ON THE MORNING OF FRIDAY, December 15, 2017, family, friends, and colleagues of Barry and Honey Sherman woke, shook off sleep, and set about their normal routines. But for some, a nagging thought persisted. Something was amiss. An email not returned, an empty desk in the executive office, a vacant seat at a charity boardroom table. At 50 Old Colony Road, in Toronto’s suburban North York, snow was softly dusting the ground, melting quickly on the heated driveway and obscuring any footprints that may have been made on the front lawn or unheated steps over the previous two days. It had been cold, ten degrees below freezing, and as the sun rose behind clouds, it promised to be another grey, wintry day in Canada’s biggest city. Many of the people who owned homes on the street had already flown south to escape the cold weather, so it was not unusual at this time of year for a house in the neighbourhood to be quiet. At the rear of the house was an outdoor pool, long closed for the season, a tennis court surrounded by a fence, and two patios. In a basement underneath the tennis court, stretching north on the property, was a lap pool rarely used by the homeowners. In front of the house, one vehicle was parked on the circular driveway, a light gold Lexus SUV that was ten years old. Judging by the snow lining its fenders and windows, it had been there at least overnight. Beside it, on the left, was a long bed of snowball hydrangeas, their withered brown flower heads perked up by little hats of fresh snow. A ramp to the right of the Lexus led down to a closed garage door that opened into a six-car underground garage nestled in the basement of the house with utility and recreation rooms on the ends closest to the road, and the lap pool at the far north end.
At 8:30 A.M., two people arrived on a clockwork schedule: a cleaning lady on her regular Friday visit, and a woman who came twice a week to water the plants in the home. The cleaning lady parked in the centre of the circular drive. The woman who came to water the plants trudged along the street, passing the large For Sale sign at the curb. The house had been on the market three weeks with an asking price of $6.9 million. Just the day before, a Toronto magazine had revealed publicly for the first time that the property was for sale: “Pharma Titan Barry Sherman is selling his modern North York mansion.” Inside 50 Old Colony, the woman watering the orchids and other plants filled her can and went from room to room. The cleaning lady got busy as well. Hanukkah had begun the previous Tuesday evening and included in her assigned duties today was helping Honey prepare potato latkes, which she would cook later that day at the home of one of the Sherman children. The main floor was 3,600 square feet, anchored by a grand entrance topped with a chandelier and a curved staircase heading up to the second floor. The six-bedroom house, including the expansive lower level, was well over 12,000 square feet in total.
Both women began their chores on the main floor. While they were working, a phone rang. The cleaning lady followed the sound into a powder room, where she found an iPhone lying on the tiled floor. By the time she picked up the phone it had stopped ringing. When she moved upstairs, she noticed that the bed in the master bedroom had not been slept in and that the room was unusually tidy. Normally, on cleaning day, the bed was unmade and clothes from the night before were casually strewn on the bed or a chair. The cleaning lady busied herself dusting surfaces and picture frames.
Around 10 A.M., Elise Stern arrived. Dark-haired, with a thin, angular face, Stern was a twenty-year veteran real estate agent who shared the listing for the house with Judi Gottlieb, who was the senior realtor on the file. Just the other day, Gottlieb had shown the house to two men who struck her as odd ducks. But in her business you met all kinds. Gottlieb and her husband were now in Florida on vacation, and in her place Stern was showing the house today. Gottlieb was a longtime friend of the Shermans and had travelled with Honey internationally, including an unforgettable visit to India. Elise Stern was involved because she was close friends with Honey Sherman’s sister, Mary Shechtman, who helped her wealthy older sister with all of her real estate transactions. There was some confusion over whether it was okay to have a showing today. Both Stern and Shechtman had tried to reach the Shermans that morning to make sure it was all right, but they’d had no luck. A couple, a man and woman, were interested in the property, and Stern decided she would take a chance on bringing them to the house. She ushered them in the front door along with their agent.
