Suspicion | The Billionaire Murders: The hunt for the killers of Honey and Barry Sherman: S2 The Billionaire Murders | E8 Perfect Storm

It's being called the worst storm in recorded history.

Hurricane Grace is accelerating off of Sable Island.

Once it starts, no force on Earth can stop it.

These storms have collided.

You're going to run right into this thing.

Are they OK?

No one knows.

Please, God, get them there.

Called the perfect storm.

That's a clip from the trailer for the movie

about a powerful hurricane that battered the east coast

of the United States in 1991.

Journalist Sebastian Younger, whose book the movie was

based on, coined the phrase the perfect storm

to describe a rare convergence of weather patterns.

It's my belief that the murders of Barry and Honey Sherman

were the result of another kind of perfect storm.

Events that came together at a key time with deadly results.

There were literally people crying hysterically.

I walked in the front door right there.

People plaits on the stairs, people embracing each other.

I mean, I could barely make my way up to Jerry's office.

That's Jordan Berman, one of the apotex vice presidents,

describing how staff took the news of Barry Sherman's death.

Though Barry openly mused at how someone might kill him one day,

his employees were understandably stunned.

Shock, the shock of it, how it happened, everything.

People just couldn't, they couldn't fathom it.

They couldn't make sense of it.

In this episode, I'm going to look at my theory

that the killer or killers took advantage of the great turmoil

in the lives of the Shermans just before the murders.

And also how key friends of the Shermans

were out of town at the time,

and there was an absence of scheduled events.

This makes me think the killers knew their schedule.

I think they chose this moment

because they'd have time to cover their tracks

and there'd be plenty of suspects.

I had absolutely nothing to do with Barry and Honey's death.

Zero.

I want to be done on the record.

From the Toronto Star, I'm Kevin Donovan.

And this is the billionaire murders,

the hunt for the killers of Honey and Barry Sherman.

Episode eight, Perfect Storm.

If somebody, as you believe somebody, did them both in,

it was so up close and personal.

It wasn't like a whack job by Mossad or the Russians.

It was somebody who was really angry,

punched Honey, strangled them.

I've told you how Carrie Winter, Barry's cousin,

believes it was murder suicide

despite the forensic evidence of double murder.

Yet at one point in our first interview,

Carrie changed his tune.

I mean, the person who did this would really hate it them.

I don't know if it was disgruntled,

apocalyptic avoid.

I don't see the Russian Mock,

the Russian Mock goes and been born.

I agree with Carrie on that point.

I've never believed some international assassin

flew in and murdered the Shermans.

I think it was people close to them who did it themselves.

In the first part of my Perfect Storm theory,

the killers needed a series of red herrings

for police to chase.

I can't think of anyone who has been more open

about his hatred for Barry Sherman than Carrie Winter.

And just before the murders,

Barry defeated Carrie and his siblings

in their long running lawsuit seeking a billion dollars.

The judge also awarded Barry $300,000 in legal costs.

That ruling came down one week before the murders.

In our interviews and in his interview with police,

Carrie was adamant that he didn't kill his cousin.

Wednesday night, I attended a 12 step program.

I attend regularly.

After that, I went home as I usually do.

And I watched an episode of Peaky Blinders on Netflix.

I checked with someone who was at his cocaine anonymous

meeting that night.

The man verified Carrie's attendance.

That meeting went until about 9 p.m.

And it would have taken Carrie

about a half hour to get to Old Colony Road.

The timing just doesn't fit.

I used to think the murders took place

between 9 and 11 p.m.

But by 2023, my investigation showed the Shermans

were likely both dead closer to 9 p.m.

Now, to add someone else into the suspect mix,

Carrie told me that he initially suspected

his own brother, Jeffrey.

That's because of a thought that occurred to Carrie

the night before the murders

while he was meeting with his lawyer,

Brad Teplitzky, at his home.

So I'm going there to sign this offer, David.

And I signed it.

And I'm about to leave Brad's house

because I'm only there about 10 minutes.

And I said to Brad, I said, Brad,

do you think it's ever crossed Barry's mind

that my brother, Jeffrey, could go off the deep end

and kill him?

I tried to talk to Jeffrey for years.

And then one day, he called me up out of the blue.

He wanted to talk about his relationship with Barry,

how his cousin helped him start several businesses

over the years.

Jeffrey didn't give me an alibi for the Wednesday night,

but he said he had nothing to do with the murders.

Now, Jeffrey has fallen on hard times.

He's bipolar and not been able to work.

His marriage broke up too.

