Murdered Canadian Billionaire's Children Fight for Answers

A true crime case in Canada turned out to have an incredible plot twist.

After the bodies of Canadian billionaire Barry Sherman and his philanthropist wife, Honey, were found in their Toronto mansion on Dec. 15, police initially classified the deaths as a murder-suicide. The Shermans’ fully-clothed bodies were discovered hanging by belts from a poolside railing by a real estate agent taking potential buyers through the home.

But the children of the 75-year-old pharmaceutical giant and his wife, 70, knew that their father could not have committed such a grisly crime. So they hired defense lawyer Brian Greenspan to put together a team of private investigators to comb for clues that the police missed.

They found them: starting with photographs of the bodies that showed Barry Sherman’s legs were positioned too neatly aligned for a person who had strangled himself.

“The Greenspan team came to believe that the crime scene had been staged, the people said, and was likely the work of hired professionals,” wrote The Wall Street Journal.

“Mr. Greenspan made several public overtures to Toronto police to share his team’s findings. On Jan. 24, the lead investigator for the Toronto Police Department operation, Detective Sgt. Susan Gomes, met with Dr. Chiasson.

“Two days later, Ms. Gomes told a packed room of reporters at police headquarters that the killings weren’t a double suicide or a murder-suicide. The couple had, in fact, been strangled by one or more perpetrators.”