The Old Colony Road property was purchased as a building lot by Barry and Honey Sherman in 1985, and they set about constructing what in its day was a spectacular home that soon had its own story to tell. The story involved a protracted trip through the courts—something not uncommon for the Shermans—with the Shermans alleging poor building practices on the part of the contractors and emerging as winners, recouping most of the money they had spent to build the house. Now, after many years, the Shermans were moving to an even nicer address, closer to growing grandchildren, on a large pie-shaped lot in Forest Hill, one of Toronto’s most exclusive neighbourhoods, and a house—complete with a retractable roof over one portion—that would easily cost $30 million or more to build, decorate and furnish.
A short online item in Toronto Life magazine announcing that the Sherman home on Old Colony was on the market described the thirty-year-old property as a “poured-concrete colossus” and noted the extensive use of opaque glass block throughout, a popular building material in the 1980s that let light into private spaces. Still lovely, and immaculately kept, it was nevertheless dated. With the modern penchant of knocking down houses and building new ones, the agents knew they would need just the right purchaser. Then again, the lot was large enough and well located and a builder might want to tear the home down and start from scratch. The area, inhabited predominantly by Jewish families for decades, was now home to a growing number of Chinese and Russian families.
As the snow continued to fall, the agents and clients toured the upper two floors, with Elise Stern pointing out the features: the expansive master bedroom with a section dedicated to gym equipment and a large sitting area with couches, television, and fireplace; the spiral staircase that allowed residents to go from the master bedroom and sitting area on the second floor to the basement; the marble bathrooms and Jacuzzi tubs; the five other bedrooms; the many nooks and crannies for a family to enjoy. The owners raised four children in the house, and Stern showed off all the room for spreading out.
The tour continued back on the main floor: a large kitchen that could certainly use updating but had been ground zero for many an event; the spacious dining room, where a future prime minister had dined not too long before; bathrooms big and small. Then Stern led them down to the lower level using the spiral staircase. At the bottom, they passed a sheet metal art installation depicting a life-sized woman leading a sheep by a rope around its neck. Stern walked ahead of the agent and his clients. The lower floor was much bigger than the other levels, its footprint extending under the tennis court out back. Stern led the way down a wide hallway lined by glass block, the garage to their right, and storage, bathroom, and a large cedar sauna to their left. She stooped to pick up some stapled-together pages from the tiled floor. That was odd, she thought. It was a home inspection report for 50 Old Colony. Someone must have dropped it coming in from the garage. Stern continued to a locked glass door at the end of the hallway, pressed a red safety button at shoulder height to release a magnetic lock, and walked in, outlining as she did so the features of the lap pool they were about to see.
Stern stopped abruptly, not letting the clients advance. “Oh, I am so sorry,” she said, then turned suddenly and pushed the small group back. “They are doing…yoga. We’ll come back.” In an instant, Stern’s eyes had swept the rectangular room. She had taken in the strange tableau and reacted.
In one of the rooms upstairs, the Shermans had another art installation, this one of two life-sized human figures, male and female. Both Stern and Gottlieb had found it unusual, but just as clients viewing a home could sometimes be different, so too could the homeowners. Real estate agents, successful ones, learned not to judge. In Stern’s quick look into the pool room, it seemed like there was a similar art installation positioned by the pool. Then her brain caught up, adrenalin surged, and her heart beat faster. She apologized and said they could all view the pool room at a later date if there was interest. Still, as she related to the Sherman children later, at that moment she wondered if the Sherman couple were performing some sort of odd meditation.
Trying not to appear overly rushed, Stern escorted the clients and their agent upstairs. They were upset at being told to leave so quickly. The agent in particular was angry. He would later tell a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter that he initially thought what he saw in his brief glance into the room was something left over from Halloween and that his clients, from mainland China, were superstitious and considered the experience a “bad omen.” Stern calmed the agent and his clients down, chatted with them for a few minutes, made sure they had a copy of the listing, shook hands, and said goodbye. She then called to the cleaning lady and the woman watering the plants. The cleaning lady, who occasionally helped Honey Sherman in the kitchen, was getting the flour, potatoes and other supplies ready to assist Honey with their Friday morning cooking plan. Something was off, Stern told the two women, the image of what she had glimpsed so briefly now coalescing in her mind. Not an art installation, she thought. Not a Halloween display. Not meditation.
