What do we know about the day Barry and Honey Sherman were murdered and, five years on, where is the police investigation currently focused?
www.thestar.com
''Guest: Kevin Donovan, chief investigative reporter
It has been five years since the
murders of Barry and Honey Sherman. The police say it is an active investigation, but there are have been no arrests and only one very mysterious suspect. Noting a lack of progress, family members have
increased the cash reward up to $35 million for information that leads to the culprit or culprits.
What do we know about the day the Shermans were killed and, five years on, where is the police investigation currently focused?''
The Barry and Honey Sherman murders: Kevin Donovan reflects five years on
December 13, 2022
Podcast transcribed by deugirtni (please advise any errors)
Skipped intro
Host = Raju Mudhar, Podcast Co-Host/Producer
KD = Kevin Donovan
--
2:15 Host: Are we any closer to finding out who murdered the Shermans?
2:18 KD: That’s an excellent question. I think the police are closer to being able to prove a case against individual or individuals. They are seeking information in five different countries now. They’ve assured me they’re not doing this as a fishing expedition where they’re looking for anybody who might know about this. They have a theory, they’re pursuing the theory and looking for something, I’m assuming it’s financial, in another country, so they’re getting closer but this is not a case that, barring somebody walking in the door and confessing, is going to be solved in time for the anniversary, which of course is upon us. This is dogged police work - that’s what the police say - and it’s going to take more time, it could be years.
3:07 Host: I think one of the most interesting things about this case was what we first heard about it, and how the theories of it sort of changed. As you said, the police first said that the Shermans died in a murder-suicide. Then perhaps Barry killed Honey. How has the investigation evolved since then?
3:24 KD: Well the investigation begins as all of these suspicious death investigations begin, with the discovery of their bodies, and it’s kind of screwed up from the start and the police and the pathologist both come to the conclusion that this is not a double homicide. And they spent five weeks asking people the wrong questions. They were asking did Barry and Honey have a reason to commit suicide together, was there some suicide pact, is there a letter out there – a suicide letter, was one of them sick and wanted to end their lives for that reason. And they’re not asking the questions that I think they should’ve been asking, which is – who would’ve done this.
When I first heard about the case, I didn’t really know anything about Barry and.. Sherman. I knew that we’d reported on his generic company, but I didn’t, had never met him. I had never even heard of Honey, or that Barry even had a family, and I’d actually took the media and the police sources at face value. And then I get assigned and start digging into the case and through various means I’m able to get ahold of information related to the Sherman family’s own private investigation, and I find out about the autopsy, that Barry and Honey in fact were tied up, and it’s pretty hard for Barry to kill Honey if he was tied up at the time. And so we published that story five weeks into the case and that causes the police to change their minds. A question that I still have no answer for, is why didn’t the Sherman family just give that information - the result of their second autopsy - to the police. Why did it have to take a headline in the Toronto Star to change the course of that investigation.
5:05 Host: There’s so many questions about that over the course of this. Can you tell us at least who’s been ruled out? Do we even know that?
5:11 KD: Police have said to me in this court process that I’ve gone through for five years where I’m trying to get access to police documents, and have had some success on behalf of the Toronto Star in getting access, and they say we’re not saying who we’ve ruled out. Now there are some statements that are made by people and those statements are in these search warrant documents and they’re completely released, and so those people, it’s not important to name them, they’re just, you know, friends of friends – they didn’t do it - they refuse to rule out publicly anybody who might’ve had a motive. The police say, ‘we have a number of persons of interest, but none of them rise to the level of suspect’, and so just as a way of explanation, police categorize people as persons of interest if they’re somebody that might possibly have had a reason to commit the crime of murder, but there’s no evidence against them, and nobody’s saying they did it. Then ‘suspect’ is where they put it all together and they say that person’s a suspect. The only suspect that they’ve identified is the mysterious ‘walking man’, that, or as you and I’ve talked about before on your podcast…
6:27: brief playback regarding the ‘walking man’
7:02 KD cont’d: …there’s no proof that this guy did it, they just find his activities very suspicious. So that’s a long-winded answer to your question – none of the people that our listeners might think is a potential suspect - none of them have been ruled out, at least not publicly.
7:18 Host: There’s a lot of stuff I want to get in there but you mentioned about, you going to court over the last five years – I believe it’s almost ten times – I want you to tell us why you did that, and how that experience has been and what information you’ve gotten. Really I think it shed an incredible light on this investigation.
7:37 KD: Police are not in the habit of just releasing information relating to an ongoing investigation. In the United States they do that a bit more, in Canada they don’t. The only source that I had of information, are documents that police filed in aid of getting a search warrant, or a production order to get information on some person. So these are all sealed by court order, and what I’ve been doing is arguing the case. I’m not a lawyer but I’ve developed a bit of skill in doing this. I’ve been arguing multiple times – I go every six months before a justice in Toronto to get that information unsealed - and they’ve started unsealing information, there’s about 3300 pages of search warrant and production order documents now. I think I probably have about 60% unsealed, but it’s very frustrating when you look at what I’ve gotten unsealed because there’s so much stuff under the black ink that would answer all of the questions that you’re quite suitably asking. I’m still hoping to get those unsealed too.
