Barry Sherman owed $1 billion and was not going to pay, police documents reveal
The Toronto Star has won court-approved access to police investigative documents in the now four-year-old Barry and Honey Sherman murder case, and the information is being released in chronological order, not all at once. Last week, we reported that by the summer of 2021 the hope of catching the killer or killers through cellphone tracking had failed, leading to the release of the “walking man” video. In today’s instalment, the Star reveals what the children, friends and business associates of the Shermans told detectives in their interviews.
Barry Sherman faced a crushing payout — he owed $1 billion to other companies and had no intention of paying. Two of his most trusted advisers wanted him to show his favourite lieutenant the door. At home, things were better with Honey and the kids than in the past, but detectives’ notebooks quickly filled up with tales of past family turmoil and separate sleeping arrangements.
There’s an old saying in homicide investigations, “there are no secrets in a murder case,” something made abundantly clear in police documents newly unsealed by the court. The files, a collection of interview statements and police theories, also shed new light on Honey’s sister’s belief that the couple was murdered for religious reasons.
Barry Sherman, founder of drug company Apotex, and wife Honey, were killed in their Toronto home the evening of Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2017, and their bodies were discovered 36 hours later by a realtor touring clients through the property, which was listed for sale at $6.9 million. An offer of $5 million for the house on Old Colony Road had just come in, but Barry dismissed it.
In the early days of the now four-year-old probe, detectives and forensic experts were of the belief that the deaths were a murder-suicide. Detectives, pursuing that theory, asked people about the couple’s mental and financial health. All of these interviews have become part of police documents used to convince a judge to authorize search warrants and production orders at various stages of the investigation. The Star has been arguing in court since early 2018 that these documents should be unsealed so that the troubled investigation can be scrutinized. The first unsealing came in late 2020 and involved descriptions of the crime scene.
In this most recent round of unsealing, following a Star reporter’s cross-examination of the sole full-time homicide detective on the case, portions of family interviews previously redacted have been made public.
In one example, Jonathon Sherman, Barry and Honey’s then-34-year old son, described to police how he and husband Fred Mercure had been on vacation in Japan since Nov. 28, 2017, returning home on Tuesday, Dec. 12. Fred, in his interview, told police that on Friday he and Jonathon drove to their cottage and it was around noon that Jonathon received a call from his aunt, Mary Shechtman, with the news.
Standing in the cottage driveway after the call from his aunt, “Jonathon told Fred that his parents had been murdered and that they were found in the basement and that his aunt was very distraught,” according to the police account of Fred’s statement.