True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast was recorded on.

On December fifteenth, twenty seventeen, Elise Sterne was showing a group of prospective buyers through the multimillion dollar Toronto mansion owned by pharmaceutical billionaire Barry Sherman and his wife, Honey.

Now Honey was in the midst of building a new home for her and her husband.

The estimated thirty million dollar estate that was nearer the city and her daughter and new grandchild would include living quarters for all the stuff they'd need on hand to help run it.

So the one they were currently in, with all its slightly outdated features, was going on the market.

Elise stern knew that the Shermans wouldn't be around that day.

Honey, she'd been told, was on a trip, and Barry, who ran the highly successful generic pharmaceutical company Arpitects, would be at work like usual, So she grabbed the key from a lock box the Shermans had left out for her and let herself in.

Now she took the buyers on a tour of the home, pointing out its eclectic ears.

She'd tried not to jump scare them when they came across the life sized human statues that recline on speakers in the media room, laughing as they continued on their trek through the five bedroom home, complete with tennis cordon sauna.

Then Alice suggested they head further into the basement to see one of the property's more unique features, the indoor pool and hot tup.

Now like a lod of the mansion, it was also a little outdated with its surround of those frosted glass brick walls, but it was designed so that the occupants could swim all year round, even in the depths of Canada's harsh winters.

As the group moved through the doors and into the warmth of the room, they were surprised to see again more human like artwork, this time two mannequins in that familiar seated position like they'd seen in the media room, but this time they were held up by their necks, hanging from the low handrail at the far end of the pool.

Now only the pool lights were on, so they were illuminating the space from below, making it quite difficult to fully tell what was happening down the far end, but at least knew this house and she knew there was no extra artwork down here.

She rushed the buyers outside and then went up and voiced her fears to the housekeeper.

She sent the gardener down to confirm it.

They're dead, Alise would scream to the emergency dispatcher who took her call.

The discovery of the bodies of Barry and Honey Sherman, one of Canada's richest couples, would set off an investigation that, nearly eight years later, is still not any closer to being solved, even with a thirty five million dollar reward on the line for the person who can shed light on what really happened to them.

But the Internet has theories.

I'm Claire Murphy and this is True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them.

We do need to start off today's ap by saying that no one has ever been charged in relation to the deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman, but there have been many who've been considered potential suspects, either by the police themselves or Honey in Barry's family members and netizens who have a lot to say about this still unsolved double murder.

Was it connected to Barry's business dealings.

He was considered, if maybe not big farmer, decently sized farmer in Canada, and he had a lot of court cases pending at the time of his death.

Was it a family member squabbling over an inheritance that would make some of them instant billionaires If not one, but both of the Shermans died, and who was the mystery man seen walking away from the Sherman's home when the dates believed they were killed.

Despite the Shermans being quite the philanthropists, donating to many charities and helping their community, there are people who were not surprised by their deaths or who had openly discussed how they'd imagine framing or even killing them in the past.

Even Barry himself had openly discussed the fact that someone may try to take him out one day.

But could it have also been a case of murder suicide.

We'll explore all the theories of how the Shermans ended up dead with Kevin Donovan, a journalist with a Toronto Star and host of their podcast Suspicion.

He's also the author of the book The Billionaire murders, he joins us.

Now I'd like to start with just giving us an idea of who Barry and Honey Sherman were at the times of their death and how they were perceived by the people around them in the wider community.

So can we start with Barry because the overarching sense I get from the feedback from everybody who knew him was that he was a chronic workaholic.

Yes, that is the understivement of the century.

Barry was a chronic workaholic.

He was seventy five years old at the time of his murder.

He grew up in a harsh part of Toronto.

Father died at a very young age, and Barry had been called butterball by his tea teachers, which is not something the teachers say these days, but this was the fifties.

And then he realized that he needed to start working, and he worked for his uncle Lou who was a pioneer in the generic pharmaceutical world in the summer, and then Barry went to university in the US did a PhD in Masters.

In quick succession, his uncle dies.

Barry ends up buying his uncle's company and not going to work at Nassau which was his plan all along.

