Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: The Murders of Barry and Honey Sherman

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

Barry Sherman had built Apotex into one of the largest generic drug companies in the world, and his wife Honey was among the most prominent philanthropists in Canada. On December 15th, 2017, a real estate agent showing their Toronto mansion opened the door to the basement pool and found them both dead at the water's edge, seated upright and side by side. Within hours, unnamed police sources were telling reporters the working theory was murder-suicide. The Shermans' four children refused it, hired their own lawyer and pathologist, and paid for second autopsies that found marks on both wrists and no restraints anywhere at the scene. Six weeks later, Toronto police reversed themselves and called it a targeted double homicide. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy examines the first six weeks that shaped the investigation, the family's decision to investigate their own city's police force, and the unidentified figure caught walking a snowy sidewalk on a neighbor's security camera. Nearly nine years on, no one has been charged with the murders, and a reward that has climbed to $35 million has never been claimed.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hey everyone, Carter here. I am hosting a new show called What the Fact with my co-host, Connor Tomlinson, who you might know and love from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. Every week we take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Connor brings the tangents and an infectious energy that will make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on Earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube. at What the Fact Pod. This is Crime House. In May of 2019, a demolition crew rolled up to a mansion on Old Colony Road in one of the wealthiest corners of Toronto, Canada.

The house was enormous. Six bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a tennis court sitting on top of the garage, and underneath it all, a heated indoor swimming pool. The property wasn't being renovated or flipped. the family that owned it wanted it gone. So the excavators got to work. They tore through the bedrooms and brought down the walls. And when the house was rubble, crews filled in the pool and hauled everything away. When they were finished, one of the most exclusive addresses in Canada was a bare patch of dirt. The four siblings who grew up in that house asked for this. In their application to the city,

a representative wrote that the property carried, quote, bad memories. That was an understatement. 17 months earlier, a real estate agent had walked a group of buyers through that same house, and the tour ended downstairs at the pool. When they arrived, two people were already down there, sitting at the edge of the water, side by side, their heads upright and their bodies completely still. They were one of the most recognizable couples in Canada worth billions.

They had been building a bigger house across town with a flight to Florida booked for that Monday. They never made it there. Nearly nine years later, no one has been charged. No one has explained how they ended up in that room, and the reward for the answer has climbed to $35 million without a single person ever coming forward to claim it. This is the story of Barry and Honey Sherman. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end.

But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crimehouse community.

Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content to join. Go to Crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head.

The ones where the evidence points in multiple directions and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for Crime House Studios and be sure to like and subscribe. Today's case comes from Toronto, Canada, where Barry Sherman built Apotex, one of the biggest, generic drug companies on the planet. At the time of his death in 2017, Forbes pegged his fortune at $3.2 billion U.S. dollars, making him the 12th richest person in the country. His wife, Honey, was one of the most beloved philanthropists in Canada. When the two of them were laid to rest, the huge crowd of mourners included the prime minister. You would think a case with that much money

and attention would be solved in a week. Instead, it's dragged on for nearly nine years through two competing investigations, a family at war with its own police force, and a reward that's bigger than most lottery jackpots. All that and more coming up. Barry Sherman was born in Toronto on February 25, 1942. His grandparents were Jewish refugees

who fled persecution in Russia and Poland. By the time Barry, came along, the family had built a modest, comfortable life. His father was a partner in a zipper company. His mother trained as an occupational therapist. Then, when Barry was 10 years old, his father died of a sudden heart attack. His mother went back to work to keep the family afloat, and Barry poured himself into the one thing he could control. School.

