* * *
—
With the questions asked by police of Denise Gold that Saturday, the day after the bodies were discovered, two issues jump into focus. First, the nature of the crime police were initially pursuing. From the outset—although they have never confirmed this publicly—the Toronto Police were actively pursuing only the murder-suicide theory. I was able to prove this when I convinced a judge to release some of the search warrant documents sworn in the first few weeks of the case. When a detective asks a judge to authorize a search warrant, the officer must provide information about the nature of the crime under investigation. It cannot be vague. For the first month of the investigation, police detectives swore affidavits stating that they were investigating the murder of Honey Sherman. Only Honey. That explains why the police initially saw no need to collect basic forensic materials from people known to have been at the scene of the crime. But once it was accepted that this was a double murder, why did the police wait so long to collect this potential evidence? It may have been a matter of a lack of resources in an already stretched homicide department. In 2018, the year that began two weeks after the Shermans died, there were ninety-six homicides in Toronto, a record number. Among those cases were three major investigations: the Bruce McArthur serial killer probe; the April terror attack by a man who killed ten people and injured sixteen with his van on a major street in north Toronto; and a shooting in Toronto’s Greektown in July, which killed two and injured thirteen more.
The interview with Denise Gold indicates that the police were aware of the telltale markings from restraints of some sort (ropes or plastic zip ties) on Barry Sherman’s wrists from the first day of their probe. But it would not be until the expert opinion of a more experienced pathologist was brought to their attention that they gave proper weight to the markings. Why didn’t the detective ask Gold whether she’d seen any marks on Honey’s wrists? It could be simply that Honey’s autopsy was the second one done that Saturday and the information about her injuries was not communicated to the detective before the interview. Still, detectives had certainly seen the bodies, as had the first pathologist, so it’s likely that the information would have been passed on. It may be that the detectives were myopically pursuing the murder-suicide theory, though how wrist markings on Barry alone would fit into that theory is a mystery.
Toronto Police have repeatedly declined to answer any questions about their strategy. Their belief in the murder-suicide scenario created a deep rift between the police and the Sherman family. It started on the Friday evening, when homicide detective Brandon Price had emerged from behind the yellow police tape at the Old Colony Road home to tell the media two things: there was no forced entry, and they were not looking for suspects. His comments, and what police sources said to the media about it being a murder-suicide, enraged members of the Sherman family. They soon hired Brian Greenspan, who assembled the team of private investigators with the stated purpose of creating a “second lens” through which to view the investigation. Price’s comments also prompted the Toronto Sun, and later other media, to ask questions of police sources, and that is where the media learned of the suspected murder-suicide theory. To be fair to Price, he also said he was making these comments to “alleviate some concerns in the neighbourhood.”
What he did not say, and what was never reported at the time in any of the Sherman coverage, was that there had been a high number of break-and-enters into homes on the streets surrounding Old Colony Road in the previous year. A total of 160 break-ins were logged by police, with millions of dollars’ worth of jewellery and other valuables stolen. There had been no violence and no injuries in any of the break-ins, but in some cases burglars entered when the homeowners were in the house. A community meeting had been held on December 4, just over a week before the Sherman deaths, with police and the local city councillor in attendance. Community leaders suggested that people consider installing surveillance cameras and perhaps hire a security company to patrol the neighbourhood. One community leader in attendance told me there was “real pushback” from homeowners. Few wanted to spend the time or money to provide their own deterrents; they wanted the police to solve the problem. When news broke that the couple down the street had been found dead, the neighbours, already on high alert, immediately speculated that it was a burglary turned violent. The Sherman home had been the target of a break-in the year before. Burglars broke through a skylight and dropped from a high ceiling to enter the home. But comments from police were interpreted by neighbours and the media to mean that the killer was Barry Sherman, and he was dead. Police sources speaking to media did the rest.
All of this, along with a call to Sherman daughter Alex from the relative of a couple, Rochelle Wise and David Pichosky, murdered in Florida five years earlier, prompted the Sherman family estate to hire Brian Greenspan.
Greenspan was a natural choice. First, he knew and had worked for Barry Sherman before. More importantly, he was one of the top criminal lawyers in Canada, with a network of contacts and extensive experience dealing with police. For decades, he and his brother Eddie, who died in 2014, were known as the top criminal lawyers in Canada. They were the lawyers you called if you had money and were in serious trouble. Though many of his legal cases involved fraud, Greenspan estimates he has done about thirty murder trials and handled two hundred appeals of murder cases where an individual had been convicted. He is intimately familiar with the justice system. Once he and his team saw the photos of the Sherman death scene, the nature of the crime was clear. “I didn’t need one minute of expertise to know this was a double homicide,” he says. To this day, Greenspan remains baffled that the police spent so much time on the murder-suicide theory.