And then he sells that company, sets up Appitects, which is Canada's biggest generic Canada's only big generic pharmaceutical company.

And that's in the early seventies, and then by the eighties he is a millionaire, and by late nineties, early two thousands, he's a billionaire.

Honey different upbringing.

She was a product of the Holocaust.

Her parents were in Nazi slave camps during the Second World War.

She's born in a displaced person's camp in nineteen forty seven, and she ends up end the up in Canada with her mom and dad and her young sister and they meet as people used to, not through tinder, but through being introduced to by a good friend of theirs, and they marry in nineteen seventy three.

And so at the time of their death, they were one of Canada's I would say, in the top five wealthiest couples.

They were valued, I believe at ten billion dollars Canadian dollars, and I'll let you do the exchange rate for your listeners.

And they were you know, Barry was a workaholic, as you said, Claire, and would work until ten thirty on almost every night Honey was the driving force of the philanthropy of the family.

They gave away hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to all sorts of Jewish they're Jewish couple and non Jewish charities.

And you know, they were unique billionaires, a little bit like Warren Buffett in the US.

You know, drives an older car and lives in the same house forever.

You know, Honey had this pair of workout shorts that she got a hole in the crotch and she'd darned them instead of getting a new pair.

And Barry, they both drove old cars right up until their death, got them fixed if they had too many rest spots.

They were very different.

There's that iconic story of Honey giving Barry a sports car for his birthday and him famously telling her to take it back.

They were pretty tired with their cash at times.

They were.

I mean, they did, I would say, have a unique relationship with cash.

Yes, Barry was given a sports car, but he wanted to keep his old fifteen year old Mustang ragtop convertible with brakes that didn't work, because how would you get a place to fix breaks if you're a billionaires?

There like that.

At the time of their death, they had two iPads that were so smashed, just by the early model iPads, one on each side of the master bedroom.

You know, they never thought to get a new one.

They didn't know how to get Netflix on the television.

But they were building a thirty million dollar mansion at the time of their death, which was Honey's idea.

Honey of the workout shorts, that she would darn when they got a hole in them.

She wouldn't buy a new pair, yet she wanted a mansion.

So it's it's unique.

It's a very different relationship with money, and that was also an unusual relationship when it came to their children, very parented by giving money to the kids, more to some than others.

There's four children.

Honey didn't like that.

She wanted them to work and make their own money, and that was one of the big sources of tension in the Sherman family.

Well, can we talk about the day that the Sherman's bodies were found.

We know that they were initially discovered by the real estate agent who was showing the potential buyers through and then confirmed by the housekeeper that it was actually Barry and honey hanging from the railings around the pool.

But before all the bodies were found, I understand that the housekeeper had said that she had noticed some things that seemed a bit odd when she arrived to work that day, and in fact, the real estate agent had also found a few odd things before those bodies were discovered.

What were the things that were kind of out of place that day that made people think, oh, that's a bit weird before they even knew something terrible had happened.

Yeah, So it's Friday, in the middle of December of twenty seventeen.

The cleaning lady, Nelia, walks up as she often does, to pick up an emil or newspapers, and she sees that there's two copies of actually my own newspaper, the Toronto Star, lying on the front doorstep.

And this is a Friday, and that seems odd to her.

She does not come on the Thursday.

She had been there earlier in the week, but somebody else would normally be there, like the Shermans, to pick up the paper, so that's odd.

She goes to the side door.

The Shermans, like I think many people, including myself, are side door people.

They don't use their front entrance, so she goes to the side door and she tries her key, and her key works.

She goes in, and then she notices that the alarm was not set.

The Shermans are not big on security.

They have no video or anything like that, but they do lot.

They put on their alarm every night, so she thinks that's odd.

And then she goes upstairs and she sees that the bed is made in a way that Honey would not have made it.

So on the Thursday, this is a Friday, she's expecting to find the bed unmade because that's one of her jobs to do the linen and tidy up the place.

But she sees that the bed has been made, but in reality it's been made by a cleaning lady.

On the Wednesday, which is the last day the Shermans are alive, so that's unusual, she expects to find Honey there.

They had a plan to make potato latkaz for Hanukkah celebration that night, and Honey and Barrier not in the house, which is unusual.

