Suspicion | The Billionaire Murders: The hunt for the killers of Honey and Barry Sherman: The Clintons did it? A bonus episode of ‘The Billionaire Murders’

3/3/23 - Episode Page - 19m - PDF Transcript

From the Toronto Star, I'm Kevin Donovan, and this is The Billionaire Murders, the hunt

for the killers of Honey and Barry Sherman.

Over the next few weeks, we're presenting several behind-the-scenes episodes with content

we think will further your understanding of this story.

Our main series continues in April.

Today, the Clintons did it.

When people call me with information about the Sherman case, it usually starts like this.

Reasonable, chatty.

I put my telephone number and email at the end of each story I write, because I want

people with information to reach out.

This is a Toronto man who says he knew the Shermans.

Then the intrigue starts.

Now, if I was a fish, the hook is set.

This tipster has established, in his mind, his bona fides.

He knew the Shermans, and somebody he knows has told him a story.

Maybe this is the clue I've been looking for.

I've followed the Clintons for years, I'm not a liberal, but I firmly believe the stuff

about the Clintons, if there's somebody that they don't like, they can get rid of you.

Ah, the Clintons did it, that old theory.

People might say, oh, that's bullshit, but I've followed the stuff myself, and a lot

of the stuff is very suspicious about why people are disappearing, that the Clintons

know and don't like.

And then the tipster adds a bit of information to establish credibility.

Okay, so what this person told me was that Barry donated $45 million, drew with the Clinton

Foundation to help the island of Haiti after that earthquake.

So what this person told me was that after Barry donated it, he wanted to try to follow

up and see where the money went, okay?

And apparently, nobody had any idea of where this money went.

And then, that's why Barry and Honey were murdered?

So I don't have any proof of any of this stuff, but if you're asking me yes or no, I would

just say yes, but I don't know any more than that.

I'm joined today by my producer, Reggie Moudar.

Reggie, what do you think?

Well, Kevin, I think the first question people want to know is, how much effort do you actually

put into looking into all these crazy conspiracy theories?

I'd say that I get a dozen new tips a week.

It's a little bit like madness, but my feeling is you never know.

My analogy is with the firefighter, sometimes an alarm goes off, firefighters got to go

and answer it.

They don't know if there's a fire, usually there isn't a fire, but you've got to check

it out.

And that's my approach to these tips.

What's the deal with the Clintons though?

How were they ever tied to the Shermans?

Well, there's a very active online conspiracy theory out there that Bill and Hillary Clinton

have left a trail of bodies behind them over the years.

Vince Foster is an example of one of the people they're supposed to be involved in killing.

I know that's out there, but you're right.

Why are Barry and Honey Sherman involved?

It's because many years ago, when the Clinton Foundation, which is a charitable foundation,

when they were providing relief efforts in Haiti, Barry Sherman's company Apatex provided

some medication, a lot of it, just as a donation, which Barry Sherman who's very philanthropic

often does.

Very soon after the Shermans were murdered, all of a sudden people, and it's usually from

the area codes that typically call me, it's somebody in the southern part of the U.S.

And they start calling me up and telling me the Clintons were involved.

And the first time I heard it, I was shocked.

Now I'm not shocked anymore.

And it's a rare month that goes by that I don't get a new Sherman tip related to the

Clintons.

Do you think the police are getting calls like this?

The police get a lot of calls like this during my cross-examination of the detective who

seized with this case that I'm cross-examining him to try and get more police documents unsealed.

I've asked him, do you get calls that are from psychics?

And he said, yes, we do.

I said, do you check them out?

And he said, we do our best to do that.

The police also have to deal with all the tips that went into the private investigation

team that the Sherman family hired.

And similar tips, some will be different, some will be the same.

They're checking out all of them and as far as I understand, they're not done yet.

There's a woman out there who has talked to all of us, the private detective, the police

and to myself.

She calls herself Victoria and she says she's a psychic.

I'm not sure if that's her real name.

She's called me a few times.

So just tell me, so you read the stories and you'd mentioned something about psychic ability?

Yes, I do.

I just don't tell anybody and I don't charge money, it's a gift that I have.

So I don't exploit it.

When I get these calls, I'm listening for something that is not general, something specific.

I don't personally believe in psychics, but hey, you never know.

I don't expect any money or anything back.

So anyway, these are professional assassins.

They are paid astronomical amounts of money and I believe that they are contractors.