Back in 2017, he was living like a bit of a hermit

in his house west of Toronto.

Now he's living in a shelter.

To me, the cousins are red herrings

and a reminder that by the time of the murders,

cousin Dana was dead.

And Tim, the eldest of the brothers,

he never really had much involvement with Barry.

To close out their part of the story,

the cousins continued their legal fight

long after Barry was dead, but eventually lost.

And the Sherman children never asked

for that $300,000 in legal costs.

A labor strike is set for Israel on Sunday

in response to pharmaceutical giant Teva's

newly announced layoffs.

The largest generic drug company in the world

is planning to lay off some 1,750 people,

a quarter of its Israeli staff.

In the fall of 2017, months before the murders,

there was great turmoil in the generic pharmaceutical world,

both at Apatex and internationally

at Apatex's great rival, Teva.

A downturn in generic drug prices hit Teva very hard.

Teva is one of Israel's leading companies

in the way General Motors once was

one of America's bedrocks.

Now, there's a backstory with Teva and Apatex.

In the old days, Barry Sherman's only real Canadian rival

was a company called Nova Farm, run by Leslie Dan,

like Barry, a philanthropist businessman.

Leslie sold to Teva in 2000 and the rivalry continued.

To put company size and perspective,

Teva was Goliath, the biggest generic company in the world,

with six times the revenue of Apatex's David.

Both were fighting for market share and behind the scenes,

there was a nasty bit of litigation

between Teva and Apatex involving Barry's CEO, Jeremy Desai.

It is nothing, there's nothing to talk about now.

Jeremy was Barry's hand-picked CEO,

a fellow scientist who Barry adored.

The year before the murders, Teva had alleged to the FBI

that Desai and a female Teva executive

had a romantic relationship and the Teva executive

was emailing Desai information

on a generic drug and development.

The FBI investigated and no charges were ever laid.

Not satisfied, Teva sued Apatex

six months before the Sherman murders.

Apatex and Desai denied all allegations.

But I know from Toronto police documents

that other execs at Apatex wanted Barry to fire Desai.

They'd had enough of him.

Barry backed me 120% and I said,

as recent as like 30 days prior to,

he said, you know, we're going all out.

He said, I need your commitment

over the next three to five years.

Barry's unwavering support for his beleaguered CEO

led to whispers in the pharma community

that Barry was a quarterback of a plan

to steal Teva information.

And when Barry was killed, those whispers intensified.

Maybe Teva was responsible.

That's when the rumors really started to spin.

Apatex!

The Israeli drama Fouda was a Netflix hit in 2017.

Fouda, which means chaos,

cemented the idea that Israeli fighters

are efficient, ruthless killers.

I've looked into the Teva hitman conspiracy theories

and I just don't see it.

Yes, Teva didn't like Barry Sherman

and Apatex and both companies

were in financial difficulty at the time.

But Teva had at least eight other generic companies

it was battling for market share.

All much bigger than Apatex

and their founders and CEOs were never killed.

Still, there was one additional piece

of the Teva Jeremy DeSye puzzle

that raised suspicions after the murders.

So there were certainly dramatic developments

into the investigation,

into the deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman.

But on top of all of that more drama,

the CEO of the company that Sherman founded,

he resigned just hours ahead of the police news conference.

Yeah, the timing is quite interesting.

So as you say, just about an hour before

that dramatic news conference by Toronto detectives today,

we got word that Jeremy DeSye had resigned

as the president and CEO of Apatex,

the generic drug company that Barry Sherman founded,

the company that made him his billions of dollars.

In a statement to me, Apatex said

that the resignation was effective immediately

and it was for Dr. DeSye to pursue other opportunities.

Now there's no indication that the resignation

was in any way linked to the news conference today,

but certainly the timing is raising eyebrows.

Jeremy was adamant in his interview with me.

He resigned to pursue other interests

and there was nothing to the Teva allegation.

Privately, company insiders told me

that with his protector gone,

Jeremy was simply no longer welcome.

As I dug into the business affairs of Barry Sherman,

I found other business grudges just before the murders.

A warning for would-be lovers about a form of fraud

that is breaking hearts and emptying bank accounts.

Romance scammers start with a fake profile

on a dating app or a social media site.

They lured these victims into believing

that they have found a match online

and at some point they will defraud them.

One of Barry Sherman's unusual investments

was in a business created by Sean Rutenberg,

a convicted fraudster who had served prison time

alongside an old friend of Barry's, Myron Gottlieb.