He turned out to be scary, smart. He won a National Physics contest in high school and went on to study engineering at the University of Toronto. During summers, he drove a delivery truck for his uncle, Louis Winter, who owned a small generic drug company called Empire Laboratories. It was grant work years later in an unfinished memoir. Barry wrote that those summers would, quote, prove to be of critical importance to his future. He had no idea how right he was. On the fall of 1965, tragedy hit the winter family twice in less than three weeks. Barry's uncle Lou died of an apparent aneurysm,

and just 17 days later, Lou's wife Beverly died of leukemia. Their four young sons, Paul, Jeffrey, Carrie, and Dana were suddenly orphans. Barry was in his early 20s at the time, off at MIT working on his doctorate. When he heard the news, he made the executive. of his uncle's estate an offer that tells you everything about the businessman he would become. He said he'd step in and run Empire for two months in exchange for $3,000, a car, and the right of first refusal if the company was ever sold. He gave them 24 hours to say yes or the offer was off the table.

The trustee said no, but Barry couldn't let it go. In 1967, he came back to Toronto, degree in hand, and tried again. Now, this time, he brought his best friend, Joel Ulster, as a partner, and made a formal offer of $450,000. The trustees were willing to sell, but they wanted the deal to protect the four orphaned boys. And what Barry agreed to is called an option. Each cousin could work at Empire when he turned 21 and buy up to 5% of the company at 23, as long as Barry still owned it, if he ever sold, the option died. A judge who reviewed the deal decades later, put it plainly,

Barry was asked to be more generous, quote, but would not budge. With that, a 25-year-old with a doctorate in astrophysics and zero experience running a company took over his dead uncle's business. Around the same time, Barry was learning the drug. drug business, Joel Ulster's wife decided that Barry's personal life needed some work. She was a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, and she had someone in mind. A young woman named Anna Reich, who volunteered there between classes. Nobody called her Anna. To everyone, she was honey.

She'd been born in 1947 in a displaced persons camp in Austria, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors before the family made their way to Toronto. Toronto. Money was tight growing up, but honey came out of it with a huge laugh, a gift for people, and a habit of giving back. She earned an arts degree from the University of Toronto, then a teaching degree and volunteered at Mount Sinai between it all. She also had a running joke that she wanted to marry a nice Jewish doctor. Well, technically, Barry's doctorate was in astrophysics, not medicine, but honey agreed to meet him anyway. Now, on paper, it made no sense. Barry was an introvert who hated small talk and once wrote that he felt, quote, disdain for organized religion. Honey was an extrovert who lit up every room and loved tradition. But somehow, it worked.

In 1970, she met the 28-year-old workaholic, and on July 2, 1971, a judge married them at the courthouse. And while the newlyweds settled in, Empire changed hands. Through a share swap and then a sale in the early 1970s, the company went to a big American drug firm called ICN for close to $2 million. That sale made Barry a wealthy young man. It also did something else, something almost nobody noticed at the time. The moment Empire was sold, that option agreement for his four orphaned cousins became worthless. The boys were still kids. They had no idea the promise had ever existed, let alone that it was gone. But Barry was just getting started. In 1974, he launched a brand new generic drug company and called it

Apotex. He was a fanatic about costs in those early years, and the bet paid off in a way, even he probably didn't expect. Apotex grew into the largest generic drug maker in Canada and eventually a global giant. It had more than 10,000 employees and over 260 medications sold in more than 115 countries. Barry loved to cast himself as the underdog in all of it, the scrappy guy making cheap medicine while the brand-named giants gouged patients. He once said, if we're thieves, we're robin hoods. And Barry had a favorite weapon, the courtroom.

Epitex filed more than 1,200 actions in Canada's federal court alone, including 83 against the country's own health department. Barry sued drug giants, regulators, contractors, business partners, and eventually his own relatives. One rival, a physician and entrepreneur named Morton Schulman called him, quote, the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever. Even the government felt hunted. A former head of drug approvals at Health Canada described what it was like on the receiving end. He said, quote,

it was intimidating to come back from lunch and find an urgent memo on your desk saying you've got to get over to federal court because Sherman was at it again. Another incident even became a best-sexual. selling murder mystery. In 1998, a respected researcher at Toronto's Children's Hospital raised safety concerns about an Apotex drug trial and published her findings. The company threatened to sue her, a scandal that helped inspire the John LeCarray novel, The Constant Gardner. Well, that's who