8:41 Host: Okay Kevin, you know, I think this is a big one, but you know, and you’ve mentioned it a little bit, the police have made a lot of mistakes throughout this investigation, particularly right at the beginning of it. Can you just sort of talk about some of those and how they’ve hurt their ability to solve this crime.
8:57 KD: Well, beyond the fact that they mislabeled the crime as a murder-suicide, which is a big problem, other mistakes include not – they’ve got this video of this mysterious ‘walking man’, and they’ve got it within a few weeks of Barry and Honey being killed. They’ve got it at a time that you’re not quite sure what the crime is they’re investigating, but they’ve got it and they find it suspicious – they don’t release that to the public for four years. Would’ve been better to release it contemporaneously at a time when peoples’ memories are better. There’s a video camera across the street from the Shermans’ home - the Shermans have no video cameras, by the way – but there is a video camera across the street at a neighbour’s. Police don’t go and pick that video up for three days, they lose three days of video because it’s an older model of recorder that wipes every seven days.
They don’t take DNA and fingerprint information from people who were known to be in the Shermans’ home, for nine months. They should do that right away, ‘cause you’re trying to exclude the housekeeper, or the realtor, or the clients, all those people, you’re trying to exclude them. They don’t go to the airport - when they know that this is a potential international case – they don’t go to the airport to try and look at any video see if they see our mysterious ‘walking man’ with his limp walking through security. There’re just so many mistakes like that, and I’ve even mentioned the fact that the lead homicide detective doesn’t even go to the crime scene when the bodies are there, in fact she doesn’t go for four days.
But I think the bigger problem with this case now, is that police are not doing any interviews with new people. They stopped doing interviews a couple years ago, and now they’re just focusing on getting information, getting data basically. And I’m sure that’s important – the police certainly say it is – but you have to get out there and pound the pavement and talk to people. I think they should be out interviewing all members of the Sherman family again, just to see if they remember something. I think they should be talking to the business colleagues, and maybe some people that didn’t get along with Barry too well – they’re just not doing stuff like that.
11:11-11:30: ads
11:31 Host: You’ve mentioned the mysterious ‘walking man’ a couple times. We didn’t hear very much about this case for a long time and then about a year ago, four years afterward, there’s a sort of bombshell video of this man with the strange gait – let’s talk a little bit about him like – he’s a suspect? I mean, is it me, like, you know, like is it my imagination, is the thinking that he’s some sort of hitman?
11:50 KD: They haven’t said that he’s a hitman and I personally believe that - and you know, what do I know, I’m just a reporter - but I personally believe that the person who wanted Barry and Honey dead, or the people that wanted them dead, did it themselves. I’ve never believed in the theory of the mysterious overseas hitman. But the police are focused on the ‘walking man’ because Barry and Honey are both home by nine o’clock on that Wednesday evening. Honey’s home at eight o’clock, Barry’s home by nine, and they’re killed pretty soon after that. Canvas by the police of the neighbourhood - eventually, when they get around to doing it - they go through and they see ‘Person X’ out walking their dog, ‘Person Y’, you know, get in their car and drive to a store, and they figure out those people aren’t involved. And they find this one individual – somebody between the height of five feet six and five foot nine – walking in the area of the Sherman home, coming right up to the Sherman home, you know, appearing in a video that shows a person is getting close to the Sherman home, then he disappears, ‘cause there’s no video coverage, and then he reappears about an hour later and proceeds east, away from the Sherman home. That’s their reason for thinking this person is suspicious, and sure, it is suspicious.
13:04 Host: You mentioned the Sherman family, can you just talk a little bit about the children, and I know you’ve talked to some of them previously, how are they doing amidst all of this, I mean it’s now, you know, five years without an answer.
13:17 KD: I’ve spoken to Jonathon and Alexandra, two of the four children. Lauren, who is the eldest child, at one point was going to give an interview and then said she didn’t feel comfortable doing that, and Kaelen, the youngest, has never responded to my requests. In the last week we’ve heard a little bit from both children. We’ve heard from Alexandra, who put out a statement to all the media saying what happened to her parents was terrible, please come forward to the police, and if you have information, and by the way, there’s a ten million dollar reward still in place. Just recently Jonathon, in a release to only one media outlet – not us – came out and said the same thing, but also said, I’m going to add twenty-five million dollars to that pot.
14:00 Host: Well, you have spoken to Jonathon and he basically told you that his sister suspects him being involved in this in some way, right?