Myron and his wife were longtime friends

with the Shermans and he's best known

as the theater impresario, a phantom of the opera fame

who is convicted of fraud

in the live-ent accounting scandal.

Rutenberg and Gottlieb pitched Barry

on a concept called trivia for good,

a smartphone app that claimed to generate revenue

by pushing advertisements on the user.

Unbeknownst to Barry, there never was an app.

Meanwhile, Rutenberg was scamming women

in what is known as romance fraud.

In the weeks before the murders,

Barry went after Rutenberg in the courts, hard.

The Apodex billionaire was only out about $150,000

but he wanted financial blood.

This type of business deal is the sort of thing

at which his good friend Fred Steiner

would just shake his head.

He didn't have time to spend micromanaging them, okay?

And that's why he got hurt in a lot of deals too.

You know, he would trust in people, put money with them.

Barry gave his friend Myron a pass

but brought the full force of his litigation team

down on Rutenberg.

The morning of the day he was murdered,

Barry had his lawyers file new documents

against the con artist.

To some media who later wrote about this case,

it looked like Rutenberg might have had something

to do with the murders.

You know, kill Barry in retaliation.

I don't think so.

It's just one part of the perfect storm

that made December 2017 an opportunistic time

to murder the Shermans.

Rutenberg, by the way, was eventually sent back to prison

six years for stealing a woman's life savings.

Many of Barry's investments also left his second in command,

Jack Kay, shaking his head.

Once Barry made the decision to do A, B, or C,

whether I agreed with A, B, or C or not,

he was the owner, he was the decision maker.

My job was to operationalize.

Whether I agreed with A or not.

And I looked by choices were, and it's had many,

but on a number of occasions, I vehemently disagree.

And my wife and I had the discussion.

And look, we socialized with Barry at honey

and my wife would say,

Barry, you're gonna force him to resign.

We'll be right back.

Now, something else about the days and weeks

just before the murders.

Even though Barry was pouring millions of dollars

into schemes in the latter half of 2017,

including $65 million to rescue

a condo skyscraper project in Toronto

run by a man named Sam Mizrahi,

he was also facing a crushing debt.

Toronto Police interview, December 17th, 2017.

Brad Krocek interview with Detective Brandon Price,

homicide unit.

Barry seemed quiet lately, but not sad

despite losing a total of about a billion dollars

in lawsuits in the last three months.

He was maintaining that he wasn't going to pay them

and that they were financially stable.

Everyone was told everything was fine.

That's a statement to homicide detectives

by Brad Krocek, Barry's son-in-law,

read by a voice actor.

At the time, Brad was married to Alexandra,

Barry and honey's daughter.

Brad told police that Barry had recently remarked

that he was in financial difficulty.

As you heard in our last episode,

Barry had just lost a $580 million case.

It's confusing, but Barry apparently told Brad

it was a billion dollar case

and the police documents don't explain this discrepancy.

No matter the amount,

Barry told Brad he wasn't going to pay.

But at the same time,

Barry was asking his son Jonathan to take out mortgages

and repay $50 to $60 million

to help cover this massive judgment.

I'm not gonna kill my dad

because he needs $50 million to get through a crisis.

That's a comment Jonathan Sherman made to me

during an interview, read by a voice actor.

Just before the murders,

Barry told his son he needed money

and he was telling business associate Frank D'Angelo,

who Barry had supported for so many years,

that he might have to close his businesses down

if the bottom line didn't improve.

These are just some of the events in Barry's life

that contributed to this part of the perfect storm.

Just like in the movie Knives Out

or the Agatha Christie novel,

Murder on the Orient Express,

plenty of suspects to muddy the water for the real killers.

If there was a murderer.

What is going on?

And there was a murderer.

The murderer is with us.

And every one of you is a suspect.

And who are you?

My name is Hercules Poirot

and I'm probably the greatest detective in the world.

Only Agatha Christie's Hercules Poirot

was not assigned to this case.

Not even close.

Now, the second part of my perfect storm theory

relates to why I think Wednesday, December 13, 2017,

was chosen for the murders.

I can tell you that all of us at Apothex

are thrilled that we have had the opportunity

to participate in achieving something

that has benefited Thalcy the Avengers.

Now, that's Barry Sherman in the summer of 2017,

speaking in New York to the Cooley's Anemia Foundation,

a group that supports people

with a fatal blood disease called Thalassemia.

Barry and fellow Apothex scientists

were being honored for developing the drug Faraprox

that many say is literally a lifesaver.

Now, this drug is not without controversy

and researcher Nancy Olivieri

continues to criticize Apothex

for not paying attention to side effects.