Stern asked the cleaning lady to go down and look into the pool room. She came back a few minutes later, shaken. She had difficulty speaking. “Call the police,” she stammered, and she described what she had seen. Stern did not immediately call the police. Instead, she called Mary Shechtman in Florida, who told Stern to call the police. Then Shechtman hung up and started dialing numbers for the Sherman children, getting through first to Jonathon Sherman, Barry and Honey’s son. Finally, after a delay of almost ninety minutes from the discovery of the bodies, a call was made to the Toronto Police 911 system from the house on Old Colony Road. Police records show it coming in at 11:43 A.M. Within one minute, police were en route, along with two paramedic crews and firefighters. Two officers and the paramedics entered the front door, passed under the chandelier, and quickly tramped down to the pool area. As first responders, their job was to save lives, and no care was taken to preserve the scene.
Barry Sherman, multi-billionaire founder of Apotex and well-known philanthropist, was in a seated position, legs outstretched, the right leg crossed neatly over the left, his back to the lap pool. He was wearing his glasses, perched undisturbed on his nose. His bomber-style jacket was pulled slightly off his shoulders and down, which held his arms at his sides. Beside him, Honey, his wife of forty-seven years, known as the “queen” of Toronto’s Jewish community, was in a similar position, the light coat she wore also pulled off her shoulders, holding her hands at her sides. They were both VSA, paramedic and police code for “vital signs absent.” A quick estimate by the paramedics suggested the couple had been dead for at least a day if not more. Rigor mortis, the condition where the muscles stiffen after death, had passed, and the limbs were relaxed and limp. The reason they were still in a sitting position and had not slumped over or tipped back into the pool was that each of the Shermans had a man’s leather belt around their neck that was tied above their head to the three-foot-high stainless steel railing around the end of the lap pool. Both were fully dressed, their coats over top of clothes they had worn that day. Barry’s face was untouched; Honey’s was damaged, but by what was unclear.
“I’ve got bad news.”
Joel Ulster, Barry Sherman’s oldest friend, was in the empty guest bedroom of his new Manhattan apartment, where he was meeting with contractors. He and his husband, Michael, had just purchased a new spot along the Hudson River, and there was a good deal of work to be done before move-in day. Joel and Barry had met in high school when they were sixteen. They had been business partners, friends, and confidants, and over the years Barry had provided generous advice and support to Joel’s four children from his first marriage and to Joel and Michael’s two adopted children.
“Barry and Honey were murdered at home,” came the words over the cell phone from Toronto. “They found their bodies.”
Ulster stepped away from the contractors. He could hear voices in the background at the caller’s end. It sounded like there were several people in the room all talking at once. He heard “murdered” again. A moment ago, he’d been thinking about renovations, where to put their mountain bikes in the apartment, what Broadway or off-Broadway play he and Michael would see next. Now, on the line from Toronto, was Mark Steiner. Mark’s father, Fred, was an old friend of Joel and Barry’s. The three of them had been business partners back when they were all just starting out in the early 1970s and they had remained close friends.
“What are you saying…?” Ulster said, his voice trailing off. When he first heard Mark stammer he had bad news, he had feared that Fred had died.
“They have been murdered. They are dead,” Mark repeated.
Joel and Michael were to fly to Toronto that weekend for a dinner get-together with Barry and Honey. One of Joel’s sons had planned to treat the Shermans to thank them for their generosity in giving him advice and some financial support on his first foray into business. Two days later, when Joel was in Toronto with the grieving Sherman family and the restaurant called to ask if they were keeping the reservation for a large table, he could barely manage a reply. He still couldn’t believe he was in Toronto for a funeral and wasn’t about to sit down to dinner with his friend of fifty years.
