropped by Sherman’s office, and they were “shooting the shit” when the telephone rang. Sherman motioned to Steiner to stay; it would be a brief conversation. As Steiner divined from listening in, it was a Toronto rabbi calling, and he had a problem. There was a Hebrew school that had a bus for disabled children. The bus had broken down. Sherman nodded, listening. The rabbi was talking a lot, pleading his case, and Steiner could hear the man’s voice, though Sherman had the receiver pressed close to his ear. “Hmm…yes…hmm, uh-huh…yes. How much is it? Okay, I’ll give it to you. But on one condition. Do not tell anybody where you got it.”

  SEVEN

  THE TRAIL

  THE MAN SEATED ACROSS FROM ME picked the knife up from his plate, and with a deftness that evoked the precision of a surgeon, he gently drew a slit down the centre of his second bran muffin, then buttered each side. The first bite he took was followed by a sharp slurp from his coffee cup. The volume appeared to be more than was intended, and the combination of liquid and muffin sent him into a deep coughing fit. A few dribbles of coffee escaped the corner of his mouth. Flecks from the first muffin, eaten the same way, were scattered down the front of his sports jacket, competing with its checked pattern. There was nobody else in the back corner of the restaurant. I waited.

  “Why should I help you?” he asked, drawing out each word.

  This was an excellent question. Why help a journalist?

  January 18, 2018: a little over a month after the Shermans died. In the diner where we had agreed to meet, the walls were lined with sports and entertainment memorabilia. A lot of diners have stock “signed” photos of Frank Sinatra and Bobby Orr and David Copperfield, but these looked authentic. My breakfast guest was staring at me, doing what my first partner decades before always called “a cop thing,” asking a question and following it up with silence. I decided to bite. I was close to getting a story and just needed a little more help.

  “I get the real story of the Sherman deaths out,” I said, “and maybe something good comes out of it.” I wanted to add something about “the truth” but figured that would sound too much like a prepared speech.

  “You can do better than that,” he said.

  I looked down at my empty coffee cup, then back up. “The Shermans have spent a lot of money pulling together this private investigation team. Ex-homicide guys. A pathologist. Lawyers. I am hearing four to five hundred dollars an hour for each person on the team. And lots of hours.”

  I watched to see if he would contradict me on the figure, but he did not. In my notebook, when I jotted down my recollections after our meeting, I called this man “Zero” as a code name. “The team has found out some stuff. From what my other sources say, important information the cops have missed or maybe just ignored. Why not help me put that information on the front page?”

  I had arranged this meeting looking for a third source to confirm, and perhaps add to, what I had already learned over the past two weeks about the manner in which Barry and Honey Sherman died. When you are pulling together strands of information that competing parties—police and family—want to keep secret, that is how it goes. Lots of meetings in coffee shops and bars. To some extent, journalists are like salesmen. We are selling our trustworthiness. Zero, my breakfast companion, brushed the crumbs off his lapels. This was the first time we had met, but he came well recommended as a source with knowledge of this case by several people.

  “I don’t mind helping you. But I am not in this,” he said. “Not in this at all. No name. No job identification. Nothing.”

  “You got it,” I said.

  “Or you’re finished.”

  I took that in and nodded. Having arrived at an agreement, albeit an uneasy one, we began. No notes. No tape recorder. Just talk.

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  My journey to this meeting in a Toronto diner had begun two weeks earlier. On January 5, 2018, my boss at the Toronto Star, editor-in-chief Michael Cooke, sent me an email. “I don’t know if you’re looking at the Sherman case—but JH dropped by with some info from someone he termed ‘absolutely close to the family.’ ” JH is John Honderich. He and his family are the leaders of a group of five families that have a controlling interest in Torstar, a publicly owned media company that owns the Toronto Star. Honderich is the company chairman. Both he and Cooke are also legendary newsmen with, as the old saying goes, ink in their veins. If they sensed a bigger story, it was most likely a bigger story.

