The Billionaire Murders

by Kevin Donovan

  Putting pressure on the police might also help, it was suggested. Alex called Senator Linda Frum, a family friend, and implored her to help persuade the police that the theory of murder-suicide was preposterous. Frum, through her network of contacts, made the situation known to the chairman of the Toronto Police Services Board, which provides oversight on police activities. Mayor John Tory, a friend of the Shermans, was also contacted, and he later received public criticism for weighing in.

  Saturday morning, the story in the Toronto Sun went off like a bomb in places where people gathered to mourn the Shermans, particularly at Alex and Brad’s home. In the air, approaching Toronto on a flight from Florida, was Harry Radomski, a veteran litigator who had been at the forefront of Barry Sherman’s patent battles. Beside him was Karen Simpson, his wife. Radomski had come in from the golf course on Friday at 12:30 P.M. and received a call from Jack Kay telling him their good friends were dead. By mid-morning Saturday he was at Apotex, meeting Kay and other senior company officials to figure out how to deal with the pressing business of running a complex company whose commander-in-chief was suddenly gone. Radomski’s phone rang. It was Alex. “What do we do?” she asked. “How do we deal with this?” she said, referring to the murder-suicide theory. Radomski is a civil litigator, and he knew the situation called for someone experienced in criminal law, someone who would know how to deal with police and, if necessary, hire private investigators. “I think we should call Brian Greenspan,” Radomski told Alex. Greenspan, one of Canada’s top criminal lawyers, had once assisted Radomski and Sherman in one of Apotex’s pharmaceutical battles. Within the hour, Greenspan was retained by the estates of Barry and Honey Sherman.

  One of Greenspan’s first actions was to make contact with the coroner’s office to ensure that the Sherman bodies, once the official post-mortems were done, would remain on site at the complex. He wanted a second set of autopsies. Then, at 4 P.M. on Saturday, and with the help of Greenspan and the public relations department at Apotex, the four Sherman children released a statement to the media.

  Our parents shared an enthusiasm for life and commitment to their family and community totally inconsistent with the rumours regrettably circulated in the media as to the circumstances surrounding their deaths. We are shocked and think it’s irresponsible that police sources have reportedly advised the media of a theory which neither their family, their friends nor their colleagues believe to be true. We urge the Toronto Police Service to conduct a thorough, intensive and objective criminal investigation, and urge the media to refrain from further reporting as to the cause of these tragic deaths until the investigation is completed.

  * * *

  —

  Retired doctor and former deputy chief coroner Dr. Jim Cairns was sitting on his couch Sunday morning looking at his bike, which was nestled softly on a special mount attached to the wall in the front foyer. He and his wife, also a retired doctor, lived in Orangeville, a seventy-five-minute drive northwest of the big city, and since leaving government service, Cairns avoided downtown Toronto as much as possible. The bike he was staring at was a retirement present to himself, a Colnago racing bike with a retail value of $20,000 (Cairns was able to get it wholesale).

  Lean, with a shock of snow-white hair and a mischievous glint in his eye that could turn steely, the retired Cairns was bored. Not many years ago, he’d had his fingers in all the big crime cases in Toronto and beyond. The previous morning, he had read the Saturday newspapers and cast a keen eye over the story on the apparent murder-suicide of the Apotex billionaire and his wife. Exactly the sort of case he loved being involved in when he was on the job.

  “There is no possible way this could be a murder-suicide,” Cairns said to his wife, Jenny.

  “Relax, Jim,” she said. “You’re retired.”

  Cairns looked at the newspaper again and shook his head. Ten years retired, he still wondered on a daily basis what his next act would be, other than hundred-kilometre cycling trips. Snow was falling—more heavily here, north of the city—and it would be months before the native of Ireland, transported to Canada as a young man, could hope to be out on those two wheels. His cell phone rang. Cairns did not recognize the number.

  “Jim?” the voice said. “Tom Klatt.”

  Cairns remembered him. He had known Klatt when the gruff-sounding detective was a member of the Toronto Police homicide squad. Now he was working as a private investigator, a common gig for retired detectives. Klatt explained that Toronto lawyer Brian Greenspan had been hired by the Sherman children to put a team together to conduct a sort of shadow investigation. The children wanted to disprove the murder-suicide theory. With the official autopsy complete, Greenspan and Klatt wanted Cairns to join the team, not on a full-time basis, but for one job: to locate the best possible forensic pathologist to conduct a second set of post-mortems. They had no access to the detailed results of the first autopsies, but, as representatives of the Sherman family, they were entitled to examine the bodies once they had been released for burial. Given that a funeral was being arranged in the next few days, and with knowledge of sensitivities in the Jewish faith regarding a quick burial, Klatt said they would have to act fast. Greenspan, a veteran lawyer who had a string of high-profile cases on his resumé, would hire additional retired detectives to work on the team. Money was no object. Cairns was told that the Sherman children, heirs to literally billions of Apotex dollars, wanted answers.