And she notices that the sink is dry, and by that time eight thirty on the Friday morning, she would expect Honey to be up and to wash her face, and so these are things that are tells to her, but you know, she has no idea, you know, the reality, the horror that is in the basement.

And she later tells the police investigators that she had and these are her words, a black feeling when she walked in that house.

Very superstitious woman originally from the Philippines, so she feels that something is off.

The real estate agent also finds some paperwork randomly sort of scattered on the ground around the garage and berries BlackBerry, which is weird for anyone to be using a BlackBerry by that stage, but kind of tracks with how they were with technology at that stage, I guess on the ground and she sort of tied is that up too?

So she she seems to think that maybe something's not quite right too, but she's distracted by the fact that she's got bias and has to show them around the property.

Yeah, and in fact, that discovery has made about a minute before she discovers the bodies.

It's ten o'clock in the morning.

Nelia, the cleaner's been there since eight thirty.

Ten o'clock at least the agent is there with another agent and two clients.

Houses for sale for six point nine million had just gone on the market, and Barry had promised to mark up a home inspection report and bring it home for her, and she was expecting to find that, perhaps on the kitchen table.

She doesn't.

She goes to the basement after finishing the full tour, takes the clients in, and that's where she sees the BlackBerry, and she sees the home inspection report, a bunch of papers in a folder, and she also sees gloves just lying on a hallway which is immediately outside of the garage door.

The garage door where and Barry's car is parked on the other side, so she thinks that's odd, And then of course she makes a discovery.

Well, can we talk about what is actually in that room, because as I've heard it described, when at last first walks in and she turns the pool lights on, and this isn't a basement, so there's no windows, there's no skylights, so it's like from within, the pool is lit up and they can see what looks like two human figures on the other side the filing.

Then there's a lappool, so it's not a small pool.

It's quite long and they see them hanging there.

So what is actually discovered when someone goes to check on Barry and honey, what does that scene look like?

Well, the scene is from the doorway of the pool.

It's just over forty five feet to where the Shermans are our positioned, and you're quite right.

It's a very narrow lap pool and at the far end is a safety railing kind of guarding the area where you get into the pool.

So it's just three feet high.

So at least the agent she sees in the distance these two figures, and she's got clients with her, and her heart starts to beat and then she thinks, oh, are the Shermans doing yoga?

One of the children, one of the Sherman children, is a yogi out in Western Canada.

But then she thinks they're not doing yoga, there's something around their necks.

So she gets the clients out of there.

And then eventually the gardener who has shown up that morning to water indoor plants.

This is winter in Canada, so it's no outdoor gardening.

The gardener goes down and gets a really close look.

She comes within three or four feet of the Shermans and I have the crime scene pictures.

I know what they look like.

The Shermans are quite obviously dead.

Their tongues are purple, they're out of their mouth.

They are in a their position kind of backwards like this, so they're in a seated position.

Their buttocks are on the floor, but they're tilting backward and the force of the belt is around the back of their neck.

And Berry and Honey, both their shoes are on.

Berry's feet are crossed in a very passive manner.

His eyeglasses are perched neatly on his head.

These are all things that in my investigation, you know, the police should have picked up as signs of a staged crime scene, but they didn't.

And then you know, the police are called, and then then what happens is the not Toronto's finest comes tramping in and one of the young officers who's put in charge of the scene while they wait for the homicide detectives, gives the three women present, the gardener and the agent, and the cleaning woman separates them, puts them in different rooms.

And the cleaning woman does what any self respecting cleaning person would do when she has two hours to wait to be interviewed by police.

She starts cleaning, so she is cleaning the kitchen area and the foyer, which are areas where the actual crime took place.

So that's, you know, one of the main mistakes in the early days, but surely not the only one.

What would have led police to suggest at the very start of this investigation that it was a murder suicide.

Well, that's a question I've been trying to saw for seven and a half years.

There's an email chain between Barry and Honey from a few weeks before they're clearly not getting along.

Barry writes to Honey that you have been you Honey had been abusive to me and our children for forty years.

Honey had been trying to get Bury to agree.

Buy email there in different places.