Barry was at work. At home, he and Honey raised four children, Lauren, Jonathan, Alexandra, and Kalin. In 1991, after five years of construction, the family moved into a custom-built mansion on Old Colony Road in North York. Now, when the couple decided the work wasn't up to their standards, Barry handled it the way he handled everything. He sued the architects, the contractors, even the designers of the tennis court, and testified that the house was a disaster. At the center of the fight was a garage structure with that tennis court on its roof and in the inside it, a sauna, and the underground swimming pool. Barry spent years suing over that house, but Honey was the one who made it a home. She organized family vacations and holiday dinners, while Barry worked seven days a week,

and she once joked to a newspaper that her official title at Apotex was Persona non grata. But the truth is she was the company's best ambassador, and the family's public face. As their fortune grew into the billions, honey turned giving it away into a full-time job. She sat on more than a dozen charity boards. She raised money for hospitals, universities, and Jewish causes across Toronto. The couple's gifts ran into the hundreds of millions, including $50 million for a community campus that carries their name. One charity executive called her the best fundraiser in the city. The mayor of Toronto put it another way. It was impossible to say no to honey. Friends described the Sherman's as night and day. One charity founder

said that talking with Barry meant ideas and strategy, while, quote, with honey, there would be a slap on the back and a, how are you? That was the public picture by the turn of the millennium. the brilliant, combative tycoon, and the warm, unstoppable philanthropist. What most people didn't know was that Barry understood exactly what decades of fighting had earned him. In 2001, he gave an interview to an author writing a book about the pharmaceutical industry, talking about the enemies a man like him collects. Barry said something that reads very differently now, quote, For a thousand bucks paid to the right person, you can probably get someone killed.

Perhaps I'm surprised that hasn't happened. He didn't hire bodyguards after saying that, and he never installed security cameras at the house. He just went back to work. Barry Sherman was 59 years old. He had 16 years left. Some of the scariest stories aren't found at. horror movies or novels, they come from real people who survived terrifying encounters. And that's exactly the kind of stories you'll hear on Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast. Each episode of

Let's Not Meet presents a collection of firsthand accounts, stories of stalkers in the night, attempted kidnappings, and encounters that still haunt the people who live through them. These are not campfire tales, their true experiences told by those that made it out alive. Join Let's Not meet every Sunday night to hear stories like the fingers under the door, the smiling man, or the laughing in the woods. And with over 15 seasons, 400 episodes, and thousands of terrifying tales, there's no shortage of thrills. So if you're ready to leave the lights on, listen and subscribe to Let's Not Meet a true horror podcast wherever you get your podcasts. By the 2010s, Barry Sherman was in his 70s, still running apotechs like a man half his age and still collecting enemies.

The biggest fight of them all was with his own family. And to explain it, we have to go back almost 50 years to those four orphaned cousins and the option agreement that died the day Barry sold empire. Paul, Jeffrey, Carrie, and Dana were placed with an adoptive family. after they lost their parents and life didn't get any easier for them. Barry lost touch with them for years. When he reconnected with his cousins as adults, he opened his checkbook and gave them millions of dollars over time, seed money for their businesses, loans, whatever they came to him for.

Then the cousins discovered the old option agreement, the one promising each of them a piece of the company that became the foundation of Barry's empire. In 2007, they sued him, arguing that since Empire led to Apotex, they each deserved a 5% cut of a multi-billion dollar fortune. And the most outspoken of the four was Carrie Winter. But Barry didn't settle, not even with family. He fought back hard, demanding the cousins return the millions he'd given them,

and the fight ground through the courts for a decade. And while that battle dragged on, the rest of his world kept catching fire. In January, 2017, Apotech sued one of its own longtime chemists, accusing him of stealing drug formulas to build a rival factory in Pakistan. The chemist denied it. Months later, the world's biggest generic drug maker accused Apotech's of corporate espionage, claiming Barry's CEO had gotten trade secrets from a glist. girlfriend inside their company.