  Cairns hung up the phone and looked at Jenny, who just shook her head. The retired deputy chief coroner was back on the job. He began making calls. Greenspan and Klatt were concerned that an Ontario pathologist, even if he or she did not work for the government, would feel that the job put them in a conflict of interest and would not want to butt heads with Ontario’s current chief forensic pathologist, Michael Pollanen. Cairns’s network of contacts included pathologists around the world, and a US pathologist would be a good choice. The first pathologist he turned to was Dr. Mary Case, the chief medical examiner for St. Louis County, Missouri, who was also a professor of pathology at Saint Louis University. He reached Case on Monday morning, and as Cairns would later describe it, her voice was “buzzing” with excitement.

  “Jim, I was about to call you,” Cairns recalls her saying. “You don’t realize it, but this case from Toronto is the big talk among the profession here in the United States. If this is a murder-suicide by hanging, it will be the first one recorded in history.”

  Case told Cairns she would have liked to do the second post-mortems but could not undertake the job for several weeks. Due to the upcoming holidays, there was just no way she could get away to Toronto. She gave Cairns the names of three other US pathologists. He called each one. They declined, because of the holidays and because they were worried they were not licensed to perform an autopsy in Canada. Cairns called Klatt and said he wanted to call Ontario’s former chief forensic pathologist Dr. David Chiasson. Cairns knew him well. Klatt agreed.

  Unlike Cairns, Chiasson was still working. Though he had retired from government service, he was now a senior forensic pathologist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and a professor of pathology at the University of Toronto. Cairns reached Chiasson between clinics he was giving on Monday afternoon, explained the situation, and asked the pathologist to take on the job. Chiasson thought about it on his train ride home at the end of the day, then called Cairns Tuesday morning to accept. Arrangements were made for him to do both post-mortems the next day, Wednesday, December 20. Chiasson contacted Michael Pickup, the first pathologist, who agreed to attend and answer any questions Chiasson might have. Klatt and Chiasson informed the Toronto Police that they would be performing second autopsies and told the detectives they were welcome to attend. The police declined the offer.

  FOUR

  FINDING HONEY

  HONEY RICH WAS NOT OUT OF BED YET. It was almost noon, but Bryna Fishman was not surprised. She adored everything about her fr
iend: her gutsy up-for-anything attitude, her laughter, the smile that warmed cold rooms, the way she always took an interest in Bryna’s life. But Honey’s tardiness was sometimes too much to take. For that reason, when they were heading out for an afternoon or evening adventure, Bryna would set a time and she would pick up Honey, not the other way around. She felt that was the lesser of two evils; better to get to Honey’s house and get her going rather than waiting at home for her to eventually show up. On this particular day, in the summer of 1967, Bryna had arrived at the Reich house in the Toronto neighbourhood of Bathurst Manor at the prearranged time and learned from Honey’s mother that her oldest daughter was still in bed. “I’m getting up,” Honey called downstairs from her bedroom. A few minutes later, Honey appeared and performed her “morning” ritual. Boil the kettle. Make a cup of tea. Slowly, carefully, swirl the tea bag on its string, dipping it in and out of the hot water. Then, taking two Turtles chocolates out of a box she kept on the counter, she would dunk the Turtles in and out of the tea before slowly eating the softened caramel-pecan-and-chocolate treat. Only after that was she ready to go back upstairs and get dressed so that the two nineteen-year-old girls could head out on the town, enjoy the weather, and make plans for the future. Both were studying psychology at the University of Toronto and hoped to follow that up with teachers’ college.

  Anna Reich, known to everyone as Honey, was born in 1947 in a displaced persons, or DP, camp in Austria. These camps were set up after the Second World War to provide temporary housing for survivors of the Holocaust. Her parents, Naftuli and Helen, had been freed by Allied forces from a Nazi work camp in Poland. They were among the thousands who lived in one of these settlements overseen by the US Army, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and the Central Committee of Liberated Jews. The Reichs then emigrated to Canada with the help of a Jewish agency and set up home in Toronto, where Mary, Honey’s younger sister, was born. The Reichs opened a mom-and-pop shoe store in Toronto’s west end near the intersection of Keele and Dundas Streets. Reich Shoes gave the family a comfortable, but far from wealthy, existence. The Bathurst Manor area, ten kilometres north of Keele and Dundas, in North York, was and still is a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. First developed in the 1950s, it became home to many displaced families from Europe who hoped for a better life in Canada. As Mary would recall years later at her sister’s funeral, the family did not have a lot of money and so they let out parts of their home to boarders, as Sara Sherman did after Barry’s father died. “Our parents bought a house and rented out every square inch of it,” Mary told mourners. “Our house, there was a front room with a piano in it—we didn’t realize it was really a hall. Then there was a kitchen like people have kitchens, and then there was our bedroom, but we didn’t know it was a hallway with two fold-up cots.”

  Bryna first met Honey on campus at the University of Toronto, and they were friends from then on. Their exploits started with Honey getting an idea and then coaxing Bryna to go along for the ride. On a trip to New York in the late 1960s, Honey and Bryna found themselves in the lobby of their hotel, two attractive young women, with long dark hair, wearing relatively short skirts. Several young men approached Honey.