She's on a golf trip, he's at the office, and she's trying to get Bury.

Hey, let's go and go to Montreal and have a nice weekend.

And that's when he makes these quite strong remarks against his wife.

I think the police saw stuff like that and wondered if maybe this was a case of murder suicide.

The main problem seems to be that the pathologist, relatively junior pathologist, is called to the scene.

That doesn't often happen in Canada.

Pathologist usually just does the autopsy.

This pathologist came to the scene and he misdiagnosed it.

The police invest are assigned to the case.

She actually a veteran homicide detective.

She, for a reason that has never been explained, does not go to the crime scene.

Any watcher of crime shows, listener to podcasts, the detective always shows up and so by later that evening and not too late, media is on the front lawn.

This is a big story in our country.

Top billionaire, top philanthropist found dead.

But junior detective gives a press conference in which he says, at this time there are no suspects to be going after and so it's completely misdiagnosed.

They don't change their diagnosis of the crime until I come out with a story on the second autopsies that were done by the Sherman hired pathologist.

And one of my things that really surprises me is why did the police have to hear that from me from my newspaper, The Toronto Star.

Why didn't the state trustees and the children of bearing honey, Why didn't they call up the police and say, hey, do you want to see this report.

But anyways, that's why media is necessary in the society.

You're listening to true Crime Conversations with me, Claire Murphy.

I'm speaking with Kevin Donovan, investigative journalist at the Toronto Star, author of The Billionaire Murders and host of the Billionaire Murders podcast.

Up next, Kevin explains what the pathologists report uncovered and why it changed what many believed about how Barry and Honey died.

Can we talk about the pathologists report?

What did that discover that led you to believe this was not a case of murder suicide?

Oh, I mean it's glaring.

The second pathologist does to autopsies on Burian Honey the following week, just before the burial, discovers that under the wrists when you do an autopsy, degloving often occurs where the skin is pulled back and he finds marks on the wrist which indicate to him that they have been tied up while alive.

He knows they were alive because the type of microscopic damage to the cells that he discovers only occurs if blood is pumping, So that's the first thing.

The belts that are around their necks which are holding them in this semi seated upright position, tied to the railing above them on the pool deck.

The belts don't aren't the method of their death.

There are thin ligature marks, quite thin from something that has been likened to me as a cable tie, so quite a large would have to be a twelve inch cable tie used to tie cables together.

That is most likely what killed them.

The belts are just holding them up.

So he finds these two things.

And the real kicker, of course, is none of these ties are found at the scene.

So I would say to the Toronto police, how does he tire up, tie himself up, kill honey, kill himself and then make these things van It's not possible.

Where does the police investigation go then?

After that autopsy report?

As far as I can see, police have never officially released a name of any potential suspect throughout this investigation.

So where does it go from there?

Yeah?

So the police, after our story comes out and they have a big press conference announcing that after their hard work, they have determined it as a double murder, they start asking the question they should have asked all along in the first six weeks before it was labeled a double murder.

They were asking people, and I have all the witness statements, why would Barry do this to Honey?

They should have been asking who would have killed Barry and Honey and killed them both?

So the police start doing all these interviews.

They interview about two hundred and fifty people, friends, relatives, children, business associates, charity associates, people like that, and they're nowhere and they have only ever labeled one person an actual suspect publicly.

We don't know who this person is.

It's this infamous walking man who is spotted caught on camera about a kilometer away from the Sherman home.

They don't know who he is.

They see him moving through the neighborhood.

By the way, our CCTV, at least in this area is not as good as you see on television.

There's not as much of it.

But they do catch this person walking towards the Sherman house at around the time of the murders and walking away from it.

And the person that is between five foot six and five foot nine, please say he's involved in the murders, but they don't know who he is.

And one of the other big mistakes in this police investigation is that they wait four years to show the image of this walking man walking through the snow with his apparently distinctive gait where he lifts his right leg up slightly more than his left as he walks.

Four years is a long time to ask the public to remember who somebody is.

You know.

They don't check airport's surveillance.

They don't check our Transit Commission buses, which are all equipped with cameras.

They don't do any of that stuff.

