The Billionaire Murders

by Kevin Donovan

  A local couple, Dr. Moishe “Martin” Barkin and his wife, Carol, who had their own children, took in the four boys and eventually adopted the children, using money from the estate to raise them. But while Sherman had no interest in being thrust into parenthood, he did have an interest in the Empire companies Lou Winter had created and where he had worked for two summers. After Beverley’s funeral, Sherman delayed his return to Boston. He had a sense that the business was in trouble, and he wondered, as he recalled later, if there was something he could do to help.

  Lou Winter’s will had appointed the Royal Trust Company as executors and trustees of the estate, with instructions to oversee the affairs both of Empire and the four children, should both Winter and his wife die. Three days after Beverley died, Sherman wrote a letter to Royal Trust. He had a plan. Opportunity was on the table, risk was certain, the reward could be substantial. He proposed that he would purchase all of his deceased uncle’s assets, including Empire and related companies Winter had created. He was “anxious to protect the value of the said assets for the benefit of the children of Louis and Beverley Winter,” Sherman wrote. He suggested that he would take over immediately as general manager of Empire, putting his studies on hold, and that he would be given the first opportunity to purchase all the assets in January, just two months later. Sherman gave Royal Trust a twenty-four-hour time limit to consider his offer. It was rejected.

  Sherman went back to his studies in Boston, leaving behind for the time being any thought of a career in pharmaceuticals. Years later, when Sherman was a veteran of court actions, testifying in patent cases about one drug or another, his lawyer Harry Radomski would typically begin by leading him through his curriculum vitae, with a sharp focus on Sherman’s academics. Sherman would describe how he was awarded both a master of science degree in aeronautics and a doctor of philosophy in systems engineering after just a little more than two years at MIT. His grade point average, Sherman would tell the court, was a “perfect 5.0.” The cumbersome title of Sherman’s doctoral thesis, “Precision Gravity Gradient Satellite Altitude Control,” for which he eventually received a patent from the US government, always raised quizzical but respectful eyebrows. Another paper he penned for an earlier course was titled “Tethering a Satellite to the Moon.” After all of this was said on the witness stand, Sherman would pause and say to the judge, “I guess you could say I am a rocket scientist.” That would get a predictable chuckle from the judge and anyone sitting in the gallery, a welcome relief from the tedious discussion of whether a particular active pharmaceutical formulation was done in a manner that would circumvent a Big Pharma patent.

  It was surprising to some who knew Sherman in the 1960s that he dropped his dream of working for NASA and returned to Toronto to make another bid for Uncle Lou Winter’s company.

  “I had decided that I did not want to seek employment as an astronautical engineer,” Sherman recalled in his memoir. “I was interested in both science and business and I also wanted to return to Toronto to live.” A deciding factor for him was that he wanted to be his own boss. One summer, when he was fifteen years old, Sherman had joined the student militia of the Royal Canadian Artillery. The physical challenge of training was bad enough, he recalled in his memoir, but worse were the drill sergeants. “I was and always have been reluctant to submit to any authority.” The one bright light for Sherman during his military summer was the opportunity, as he described it, to engage “persistently in aggressive and disrespectful debate” with the military chaplain.

  With the NASA plan behind him, Sherman was back in Canada in 1967, checking in on his mother and sister. He called Joel Ulster, who by this time had given up on law and was working towards becoming a chartered accountant. Ulster was married to a nurse, and they had three very young children, with a fourth on the way. “Uncle Barry,” as his children called Sherman, was a hit when he visited their house just north of Toronto, romping around on all fours pretending to be a jungle animal and taking an interest in them that would last his whole life. Sherman wanted to get married and have children himself, but not yet. As far back as high school, Joel and Barry had agreed that if they could find a business that was a good fit, they would see if their partnership, first forged during a newspaper puzzle contest, could work in the real world. When they became friends at Forest Hill Collegiate, they would fantasize about the companies they would run and conjure up names using the first letters of their first names, like JOBA Enterprises, or BaJo Ltd. Now, Sherman had an idea, and he wanted Ulster involved. Both knew that to pull it off, they would need financial help from their parents.

  Sherman drove over to Empire Laboratories, the group of companies he had tried to purchase two years before. A few of the executives he had known were still there. The new boss, put in place by Royal Trust on behalf of the Winter estate, was a university chemistry professor named George Wright. “He may have been a good chemist, but absolutely incompetent when it came to business issues,” Sherman later recalled in a deposition for the cousins’ lawsuit against him and Joel Ulster. Sherman said he came to that conclusion by chatting with people at the company, asking questions about revenues, expenses, and, most importantly, their product line. Whereas Empire had been on the cutting edge of the fledgling generic market a few years before, it had not introduced a new product since that time. He also found that they were supplying product to the other new generic company in Toronto, Novopharm, and that Novopharm was then selling the product in stores and undercutting the price Empire was charging. And it turned out Empire president Wright had a plan that to Sherman’s young but sharp business mind made no sense.