14:07 KD: That’s right. So by the time I interviewed Jonathon, I’d heard from other people that his sister has this belief that Jonathon is somehow involved. Jonathon, of his own volition during my five hour interview with him, comes out with that information and you know, we published it, quoting Jonathon, that his sister, Alexandra, thinks he had something to do with it. I had asked of course, the natural followup – did you have anything to do with it – and he says no, he was away until just before the murders, he was in Japan for a couple of weeks, got back just the night before. He says that only he knows that he had nothing to do with it. He says it’s ridiculous that anybody would think he had anything to do with it. And he says, you know I was quite close with my father, my father had been supporting my business. But then I asked him about, I’d heard that his father was trying to reign him in a little bit in the weeks leading up to the murders, and he was quite open about that, in fact he provided me emails that showed that in the couple of weeks before the murders, Barry was saying, ‘look Jonathon, you and your business partner need to repay to me fifty to sixty million dollars out of the money I’ve given you over the years, because I need to make a big payment.’ Barry had lost one of his legendary court cases and he needed to scrounge around to get some, quite a bit of cash, and Jonathon said that’s completely normal, he said his father was all-in with Jonathon’s business. ‘Don’t Kevin,’ he says, ‘read anything into that.’ He was very open with this. He didn’t have to give me that information, but he did. He also gave me, I’ve asked everybody in all the hundreds of people I’ve interviewed, ‘where were you the night of the murders?’ - I always ask that question - and he said, ‘I was at home in [north of Toronto]’, he gave me a picture that he took of his hand, holding some crytocurrency codes – he’d been into crypto, he said, when he was in Japan – showed me a picture taken at 7:17 pm on the Wednesday night – that’s the night of, that the murders take place – he said, ‘Look, here’s a picture of my hand, you can see the time code, you can see that it’s taken where my house is, the geographical location,’ and he gave that to me and I found that quite odd, I did point out to him that, you know, I could drive from his house to the Sherman house in thirty minutes, but he was able to, you know, respond to these questions of mine, and didn’t seem nervous at all and it was very interesting to hear his take on it and how open he was about this. I had a feeling that he’d been asked these questions before, quite honestly - not by other media, by the way.
16:36 Host: What has become of the parents’ wealth and the company, Apotex?
16:40 KD: A couple of months ago Apotex was sold, pending regulatory approval, to a New York company that is in the chemical business, not in the chemicals used to make pharmaceuticals, but a different type of chemical business. They bought it, and the sale hasn’t gone through yet because Apotex employs six thousand people in Canada and there’s certain regulatory hoops - the Canadian government doesn’t want Apotex to leave - and so that’s where that stands right now.
Honey had no will, Barry had a will that, should he predecease Honey, she would get almost everything. With Honey gone, it’s a very simple will, it divides it to the four children – one quarter, one quarter, one quarter, one quarter. There’s no money for charity, there’s no money for anybody else, just the four kids. And the children are certainly involved in charities still – Alexandra is most involved, she’s in charge of the charity for, you know, the Sherman group of charities, she personally is quite generous. I know that Jonathon is giving money as well. They’re a very private group, the four children, because of Honey I think, out at just about every charity gala - and they were out there not just giving money, but asking other wealthy people to give – that’s ended. I think there’s probably some charities at this time of year that are hurting a little bit because they don’t have Barry and Honey out there making sure that their coffers are filled.
18:06 Host: Do you think the police have a theory that they’re withholding?
18:09 KD: I do think the police have a theory, I think they are following a theory, I think I’m following the same theory, and they’re withholding the theory because a)they don’t want to hurt their case if it comes out; b)if they’re wrong, they don’t want to harm an innocent person or persons. So it’s this sort of cat-and-mouse game that I play with them in court where I’m trying to get them to admit that they’re going down certain roads, and it’s a game that’s very much still afoot, and I look forward to going back to court in a few months actually.
18:46 Host: Kevin, what are your takeaways from this investigation?
18:48 KD: I think the most important part of this investigation that we’re doing at The Star is, we’re not doing this just because a wealthy couple was murdered. Obviously that’s horrible – and murdered in their own home – that’s a horrible thing to happen, but we’re trying to see how our policing system and justice system deals with a case, and using this one as an example, I’d say the mistakes that we’ve documented can happen in the biggest case that Toronto Police have had to deal with in a long, long time. Along with the McArthur case, I mean these two big cases happening around the same time – if mistakes can happen in those cases, and they happened in both, what about the other cases that fly under the radar. That’s, for me, the takeaway of this. Turns out there’s no system at the Toronto Police to review an investigation to see if it was done correctly. And to me, that’s just shocking. And so what we’re doing here is focusing on this one case and hoping that the Toronto Police will take a solid internal look and make sure that in other cases going forward, they do a better job.
19:57 Host: Well Kevin, I know that you’re still on the case, this has been fantastic for us. It’s always a pleasure talking to you and I want to thank you so much for your time today.
20:05 KD: Thanks for having me on.
20:06 Host: Kevin Donovan is the chief investigative reporter at The Star.
The Barry and Honey Sherman murders: Kevin Donovan reflects five years on
www.thebureauinvestigates.com
apnews.com
www.abc.net.au