So all that evidence has just gone unfortunately.

And do they find anything in the home itself that might give them some idea like whether this was a robbery, was anything taken?

Did they find any you know, paperwork or money missing, or anything that might give us an idea as to why this walkingman targeted Berry and Honey.

They don't find anything that will help them, either forensically or as you mention, related to a robbery.

Honey's purse which was found in the kitchen.

I think she was surprised.

And I should say that this murder takes place two days before the bodies are found.

They find the police look in her purse and there's seventy five hundred dollars in cash there in her wallet, so you know, thief might have taken that.

They find Berries black Bear, I mean, Barry was a titan of Canadian industry, and if you're killing Berry to try and get the secrets of the company, BlackBerry would be a good place to start.

Barry had a password of one, two, three four on his phone, which was quite well known.

They're not interested in anything like that.

Computers remain at the home of the iPads I mentioned.

Nothing is taken as far as anybody knows.

So my opinion, this is a murder of two people that they wanted dead.

And then the question is obviously who did it?

In comes the internet theories as to who this walking man is and what his motives might have beaten.

Can we talk about the idea that maybe he's a contract killer and why he might have been contracted to take out Barry and Honey.

Yeah, So I don't believe that the walking man is the killer.

I think he's a lookout and that's a Kevin.

But as far as the Internet, I mean, the internet has a lot of theories.

The contract killer one I have discounted because Barry had a lot of business enemies, There's no doubt about it.

There's a book on the pharmaceutical wars from years ago, and Barry is quoted in it saying, I know I've got enemies.

If they want to kill me, they can shoot me coming out of my office at ten thirty or eleven at night.

Barry comes home early this night for a reason that I don't know.

It's very unusual for him to come home early.

They're both in the house.

I think that a contract killer would not kill somebody in their house.

There's too much a danger of being captured, of leaving something forensic on them.

I think these are amateurs and the Internet is wrong.

Let's pivot a little and talk about the family, because they have been scrutinized by Internet theorists as potentially being involved in barryon Honey's death.

So I guess the first of cole is the ones who've kind of outwardly said that they were happy that they were dead, and that is the cousins.

So they are the children of Barry's uncle who passed away and whose company Barry purchased because they were little children when their father died.

That's great.

So Barry bought his uncle's company.

Can you explain what happened after that into why the cousins were very unhappy with Barry and Honey.

Yeah, so there's four four male cousins of Barry and Yes.

In the nineteen sixties, when Barry bought their father's company, Empire Labs, which is a very small generic firm at a time when generics were not big in the world.

It was just starting out, so great business opportunity, which is why Barry bought it.

Those kids were all under the age of ten.

The one that you'll see most often on the internet is Carrie Wench, who is the kind of being the main spokesperson for the four of them, and he's somebody that I have come to know fairly well over the years.

So Barry over as they grow up, he, according to Carrie, does look out for the cousins.

He gives them over the next couple of decades about fifteen million dollars in total.

That's in buying homes, cottages, cars, things like that, funding the business of one of them, Jeffrey.

And you know Barry's account would be I did everything to help them.

They all struggled with various issues, either mental health issues or drug issues in the early nineteen nineties.

One of them is looking through a court file and it's the court file related to the estate of their late father, and he's wondering, you know, how did Barry become so successful.

There's just all these stories to the family that, you know, Barry bought their dad's company.

And he finds a document which really brightens his day, and he and his siblings start talking about it, and they believe that this document indicates that they are entitled to a billion dollars, one fifth of Barry's new company's worth.

And they go to court and they sue Barry, and they lose their case just before the murders.

They lose it in September.

The murders are in December, but just a couple of days before the murders, the judge in this civil case between Barry and the cousins, the judge awards legal costs to Barry.

Now, Barry doesn't need three hundred thousand dollars.

He'd wanted a million, but the judge said, look, these guys don't have a lot of money.

But he makes this award.

And I believe this is part of what I call the perfect storm theory all the different things that were happening leading up to the murders, which would, in the murderer's eyes, would give red herrings.

Now, Carrie, the main spokesperson of the four cousins, doesn't help himself by going on national television and talking to me, but sometimes TV does have quite an impact.