  “George Wright told me that his plan to save the company was to make oral contraceptives for sale to India,” Sherman recalled in his deposition. “Completely off the wall idea that made no sense whatsoever. So it was apparent that the company would be closed down and there would be no value at all within a matter of months.” Profits from Empire, what little there were, belonged to the orphan cousins. Though his conduct was continually called into question in the cousins’ later court action, Sherman never wavered in his response. He believed that it was a good business opportunity for him, and if he purchased it from the estate, that would give the four Winter brothers money for their future.

  Sherman called Royal Trust, which was now two years into its job of managing the Winter assets and overseeing the financial affairs of the orphaned cousins, who were being raised by the Barkin family. This time, Sherman made an offer that included what a senior judge fifty years later would refer to as a “sweetener.” Sherman stipulated that the four cousins would one day be able to work at Empire and each would have the right to purchase 5 percent of the company shares, provided certain conditions were met. Royal Trust agreed to sell. Sherman and Ulster’s offer of $450,000 was $100,000 higher than the only other offer. They would assume responsibility for $200,000 in company debt, and the actual payout to Royal Trust would be $250,000—paid for with a $100,000 loan from Sherman’s mother and a $150,000 loan from Ulster’s father. When the purchase deal was done and Sherman and Ulster had control of Lou Winter’s company, the two men, both in their mid-twenties, looked around the four walls of their acquisition and took a deep breath.

  “We’re going to be millionaires,” Sherman said, his eyes widening behind his glasses. The next day, combing through the company documents and examining the product line, he sat back in his chair and looked at Ulster.

  “We’re going to be bankrupt.”

  THREE

  CLUES

  BERNARD CHARLES SHERMAN’S BODY LAY on a stainless steel autopsy table in a modern coroner’s suite in North York, in Toronto. Natural light filtered through opaque glass blocks not too dissimilar to the glass blocks in the house on Old Colony Road that brightened the pool room. Waiting in a cool storage locker in the next room was the body of Sherman’s wife, Honey. Barry was seventy-five when he died; Honey was seventy. Their bodies had been disco
vered the day before at their home, a fifteen-minute drive to the east. The Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario, which is attached to the Centre of Forensic Sciences, is one of those anonymous glass and concrete building complexes, and even though one would pass within three hundred metres of the buildings when driving from Apotex to Old Colony Road, the couple likely never would have realized they were passing near it.

  On Saturday, December 16, pathologist Dr. Michael Pickup had been assigned to conduct the autopsies. He was the forensic pathologist who visited the death scene on Old Colony Road the day before. A story in Toronto’s leading tabloid newspaper that morning stated that police believed it was a murder-suicide. It was Pickup’s job to deliver his determination. Following protocol, Toronto Police detectives would be on hand to make notes on the results and to ensure the paperwork was done for what is known as “chain of custody” for any samples that were taken from the bodies. Ontario had a relatively recent troubled history with forensic pathology. This fifty-thousand-square-metre building, completed five years before, was in part built as a state-of-the-art response to serious failings discovered in many botched cases over the previous two decades. The work of pathologists and coroners, and sometimes police, had been found lacking. Child deaths were misdiagnosed and a serial killer and rapist stayed on the loose for years, to name just a couple of the wrongs this building and a more focused approach to forensics were supposed to cure. Things were supposed to be better now, more methodical.

  Pickup was a medical doctor and a staff pathologist who had qualified as a forensic pathologist seven years earlier. With the high-profile nature of the case, it would have been more likely that Dr. Michael Pollanen, Ontario’s chief forensic pathologist, was at least in the room for the autopsies, but he was unavailable. (Neither Pickup nor Pollanen would agree to be interviewed for this book. The description of what happened in that autopsy room is pieced together from sources with knowledge of the case.)

  The role of the pathologist in conducting an autopsy is to examine the body, take samples, including toxicological samples of fluids such as blood and urine, and, if possible, determine how the individual died. The fact that a heart stopped beating does not explain how a person has died; it is a symptom caused by something else. In the case of a heart attack, for example, the heart stops because one of the coronary arteries pumping blood to it has become blocked.

  Pickup’s job was to learn why Barry Sherman’s heart stopped. What were the root causes and any compounding factors—disease, drugs, alcohol—that led up to the death? He would do the same for Honey Sherman later in the day. His examination would include a careful inspection of the surface of the body to see if there were any markings that would help the police determine what happened in the Shermans’ house. A full post-mortem can easily take three to four hours.

  Among the police present were divisional officers, local detectives who “caught” the high-profile case when it was called in, and members of the homicide squad, who that day were present only in an advisory and support role. The case was classified only as “suspicious.”

  Pickup began by taking photographs of Barry Sherman’s body. At the neck, there was evidence of abrasions, indicating that something had been wrapped around it. From his visit to the scene, Pickup knew that both Barry and Honey Sherman were found with a man’s leather belt looped around the neck. Pickup used a scalpel to surgically open the neck. From his knowledge of pathology, he knew there was one key anatomical area that, though it would not tell the entire tale, would provide a strong clue about what happened.