Yellow police tape went up around the entire Sherman property a few hours after the bodies were discovered. One end of it was tied to the large For Sale sign near the curb. On the street immediately to the north, a cruiser pulled into the driveway of the home that backed onto the Shermans’ house and officers got out to check the grounds of that property. On Old Colony, more uniformed officers arrived in marked cruisers, then detectives in suits driving unmarked cars, and finally forensic teams in white CSI-style overalls. Coroner Dr. David Giddens had been notified, and he arrived at the house. So too did a forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Pickup. Police took statements from those present, including a man, a personal trainer, who had a regular Friday afternoon appointment with Honey. He showed up at the yellow police tape and started sobbing when a bystander told him the news. A woman who lived across the street approached the police. Her home had two security cameras trained on her own property, but they picked up the Sherman home in the background. She and her husband had looked at the tape and seen something they thought police needed to have a look at. “We’ll send someone over, ma’am,” an officer said. Two days later, the helpful couple was still waiting, concerned that the seven-day loop on their system would be overwritten by the next week’s footage before police arrived. The Sherman home, like many on the street, lacked outdoor security cameras. There was a security video camera in the pool room, where the bodies were discovered, but it had never been set up.
In an industrial area to the northwest—at a location referred to, in an admiring way by employees and a scoffing way by rivals, as “the corner of Barry and Sherman”—news of the founder’s demise reached the headquarters of Apotex, the generic drug firm that employed six thousand people in Canada. Sherman had built Apotex into a billion-dollar empire starting in the early 1970s with the help of Jack Kay. At her desk, Joanne Mauro was crying. Barry Sherman had hired her as a “girl Friday” for a summer forty-two years before, when she was in Grade 11. That job had become permanent when she graduated high school, and for all those years Mauro had been Sherman’s executive assistant. Honey Sherman’s sister, Mary, who had been looking for the Shermans that morning to arrange the showing of the house, had called Mauro at 9 A.M. She wasn’t overly concerned that she couldn’t track down Honey or Barry, just curious. A little over an hour later, Shechtman called back, her voice shaking. “Joanne, something’s happened. Something’s happened to them.”
The Sherman family, including Barry and Honey’s four adult children, were informed over the next few hours. One of their children was away in Mexico; one had just returned from a trip to Japan; another had just had a baby; and the fourth was planning a wedding with Honey’s help. Barry’s sister, Sandra, who was with her husband in Palm Desert, California, received a call telling her that her brother was dead.
Friends in the couple’s business and social circles began hearing whispers that something terrible had happened. Jack Kay, Barry Sherman’s second in command at Apotex for more than three decades, was in New York City with his wife and had just returned to his hotel from a shopping trip on Fifth Avenue when he got the news from Barry and Honey’s daughter Alex. Bryna Steiner, Honey Sherman’s oldest friend, received a call from the wife of Barry Sherman’s main lawyer, Harry Radomski. Bryna called her husband, Fred, at the office and said, “I have terrible news. I am coming over to tell you. Just sit tight.” The Steiners and Shermans had been the best of friends since a chance meeting in Florida in 1970 brought them together. After Bryna delivered the news to her husband, they both had the same thought. Had anybody told Joel Ulster, Barry’s oldest friend? The Steiners asked their son Mark, who was in the adjacent office, to make the call. Unlike the Sherman children, Mark had followed his father into the family business. In another part of Toronto, two women Honey counted among her closest of confidants learned the news. Honey and the two women—they jokingly called themselves Thelma, Thelma, and Louise—had just returned from an epic golf trip to South Carolina. Despite hip and shoulder replacements, arthritis, and other infirmities, Honey had driven most of the way, as she always insisted on doing, in her decade-old gold Lexus SUV.
Like a dark cloud, the news travelled through the inner circles of the Sherman family and friends, but for a few hours it was kept from the public. Then, just before 4 P.M., the story broke in the Toronto media that two bodies had been found inside the home of Apotex founder Barry Sherman. A few minutes later, a tweet went out on social media from Dr. Eric Hoskins, Ontario’s health minister, who had dealt with the Shermans both professionally and as a friend. Television crews, reporters, and photographers rushed to Old Colony Road.
Hoskins, who had heard the information earlier but waited until it became public, confirmed the identity of the bodies found in the Sherman home. He wrote on Twitter, “I am beyond words right now. My dear friends Barry and Honey Sherman have been found dead. Wonderful human beings, incredible philanthropists, great leaders in health care. A very, very sad day. Barry, Honey, rest in peace.”