Apotex and its CEO denied it. Then on Halloween of that year, a group of American states added Apotex to a sprawling price-fixing lawsuit, accusing the company of conspiring with competitors to keep drug prices high. In the weeks before December, the company lost a $500 million patent ruling and started laying people off. Police documents would later reveal. that Barry owed roughly a billion dollars from various legal fights

and had no intention of paying. Even his charity came with a lawsuit attached. A political fundraiser he'd hosted for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau back in 2015 had triggered a federal lobbying investigation. True to form, Barry went to court to try to shut the inquiry down. None of it seemed to rattle him. That November, he learned he'd been appointed to the Order of Canada, one of the country's highest civilian honors, a lifetime achievement award.

They told him he'd be presented with it at a ceremony the following year. Then that fall, two money problems landed very close to home. On September 15, 2017, a judge finally threw out the cousin's decade-long lawsuit, dismissing their claim as, quote, wishful thinking and beyond fanciful. On December 6th, the same judge ordered the cousins to pay $300,000 toward Barry's legal costs. Barry had won the war outright, and his cousin, Carrie, who had hated him for years, now owed him money on top of it. Around the same time, Barry asked his own son to pay him back.

Jonathan and a business partner had borrowed roughly $50 million from Barry to build a self-storage company, and with cash tight, Barry wanted it returned. Jonathan later said he and his partner started talking to banks about refinancing to make that happen. While Barry fought his many legal battles, Honey was building their next chapter. In November 2016, she'd bought a prime corner lot in Forest Hill, one of Toronto's most exclusive neighborhoods. The plan she filed with the city described a 16,000 square foot dream house, a central pool under a 41-foot retractable skylight, an event room, an elevator, and space for live-in staff. Barry didn't really want to move. He told his friend Frank DeAngelo, quote,

I wish I was staying here, but my wife wants to move, so we're moving. To pay for the new place, they listed the old one. On November 27, 2017, the old colony road mansion went on the market for just under $7 million. Complete was something rare for a home like that, a lockbox on the door, so agents could come and go for showings. but selling it barely slowed honey down. In late November, she flew to Ottawa to receive a Senate medal for her volunteer work. On December 12th, though, something out of character happened.

She missed a board meeting at a foundation she supported, which was unheard of for her. When the staff emailed a check in, she wrote back right away. She said she was, quote, dealing with some stuff. Well, nobody thought anything of it. She was honey. She had a trip to their Florida condo booked for December 18th, and Barry was going to join her on Christmas Day. On Wednesday, December 13th, 2017,

Barry and Honey were both at Apotex headquarters. Around 5 p.m., they sat down with a custom home builder, an architect, and a subcontractor to go over details of the new house. The meeting was ordinary, just desalceding. changes and plans for the future. Around 5.30, Honey said her goodbyes and drove home. Barry stayed behind at the office to finish some work the way he always did. At 6.21 p.m., Honey used her cell phone to call a friend.

They talked for five minutes. As far as anyone knows, that call was the last time any friend or family member ever heard from her. The next morning. Thursday the 14th, people started calling Honey and she didn't pick up. By the end of the day, at least 10 calls had gone unanswered. Barry missed things too. He and Honey had a session booked with their personal trainer, and neither of them showed. If this were most couples, someone might have driven over that first day,

but the Sherman's were busy, private people, and everyone assumed there was an explanation. On Friday morning, December 15th, their housekeeper and their personal trainer arrived at the house around 825. They noticed something odd right away. The alarm system was off. In three years of working there, they had never once seen it deactivated. Still, nothing looked wrong, so the day went on. A furnace technician came and went just before 11 a.m., a group arrived for a show. going. The Sherman's own agent, Elise Stern, along with another realtor named Wei Dong Zhao and two of his clients.

