When billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman were found strangled and ‘staged’ like macabre human statues beside their indoor swimming pool there was no shortage of suspects.
Had the notoriously litigious pharmaceutical magnate, 75, finally made an enemy he couldn’t sue into submission?
Or was a simmering, years-long family feud the trigger for a grisly double homicide in the basement of the couple’s upscale Toronto mansion?
With a $35 million reward on offer from the couple’s children, it seemed a matter of time until police closed in on the killers of the Apotex founder and his 70-year-old wife.
But the best part of a decade later detectives haven’t made a single arrest in the December 2017 slayings – and Barry’s cousin Kerry Winter insists they never will.
‘It will never be solved because it never happened,’ Winter, 63, explains. ‘There were no footprints in the snow. No fingerprints. No knives, no weapons. There’s not a shred of evidence that it was a double homicide.’
Winter offers an explosive alternative to the established police narrative that would turn Canada‘s most notorious unsolved crime on its head: murder suicide.
The true mystery, he tells DailyMail.com, is why nobody will admit that Barry killed Honey, his wife of 46 years, then took his own life.
‘You have to understand this. Barry had dementia. Barry was losing his mind,’ Winter alleges.
‘He was losing big lawsuits. His kids weren’t talking to him. His two major plants were being shut down. It goes on and on and on.
‘There was a perfect storm circling around my cousin’s head. Everything was pointing in one direction: He was about to snap and kill his wife.’
Winter was once so close to Barry – formerly Canada’s 12th richest man with a $3.2billion fortune – that he considered him a father figure.
But the pair were bitterly estranged at the time of the killings and Winter later admitted that he disliked the mogul so much that he should be considered the ‘prime suspect’.
It would be easy to dismiss the recovering drug addict’s allegations as embittered and unreliable, especially his unsubstantiated claims of dementia.
And yet homicide detectives gravitated toward a similar conclusion when Barry and Honey were found dead on the icy morning of December 15, 2017.
The couple’s $5.5million suburban mansion was on the market because Honey, who served on the board of various charities, wanted to build a huge new home closer to the city.
A realtor was showing prospective buyers the swish lap pool and hot tub when he stumbled across the bodies.
They were seated side by side, held upright by leather belts looped around their necks and tied to the stainless-steel pool railing.
A report in the Toronto Star suggested the corpses could have been ‘staged’ to resemble an abstract art sculpture.
Honey’s face was bruised but no other injuries were recorded.
Police agreed the deaths were ‘suspicious’ but said there were no signs of forced entry and they were not ‘currently seeking a suspect’.
It was another six weeks until they changed their mind and designated it a double homicide by ‘ligature neck compression’.
‘Both Honey and Barry Sherman were in fact targeted,’ Detective Susan Gomes told reporters, saying the about-turn was prompted by a review of the evidence.
The move was welcomed by their children, Jonathon, Lauren, Alexandra and Kaelen, who had hired their own team of investigators and ordered a second autopsy.
Dr. David Chiasson, formerly Ontario’s chief forensic pathologist, suggested his counterpart had overlooked markings on Barry and Honey’s wrists consistent with being tied up.
Winter believes the Sherman brood – heirs to billions and deeply invested in their parents’ legacy – leaned on the authorities because they couldn’t accept the truth.
‘The family don’t want the stigma of their dad going off the deep end and killing their mom so the story has to be murder,’ he says.
‘That’s why there’s a $35million reward. And that’s why it’ll never be collected – because there was no double murder.’
Renowned philanthropists Barry and Honey gave away hundreds of millions of dollars to charity and enjoyed a close association with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
But Winter claims his cousin’s kindness masked a frightening temper.
‘They say that people with dementia can, not always, but often, lose their tempers very easily. And Barry had a terrible temper,’ Winter alleges.
‘Maybe they were fighting about the new house. Who knows? She started to ridicule him and he snapped.
‘I think he smashed her over the head with a frying pan. Then he dragged her down to the pool and set it up to look like a lovers’ pact.
‘There aren’t any defensive wounds, scratches or bruises on Barry at all which is the obvious fact that points to murder suicide.’
It’s a mind-boggling theory that Winter first voiced during an exclusive 2018 interview with DailyMail.com.
Barry had hated his wife so much, Winter told us, that he had once considered hiring a hitman to have her ‘whacked’.
The Sherman children responded with a statement saying the allegations were hurtful and ‘completely absurd’.
They had been at loggerheads for years after Winter sued Barry in 2006 for allegedly conning him out of a share of his pharmaceutical empire.
The seeds of the feud were sown back in 1951 when Barry’s father, Herbert, died from a heart attack.
The nine-year-old was taken in by his uncle Louis Winter who ran a successful biochemical company, Empire Laboratories.
Barry began working there in the 1960s and acquired the company after Louis and his wife Beverly died within 17 days of one another in 1965.
He struck a deal with his uncle’s estate which guaranteed jobs for the Winter orphans – Kerry, Paul, Jeffrey and Dana – when they turned 21 and an option for them to buy 20 percent of the company.
Barry would later claim, however, that he was absolved of any ‘fiduciary duty’ to the four siblings because he merged with a drugstore chain and relinquished control.
By the time he and Winter reconnected in the late 1980s, the latter was struggling with cocaine addiction. Dana had died from a heroin overdose.
Barry was an enormously wealthy businessman after selling Empire and founding Apotex, now Canada’s premier pharmaceutical firm. He offered to help his cousins.
Barry co-signed millions of dollars of credit, mortgages and loans supposedly to help Winter expand his home-building business, bankrolling him to the tune of $20,000 to $30,000 a month.
Their close bond soured, however, when Jeffery started asking questions about the sale of their father’s business.
The Winter siblings sued Barry in 2006 for $500million and again in 2007 for $1billion, arguing that he owed them a slice of Apotex because he’d stolen their share of Empire.
Their complaint was thrown out in September 2017 – three months before the Sherman’s were found slain.
Winter denied any involvement but told DailyMail.com in January 2018 that the longstanding feud would likely make him a potential suspect.
He even wondered why cops hadn’t hauled him in for questioning given that he had such an obvious axe to grind.
That was to change within weeks of our article.
Winter was interviewed in February 2018 – but was never charged with anything.
‘I went to the 31 Division without a lawyer. I handed over my phone and I sat down for three hours with Detective Brandon Price,’ Winter says.
‘He says to me, did you have anything to do with the murder of Brian and Honey Sherman?
‘And I said, for God’s sake Brandon, how could I have anything to do with the murder? You and I both know he killed her.’
Winter says he’s supplied a letter of consent to a Canadian journalist who is trying to get a transcript of his police interview released to the public.
Developments in the beguiling murder mystery have otherwise been few and far between as each year passes.
Toronto Star journalist Kevin Donovan recently claimed to have viewed potentially significant CCTV footage that cops seized in the early days of the investigation.
Donovan said the clip showed two SUVs pulling into the next-door neighbor’s house and four people walking, at times running, around the driveway on the night of December 13, 2017.
That’s the day Barry and Honey were last seen alive.
Police insist the murder investigation remains ‘active and ongoing’ but have refused to say whether or not the footage has any relevance.
Regardless, Winter isn’t backing away from his dark, uncomfortable theory.
‘There’s no doubt Barry Sherman killed himself,’ he said. ‘And there’s no doubt in my mind that he killed his wife.’