  Full confession here. When news first broke of the Sherman bodies being found, followed up the next day by the murder-suicide story in the Toronto Sun and then my own paper and others, I believed the theory. I knew very little about Barry Sherman and had never heard of his wife, but I did know from thirty-four years of covering and investigating various elements of the human tapestry that sometimes people snap. On my own and with various partners, and as the leader of the investigative team at the Star for a big chunk of my career, I have rubbed up against many seemingly bizarre events. Parents who lose it and kill their children. Children who kill their parents. Top executives who are well paid but rob their company or the government blind. Husbands and wives who run out of patience and turn to murder. Religious leaders who sodomize little boys and then are protected by their organization, which covers up the crimes. A cult leader who hacks off a devotee’s arm, disappears into the forest in small-town Ontario, and is later found to have killed another follower, after he impregnated all the female members of his cult and fathered twenty-six children.

  My point is, bad things happen, and sometimes outwardly good people have a dark side. I knew only that Barry Sherman was the founder and owner of Apotex. I knew nothing about his personal life. On January 5, when Cooke assigned me to sniff around, I knew only what I had read in the media, beginning with the blockbuster article by Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington the day after the bodies were discovered. When I read that piece, I believed that he was correct in reporting that the police considered it a murder-suicide. While I have often criticized the police over the years, I did not believe that the Toronto Police Service could get something so wrong. This was not, after all, just any pair of deaths. The Shermans were very wealthy people whose deaths, given the way the world works, would likely be given high priority. It seemed to me that the police and the media must have got it right. My wife, to her credit, told me I was wrong.

  “Tell me one time when two billionaires died like this in a murder-suicide,” she said.

  “It happens all the time,” I shot back.

  “Name one other case,” she said. “One case of murder-suicide like this.”

  I did some online checking and talked to experts I knew in policing and pathology. Nothing. Sure, husbands killed wives and then themselves. Usually a gun was involved for both deaths, or the wife was bashed over the head and the husband shot himself. Sometimes the husband killed the wife then set fire to the house while he was still inside. But with both deaths attributed to strangulation, or “ligature neck compression,” this type of murder-suicide just did not happen. If it had happened in the Sherman case, the mechanics of it were not clear to me. At the time, the media reports said the couple were found hanging in the pool room, but there was no clarity on the positioning of the bodies. The word han
ging conjures up an image of being hung from a height, high enough for a drop of some distance and for the legs to swing free. Was that what happened? Nobody was saying. There was another reason the whole murder-suicide or double suicide by strangulation theories did not make sense. Given the nature of Barry Sherman’s business, wouldn’t pills be the obvious method?

  Beyond the initial reporting in December, not much else was known publicly. Yet there was a tremendous interest in the case. At the Toronto Star, our reporters, most notably intern Victoria Gibson, had written fascinating stories on the litigious nature of Barry Sherman. In one example, Gibson had unearthed court documents showing that the Shermans’ house was the subject of a lawsuit years before and that Sherman had come close to recouping the entire cost to build the home. Stories like that were interesting, but none of the journalism produced in the three weeks since the bodies were discovered had tackled the central issue: Was it murder-suicide, double suicide, or double homicide?

  As it turned out, one of my wife’s friends knew the Shermans in passing and was close with people who knew the deceased couple. She called to pass on her thoughts. “People who knew the Shermans are saying there is no way, not even a chance, that it is murder-suicide,” she said. “You should look into this.”

  Assigned to this story by my wife, her friend, and now my editor, the question was how to find out what was going on behind the scenes. The Sherman family had buried Barry and Honey and hired a private investigation team to conduct an unheard-of, at least in Toronto police history, mirror investigation. Leading the charge was Brian Greenspan, one of Canada’s top criminal lawyers. Greenspan and I had clashed over a number of high-profile cases. Once, he held a press conference outside a courthouse and denounced me because of stories I had written about one of his clients. I was pretty sure Greenspan and his team would be of no help, at least not initially.