They toured the house, top to bottom, and the last stop was the basement, where the pool was one of the big selling features. Stern opened the door and flipped on the lights. Across the pool deck, near a low railing at the water's edge, two figures were. seated on the ground side by side, legs stretched out in front of them. Their heads were upright, but their bodies were completely still. For a moment, Stern wondered if the couple was doing, in her words, some weird yoga thing. Zhao's first thought was it had to be some kind of a prank, a leftover Halloween display. He'd later describe it as looking like, quote, fake murders. But it wasn't a prank. It was Barry and Honey Sherman.

At 1145, Stern called 911. The dispatcher asked what was happening, and her answer was two words. They're dead. Police were there within minutes, and what they found by that pool made no sense to anyone. 75-year-old Barry and 70-year-old honey

were seated on the deck with leather belts looped around their necks. The other end of each belt was wrapped around the metal railing beside the pool, holding them upright. They were dressed in ordinary everyday clothes. Autopsies determined they had both died of what pathologists call ligature neck compression, strangulation by some kind of cord or band. They had likely been dead since Wednesday evening. Right after that last phone call, there was no sign of forced entry and nothing appeared to be stolen.

But the house had no security cameras, so it was hard to say. Within hours, a theory took hold inside the investigation, and it leaked almost immediately. Unnamed, police sources told reporters the working theory was a murder suicide, that Barry had strangled honey, staged her by the pool, and then hanged himself beside her. Think about what that meant for the four Sherman children.

In the same news cycle where they learned their parents were dead, they were reading that their father was the killer. No, they didn't believe it for a second. Their parents had been married for 46 years. They were planning a new house, a Florida vacation, trips to Japan and Israel.

The very next day, the family hired one of the most famous criminal lawyers in Canada, Brian Greenspan. He started assembling a shadow team of retired homicide detectives to run a parallel investigation. Their first move was the one that changed the case. Greenspan brought in Dr. David Chaison, the former chief forensic pathologist for the entire province of Ontario, to conduct second autopsies. He examined the couple on December 20th, the day before their funeral. What he found didn't fit a murder-suicide at all.

Both Barry and Honey had markings on their wrists, the kind left behind when someone's hands are bound. And yet, no rope, no zip ties, no restraints of any kind were found at the scene. someone had tied them up and someone had taken the bindings away. Reporting on the case would later reveal a second problem. Underneath the belts, each of them had a fainter, thinner, ligature mark, consistent with something like a cord,

an item that was also never recovered. In other words, the belts around their necks may not have been what killed them. The evidence suggested they were strong. strangled with something else, and the belts were only added afterward to hold the bodies upright against that railing. If that's right, then the scene the realtors walked into wasn't a tragedy frozen in place. It was a stage set. On December 21st, while all of this was still secret, Canada said goodbye. More than 6,500 people packed a convention center for the funeral with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario's premier, and Toronto's mayor in the crowd.

Thousands of Apotech's employees came dressed in the company's blue. Some in T-shirts reading, We will continue your legacy. At the service, Jonathan Sherman announced that he and his sisters would start a new foundation to carry on their parents' giving. While the country mourned, the official police theory was still that the man in one of those two caskets had killed his wife. That finally changed in the new year. After the Toronto Star reported the findings from the second autopsies,

detectives sat down with Dr. Chason themselves. On January 26, 2018, Detective Sergeant Susan Gomez stood in front of the cameras and announced that Barry and Honey Sherman were the victims of a targeted double homicide. Whoever walked into that house had a six-week head start. And by then, the trail had gone cold. But somewhere in the footage police had already collected sat a single figure they couldn't account for.