That story deserves a podcast of its own,

but I'm telling you about it

because of how the New York visit

affects the Sherman timeline.

I went to New York with my wife

to hear Andre Boccelli at Madison Square Gardens.

Jack Kay is describing how what happened

at that New York event in the summer of 2017

led to him being away from Toronto

when Barry and Honey were murdered.

He gets emotional recalling this.

They raffled at the Cooley's Anemia function tickets,

400 Boccelli.

Sorry.

I sat at the table with Honey and Barry,

my wife and I, you know that Fernando

and his wife and Mike and his wife and King Time

for they ever got auctioned these tickets.

Honey bid.

She bid X, I can't remember what it was.

And nobody else was bidding.

So I said to my wife, I says bid.

So whatever Honey bid, we bid a pie.

Nobody else bid.

I thought that I could engage Honey, right?

And we'd raise the stakes and I'd quit.

Honey dropped her hand.

Jack and his wife bought the tickets.

Andre Boccelli.

Jack and his wife flew to New York

on Wednesday, December 13, hours before Barry

and Honey would be murdered.

By the time Boccelli took the stage

at Madison Square Gardens on the Thursday evening,

the Shermans had been dead for a day.

Jack and Barry worked physically close to one another

for more than three decades.

They had adjoining offices at Apatex

and the connecting door was always open.

Jack would have noticed Barry's absence.

And he says he would have sounded the alarm.

And they would have known that I wasn't going to be there.

Mary Shekman, Honey's sister and best friend,

left for Florida on the Thursday morning.

Like many people, she has her own theory

on who was involved in the murders.

And I've promised to keep that between us,

though she's shared her suspicions with the police.

Jack and Mary were not the only close people

in Barry and Honey's life

who were away at this time.

I'm Sheila Stanley.

I've been Honey Sherman's personal assistant for two years.

My job includes taking care of bills, scheduling,

keeping Honey's devices in line,

dressing Honey for events, other random jobs.

That's a voice actor reading from Sheila Stanley's

statements to police shortly after the bodies

were discovered on the Friday.

Sheila said she last saw Honey at 2.40 p.m.

on the Wednesday afternoon,

right after Honey's massage ended.

I'm usually at Old Colony from 10 a.m.

till mid-afternoon, Monday to Friday.

But that week, Honey had given her Thursday and Friday off.

I was at home preparing for a family trip to Cuba.

The detective asked Sheila,

given that Honey had a variety of staff

in and out of the house,

was anybody scheduled for Thursday?

Thursdays?

There's no one normally scheduled to come.

The detective asked Sheila,

how would someone access Honey's schedule

and the schedule for appointments at Old Colony?

Honey didn't have a password on her phone or iPads.

She kept all of her scheduled events in her Google Calendar,

which was linked to those devices.

She liked me to print out her calendar appointments

and she kept them all clipped together

with a fat black clip,

kept on her desk beside the computer.

She didn't like waste,

so she used paper that was already printed on one side.

Let's talk about the Sherman House.

You've heard how it was a beehive of activity

on the Wednesday,

the day the Shermans will be murdered.

The house was listed for sale.

There were cleaners, painters, realtors, and a showing.

Plus, Barry and Honey had a personal trainer at the house

and Honey had a masseuse.

But nothing was booked for Thursday.

That day, Sherman Realtor Elise Stern

was trying to reach Honey to arrange a Friday showing,

but her calls and emails were not returned.

Others were surprised at the radio silence

from Barry and Honey, but nobody took action.

Honey had a charity meeting on the Thursday morning,

but when her chair in the boardroom was empty,

nobody followed up.

Barry's lawyer, Harry Radomsky,

also found it odd not to hear from Barry,

but he didn't do anything about it.

I sent him an email on the Wednesday night,

just laying out some stuff and wanting his advice.

I thought it was kind of odd

that I hadn't heard from him all day Thursday.

And so, I think I flew to Florida on Thursday night.

Barry's schedule was kept by Joanne Morrow,

his personal assistant at Apatex.

I've been told that Barry's passwords

were always some version of one, two, three, four.

And that was a running joke at the office

and among people close to him.

Joanne told me that Barry, as the boss,

came and went as he pleased.

And with the arrival of his daughter,

Alexandra's second child,

he did sometimes visit with his grandkids in the afternoon.

I know Barry would take the afternoon

or a day he'd spend time with his kids.

So that day when he didn't come in,

yeah, it was kind of odd, but at the same time,

oh no, you know what?

Alex just had her other baby.

