Questions about the Barry and Honey Sherman murder case: Part 2
How long did the police investigate the deaths as a murder-suicide?
There is a large contingent of people — almost none of whom have seen the crime scene — who maintain the cops were complete morons not to immediately recognize that the deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman were a double murder. The media often quote Elise Stern, the realtor who was selling the Shermans’ house, as telling the 911 operator that someone had killed her clients. But Stern’s first reaction, upon discovering the Shermans hanging next to their indoor swimming pool, was not that they had been murdered or even that they were dead. Rather, she told others at the house that she thought the couple were doing “a weird yoga thing”. Stern had to ask if she should call the police.
A second real estate agent, who Stern had been escorting around the house along with his clients, thought the crime scene was some kind of Halloween prank. The bad feng shui sent him and his clients straight up the stairs from the basement pool and out the door. From the discussions taking place around her, Nelia, the housekeeper, understood that the Shermans had hung themselves. Claire, who tended to the Shermans’ house plants, worried that the couple might have succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning and volunteered to go down to the basement for a closer look. When she returned, she confirmed the Shermans were dead.
While the police now claim that they always considered the deaths could have been a double suicide, murder-suicide or a double murder, the affidavits they wrote to obtain search warrants and other information indicate they were leaning heavily toward murder-suicide for the entire first month of the investigation.
To be frank, unlike many others, I don’t entirely blame them. Based on the witness accounts in the affidavits, the crime scene wasn’t immediately reognizable as a double murder despite all the 20/20 hindsight. The statistics were also on the police’s side. In this kind of situation, murder-suicide is a lot more common than double murder. It wasn’t stupid to consider it as a possibility, which I still do.
The problem was, as the affidavits show, the police don’t seem to have genuinely considered the double murder possibility. Many key witnesses weren’t interviewed until weeks after the fact. And critical evidence was not collected. Opportunities were missed.
I’ve heard unverified chatter that some cops still think this was a murder-suicide and that the infamous night walker was just some rando out for a walk on wintry December eve. That seems like too much of a coincidence to me, but the police see coincidences all the time. They know that in real life you don’t get answers to everything and have to accept that there are a lot of things that can’t be explained. Life is not a movie with an ending that answers all the questions.
To try and see if there was anything behind this rumoured chatter, I asked Brandon Price, when I ran into him, if he thought there was any possibility that this could have been a murder-suicide after all. He seemed taken aback by the question. “Something would have had to happen,” he said, according to the notes I took right after the conversation, meaning, presumably, that startling new evidence would have to emerge.
Then, almost as if he thought he might have misunderstood my question, Price pointed out that the first police affidavit, dated December 20, 2017, just five days after the disovery of the Shermans’ bodies, made it clear that double murder was very much on the table.
I’ll let readers judge that for themselves. Here are the affidavits prepared by Detective Constable Kristy Devine in December 2017 and January 2018:
When Detective Constable Dennis Yim takes over the affidavit writing in January 2018, police are still actively looking for evidence that would bolster the murder-suicide and double suicide theories.
Things change a few days later when police hold a press conference and announce that both Shermans were the victims of a targeted double murder. Yim acknowledges this shift in his February affidavit when he writes: “In a previous application [See Part 1] I had stated that I believed that Honey SHERMAN was murdered and Bernard SHERMAN was either murdered or committed suicide. In this application I state that I have reasonable grounds to believe that Bernard SHERMAN was murdered as well and my grounds to believe are as follows …”
Here is the full affidavit Yim submitted February 8:
Please share your insights in the comments or email me at ann.brocklehurst@gmail.com.
Follow-up from Part 1
In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about how the issue of solicitor-client privilege hampered the investigation. Readers may find It it interesting to compare the sections entitled “Further Conditions Respecting Privilege” outlined by Devine in her second affidavit (p. 8) to the process that was finally agreed upon and described in Part 1.
Devine also refers to “an unresolved civil suit that was brought against both Honey and Bernard SHERMAN and Apotex,” but I could not find this case in the Ontario courts online database. She further writes, “Counsel for Apotex and Honey Sherman’s estate trustee have both provided the names of law firms that may have communicated with Honey Sherman by e‐mail.” This is curious given that Honey Sherman is now said not to have had a will and, according to the Ministry of Attorney General of Ontario, most estates take between 6 to 8 weeks to be issued a Certificate of Appointment of Estate Trustee.
One of the reasons I’m posting these affidavits is that I wanted to see what others might find in them. An alert reader, with username “newsnerd” noted an interesting fact on the Websleuths forum:
there is no mention of Honey having a personal banking acct or even a debit card. (Only an Aeroplan Visa) IMO, it is very strange that she used her Visa to take out cash @ a CIBC that evening before she went home. They were known for being extremely frugal. Why would she use a card like that for a cash advance? The interest starts immediately from the day the money is withdrawn. If the amount was $7,500 that she withdrew, that amount would quickly rise with daily interest fees. Since it seems that BS was a bit controlling with her access to money, it appears odd that this would be her regular habit of withdrawing funds.
This is indeed a weird detail. The affidavit indicates that, as late as January, police don’t seem to have located a regular bank account for Honey Sherman. And while newsnerd makes a few too many assumptions — Honey could have been using a debit card from another bank account yet to be discovered — it got me thinking about some other money-related details in the affidavits.
“Denise [the personal trainer] said that Honey would sometimes ask Barry to bring home large amounts of cash, around $5000 to $10000.” [p. 31, Yim 2018/02/08]
Honey did not spend that much money and it was Mary who spent a lot of money at U.S. Saks and Barry was never to see those bills. [p. 32, Yim 2018/02/08]
While I have never put much stock in the unsupported theory that Barry was controlling of his wife’s finances — I saw both him and Honey as being proud of their frugality — these statements are making me reconsider. Why would Barry who gave millions of dollars to his children and friends monitor his wife’s credit card expenses? And why would he have to bring home cash to Honey if she was in charge of the household finances?
This is an ongoing series. Read Part 1. And sign up for a subscription to ensure you receive Part 3.
Observation about frugality does run adverse to using a credit card to withdraw cash. Do we have any indication Honey was a spendthrift? Excuse the macabre, but what a fascinating story.