We turn to that murder mystery that has gripped Canada.
It did seem like you were watching
a work of fiction, not reality.
Tonight the mystery deepening behind
the double homicide of one of the world's richest couples.
But of course truth is often much stranger than fiction
as I learned as I went on with the reporting.
Their murder has shaken the political establishment
with many wondering who could have wanted
to see them dead and why.
This was just a seismic event in the history
of Canadian business and Canadian news.
Now police want to know who would want them dead.
We are now well over a year after their deaths
and they remain completely unsolved.
It's quite a macabre story in terms of how
Barry and Honey Sherman were discovered.
They were last seen, both of them, on December 13, 2018
which was a Wednesday.
They were trying to sell their home
and so their real estate agent was holding viewings
for prospective buyers and the agent had a couple
touring the home who were being shown
around the kitchen, the bedrooms,
and they were shown the indoor pool.
If you can imagine a line of people comes into the pool area
and sees this really gruesome tableau of
Barry and Honey Sherman suspended from a metal railing
that surrounded one end of the pool
with leather belts holding them up by the neck.
They were in kneeling positions facing away from the water.
She was kind of slumped on her side a little bit,
he was more upright.
There was then a 911 call
and the police were on the scene very soon afterward.
Now the billionaire founder of Canada's largest
drugs firm, Barry Sherman and his wife Honey have been
found dead at their home in Toronto.
Police describe the deaths as suspicious
but say they were not being treated as murder.
We discovered two bodies of people inside a home here.
The circumstances of their death appear suspicious.
Homicide detectives are leading
the investigation but there is still no indication
from police that the deaths are homicides.
Over the next 24 hours you began to see
anonymously sourced stories in some of the
Toronto papers to the effect that the police
were treating this as a murder-suicide
committed by Barry Sherman.
The Sherman's adult children put out a statement
saying that this was completely inconsistent
with the character of their parents
and they also put together their own investigative team.
And they actually did a second autopsy which is remarkable.
They found things that they believed indicated
this could not have been a murder-suicide,
narrow markings on Barry Sherman's wrists,
the scene was for lack of a better word, quite clean,
the way in which the murder scene
seemed to have been staged.
And then in late January
the police hold a press conference.
We believe now through the six weeks of work review,
we have sufficient evidence to describe this
as a double homicide investigation
and that both Honey and Barry Sherman were in fact targeted.
We are not police detectives, we do not have access
to the corpus of evidence, we are not going to solve
the crime, so my goal was create the richest portrait
possible of this very unusual person
and how he came to this very unusual end.
As head of Apotex,
the largest pharmaceutical company in Canada,
Barry's net worth was estimated
at over $4 billion at the time of his death.
Barry Sherman was a science guy.
He had a PhD in physics at MIT but he had become
an expert in generics and in drugs.
The generics business is a very tough one.
It is zero sum in the strictest sense of the term.
That means that if you're selling a branded drug
you have had a significant amount of your profit wiped out
and he was very tough in doing this, very uncompromising.
When you speak to people in the
branded pharmaceutical industry they sometimes refer
to Barry Sherman in unprintable terms.
It has been said, though there may be some exaggeration
in the numbers, that he would sometimes be involved
in as many as 100 lawsuits at any one time.
He was a guy who did not like to be crossed
and if someone did betray him or did something
that he felt was improper or disloyal, he would sue.
He was a tough guy.
Definitely someone who did not have a lot of friends
beyond his inner circle.
Barry Sherman did face multiple lawsuits,
among them a decade long battle with a group of cousins
who felt cut out of the Sherman business.
These murders had sort of a
Murder On The Orient Express quality to them.
There was a long list of theories out there.
Someone who everyone looked at very quickly
was Barry Sherman's cousin, Kerry Winter,
the son of Lewis Winter, the founder of Empire Laboratories,
the company where Barry worked as a student
and later ended up owning and Kerry
and his siblings have been engaged in a legal battle
alleging that he owes them 20% of Apotex,
that they were done out of their inheritance.
He cared about one thing, money, making lots of it
and not caring who he destroyed, who he stepped on.
That is a very bitter legal battle and it's one where
Kerry has expressed publicly and otherwise a lot of anger,
said some things that certainly did not
make him less of a suspect.
I probably had reasons to lash out, to do the dirty deed.
But here he is, over a year later, walking free
and unarrested so I think it's safe to say
that he had nothing to do with this.
Police say they are still talking
to neighbors, witnesses, family members,
business associates, anyone who knew anything
about the Sherman's lives or even their last hours.
One of the things I was astounded by
when I started reporting this story,
and it's something that I really had no inkling of,
was the extent of some of Barry Sherman's entanglements
with really inadvisable financial deals, businesses,
and this put him in to bed financially with a lot of people
who really most high level pharmaceutical executives
would never have anything to do with.
Kevin Trudeau, now in jail, another convicted fraudster
called Shaun Rootenberg convinced Barry Sherman
to invest in a online trivia app.
The introduction in that case was made
by someone called Myron Gottlieb.
Gottlieb and Rootenberg had actually met in jail
and the most dramatic of these involvements
over the years was someone named Frank D'Angelo.
He is something of a B-list celebrity in Canada.
He's well known as a director of movies
that don't typically get great reviews.
Barry Sherman invested in most of these films.
Do what you gotta do.
You're trouble for me Angelo.
I met Frank for lunch and he is a colorful guy
to say the least.
If you wanna talk about unprintable language,
he certainly uses a lot of it.
I just felt that I owed it to Barry
to give my two cents.
You know I don't think I'll ever get over this
incredible tragedy, this senseless act,
as long as I live on this planet.
You can see the appeal of hanging out with him
for Barry, particularly because he would've been
so dramatically different from the other people
who Barry Sherman would've seen
and dealt with on a daily basis.
Meeting Frank was not uncomfortable at all.
He was happy to help, he had checked me out.
He knew about me.
I think I found him on Facebook and sent him a note
asking if he would meet and after a few days he responded
and said that he would.
But he did make clear to me, he pulled me close as we were
leaving that first lunch, and said you know,
do the right thing for my friend
and if you don't I'm gonna come to London and find you.
He had been questioned by the police.
He is emphatic that he had nothing to do with the murder
but he is of course emblematic, indicative,
of the tone of some of these financial entanglements
and those entanglements are to many people very suspicious.
Hank Idsinga, the acting inspector
of the homicide squad, says the investigation into
who killed Barry and Honey Sherman is still very active.
I feel for the family and the friends.
It's dragging on, it has been a year.
As an attempt to reignite an investigation,
The Sherman family has asked me to announce the offer
of a reward of up to $10 million dollars for information leading
to the apprehension and prosecution of those responsible
for the murders of Honey and Barry Sherman.
Truth is very strange, you know.
Truth is much stranger than fiction,
that's why I love this job, is that you keep finding out
that what happens in the real world is just as weird
or weirder than Hollywood could every come up with.
It seems pretty clear to all involved that something
that Barry Sherman got involved in went wrong
and came back at him.
If you think about the crime, it is remarkable in many ways.
One of the things that's remarkable is that
his wife was killed and the other thing that I think
has confounded a lot of the investigators
is when there are hits, it's usually a bullet,
it's usually quick, it's done cleanly, efficiently,
in a way that allows a quick getaway.
Barry and Honey Sherman were strangled to death.
So there's this confusing tangle of evidence
that for the police and for anyone else trying
to understand this, it doesn't all point in one direction
and that's I think what is so tantalizing about this
as a mystery in some way and I think it's a mystery
that's going to endure.