Questions about the Barry and Honey Sherman murder case: Part 6
Do we need to talk about Jonathon?
I do not believe that Jonathon Sherman killed his parents. Nor do I believe the police think he did.
Yes, Jon is an odd guy who says odd things on odd occasions including the eulogy he gave at his parents’ funeral and and the interview he gave to the Toronto Star. Yes, he wrote some nasty emails questioning whether his father could be removed from Apotex due to mental incompetece. Yes, his sister Alexandra has told people she thinks Jon’s the killer. And yes, he’s inherited a lot of money as a result of the murders.
That all sounds pretty damning until you break it down.
By many accounts, Alexandra is just as eccentric and excitable as Jon, whose friends swear he wouldn’t hurt a fly and loves nothing more than spending time in the great outdoors. As for those notorious emails about Barry, two years later, father and son had patched things up. In early 2017, when Barry removed his three daughters as trustees of his estate, he kept Jon on.
That all four Sherman children inherited billions upon their parents’ deaths is hardly unusual. In their testy 2015 email exchange, Barry reminded Jon he would likely be a multi-billionaire one day, thanks to his father’s business acumen. It would be far stranger if Mom and Dad had left the kids penniless or with just a million or few.
The conventional wisdom among the Jon-did-it crowd is that Jon acted to off his parents before they could change their wills and leave everything to charity, but there is nothing to support this narrtive other than some offhand comments Barry supposedly made. As much as online sleuths love to mutter about following the money, they never seem to follow it anywhere than to the most obvious place. The real money followers, in pursuit of a $35 million reward, may prefer to keep quiet as they trace all the Sherman money streams that dried up in the years and months leading to the murders.
In 2014, for example, Barry Sherman’s Sherfam Inc company stopped lending to the Martin Ross Group [page 37], a jewellery business run by his and Honey’s brother-in-law Allen Shechtman, which had been bankrolled by the Sherman family holding company, Sherfam, since its inception in 1993. A business and personal associate of Barry and Honey explained that the cutting off of Martin Ross Group at that time was part of a bigger decision reached by the president of Sherfam, “to exit non-core businesses.” The business person said he had no idea what the rationale for this move was and declined to name the president of Sherfam at the time.
Barry’s brother-in-law Mike Florence left the role of Sherfam president in 2013 and the Martin Ross Group bankruptcy documents list Craig Baxter as the Sherfam contact. At some point, Alex Glasenberg took over as Sherfam president, a role he still holds, and Baxter left Apotex altogether when he was not offered the CEO role [Part 3].
Along with exiting non-core businesses, Barry was also settling personal financial issues. According to the police affidavits, he asked Stanley L, a former business associate living in a house owned by Barry, to arrange a mortgage and take over ownership of the home [Part 5]. While it’s hard to know how many more Stanleys there are out there, some quick googling and court records searches confirm that Sherfam was indeed getting out of a number of businesses in the years before the murders.
There are at least a dozen people for whom a case as strong (or as weak) as the one against Jon Sherman could be built. People who lost jobs and businesses and who might have sought revenge on those they felt were responsible for their personal misfortune — Barry and Honey Sherman.
I’m betting that if there are eventually arrests in this case, it’s not going to be someone whose name has been bandied about as a possible suspect, but rather someone who has been mentioned in passing or not at all.
As I was writing this latest instalment in this series on the Barry and Honey Sherman murders, police in New York arrested a supect in the case of the Long Island serial killer, which had been unsolved for more than a decade. A year and a half ago, a new police chief put together a “dream team” of investigators, who did not fool around and, within months, they had a prime suspect and were surveilling him.
It is not pretty to compare the work this dream team did with phones and cell towers to the “tower dump” descriptions provided in the police affidavits for the Sherman case. It’s just gobsmacking how long it took Toronto cops to get around to doing some simple Excel work that shouldn’t have taken a longer than half a day.
It wasn’t until September 2020 that Toronto police proposed using the most basic Excel functions to see if it would help them identify an unknown suspect. “One of the shortcomings of the investigative strategy of comparing transmission data with known numbers is that if the phone numbers of perpetrators are presently unknown to investigators, the investigative strategy of comparing the transmission data seized pursuant to the January 2019 production order to existing phone numbers in the investigation would be of no value in identifying the perpetrators,” Detective Dennis Yim wrote in an impenetrable sentence that must be read multiple times to understand it. “This production order seeks to address this problem.”
“This strategy relies on the improbability of coincidence that the same number(s) would not occur in different groupings unless it was the number utilized by someone who was involved in the offences (e.g. someone following the victims while communicating their locations using cellular devices),” Yim continued.
Please know that I do not blame Detective Yim for this sorry state of affairs. I have no doubt that that there are detectives, prosecutors and judges who fully understand what phone and other technologies can do for them and how quickly it can do it, and that is painfully frustrating to them to have to deal with colleagues who are completely clueless and holding them back.
I can only hope that behind the scenes things are moving forward and we will all soon be pleasantly surprised when police announce an arrest in the murders of Barry and Honey Sherman.
These are the remaining police affidavits not yet referenced in this series:
This is an ongoing series. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5. Sign up for a free subscription to ensure you receive further instalments.
Leave a comment or email me at ann.brocklehurst@gmail.com
Isn't funny. After reporting my misidentified likeness in the Sherman suspect video. I emailed the conversation TPS headquarters I audio tapped of them accusing me in one breath, refusing to interview me and then saying detective Yim isn't the only detective working alone on the Sherman case. Kevin Donovan should technically have this audio file I emailed to him.
Now that is understandable, someone whose business was killed/negatively impacted. Had you ever considered someone who had experienced loss through oxycodone or whatever narcotic is wrecking lives that Apotex distributes?