Big thanks, for the huge article!
Warning, autopsy details.
''Barry and Honey Sherman: how the second autopsy revealed it was a double murder
Kevin Donovan March 03, 2020''
''If he was going to do a second set of post-mortems, Chiasson wanted it done right, and that meant having experienced investigators in the room to make observations and notes. When Michael Pickup performed the official autopsies on the Shermans the previous Saturday, Toronto police detectives were present. Joining Chiasson from the private team that morning were former Toronto homicide detectives Tom Klatt, Ray Zarb and Mike Davis.
Also present were two former forensic identification officers, now retired, one who had been with the Toronto police and the other with the Ontario Provincial Police. The former ID officers were in the room to make detailed observations and to ensure the chain of custody for any samples taken, which Sherman lawyer Brian Greenspan insisted on. Even though this was an unofficial investigation, Greenspan wanted anything discovered by his team to stand the legal test of a criminal court, if it came to that.
Shortly before 9 a.m., Barry Sherman's body was wheeled in. In the days when Chiasson had conducted autopsies for the province, it had been in the old coroner's office in downtown Toronto. This would be the first time he performed a post-mortem examination at the new state-of-the-art building in Toronto's North York.
The task ahead of him was formidable. It was like being asked to complete a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.
The process of conducting an autopsy involves cutting the body open, removing organs or sections of organs for analysis, and taking fluid and other samples, including skin biopsies. Dr. Pickup's autopsy, which had determined that both Shermans had died by ligature neck compression, had been typically invasive. The other problem was that, unlike when he had conducted official post-mortems at the direction of police investigators, Dr. Chiasson had no access to the scene where the body was found. That was why Dr. Pickup was present.''
''From his conversation with Pickup, and from the police news release, Chiasson knew ligature neck compression had been determined as the medical cause of death. He was curious to see the condition of the horseshoe-shaped hyoid bones in both necks he was going to examine. Though not conclusive, the condition of the hyoid bone would inform his determination.
There were those in the forensic pathology world who believed that to make a ruling of murder by strangulation it was imperative that the hyoid bone be fractured. But 20 years earlier, Chiasson and Michael Pollanen, now the province's chief forensic pathologist, had authored a study that proved this was not the case.
They found the bone was fractured in only one-third of the cases of homicide by strangulation. In the other two-thirds, an intact hyoid was found to be related to several factors, including the pressure that was used on the neck, the condition of the hyoid bone to begin with, and the type of ligature that was used. The softer the ligature wrapped around the neck, the less likely the hyoid bone was to fracture.
Compounding this, and creating further confusion, was how age factored in. In the two-decade-old study, Chiasson and Pollanen had found that the older the victim, the more likely the hyoid bone was to fracture in a homicidal strangulation.
Barry Sherman's hyoid bone had been removed in the earlier autopsy by Pickup. But through information provided to Chiasson that day, he came to understand that neither Barry nor Honey's hyoid bone was fractured. Chiasson wondered if that was why police thought it was a murder-suicide. As he had shown with his research years before, a murder with a soft ligature could leave an intact hyoid.''