News travelled across the country and internationally. People who knew the Shermans stopped whatever they were doing and listened, then went online to search for information.
Frank D’Angelo, movie producer, soft-drink maker, restaurateur, and the most unlikeliest of Barry Sherman’s friends, was driving north with his partner, Gemma, to spend a couple of days relaxing in Collingwood when Gemma, who had been idly looking at her phone, began crying in the passenger seat. She told him the news and D’Angelo almost drove into a ditch.
Judi Gottlieb, the agent with the listing for the Shermans’ house and their friend for thirty years, was just walking into the Saks Fifth Avenue store in Miami when she heard. In the midst of her shock, her mind turned to the dozens of prospective buyers and the curious who had traipsed through the house.
Kerry Winter and his siblings, who were Barry Sherman’s cousins, had been locked in a bitter and very public legal fight seeking 20 percent of Sherman’s fortune. Winter made a phone call to another relative and raised the possibility that one of his brothers had “done it.”
For the Sherman children, struggling with the enormity of what had happened, there was suddenly a void. As son Jonathon would say at the funeral service the following week, in the first two days after learning their parents were dead, the four siblings kept expecting them to walk through the door and say, “Everything will be fine.”
“If ever a crisis would strike, we always had two people to call for help,” Jonathon Sherman would recall. “One would provide calmness, level-headedness, and perspective. And the other would instantly take charge of the situation.”
The Sherman heirs’ thoughts turned to their own safety and the safety of people at Apotex. A private security company was retained to watch over the Sherman children and their families, as well as key Apotex employees.
The snow continued to fall at Old Colony Road. Early in the evening, television cameras rolled as medical technicians with the coroner’s office wheeled two stretchers with body bags out of the residence, loaded them into black coroner’s wagons, and drove off.
The bodies gone, two police officers got in front of the cameras to give statements to the media waiting outside the house. Reporters who had been working their sources had the belief, unconfirmed, that a double murder had been committed. The first officer to speak was Constable David Hopkinson, a uniformed officer in the public relations department of the Toronto Police Service.
“The circumstances of their death appear suspicious, and we are treating it that way,” said Hopkinson, standing outside the home with a heavy police winter coat over his uniform and protective vest. He said police were inside “taking apart the scene right now,” and he invited anyone with information to contact the Toronto Police.
A few hours later, Brandon Price, a detective from the Toronto Police homicide squad, emerged from the Sherman house to provide a second statement. It was dark, past the dinner hour. Price told reporters that detectives had found no sign of forced entry and were not currently looking for any suspects. His comments raised eyebrows among the reporters. Why would they not be looking for suspects? “I just wanted to alleviate some concerns in the neighbourhood,” Price said.
Questioned further by reporters, the detective made the same point in a slightly different way. “At this point, indications are that we have no outstanding suspect to be going after.”
The comments provoked more questions: With the house for sale, were the police looking into who had viewed the property? When were the Shermans last seen alive? How did they die? All Price would do, no matter the question, was repeat what he had already said. No suspects were being sought.
The reporters were a mix of veterans and interns. The veterans grumbled at how, in the “old days,” police gave out a lot more information. The interns and a few of the veterans went door to door on the street, asking homeowners what, if anything, they knew. As deadlines approached, the reporters left to file their accounts of the mysterious deaths. On Saturday morning, one newspaper’s headline sent a second shock wave through the community and far beyond, to New York, London, Mumbai, Sydney, Hong Kong, and other major cities where the Shermans and Apotex had a connection.
“Murder-Suicide Suspected in Deaths of Toronto Billionaire and Wife” was the bold headline in the print edition of the Toronto Sun tabloid. As the day wore on, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and all other media—television, radio, and online—had different takes on the same theme. Barry Sherman had strangled his wife and taken his own life, according to police sources.
Having just landed in Toronto, his head in a fog, Joel Ulster took a call from his son Mark, who was at home looking at the Toronto Sun newspaper. “It’s not good, Dad,” Mark said. “What the newspaper is saying is not good. Are you sure you want to know?”