Publicly, police claim that murder-suicide was just one of three theories they considered equally, the others being double murder and double suicide. But it appears that it was the murder-suicide theory upon which they initially focused most of their efforts. In Greenspan’s own carefully chosen words at an October 2018 press conference where he announced a $10-million reward, this myopic approach “fell well below” the standard the public expects of its police force. “They failed to recognize the suspicious and staged manner in which their bodies were situated: sitting next to each other with ligatures pulled up around their necks and wrapped around a railing, forcing them into an upright position.” When the private autopsies were concluded, Greenspan said it became crystal clear “that they were both murdered and that the Toronto Police should not have drawn any conclusion which suggested self-inflicted injuries.”
In many hundreds of hours of recorded interviews I conducted with people connected to this case, I heard only one suggestion, from Kerry Winter, that murder-suicide was a possibility. I did hear from many people very close to the Shermans why it was not a possibility. Some of the reasons were personal, some were business related. These same people provided this same information to the police in the early days of the investigation. Joel Ulster, for example, had arranged to have a family dinner with Barry and Honey on Sunday, December 17. It was something both Shermans were looking forward to, particularly Barry, who had played such a strong role in assisting Joel’s children in business and in life. Daughter Kaelen’s wedding was being organized, and both Shermans were excited that their youngest was taking that step. As Sherman told Jack Kay on more than one occasion, he wanted twenty-five grandchildren and was hopeful that all his children would have children. Lauren had one son, Alex had a son and daughter, and Jonathon and his husband, Fred, were looking into surrogacy with the aim of having two boys, something that eventually happened in June 2019.
On the business side, Barry had several cases that were important to him to resolve, personal ones where he felt he had been wronged. He had depositions lined up for the new year. He was also making plans to expand Apotex and to invest in a Florida facility to produce fentanyl. One day, according to Jack Kay, they would sell the business, but that was not anytime soon. Sher
man had talked to Kay about a five-year plan to grow Apotex. To his family he said he had a fifteen-year plan and wanted to ensure that the business he had built would be in good hands when he finally retired. One reason he stuck with Jeremy Desai through the corporate espionage allegations was that he saw Desai as a key part of his succession plan. Of great importance to Sherman was making sure that the Apotex employees, many of whom called him by his first name, were well looked after, and he wanted to ensure that whoever took over maintained the integrity of the company.
As to Honey, friends, including Bryna Steiner, shared their emails planning their Florida vacation. In a few cases, Honey had even double-booked dinners: different couples on the same night later in December. She was planning to leave for Florida on the Monday after the dinner with the Ulsters. Barry would follow later in the week.
Perhaps the most significant indication that this was not a murder-suicide was the Shermans’ bond with Alex and Brad’s children. Barry and Honey’s new Forest Hill house was supposed to include a giant playroom, and it would be just up the street from the grandchildren’s home. Finally, there is the intangible of faith, or lack of faith, more appropriately. Sherman did not believe in God or any kind of afterlife. “For people to have said that he killed himself is impossible,” says Jack Kay. If someone believed there was an afterlife for their immortal soul, then it might be understandable, he says, but that was not his friend’s belief. Kay firmly believed that, in his friend’s case, “You would never take your life if you believed this was it.”
It is, of course, impossible to assess a person’s inner thoughts. Sometimes, outwardly happy people do kill themselves. Around the same time the Sherman case was being probed as a murder-suicide, a couple in Oakville, west of Toronto, died. The husband shot his wife, then himself, police concluded. Neighbours said the couple seemed happy, though there had been recent business troubles. Forensic officers and detectives at the scene quickly determined the manner of deaths and an official announcement was made. It was not the case with the Sherman file, in which police took six weeks to make a determination. The conventional wisdom was that if Barry Sherman was going to commit suicide, the pharmaceutical genius would have used pills. That he would somehow hang himself, leaving their bodies in such a macabre position, made no sense to people who knew him.
It seems, based on all information available at time of writing, that the police simply got it wrong. Officers at the death scene appear to have made a hurried assessment that a husband had killed his wife, then himself. The case moved from division officers on the first day to the homicide unit on the weekend. Homicide detectives concurred, for a time, with the murder-suicide theory. Dr. Michael Pickup, a relatively junior pathologist, took a great deal of time to make a determination over the manner of death, but behind the scenes his transparency over his findings, including providing scene photographs, helped the more experienced private pathologist make that case. The two separate investigations, police and private, proceeded at a different pace and, by their nature, with different abilities and access. During the first six weeks, the Toronto Police detectives and forensic technicians controlled the Old Colony Road scene. Police, whether speaking on the record or on background, were reluctant to give away too much information about what they had done or were doing, or about what they had found. By filing three separate court challenges to unseal search warrant materials, I learned that police had, as of spring 2019, executed thirty-five search warrants and production orders. In the first challenge, police revealed that they were requesting health records for the Shermans, banking records, and airline loyalty plan data, but the courts refused to say whose banking and loyalty plan records police obtained. In my second and third challenges, police and the courts refused to release even generic information, stating that the new warrants were “too specific” and, if released, could alert the murderer or murderers.
