Barry and Honey Sherman were found dead
in their home in Toronto
on December 15, 2017.
The investigation continues into the shocking deaths
of a pharmaceutical billionaire
and his wife.
It’s pretty rare for people of this wealth
to be murdered.
And in fact, Barry and Honey Sherman were among the wealthiest
people ever to be murdered.
What we don't know is who did it.
I wrote initially in 2018
a long story for Bloomberg Businessweek about this case.
I'm from Toronto.
I grew up in the Jewish community where the Shermans loomed very large.
I was very vaguely acquainted with the family.
So of course, I was interested.
The reason I came back to it was
there was a lot of new information
and we now know a great deal more
than we did in 2018.
We still don't know the central answer
of whodunit?
Who was responsible for this heinous crime?
Barry was the founder and chairman
of a company called Apotex,
a very large generic pharmaceutical manufacturer
that filled something like one in five prescriptions in the country.
They were worth several billion dollars.
They were also sort of ubiquitous,
very well known.
They were big philanthropists.
For decades, Honey and I
had both felt the commitment
to do what we could for the community.
She does all the community service work.
She's the chair of just about everything,
and my time is better spent
doing what I can to try to earn money
so I can write the checks.
Fair and equitable.
The Shermans, despite being extremely wealthy,
lived very modest lives.
They flew economy.
Barry drove a series of kind of rattling cars.
They would open the door for anyone who knocked.
They did not live in fear
and frankly, they had no reason to.
Until, of course, they did.
Shocking news.
The founder of Canadian drug giant Apotex,
Barry Sherman and his wife, Honey,
have been found dead in their York Mills mansion.
The circumstances of their death
appear suspicious.
The manner in which they were found was bizarre.
They were found in their basement
where they had an indoor swimming pool.
Their bodies held up by belts
that had been wrapped around their necks.
So a pretty gruesome scene, as you can imagine.
Forensic officers combed the billionaire's home looking for something,
anything that may determine
who killed Barry Sherman and his wife Honey.
The day the bodies were found
there were quite a few people in their house.
There was a housekeeper.
There was a gardener, a personal trainer.
And there was also a real estate agent
who was showing their house
to potential buyers.
They go through the whole house.
It's a big place, I believe, 12,000 square feet
and toward the end of the tour,
they get into the basement.
She walks in to the pool room
and sees in the sort of dim light
her clients, Barry and Honey Sherman
on the pool deck, sort of slumped
and attached to the railing
with these leather belts.
And it's clear to everyone that they're dead.
The police were treating this as a possible murder suicide.
We are not currently seeking
or looking for an outstanding suspect.
The idea being that Barry Sherman had killed his wife and then killed himself.
And that from the start struck a lot of people close to the Shermans
as as very odd.
Just physically it was very hard to imagine.
Barry was not in great shape.
He was not a strong guy.
The people who were really most upset by this, understandably,
were the Sherman's four adult children,
and they were concerned that the police
were heading down the wrong path.
So they commissioned a private investigation.
First priority was getting a second autopsy done,
and that found forensic evidence
strongly suggested that this was, in fact,
a double homicide.
New details this hour on the deaths of
Toronto billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman.
There were markings on Barry Sherman's wrists
which seemed to indicate that his hands
had been bound at some point.
There were actually two sets of marks
on the Sherman's necks.
So obviously there's a mark from the belt.
But there was also another marking, a narrower one,
and that looked like it could have been from a cord or a rope,
but that wasn't found at the scene.
So the implication, of course, being that they were
strangled and then moved.
The private team, reported their findings to the police immediately.
It became clear
that they were both murdered.
And the Toronto Police service
should not have drawn any conclusion
which suggested self-inflicted injuries.
However, it takes about a month
for the police to actually meet with the pathologist
who the private team had hired.
Couple of days later, the senior officer gives a press conference.
We believe now we have
sufficient evidence to describe this
as a double homicide investigation
and that both Honey and Barry Sherman
were, in fact, targeted.
There were tons people who were speculated as suspects.
For example, Barry Sherman's cousin,
Kerry Winter, who was engaged
in a really acrimonious legal battle
with Sherman.
He cared about one thing
money
making lots of it
and not caring who he destroyed.
And in fact, a judge threw out the claim
in September of 2017.
So not long before the murders.
This timing was suspicious to everyone.
I was betrayed.
My cousin hurt me,
and now I want to hurt him.
As you can imagine,
this got the police pretty interested in him.
But there was just no evidence
tying him to the crime.
There are the Sherman’s children
who inherited the entire fortune.
They became, at a stroke, billionaires.
So the four kids, there are three girls, one boy.
The boy is Jonathan Sherman,
who was the most business focused.
And he would take a key role in managing these assets,
which the kids had just inherited.
This has been so incredibly painful
and so bizarrely surreal.
My sisters and I pledged to rise again
and to continue thriving.
And knowing, as our parents always reminded us,
that with great privilege
comes enormous responsibility.
As the Sherman’s children
took over the empire,
things began to change pretty quickly.
At the time of his death,
Sherman was very focused on expansion.
The children, however, wanted to slow down investments,
to back off on expansion and essentially
to get the business ready to sell.
And in 2022, they agreed to sell to
a private equity firm called SK Capital.
And certainly his colleagues
have told me that Barry Sherman
would have been horrified by this.
But of course, he's not around to make that decision.
Sherman was very unusual in a lot of ways.
He loved kind of backing people.
The person he funded most lavishly
was Frank D'Angelo.
He and Sherman were initially in the beer business together.
Frank is kind of a comic figure.
He had a low budget talk show.
He produces B-movies,
titles like Sicilian Vampire,
which Sherman funded.
Can I trust you?
Because if I can't trust you
I’ll have to come back and kill you.
And the people around him thought this was completely bizarre.
They could not understand why he would keep advancing him
tons and tons of money.
That was just one of these very odd financial entanglements
that as the police and private investigators
dug into Sherman's affairs,
they had to wade through.
The other big area that was worth looking into
was competitors.
Sherman had made a lot of enemies in the pharmaceutical world over the years.
He had himself speculated that one day a rival pharmaceutical company
might have him killed
And all of this was done
but none of it has led to arrests,
let alone a prosecution.
After really not saying anything publicly
for about two years,
they released video of the walking man.
We seized a very large amount of security video footage.
We are left with one individual
whom we have been unable to identify.
The timing of this individual's appearance is in line
with when we believe the murders took place.
Based on this evidence, we're classifying this individual as a suspect.
Why did it take you 4 years to release this video?
We undertook these investigative steps
to identify this individual,
and now, having gotten to the point
where we have not been able to do so,
this is now the prudent time
to release this to the public
and seek the public's assistance.
We don't know if releasing this footage earlier
would have had some benefit.
It is striking that the police
were in possession of this footage in 2018.
We're dealing with an intensely secretive law enforcement culture.
The default is to say nothing
and that is largely what has happened in this case.
Who would have a motive to kill both Barry and his wife?
You could imagine, for example,
in some business dispute
that had gone horribly wrong,
he might be a target, but why also target her?
The other thing that I think really
has been very confusing
for a lot of people who've looked at this
is the method.
You would think, a bullet does the job perfectly well.
But no, they were strangled,
which is a painful, intimate.
Not what you would imagine,
for example, a hitman employing.
We are five years on now
and there have been no arrests,
let alone any charges.
The whodunit, the central mystery here
remains completely unsolved.