He gives an interview in which he says, I used to fantasize about cutting Barry's head off and rolling it down the sidewalk at Barry's company.

And Carrie gives an interview to the police, given interviews to me and many others, and he says he didn't do it.

In fact, he thinks it's a murder suicide and it's a massive police cover up.

So that's the cousins, And you know Carrie.

You'll see Carrie pop up on Reddit or web slews occasionally.

He's quite fascinated by this himself.

He's got his own theory and he's entitled to them.

Next, we talk about the Sherman children and why some of them were considered potential suspects.

Let's talk about the children.

So the Shermans have four children, and they have all got their own sort of individual stories about their relationship with their parents and their parents' money.

Can you just talk us through the four kids and sort of at the time of Barry and Honey's death, while some of them perhaps have been considered as potential suspects.

Yeah, So the first child Blarren is Lauren in the nineteen seventies, and Lauren is the only one who is a biological child of both Barry and Honey.

Honey had a series of miscarriages leading up to Lauren's birth and after, and so they made the determination that they would try surrogacy, which was quite new to Canada in the late seventies early eighties.

Bury, through some lawyer, I think, found three different women in the United States, three different states, and those are the mothers.

I don't know who they are.

There's a lot of tension over the years between Honey and her kids, and they would say to her very meanly at times, you're not our mother, and in three of them that was the truth.

Biologically, the pecking order in the family was Barry first, the four kids, and then Honey, and so the kids all got different money.

The two eldest, Lauren and Jonathan, got more than the two youngest.

One of the two youngest doesn't have a great interest in money.

The other one probably would have liked to get some more.

One of the sisters and this has caused a big rift in the family Alexandra.

She has told police that she believes her brother, Jonathan is somehow involved.

Jonathan's an interesting gentleman.

At the time, he was thirty five when this happened.

He was the only one of the Shermans that had an interest in business.

He did not want to work in the pharmaceutical business.

He wanted to have his own business, and he chose the personal self storage industry.

He has a company called Green Storage and Barry we call the Bank of Barry.

What I've heard is called the Bank of Berry funded him well over one hundred million dollars over the years.

And these storage companies are you see them around Ontario.

A couple in Toronto and good real estate.

I think it's possible he's just assembling these four real estate anyways, But a year into the murder investigation, his sister Alexandra tells police that she thinks her brothers involved, and I end up going to interview Jonathan one day.

It was one of the more interesting interviews of my forty year career.

We met in a garage north of Toronto during the pandemic, unheated garage.

It was in the middle of the winter, freezing cool.

And one of the things he provided me is something that might explain why somebody would think that he is the murder.

It's a series of emails he had with his dad, Barry, just leading up to the murders.

Barry is saying, I want fifty to sixty million dollars of the money I gave you.

I want it back, I need it back now.

When will you do this?

Tell me when?

And this is just before Jonathan and his husband leave for Japan, which is a few weeks before the murders.

And then Jonathan I said, look it, you know you're the one.

And Jonathan's the one who tells me his sister thinks he's a suspect.

And I said, are you involved in the murders of your parents?

And he says, he makes a number of interesting statements.

One is, I don't know anyone who could plan a murder in three weeks.

When I put to him this the emails which he's given me, I mean I wouldn't have him without him.

The email is saying that his dad was trying to get money back, and then Jonathan doesn't give the money back.

He said, that's how billionaires converse with their sons.

So and he says he had nothing to do with it and loved his parents.

I asked him, you know, have the police looked at you?

And he said, I would hope they would look at all four of us, because that's what they should do.

He has his own or of.

Course, well if you look at it, so Barry in his will leaves everything to Honey.

But then Honey doesn't have a will in order to distribute that money that would have been hers if it had just been Barry who's been murdered.

So do the children just get all that money in the inheritance?

They do?

And I should say that I believe Honey did have a will.

Somebody that I interviewed to was somebody that's a medical person that dealt with Honey just a week and a half before, remembers Honey very clearly saying that I'm just getting my will updated.

So that's pretty interesting.

But no will has ever found.

What happened is it's a very simple will.

There's no specific money for charity.

