The Billionaire Murders

by Kevin Donovan

  The gist of Michael Cooke’s email to me was this: our mutual boss, Honderich, who, compared to most journalists, travels in rarefied circles, had been hearing from people who knew the Shermans that the police had it completely wrong. Cooke’s note presented me with three pieces of information, but I was not given the source or sources. First, that it was a double murder. Second, the motive might be connected to a land deal “which went badly wrong.” Third, that the Shermans may have been murdered as payback for a lawsuit involving bitter family members, cousins who, the note said, “challenged [Sherman] in court and lost…and Sherman called in the loans on their homes.”

  To me, the first relevant question to be answered was the manner of their deaths. If it really was murder-suicide, it hardly mattered if there was a bad land deal or some upset cousins. That would fall under the category of “nice-to-know information,” as a cop once called revelations that are interesting but not germane to an investigation. The real challenge was to determine if the police theory of murder-suicide held water. To figure this out, I needed to learn everything about their deaths, including who found the bodies, when they were discovered, how they were positioned, specific details on the cause of death, whether there were any other markings on the bodies, and whether drugs were a factor.

  In most cases, in fact in every other case I have reported on, the first source a reporter turns to is the family. In December 1988, a black teenager in Mississauga, west of Toronto, was shot dead by Peel Regional Police officers. Wade Lawson had stolen a car. The initial press release stated that Lawson, aged seventeen, had driven the car directly at officers and the police fired six shots. One hollow-point bullet—designed to have maximum stopping power, because it expands and flattens on impact—struck Lawson in the head. I was a young reporter at the time, just three years into my career. The shooting happened overnight. Early the next morning, working the phones from the Toronto Star offices before heading out into the field, I called through to the hospital where Lawson, barely alive, was being treated. With the help of our now defunct switchboard at the Star, I was suddenly speaking to Wade’s father. He told me how devastated he was, and how angry he was at the police. Before I said goodbye, I questioned him on his son’s injuries. Lawson was in critical care and would soon die. The hollow-point bullet had, as its design intended, caused maximum damage. I told Mr. Lawson I had heard from the police that his son had been driving towards the officers. Just to be sure I had the correct details, I asked where in the front of his head the bullet had entered. Mr. Lawson paused, then he told me that the bullet had entered the back of his son’s head. It proved a key piece of information, as it was evidence that Lawson was driving away from the officers when shot. The story made the front page the next day. Here was a man who, at the worst possible moment in his life, had spoken to a reporter and answered what in retrospect was an important but very brutal question about the son he loved. (Both police officers were later charged—one with manslaughter, the other with aggravated assault—and acquitted.)

  The Sherman family had a vastly different approach. No one in the large extended family—the four adult children, Barry and Honey’s siblings, nieces, and nephews—would speak to reporters. At the funeral, which received widespread coverage, son Jonathon railed against the “unreliable news media,” saying that his family “had to navigate through a terrifying maze of non-information and unfounded speculation.”

  For now, it was clear the family would not be providing any information. The story was still out there that Barry killed Honey, and the Sherman children did not want the media’s help in discovering if that was true. This was outside my understanding, as families typically speak to the media. I tried to fathom why the Shermans distrusted the media so much. Honey Sherman, according to her golf friends and trainer, not only regularly read the newspapers, the Toronto Star was her favourite. Every morning, when Barry Sherman opened his front door to collect a paper from the doorstep, it was the Star he picked up. Yet I was aware that my paper had published stories unflattering to Apotex, including investigations by my team that looked at how regulators had discovered impurities in Apotex production facilities in India. The Star’s Jacques Gallant had also, just a few months before the Shermans’ deaths, published a lengthy piece on the upcoming court challenge by the Winter cousins, who were seeking $1 billion from Sherman.

  It was not just the Toronto Star writing those stories. Over the years, other media had produced stories that could be deemed negative. One series of stories dealt with complaints of improper lobbying made by the citizen advocacy group Democracy Watch, which alleged it was wrong for Sherman, registered with the government as a lobbyist for Apotex, to host a gala fundraiser at his home for Liberal leader Justin Trudeau in 2015 during the campaign in which Trudeau was later elected prime minister. There was also widespread coverage of Sherman’s long battle with a researcher over a controversial drug treatment. Generally, and this is confirmed by Apotex public relations chief Jordan Berman, if Sherman or Apotex was in the news, the coverage was not favourable. Though in all these cases the media was truthfully reporting on actual events, the Sherman children were uncooperative when approached about their parents’ deaths.