  Inside a person’s neck there is a horseshoe-shaped bone located between the chin and the thyroid, just above the Adam’s apple, if you are looking from the front. The bone, called the hyoid bone, is anchored by a series of muscles, and one of its functions is to help the tongue move and allow the individual to swallow. Pickup examined the hyoid bone on Barry Sherman and noticed it was not broken. For Pickup, this was a key finding. When a person is strangled violently, the bone typically snaps, similar to how it would be broken in a judicial capital punishment hanging where the body is dropped two or three metres. The sudden tightening of a rigid ligature, such as a metal wire, would have the same effect. That his hyoid bone was intact was, for Pickup, an indication that Barry Sherman may have committed suicide. In suicidal hangings, which typically lack a long drop (think of a person putting a noose around his neck and kicking the chair away), the hyoid bone is rarely broken. Pickup took biopsies of the damaged skin around the neck where the belt had been looped, and removed the hyoid bone for further testing, recording his findings as he proceeded. Moving down the body, he made other observations as the detectives looked on.

  It was evident by even the most cursory inspection that Sherman, the well-known billionaire and founder of Apotex, had not taken care of himself. A poor diet and lack of exercise were evident in pockets of fat and little muscle tone. This was the person police thought had overpowered his wife in another part of the house, strangled her, dragged her down a flight of stairs, and positioned her beside a pool, holding her in a seated position with a leather belt around her neck? A woman who weighed about the same as he did and whose body, once examined, revealed considerable bone density, an indication that she was strong. Then, according to the police theory, Barry Sherman killed himself by hanging from a very low railing? It did not make sense. Something else struck Pickup. Circling Sherman’s wrists were abrasions of some sort. It looked as if something, perhaps a rope or plastic zip tie, sometimes called a zap strap, had been pulled tightly around both of Sherman’s wrists. That would also seem to contradict the suicide theory. Pickup could not determine if Sherman’s wrists had been tied in front or behind his body. But it did seem that at some point, his wrists had been bound.

  In addition to what Pickup saw at the death scene, detectives had provided him with photographs taken of the bodies before they were removed from the pool room. In the photos, Barry Sherman’s hands were not tied, and police had found no evidence of any ties or rope in the pool room. A mystery. Using a special camera that takes high resolution images, Pickup photographed Sherman’s wrists on all sides. Then, taking a razor-sharp scalpel, he removed the skin around the wrists and put it in a special sample container for more analysis. That would be done at the Centre of Forensic Sciences, next door to the coroner’s building. These biopsies were necessary because they could tell him if the wrist markings were recent or old. When living tissue is injured, it goes through minute changes as the healing process advances, from inflammation to eventual healing. They looked recent to him, but he wanted scientific confirmation.

  After a break to make notes, Pickup began the autopsy on Honey Sherman, with the police detectives watching. Whereas Barry Sherman had no evidence of violence on his face, Honey Sherman did. She had a fresh injury to the face, where there were abrasions but no bruising, an indication that she had died immediately after being struck, or she was struck after she died, because bruises need blood circulation to form. Pickup could not tell how the injury occurred. She could have been struck with a blunt object or been thrown to the ground, or, as some speculated, her face could have been injured when her body was taken downstairs to the pool room. The skin around her neck had abrasions similar to her husband’s. Pickup discovered that her hyoid bone and the thyroid cartilage just below it were intact, the same discovery he made in the autopsy on her husband. As he had with Barry Sherman, Pickup removed the hyoid bone for further testing. Looking at Honey’s wrists, he found markings similar to those on Barry’s wrists. He photographed the markings, then removed for biopsy testing sections of skin from around both wrists and from her face and neck. Pickup also made notes on the overall condition of the body. She was overweight but, unlike her husband, there was significant tone to her muscles.

  From Pickup’s examination of both bodies it was evident that the Shermans died of “ligature compression,” forensic speak for strangulation. Some sort of li
gature had been wrapped around their necks, closing off the trachea and larynx, making it impossible to breathe. How forcibly this was done was unclear. Just because they were found with belts around their necks did not necessarily mean those were the instruments by which they died. However, the belts had been brought from the death scene, and by making a comparison to the markings on each neck it seemed likely that they were the ligatures used.

  Several doctors in the forensic community in Toronto, upon hearing news that the deaths were caused by ligature neck compression, had the same thought. If the owner of a drug empire was going to kill his wife, then kill himself, would he not have found a simpler way to do so?

  * * *

  —

  That Saturday morning, before Michael Pickup began his examination, when Barry Sherman’s oldest friend and original business partner, Joel Ulster, was flying in from New York, Toronto had woken up to a startling headline in the Toronto Sun: “Murder-Suicide Suspected in Deaths of Toronto Billionaire and Wife.” The reporter who wrote the story was a veteran, Joe Warmington, the self-styled “Night Scrawler,” who has a reputation for being too close to police and some politicians, including Toronto’s late crack-smoking populist mayor, Rob Ford. But Warmington also has a reputation for getting it right when it comes to police stories. In Saturday’s piece, beside photos of Barry and Honey at a black-tie charity event, Warmington wrote,