Or anything like that, but all the kids at age thirty five get one quarter of the wealth.

The financial press always has said the Barrier is worth just under five billion dollars.

I understand my sources that it's closure to ten billion, but a lot of that money is salted at various places around the world.

But yeah, and a long way to answer your question, they're billionaires now, all four of them.

I guess you've already touched on Barry's business practices that potentially could have made him a target.

But he was involved in a lot of lawsuits in the lead up to his death.

And I mean, for those who don't understand how generic pharmaceuticals work, you're making low cost versions of drugs that big farmer have been spending millions of dollars developing and then hoping to recoup that money, and they sell it.

And so Barry's accused of stealing some of those formulas for those drugs, amongst various other things.

Have they ever tied any of Barry's business stealings into potential motives.

Barry is At the time of his murder, people were saying he's the most litigious person in Canada.

That's true, but the numbers are ram up because in Canada, the way it works with a generic pharmaceutical, if you want to break a patent, you have to do it legally, and you can only do that through the court system.

So if you go to the electronic registry you would see his name and his company many times.

That's just because he's the biggest and he has to go to court.

So it's not the most litigious in terms of him suing people, you know, claiming they owe him money.

There are some cases like that.

In fact, the people who built the house that he ultimately died in he bankrupted the contractors by claiming in court and a judge agreed with him that they screwed him by not having a doing a good enough job on the contracting.

So he is a tough guy when it comes to things like that.

As far as the businesses, I mean, I've heard lots of people say big Farmer rubbed Berry out.

To me, that doesn't make a lot of logical sense.

Barry had a big company by Canadian stand.

The next biggest company, Teva, which you'll see in some of the internets lose.

It's an Israeli company that bought Barry's big Canadian rival many years before Teva's ten times the size of Appitects and Apptex kept going after Barry died.

Now, the kids did sell it off, for sure, they didn't want to be in the pharmer business, But Appitects is still a thriving company, still based in Toronto, and I don't think a lot changed in the market share.

I also think that big pharmaceutical companies, they sue, they don't kill, and I know that the internet is alive with suggestions that they do kill, but I've never seen any evidence of that.

And I try and keep to the facts, you know, which is I think the best way to behave in some of these cases.

But it's interesting reading these theories.

I think something is really interesting in amongst all this story is the housewherean honey died, because after they died, it was really just left there for quite some time afterwards, no one lived in it.

It was essentially abandoned with all of their belongings still inside.

It seemed that their children didn't want to go and sort through their parents' things or take away any mementos or memories of their parents.

Is that true?

You think, yeah, the kids did go there.

The photos I have that were taken just before the house was knocked down by the kids.

They had legal authority to do it because they were the owners, and they got the city to allow them to knock it down.

By the way, they wanted it knocked down because they said to the city, we can't know that this place is still there.

The memories are too difficult for us.

I think they didn't want somebody to make a documentary going through that house.

Quite frankly, an urban explorer did go through it at one stage, though, didn't he And he took some photos which then he was threatened over I understand.

Not threatened.

So I encountered this, this individual and urban explorer, and he went in a literally two days before the house was knocked down.

He'd been watching it.

He went in.

He had a really bad feeling when he went in.

And I have his photos, but he hasn't given me permission to run them.

And why doesn't he want them public because he says, I'm afraid that I'll be charged by the police with trespassing, and he was trespassing.

But it's an interesting look at the house because it's a house that's trapped in time.

I mean, very little had changed since that day the bodies were discovered.

There's pictures on the walls and you know, stuck to bulden boards of a Baryon Honey, you know, you know, cuddling together.

There's nice family pictures and as far as I know, that went down with the wrecking ball.

So everything inside that house that belonged to Baryon Honey was demolished with the house.

Yeah, including I think the ulptures that are in the basement, which I think are part of this case.

The Shermans liked unusual art, and they have two American American sculpture made, these two life size sculptures using garbage, parts of skateboards, things like that.

One is clearly male, one's clearly female.

And they are in a seated position, not too dissimilar to how the Sherman's looked.

And they're in the basement just before at least just before the murders, and I think they're probably buried under all that rubble right now.

The pool was of course filled in, and there was another beautiful pool outside.