  I set about looking for anyone in the field of policing, private detection, or forensics who might possibly have picked up some information. Even a tidbit I could use to leverage another interview. It is a reality of investigative reporting that a journalist cannot simply call up a source and compel them to provide information. Sometimes, the best way to get information is to tell a source what you already know. This makes the new source more at ease and encourages that person to see it as only confirming, not revealing. I also began speaking to people who knew the Sherman family and had been in touch with them, to find out what the children and other family members had learned from police and the two sets of autopsies: the official post-mortems and the post-mortems conducted by the family’s hired pathologist. When I began, I did not even know that pathologist’s name. I did this on the premise that a fundamental aspect of human nature is a desire to communicate what you know. When a person learns something, he or she cannot help but pass that information on to others. A good reporter recognizes that and gathers information from the outside in, always tracing and trying to verify, in the hope of getting to the original source and the best information.

  One of the people who had helped me over the years on various stories was Dr. Jim Cairns, Ontario’s former deputy chief coroner. The native of Ireland had a deep belief that the justice system occasionally needed the assistance of the media to right wrongs or provide a focus where one was lacking. Though retired from government service, Cairns was someone I and other journalists went to for advice, context, and suggestions on how to research a story involving a mysterious death. He had been at the centre of many of the highest profile cases in Ontario history and had consulted internationally for years on suspicious deaths. He had many friends and contacts in the forensic and policing community and kept in touch with them. Despite being retired, he was still in the game. I had phoned Cairns to see if he could help me understand the science of ligature compression, the medical cause of death for both of the Shermans. As we spoke in general about ligature compression and the Shermans, I could tell Cairns was speaking from certainty rather than speculation, and I asked him if he was involved in the case. There was a long pause, and I imagined Cairns, on the other end of the line, crinkling his eyebrows. “Kevin,” he said, his Irish lilt strong, “as a matter of fact, I am.” With his help, and the help of other sources with knowledge of the case, I gained enough understanding to seek confirmation and elaboration of key details in the deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman.

  Twelve days after being assigned to the story, I sat in the diner with Zero. The waiter poured me a fresh coffee. Zero put a hand over his own cup and waved him off. “One’s enough for me.”

  I reached into the pocket of my coat, which was hanging on the back
of my chair. I watched Zero tense, then relax when he saw the paper printout in my hand. I unfolded the paper and spread it on the table. It was a photo taken from the internet, a real estate shot, because the house had been listed for sale. The photo was a panoramic view of the Sherman pool in the basement level of the home.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “All the stories I have read say Barry and Honey were found hanging in the pool room. Hanging from what? The railing?”

  “Yup.”

  The photo showed a stainless steel safety handrail around one end of the pool, its vertical posts bolted close to the edge.

  “You can’t hang yourself from three feet high,” I said.

  Zero chuckled. “You’ve got that right.”

  I decided to push him a little bit. “Were their legs in the pool? Is that the way they were facing?”

  “Huh?”

  I said nothing.

  “Oh, no, not in the pool. Look, their legs were facing away from the pool. Stretched out in front.”

  I referred to something one of my sources had said. “Guy I talked to who knows the family said they were ‘in repose.’ ”

  Zero’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what the fuck ‘in repose’ means. They were sitting upright, held upright, legs out front.”

  “Held up by belts?”

  “Yup. Two men’s belts.”

  “Both his?”

  “Well, he sure as fuck wasn’t wearing two men’s belts. One was his. The other, nobody knows where the other one came from.”

  The waiter came by. I asked for a refill, though I was swimming. Zero allowed another splash. Keep him drinking coffee, I thought. Keep him here.

  Zero took a sip. “Look, hanging is the wrong word. Don’t use hanging. Hanging gives the wrong idea.” He sat back in his chair, wiped a napkin over his face, then hunched forward and lowered his voice. He asked me if I knew that the family had its own post-mortems done.

  “Chiasson,” I said, trying the name of a person Cairns had told me had done the post-mortems. “Dr. David Chiasson.”

  “You have good sources. Yup. He’s a big deal, apparently. The whole private team was present, of course, but he was the guy with the scalpel, so he gets the credit. What he found…” Zero leaned in even closer. A woman doing a quick mop of the floor had come too near for his comfort. He waited until she had moved on. “What he found was that they were strangled with something soft, as in a belt is soft. Or maybe something else, but most likely the belt. But they were strangled with enough force to shut off the windpipe, but not enough to crack anything.”

  A medical term popped up from something one of my other sources had said. “Hyoid bone.” I said it as a statement, not a question.

  This time he looked right into my eyes. “Who have you been talking to?”

  I gave him silence back.

  “Okay, I get it. You can’t betray a source. I like that, for obvious reasons. You are right. The hyoid bone was not broken.”

  “Hyoid bone gets broken when?” I asked, wanting to see how much he knew.

  He picked up a napkin and took out a pen. He drew what I gathered was a neck and then he drew a U shape, the hyoid bone. “To fracture it, from what I understand, you need something really strong, certainly not a soft ligature like a leather belt. It also gets fractured in an old-fashioned hanging, where the person is dropped from a height. That is not what happened here. They were strangled enough to choke off their wind. That’s all.”

  “Which is what happens in suicide?”

  “But this was not a suicide. There are other things,” Zero said.

  “Their hands?”

  “More specifically, their wrists.”