It would take another four years before anyone outside that investigation laid eyes on them. We all experienced petty grievances in life. A bachelorette party that resulted in a run-up. away bridesmaid. A neighbor who has trained their dog to poo in your yard. An ex-friend who writes a semi-autobiographical book about your friend group and then kills off your character. Maybe these aren't completely relatable, but they are all petty crimes we've investigated on our podcast. I'm Griff, your average biracial, farm-raised, queer actor, and retired model who's living and looking for love in Los Angeles. And I'm Kira. I'm an S&L writer, a movie writer, a comedian, and I'm

the only person peddier than Griff. Petty Crimes is a true crime comedy podcast that exclusively investigates non-crimes. meaning real life, low stakes, petty drama that's submitted each week by our listeners and ruled on by us. Some weeks, we're joined by comedian friends like Ego Wodham, John Marco Seraci, Chloe Feynman, Sarah Sherman, Jeremy Cole Hane, Carl Tart, Lacey Mosley. But most of the time, you're just stuck with us. If you're the type that tells your boyfriend to shh, so you can eavesdrop on the tea unfolding at the table next to you, you found your people. Subscribe to Petty Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. In late January 2018, six weeks after Barry and Honey Sherman were found,

dead beside their basement pool. Toronto police finally declared the case what the family had insisted was all long, a double murder. On paper, the response looked massive. An affidavit filed in court that spring described 51 officers on the case. More than 2,000 hours of security footage collected from the neighborhood and 240 people interviewed or slated to be. Detectives got warrants for the Sherman's phones, computers,

bank records and health records. Over the years, they would get their hands on 75 sets of records from phone companies, banks, and airlines. But underneath the numbers, there was a problem, and it traces straight back to those first six weeks. Years later, when the star finally pried loose the interview files, the paper counted 53 witness statements in the record. And 46 of them were taken while police still believe this was a murder.

murder, suicide, which meant that when detectives sat down with family members, close friends, and business associates, they weren't hunting a killer. They asked about the couple's health, their marriage, and if Barry was stressed about work, what they almost never asked was the most basic homicide question there is. Where were you that night? In all 53 statements, a person's whereabouts only came up twice, and both times the witness volunteered it on their own, and one of the police's own documents admitted the bigger issue outright. Months into the case, an officer swore in an affidavit that investigators, quote, do not have a detailed understanding of the couple, their friends, or possible enemies.

With that kind of lackluster approach, it's no surprise the family was extremely frustrated with the investigation. And in the fall of 2018, their concerns boiled over in public. On October 26th, their lawyer, Brian Greenspan, held a press conference at Apotex headquarters and announced a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to an arrest. He said the family wanted, quote, to light the fire under the Toronto Police Service. Then he read out a list of what his private team had found after police released the house back to the family. His investigators located roughly 25 palm prints and fingerprints at the scene that police had never collected. He said police never vacuumed the crime scene for hairs and

fibers and never properly examined the homes locks. In Greenspan's words, this seriously undermined their misleading and irresponsible conclusion that there had been no forced entry. He also shared details of the staging that still stick with me. Barry was found with his legs outstretched, one crossed over the other glasses, still on his face, and his jacket pulled down behind him in a way that would have pinned his arms. Nobody arranges themselves like that. The police chief pushed back the same day, quote, If you have an opinion on it, you're entitled to that opinion.

And we don't deal with opinions. We deal with facts. At his own press conference soon after, the police chief added something even more puzzling. He said he had to be careful because, quote, the suspect or suspects are watching right now. I know that for a fact. He never explained how.

He knew that. Still, the two investigations eventually stopped feuding. in December 2019, the family's private probe wrapped up its work and handed everything to the police and its tip line went offline. By then, the house on Old Colony Road was already gone, and the empty lot would sell in the summer of 2020 for $4.25 million. Which left everyone staring at the same question. If this was a targeted killing dressed up as something else, who ordered it. Well, there's never been a shortage of candidates.

That's part of what makes this case so maddening. Start with the most obvious name, Kerry Winter, who had just lost the lawsuit and been told he owed Barry $300,000 in legal fees. After the murders, Carrie went on national television and admitted he used to fantasize about ambushing his cousin and killing him, in terms I won't repeat here.