And now that house, it's changed hands twice, it's still got the what we call hoarding around it, black hoarding a bit of an eyesore on the street, and so far nobody has decided to build a new house.

So in amongst the facts, the things that you have discovered, the things that you've reported on over the years, and all of these internet theories about potentially who is involved, all the theories that are held by the family members and others, is there one that you think prevails over all of them where we stand currently, like eight years nearly after they did.

Well.

So I'll tell you what I say when I'm asked this question.

Should I ever be able to reveal who I think did it, It's going to be in my newspaper, The Toronto Star.

Somebody said that I have given people in my reporting the ingredients to make a pizza, but I'm asking people for now to make their own pizza.

The theory that I have is I believe the same theory that the Toronto Police have.

They just can't prove it, and I can't prove it, and I don't have the resources that they have.

This was, according to the police.

You know, a crime of money, and money is the motive here not surprising giving someone a billionaire.

I think there was inside knowledge of the Sherman's movements Barry comes home early on that Wednesday night.

He never comes home early.

He parks in the garage.

He doesn't usually park downstairs.

That would give the killers a lot easier to get a two hundred pound man into the basement swimming pool if he comes in to the basement underground garage.

The Shermans have nothing.

They're killed on a Wednesday.

They got nothing going on on the Thursday.

Some key people are out of town.

Aunt Mary, the sister is very second in command, is away down in New York with his wife at a concert.

There's no cleaning lady coming on a Thursday.

I think that somebody knew that this was the day that would give them some breathing, breathing time to get away.

Now, I don't think it's because they wanted the contract killer to get on a plane.

I just think they wanted I think they wanted a stage like it was a murder suicide.

And then they got very lucky because they didn't get the A team, They didn't even get the B team.

At the Toronto Police, with what you know and what you believe the Toronto Police know, do you think it's possible that we'll ever solve this one?

It was solved as an interesting choice of words.

I think the police believe they have solved it, but they can't prove it.

You know, these days, I think defense lawyers are getting better and better.

This case has been muddled from start to finish, and so I believe that the Toronto Police have decided that, with legal assistance of a Crown attorney, that they're not laying a charge until they are absolutely sure that it'll stand up in court.

So I think they're still trying to build a case.

They've recently turned to artificial intelligence some help.

I think the police would be wise to hand this over to a new investigator with fresh eyes.

They don't seem to want to do it.

They just want to have this one guy who's now down to half his day's detective.

Yim just plodding away, occasionally firing off a search warrant, getting some business information.

And I think it's a cold case that somebody smarter than the current people need to enliven again.

Just finally, when's the last time there was anything breaking in this case?

And has there been any new developments in recent years?

Well, the developments come usually every six months.

So I'm not a lawyer, but I go to court and I am allowed to cross examine the detective to try and unseal information.

So I mean, I'm looking in a rear view mirror at the police investigation and getting these thousands of pages, you know, bit by bit unsealed.

There's been nothing from the police other than four years into the case, the revelation of this walking man.

There's been nothing like that.

I do have a couple of people who want to say they want to speak to me.

They've hired lawyers and we're trying to arrange a way that they will be protected and they can pass on information to me.

Claire.

It could be, you know, complete rumors that they're passing on one of them.

I find quite intriguing.

But as far as a break in the case, when I've asked the police that they say they haven't had any breaks.

They're waiting for that person to walk in the door and say I heard something at a bar and I'm going to tell to you.

But so far that hasn't happened.

At the end of twenty twenty two, Jonathan Sherman offered a thirty five million dollar award for any information that leads to the arrest of the person or people who killed his parents.

He said, closure will not be possible until those responsible for this evil act are brought to justice.

So far, not one person has given any information that has moved the case any closer to being solved.

Thank you to Kevin for helping us tell this story.

You can find his book The Billionaire Murders at the Lincoln Our show notes, as well as Kevin's podcast with a Toronto Star.

True Crime Conversations is a Muma mea podcast hosted by me Claire Murphy and produced by Tarlie Blackman with audio you are designed by Jacob Brown.

Thanks so much for listening.

I'll be back next week with another true Crime Conversation