Police submitted hundreds of pages of interview and case synopses to a judge to get judicial authorization to seize records. That material remains sealed. When I last cross-examined the detective who has prepared all of this information, Dennis Yim, I did learn that the police had amassed a great deal of information that they were still assessing, including 3,700 pages of documents and 1,390 electronic files. That content remains sealed too, at least for now. I also learned that cell phone records were seized but not who the phones belonged to. Cell phones, which “ping” off new cell towers with each location change, would allow police to follow the movements of the Shermans or any other person whose cell phone was at issue. The police also seized both Sherman vehicles. Honey’s, which was more modern, had an onboard GPS system, and the police would have been able to determine her vehicle’s movements by accessing the data.
What was most surprising to me was that, after an initial flurry of interviews and forensic work by fifty officers, by mid-2018 the Sherman investigation had only one permanent officer assigned to the case, Detective Dennis Yim. Detective Brandon Price, who had made the original statement about no suspects being sought, was still on the case but was working on other files as well. He was promoted to detective sergeant and would remain in the homicide unit. Detective Sergeant Susan Gomes, who had led the investigation, was promoted to inspector by the end of 2018 and moved to a uniform job in the police force’s operations division. Yim, a junior officer whose job was to prepare search warrant applications on the Sherman case and analyze the “return”—the information that comes back from a search—told me in court that as of April 2019 the case was very much still ongoing. No information about what had been discovered or what theories were being pursued could be released, because, he said, it would tip the hand of the murderer or murderers. Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders, himself a former homicide detective, said much the same at a press conference in late 2018, where he was critical of some of the information the Greenspan team had made public. “I have to be cognizant,” he said, “that the suspect or suspects no doubt are watching this now. I know that for a fact.” Saunders said he had to be careful not to provide any information that would help the killers. Whether Saunders’s bold statement was from actual knowledge or the hunch of a veteran cop, he did not say. Arguably the most significant comment police have made on the case since Detective Sergeant Gomes pronounced it a “targeted” double homicide came from Detective Yim, who said in court in April 2019 that police had a “theory” of the case and “an idea of what happened.”
The lack of police information that so frustrated the media and the public, and close friends of the Shermans, must also have been frustrating to the detectives on the case, but for a completely different reason. Media coverage of the Sherman investigation focused on mistakes the police made. To detectives on the case who, presumably, have since made progress, it must be difficult to have to keep silent.
On the topic of apparent missteps, one that baffled people was the time it took police to interview key individuals. Jeremy Desai, who was on the final email chain with Sherman on the Wednesday evening and was an extremely close colleague, was not interviewed until February 1, seven weeks after the deaths. Kerry Winter, who made astounding claims to the media about how he fantasized about killing Sherman, was not interviewed until the beginning of February. The same delay occurred with Frank D’Angelo, who was, according to Jack Kay, someone who spoke to Sherman almost every day. Others, like Jack Kay and Fred and Bryna Steiner, were interviewed more promptly. The Shermans’ four children, according to Brian Greenspan, were interviewed by police in the first few days of the investigation and “some” (he would not say which ones) were re-interviewed in early 2019. Greenspan said that the Toronto homicide officers had three meetings in summer 2018 with Jonathon, Alex, and Alex’s husband, Brad, to update them on the progress of the investigation. Those meetings were short, as there was nothing to report. In my discussions with Greenspan I was baffled by his response—or lack of response—to a question he said at first he would answer, and ultimately never
did. It was a question I tried to ask everyone. In the case of the Sherman children, Greenspan had asked that I pose questions to him, as their representative. Where were each of the children on the evening of Wednesday, December 13, 2017? By not responding, Greenspan said that he was honouring a police request not to interfere with their investigation. I had also asked Greenspan if he would tell me specifically when and where the Sherman children were interviewed. He would not answer that question either.
As part of my interviewing process, I often asked people what police detectives had asked them. Generally, I found that when police detectives did talk to people, they typically said they could relate little that was positive about the investigation. One detective reportedly said to one person, nine months into the case, “We are at loose ends.” To another person, “We do not know if we will ever solve this one.” It’s possible that the police were deliberately spreading misinformation in the hope that the killers would hear it, relax, and make a mistake. Possible, but unlikely. The fact that police did not begin taking DNA and fingerprints from people like Denise Gold until nine months after the murders indicates yet another misstep in the investigation. At other times, it seemed that police had not done even the most basic research before asking questions. When a police detective contacted Joel Ulster, weeks into the case, the officer did not know whether Kerry Winter was a “man or a woman,” Ulster recalled. Katherine Kay was interviewed by police at one point and the detective asked if she had ever been in the Sherman home. Kay said she had, once, at a party that was a fundraiser for Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. “Oh,” the detective asked, perking up, “who else was there?” Kay thought the detective was joking, given how widely reported on that particular fundraiser was due to allegations of improper lobbying. The officer relented when Kay said there were literally hundreds of people at the event.
The Billionaire Murders Page 27