  “I hear there are markings that showed they were tied behind their backs.”

  “Careful,” he said. He put his hands in front of him, wrists together, then put them behind his back, also together. Both times, he turned the wrists so that a different part of one wrist was touching the other wrist. “You try and tell me how they were tied. Nobody knows. There are marks, sort of abrasions from something, but only on one side of the wrists. It is not clear if the wrists were tied in front or in back.”

  “By a rope?”

  “I would not say rope for sure. Could be something plastic made the marks.”

  Thinking back to something I had seen the military use on prisoners when I covered conflicts overseas, I said, “Like a zap strap? Or a zip tie? You can get them at Home Depot for binding wires and stuff together.”

  “Yup. And nothing like that was found near the bodies, plastic or rope. So here we have wrists that were bound together hard enough to leave marks, then untied.” He put the napkin he had scrawled on into his pocket. “Look, I have given you a lot. I have to go.”

  Before he could stand up, I asked another question. “Bodies found on Friday. When were they last seen?”

  “Wednesday evening around 8 P.M. was the last text or telephone contact from him. Nothing from her, so he was the last one to be heard from.” Zero leaned in again. “Okay, I think it was an email from him around 8:15 P.M. Maybe a bit later.”

  “When did they die?”

  “My guess? Late Wednesday or early Thursday. But no later than that. Which makes me wonder, What the fuck were family, friends, and office workers thinking when they did not hear from the billionaire?” This time he stood up.

  I got the sense he felt he’d said too much with that last comment. I wanted to talk to him again, so I did not want to be a pest. We agreed he would walk out first. As he was putting his coat on, he came back to the table. “I am counting on you to honour our deal,” he said. “What I can tell you is that in addition to the pathologist you already knew about, there is a combined total of a hundred years of homicide investigation experience working on this case as private investigators. From everything that the team has looked at, this is a staged homicide. Likely a contract killing. Those two did not die from sitting under a little railing with belts looped around their necks. Somebody did this to them.”

  “Then how did the cops get it so wrong?”

  “They rushed to a conclusion. Tunnel vision. It was bullshit, but then they got stuck. And they still are.”

  When he left, I took out my notebook and filled pages of it with the details of our conversation. Then I headed to the Toronto Star newsroom. The place had changed a lot in the years I had worked there. Gone were the smoke-filled “get me rewrite” days, the era of editors and reporters banging away on Underwood typewriters and sneaking a drink while they hovered over the latest crime story. Although it was quieter—the office almost had an insurance agency atmosphere at times—the people in it still craved a big story. And nobody ever played a story bigger than the editor-in-chief, Michael Cooke.

  He, our lawyer Bert Bruser, managing editor Irene Gentle, and I gathered around the “hub,” a long table in the centre of the newsroom. I had written a piece based on my nearly two weeks of investigation. We worked through it, me answering questions from all three and making changes on my printout. What they were initially puzzled by was my description of how the bodies were positioned. In what must have been a macabre sight to anyone nearby, I finally took off my own belt, looped it around my neck by feeding the end through the buckle, positioned myself on the floor with legs out, and held the end of the belt up as if it were tied above my head. A couple of colleagues heading downstairs for coffee whispered to each other when they saw me sitting on the floor with a leather noose. I shrugged and smiled at them.

  Cooke looked at me, then down at his printout. He scribbled a few words, changing my description to make it clear. Back at my desk, I made a few changes to the draft based on our discussion, then sent it on to the copy desk. Cooke wrote the headline: “Barry and Honey Sherman Were Murdered.” It would soon appear on our website
and scream across the front page of the Saturday print edition atop photos of the couple. Additional words under the headline made it clear that this was the conclusion of the private investigation team, according to sources. The first paragraph of the story, or lede, as it is called, read, “It’s double murder, not murder-suicide. Barry and Honey Sherman were killed in what looks like a professional, contract killing. That’s the conclusion of a variety of experts who have been hired by the family to probe the case.”

  The story online was read by almost a million people in two days, in Canada and around the world. It was also read by senior officers in the Toronto Police Service, who summoned the homicide and division detectives working the Sherman case. The order was simple: interview David Chiasson, the pathologist hired by the family. Jim Cairns, who would later fill me in on the background activities the story spawned, said he could never understand why police needed a story on the front page of a newspaper to spur them to interview someone they should have spoken to weeks earlier. Police did get in touch with Chiasson, who spoke to them the following Wednesday. Then police talked again to Michael Pickup, who had performed the first autopsy. Pickup concurred with Chiasson’s findings.

  At the end of the week, the Toronto Police public relations department announced a press conference to provide an “update” on the Sherman case. Detective Sergeant Susan Gomes, the lead homicide officer, stood behind a lectern in the media briefing room, reading prepared remarks from a sheaf of papers in her hands, rarely looking up. She said that the police had been working tirelessly on the case and that from the start they had considered three scenarios: double suicide, homicide-suicide, and double homicide.