He even claimed that Barry had once asked him to arrange Honey's murder. An allegation the Sherman family has adamantly denied and no evidence has ever supported. But Kerry has always insisted he had nothing to do with the deaths. As he told a reporter, I have every reason to hate this man, but I had nothing to do with their demise. He has never been arrested or charged with anything in this case. Then there's the money inside the family. Jonathan Sherman still owed his father that roughly $50 million when his parents died,

and after their deaths, the pressure evaporated. The estate valued in court documents at more than $124 million, before even counting the holding companies, was split equally among the four children. Eight days after the bodies were found, Jonathan told detectives, that his parents, quote, were complicated people and that there are people out there who would have a grudge against them and would have a reason to hurt them. Years later, he sat down for a five-hour interview with reporter Kevin Donovan and addressed the timing of the loan directly, quote, I don't know anyone who can plan a murder in three

weeks, but I can tell you I was not involved. He has cooperated with police. and he has never been named a suspect. Then there was Barry's offbeat friend and business partner, Frank DeAngelo, who had burned through millions of Sherman money on ventures over the years. His name floated around the case, but he was never officially named a suspect, and he made a blunt point to the press. Why would he kill his own financial lifeline?

And hovering over all of it is the business theory. You already heard. the gauntlet Barry was running in his final year. On top of it, Apotex operated in countries where the drug trade can turn violent. Honey's own sister told police she wondered whether the couple's outspoken support of Israel had made them targets. Every one of those roads was still open when four years in, the police finally showed the public what they had. On December 14, 2021, released a piece of security video. It's about 22 seconds long, black and white,

taken from a home camera in the Sherman's neighborhood on the night investigators believe the couple was killed. It shows a lone figure in dark clothing walking along a snowy sidewalk. And, well, that's the whole tape. That clip matters because of what it took to find it. Detective Sergeant Brandon Price explained that his team had spent years,

going through footage from the surrounding streets, and had managed to account for essentially every person captured on camera that night. Quote, we are left with one individual whom we have been unable to identify. The timing of that person's walk lined up with the window of the murders, and police couldn't figure out any reason for them to be in the neighborhood. So they've made it official. This wasn't just a person of interest. This was a suspect.

But the analysis could only say so much. The figure looks like they're between 5'6 and 5 foot 9. Police couldn't determine their sex, their race, or their age. The one detail that stands out is the walk itself. With every step, the person kicks up their right foot. An unusual gate police hope someone would recognize. Hundreds of tips came in. none of them produced a name, and investigators eventually acknowledged they'd moved into a, quote, new phase of the case.

To this day, the walking figure in the snow has never been identified. One year after the video came out on the fifth anniversary of the murders, Jonathan Sherman added $25 million of his own money to the family's standing offer, bringing the total reward to $35 million. one of the largest ever. It has never been claimed. Since then, the case has moved in inches, and almost every inch has come from journalists and the family, rather than announcements from police. Kevin Donovan and the Toronto Star have gone to court again and again to unseal the investigative files, and those files keep reframing the story. In 2024, the star revealed a stack of what it called

toxic emails between Barry and Honey from the weeks before they died, including one where Barry told his wife, quote, you have been abusive to me for over 40 years. Painful as they are, those emails may explain why detectives found the murder suicide theory so easy to believe in those first hours. However, the family has always maintained that whatever friction existed, Barry was not capable of this. As for the investigation today, it's shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. By 2025, a single detective constable, Dennis Yim, was working the Sherman murders.