  “You two ladies want to go to a party?”

  Bryna turned away. “Honey. We are not going. We don’t know who these guys are. We could wind up dead.”

  Honey smiled at the men and grabbed Bryna’s arm. “We’re going!”

  “I’m not going,” Bryna said. Honey tugged on Bryna’s arm again. “Yes you are.” Fifty years later, in the condominium where she lives with her husband, Fred, Bryna Steiner smiles at the memory. “Honey was fearless. I loved her for it. We went, and lived to tell the tale. In a million years, if I was on my own, I would not have gone. She was not afraid of anything. They could be mass murderers and she would have gone.”

  On a trip to Chicago together, where they stayed with Bryna’s aunt and uncle, they went on a restaurant dinner date with two young men arranged by an American cousin.

  “Do you live in igloos up there in Canada?” one of the men asked.

  Honey gave Bryna a sideways look and muttered quietly, “Is this what we’re stuck with?”

  Honey started speaking French, and Bryna took the cue and joined in. Neither knew more than a few words of French, which had just become Canada’s second official language, so they made most of their dialogue up. The dinner ended early, and Honey and Bryna laughed all the way back to the aunt and uncle’s house. There would be other trips in the near future, and one in particular, a winter trip to Florida, would change the course of Bryna’s life.

  When they finished their undergraduate studies at university, the two young women enrolled in teachers’ college. Both wanted to teach in the public school system at the elementary level. Conforming to the stereotype, Honey’s mother kept telling her to “marry a nice doctor,” but Honey wanted to teach and was in no hurry to settle down. Three days into their course, Honey Reich announced that she was dropping out. “They are talking to us like we’re five-year-olds,” she told Bryna. She suggested they enroll in another form of teachers’ college available at the time. They switched to the Ontario College of Education at the University of Toronto, completed their studies, and began working at separate Toronto schools.

  Bryna taught for only one year, because she moved to Detroit and her credentials were not accepted there. Honey taught Grade 5 for five years at a school in Etobicoke, a borough immediately to the west of Toronto. Bryna Fishman and Honey Reich’s friendship continued to grow and would flourish over the decades to come, even at times when they were not living in the same city.

  In the late 1960s, when Honey was completing her teacher’s training, she wanted to keep busy in the summer. She always wanted to be on the go, according to Bryna, once she was out of bed, and was interested in new challenges. That saw her registering as a candystriper, or volunteer, at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. There, she met a nurse named Cindy Ulster, and the two struck up a friendship. Cindy was the wife of Joel Ulster, a Toronto man who had just purchased a generic pharmaceutical company called Empire Laboratories with his best friend, Barry Sherman. Cindy Ulster would soon make a very important introduction.

  * * *

  —

  The media stories immediately after Honey’s death spoke of her philanthropy, but only in generalities. People who were actually not that close to her personally commented on her tireless work for Jewish causes. There were few specifics, however, and few stories that allowed readers much more than a passing understanding of her character. Many who knew her were understandably reticent due to the police investigation and a fear that what was said about her might somehow affect the outcome of the probe. In my discussions with people, in trying to get them to talk about Honey, I would often use the example of the Kennedy family in the United States. People spoke openly about the wealthy Kennedys, a family that suffered more tragedy than most, I said, so why not talk about the Shermans?

  Fred Waks, a businessman who has a prominent role in fundraising in the Jewish community, spoke at the Sherman funeral. When I later approached him for an interview, he was reluctant at first, but after receiving the blessing of the Sherman children, Waks emailed me explaining why he would speak. “I hope to shed some light on a couple who my wife and I were fortunate to be very close with,” he wrote. “I’ve declined many interviews but I’m really tired of reading commentary from people I know did not understand the Shermans or were only acquaintances.”

  Our chat was arranged for a Monday morning in the spring, four months after the Shermans died. The night before our interview, Waks’s assistant cancelled it. When I tried to reschedule, Waks’s clipped response was “Sorry, will not be rescheduling.” I pursued the issue, and Waks told me, “It’s actually my family” who believed that he “shouldn’t, after considerable deliberation.” Waks then sent a package to my office that included tw
o copies of The Canadian Jewish News, one a special edition published after the Shermans’ deaths, highlighting their generosity, the other a two-year-old issue almost entirely devoted to Fred Waks.

  Waks was not the only one reluctant to speak. The then Ontario health minister, Eric Hoskins, who was the first to announce the Sherman deaths on social media, had indicated he would speak to me, but then cancelled, saying it was a “personal decision” he made not to give any interviews on the subject. Rachel Nisker, a friend of Honey Sherman who played mah-jong and golf with her, said she had been horrified by the “public defamation” the Shermans received in the early days of the police investigation. “I think the world should know how great they are,” she told me. But when it came to sitting down for an interview, Nisker said she couldn’t do it: “My head and my heart are at odds…I really don’t have a comfort level with it.” Again, no real explanation for not speaking.