They work internationally during the target hits.

I believe there's a woman involved in this as well.

There was more than one killer.

The brutality of the murders shows me that these people are pretty brutal.

Nothing specific.

Nothing you wouldn't get from your Toronto Star subscription.

It shows me that somebody was saying, hey, Mr. and Mrs. Sherman, it's payback time.

So it was basically a trophy shot.

It's like when a big game hunter chills the tiger or something, he stands in the photo

with his gun.

Like, this is a trophy.

Like, we got you.

Right?

Now, Mr. Sherman had a lot of enemies and he was always in lawsuits.

She goes on to tell me how Barry Sherman sued his contractors after they built Old Colony

Road.

Now, that was from a story by Victoria Gibson in the Toronto Star.

That lawsuit, it was more than 30 years old.

And that truly would be a revenge dish served very cold.

But then she comes out with something related to an island that's one of the 20 regions

of Italy.

Now, I would like you to see this photograph of this place in Sardinia.

When I first had my vision of it, it was way months before I saw this book on Italy.

So when I was looking at the travel book, oh my God, I said, that's exactly the place

that I saw.

I was just stunned.

I never heard back from her.

Raju, should we book a flight to Sardinia?

Sounds good to me, Kev.

But what is it about the Sherman case that you think makes people like this come out

of the woodwork?

The case is a whodunit.

It's been five years now and I certainly still get calls like this on a weekly basis.

As the case gets colder and colder and older and older, I think I'm going to hear more

stories like this.

That's because people out there are, on the one hand, that might be struggling with their

own serious issues and in their heart of hearts, they believe they're doing the right thing

like this lady who called me very recently.

It might make you feel like I've got a story.

I went to Tuala once.

He and she weren't wearing too much clothing at the time and I think they felt this might

have been cold.

But he was warm.

He was actually wearing more clothes than he normally does.

The story this lady, Sabrina, tells me, is that she met a guy who told her a story of

how he ended up on the Sherman Street on Old Colony Road and knocked on the door.

The man, Mike, boasted that people let him in all the time.

Now, the story is cloudy to be generous, but it ends up with him and the Shermans in the

basement swimming pool room.

As I questioned Sabrina, I learned that she and Mike had been in a psychiatric hospital.

They'd started chatting and this is where the story came from.

We'll be right back.

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So you can't have a story like that.

You're chasing it and then you get to the end and it's a dead end.

How does that make you feel?

Well, I've said before that I think a good reporter is like a firefighter.

When the alarm goes, you've got to answer it and check it out and that's what I try

and do and I'm also conscious that there's people out there in the world who are, as

I said earlier, struggling with issues and they want someone to talk to.

So I think a part of my job, a small part, but part of my job is to listen to them.

I think another issue, and this is happening quite recently because Jonathan Sherman, the

son of Barry and Honey, has added $25 million to the reward, the $10 million was already

out there.

So now there's this $35 million reward out there and that's a strong lure for people

and so you get these people who think maybe I can get a piece of that and maybe they're

going to give me a story that's going to help me with my pursuit of the truth and maybe

they're going to get paid.

Kevin, how do these tips and conspiracy theories affect the police investigation and your investigation?

Well it's got to make it for a very busy squad room.

You've got currently one detective constable named Dennis Yim, who's relatively junior.

He's tasked with checking out all of these tips and he's tasked with preparing search

warrant documents so they can find out new information like the information they're looking

for overseas.

He's got to check out these tips.

He's also being very busy checking out all the tips, some of them similar, some of them

different, that went to the Sherman private investigation team.

There's been hundreds of them.

And why I think this is important from a policing point of view is let's say one day person

X or people X are arrested for this crime.

The defense lawyers for person X or person X says are going to want to know everything

about the police investigation and they're going to go down all these roads, these allegations

of other people being involved and if they don't go down those roads and clear those

people and a smart defense lawyer is going to be able to say to them, hey, you didn't

do your homework and maybe that person over there is the killer and you've unfairly charged

my client.

So they have to go through this.

The police, when I have been questioning them in court, are giving me this monthly tally

of what they call investigative actions.

An investigative action for the police could be something as simple as interview a neighbor.

It could also be filing a search warrant request.

They currently tally at 1037 investigative actions.

As of a few months ago, only 71 were left to be completed.

I think one of the 71 is who done it.

That's the big one.

But there's all these other little pieces of the case that they're digging into.