And that June, a court hearing revealed he'd been told to split his time with administrative work on other homicides. To manage it all, he said he planned to bring in an artificial intelligence. tool to help him sort through tens of thousands of electronic files. The case started with 51 officers. Eight years later, it was down to one part-time investigator and a piece of software. The family keeps going anyway. Apotex was sold in 2003 and carries on without its founder. The children have poured themselves into their parents' philanthropy.

including a $52 million hockey arena, their son Jonathan, funded in Barry and Honey's honor. In November of 2025, their daughter Alexandra told the CBC, she still holds out hope that justice will come. I keep coming back to one small detail from the police files. A cleaner who worked in the house told detectives that honey never went down to that basement. Her legs were bad. She'd survived cancer and lived with severe arthritis, a hip replacement, a knee replacement, and the stairs just weren't worth it.

The pool room where she was found may have been the one room in her own home she never used. And yet, that's where she spent her last two days. If you know something about what happened on Old Colony Road in December of 2017, that reward is still on the table. And the case is still open. You can contact the Toronto Police Homicide Unit or leave an anonymous tip with crime stoppers. Before we get out of here,

this is the part of every murder mystery Friday where I tell you what I think. This is Carter calls it. Nobody's ever been charged in this case, so there's no verdict to argue with. Instead, I'll tell you which theory I find most convincing and why. I do think Barry and Honey Sherman were murdered by a hired killer. I think the motive was money.

Start with the scene itself, because to me, the staging is the whole ballgame. Nobody who snaps and loses control does what was done in that basement. Someone tied their wrists, then took the ties away with them. Someone strangled them with a cord, then looped belts around their necks and fixed them to that railing so they would be found sitting up like they had done it themselves. And of course, that may be the reason the investigation stalled. Somebody understood not only what they were doing, but how to be effective at it. So whoever did this understood something cynical and specific,

that a dead husband and wife posed just so would read as a murder suicide, and that once police wrote that story in their heads, the real investigation might never start or wouldn't start on time. Then take the fact police leaned on hardest. There was no forced entry, and to them, that meant nobody came in. But this house had just gone on the market. There was a lockbox on the front door. Agents had the code, and strangers were walking through for showings.

A locked door doesn't mean much when many people can open it. And, of course, there were no cameras inside to catch whoever did. What there is on a neighbor's camera is one person police can't name, and they went through years of footage and accounted for everybody else on that street. Everybody except the figure walking away in the snow. And still leaves the two names everybody reaches for first. Carrie Winter said unforgivable things about his cousin and the timing of his courtroom loss looks terrible. But saying you fantasized about a murder. is not the same as committing one. And in nearly nine years, nothing has tied him to that basement.

He's never been charged. Jonathan Sherman had a $50 million reason to be scrutinized, and he has been by police and by reporters. Still, he has never been named a suspect, cooperated with investigators, and put 25 million of his own money into catching whoever did this. So I'm not going to convict either of those men from a podcast studio, and nor should you. What I will say is that the answer, in my view, lives somewhere in Barry's ledger. Barry owed close to a billion dollars, and according to police documents, had no intention of paying it. He was fighting an espionage claim and a price-fixing claim. He had spent decades suing anyone who crossed him, and he had loaned and invested in investment. his money in so many places that he once testified, he couldn't keep track of it himself.

Somewhere in all of that, somebody decided Barry Sherman was a problem worth getting rid of and had the money to hire someone else to do it. And the best chance to catch that person came and went in the first six weeks, while police were still treating Barry as the suspect. instead of a victim. Back in 2001, Barry said he was surprised nobody had ever paid to have him killed. 16 years later, I think somebody finally did. I think the professionalism of the scene, the stage set in a way that let the killer get away with it, doesn't suggest somebody who's never killed before. I think it was a professional hit. But if you see it differently, if you think this was the family or something none of us have considered, please tell me in the comments, because until someone puts a name to that figure

in the snow, your theory is as good as mine. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people it affected. Murder, True Crime Stories is a Crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crimehouse, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your murder, True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on

Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two, plus ad-free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap, try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron

Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Bertowski, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Mara de la Rosa, Claire Swartlander, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening, everyone. Before you go, I am hosting a new show with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. It's called What the Fact. Every week we take three unbelievable true facts from history

and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What The Fact wherever you. listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.