The baby was only, I think, four weeks old at the time.

So it wasn't really out of the norm.

Jeremy Desai, the CEO of Apatex,

was also wondering where Barry was that Thursday.

He'd sent emails and not heard back.

That was highly unusual.

Oh, he was prompt like anything.

I mean, if you wrote an email that midnight,

one minute past midnight, you get a response back.

And that's how he operated.

So the day passed, I got quite worried

because very unusual for Barry not to respond.

And I told the police all this too, actually,

because they wanted to know the, you know,

my views of thinking was, and I said the last email was 8.13

and we never got a response to them

on the following morning.

Frank D'Angelo, the businessman Barry funded,

had frequent phone calls with Barry.

On the Monday, Barry had sent regrets by email

saying he couldn't make Frank's Christmas lunch

on the Tuesday.

Barry called Frank on the Tuesday night to apologize.

Yeah, and he called me Tuesday night to apologize

that he couldn't, that he didn't make it.

And I was busting his balls.

It was around 10 o'clock.

I said, hi, Frank, it's Barry.

I go, I know it's you.

And I busted his balls a little bit.

I go, I can't believe you didn't show up.

I've told you that Barry and Honey's son, Jonathan,

has suspicions that Frank was somehow involved

in the murders.

He's told the police about his suspicions.

Frank says that's ridiculous,

but the police did ask him about his whereabouts

on the Wednesday.

He told them he worked at his bottling plant all day,

then drove to his home north of Toronto,

where he spent the entire evening with his partner,

who was pregnant with twins.

I've interviewed her and she confirms this.

Frank said he also told the homicide detectives

that their house has several CCTV cameras,

and he invited the police to have a look

to confirm his story.

They never did.

There's cameras, there's fucking cameras everywhere.

There's ring when you walk out,

when you leave, when you come in.

I asked Jonathan if he or his siblings

kept in close touch with their parents.

I sadly didn't.

I never spoke to my mother on the phone,

maybe once a year, and my father, the same thing.

We don't have regular phone contact

because I was in the office.

I would see him in the office.

I certainly didn't know their comings and goings.

All I knew was that my dad was gonna be in town

on a certain date,

because I had my own Christmas dinner

that he was going to be coming to.

Every family is different, of course.

But on a personal note,

I do wonder if our adult children would get worried

if they didn't hear back from me or my wife.

I hope so.

As to Jonathan, he said he didn't have

that type of relationship with his parents.

The call and email logs I've been able to see

do show that each of the four adult children

of the Shermans reached out in some fashion

during the 36-hour period between the murders

and the discovery of the bodies.

Jonathan sent an email Thursday asking his father

if he'd come to a staff Christmas party

for his storage company.

Alexandra sent photos of her children on Thursday by text.

Friday, she tried to touch base with her parents

about a planned Hanukkah dinner

that was to be held that evening at her house.

Intriguingly, that dinner was to have been

on the Tuesday or Wednesday night,

but honey chains a date to Friday.

Daughters Lauren and Kaelin,

both called Barry on the Friday.

Those show up as missed calls,

and I don't have access to any messages that were left.

When the Sherman children did not hear back

from their parents, they took no action.

I explored all of this with Jonathan.

He agreed with me on one issue.

The timing of the murders is key.

I never knew when or where my parents were,

but the killers probably did.

It would be pretty simple to check all the emails

and phone records to get an indication

of who was most in contact with my parents

and would have known they're coming and going.

It will be pretty obvious that I could not have known

their schedule because we didn't talk regularly.

A perfect storm.

Great turmoil in Barry's life leading up to the murders,

and the people closest to honey and Barry were away.

I think the killers had intimate knowledge

of their schedule, and this gave them time

to cover their tracks.

In their wake, the killers left a mystery, a who done it,

but they also created four new billionaires.

Next time on the final episode of The Billionaire Murders.

It is the last will and testament of the man

at the center of one of the biggest unsolved murder cases

in Canada, recently released court documents

shedding light on how Barry and Honey Sherman

divided up their massive estates.

The Billionaire Murders, the hunt for the killers

of Honey and Barry Sherman, is written and narrated

by me, Kevin Donovan.

It was produced by Sean Pattenden, Raju Mudar,

Alexis Green, and JP Fozo.

Additional production from Brian Bradley and Crawford Blair.

Sound of Music was created by Sean Pattenden.

In this episode, Jonathan Sherman was voiced by Mark Ladder.

Look out for my book, The Billionaire Murders,

and coming later this year, The Crave Documentary

by the same name.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.