And I expect when I go back to court in a few months, as I will on behalf of the trauma

star, there's going to be another 200 investigative actions.

Some of it is busy work.

Probably a few of them are very, very important pieces of work.

So, Kevin, what I find really interesting about that is, you know, if you hear that

giant number 1037 investigative actions, it sounds like the cops have been busy, but your

own investigation has shown that there's been a lot of problems with this.

You know, this is one of these things like they're obviously working hard at something,

but it sounds like really sort of eliminating a lot of the possibilities because of these

tips and conspiracy theories.

Is that fair to say?

Yeah.

And so if I look back at our investigation over the past five years, I would like to

have added a whole bunch of other investigative actions.

Hindsight is 2020.

I'm scrutinizing the police, finding a lot of missteps.

The problem is it's just been so many.

And you know, they say they're on the right track right now.

Time will tell.

Of all the calls you get.

Is there one that you are particularly interested in?

Well, there's one that it's intriguing to me.

I'll be careful with the details because I'm still exploring it and I'm not going to name

the country or the individual, at least not yet.

But I was contacted a few months ago by a man who lives in a warm country and he's in

the business, a bit of a side business for him, of looking at hard drives.

And I guess in Canada or the US, if you've got a computer or if you've got a cell phone,

we toss it in the recycling bin and it's supposed to be wiped.

So he claims that one of his pastimes as he's working in his business and recycling these

things is looking through hard drives.

And he tells me that he's found information related to this case and it's specific information

that was written in, these are his words, a draft folder.

So this is going to sound like a spy movie, but people who don't want to communicate by

sending emails will create a Gmail account and they both have access to it because they

both have the password and they'll write in a draft folder.

The email never gets sent, so it's not going to be able to be surveilled by anybody with

the ability to hack into a computer.

And he says that he's found two people, one is a known person and another is an unknown

person planning to go to the Sherman house that day and ask Barry to sign some documents.

And I said to the person, well, have you contacted the police?

I don't trust the police, he said.

And he asked me, how do I get in touch with the Sherman family?

And I put him in touch with John Rosen, who is the lawyer representing Alexandra Sherman,

one of the Sherman kids.

And I know John from another case and so I reached out to John and I said, look, do

you want to talk to this guy?

So they end up having a conversation, according to both John Rosen and to my mystery man,

it doesn't work out.

Rosen says, you got to go to the police with this information, they'll decide if there's

any reward money to be paid out.

My mystery guy decides he's not going to do that.

Then he said, I can show you this stuff.

And I said, fantastic, and he had a plan that he was going to come up to Buffalo, he doesn't

want to go to Canada for some reason, he won't tell me what it is, and he's going to show

me this stuff.

Fantastic.

I'm ready to go.

I even offered to go to where he is.

And he said, I don't want you doing that.

I don't feel comfortable with you coming down to where I am.

And so most recently, he said, sure, he'll come up to Buffalo, but he wants expenses.

He wants $10,000.

And I told him, we don't pay for information.

We call that, in our business, checkbook journalism.

But I'm keeping him, talk about the fishing hook, using that analogy, I'm keeping him

on the hook.

I think there is a tiny chance that he's got something and I want to hear about it.

So that's the current one that's intriguing to me.

We'll see where it goes.

Perhaps it'll be an additional episode of the podcast in the near future.

Well, I'd always say that ties in perfectly with another conspiracy theory, and that's

the whole Hunter Biden email thing, which of course, we're seeing where that's going.

Kev, this has been fantastic for us.

We'll see you again very soon.

Thanks, Raju.

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 Padden, Raju Mudar, Alexis Green, and JP Fozo.

Still production from Brian Bradley and Crawford Blair.

Look out for my book, The Billionaire Murders, and coming later this year, The Craved Documentary

by the same name.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

In this bonus episode of “The Billionaire Murders,” we take listeners behind the scenes of reporter Kevin Donovan’s investigation into the murders of Honey and Barry Sherman. Titled “The Clintons Did It?” Donovan discusses some of the wild tips and theories he and police have hunted down, and outlines one tip that sounds promising and right out of a spy novel.

The Billionaire Murders: The hunt for the killers of Honey and Barry Sherman” is a “Suspicion” podcast probing the strange case of the famous Toronto couple who were found strangled in their north Toronto home in 2017. For five years, Donovan has covered the case for the Star, fought court battles to access documents on the police investigation and the Sherman estate, and wrote a book about it.