On the morning of Friday, December 15, 2017, real estate agent Elise Stern walked through 50 Old Colony Road, a sprawling modernist house in Toronto’s North York district that had recently gone up for sale. Down in the basement, beside the indoor lap pool, she found the owners. Barry Sherman, 75, founder of the generic drug giant Apotex, and his wife Honey, 70, sat side by side at the pool’s edge in a semi-seated position, held upright by leather belts looped around their necks and fastened to a low railing. They had been dead for roughly two days. There was no sign of forced entry, and nothing appeared to be missing.

The Billionaire Who Built Apotex

Barry Sherman founded Apotex in 1974 and turned it into Canada’s largest generic drug manufacturer, a company worth roughly $3 billion. Forbes estimated his personal fortune at $3.2 billion U.S. He was famously combative, spending decades in litigation against brand-name drug makers and his own relatives. Just three months before his death, in September 2017, an Ontario judge dismissed a $1 billion claim brought by his cousins, led by Kerry Winter, who argued they had been cheated out of a stake in the company. Honey was the public half of the marriage, a fixture on hospital and community boards; together the couple gave hundreds of millions of dollars to hospitals, universities and Jewish organizations in Toronto. They had four adult children: Lauren, Jonathon, Alexandra and Kaelen.

Two Days of Silence

Wednesday, December 13, 2017, was the last day anyone heard from them. Barry stayed late at his Apotex office, as he almost always did, and sent a work email that evening. Then the phones went quiet. Appointments were missed on Thursday, and no one raised an alarm until the bodies were found Friday morning. Autopsies concluded that both Barry and Honey died of ligature neck compression — strangulation. According to later reporting on the family’s private review, Honey may have been killed elsewhere in the house and moved to the pool room. Whoever did it left the belts, the bodies and no obvious trail.

A Theory the Family Refused to Accept

Within a day of the discovery, police sources were telling Toronto reporters that the working theory was murder-suicide: Barry had strangled Honey, then hanged himself from the pool railing. The Sherman children called the theory irresponsible in a public statement and hired prominent defense lawyer Brian Greenspan to assemble a private team of investigators and forensic experts. Second autopsies, performed by Dr. David Chiasson, Ontario’s former chief forensic pathologist, found markings on both victims’ wrists suggesting their hands had at some point been bound, though no restraints were recovered at the scene. On January 26, 2018, six weeks after the bodies were found, Toronto police reversed course and announced that the Shermans were victims of a “targeted” double homicide.

A Private Team and a $10 Million Reward

In October 2018, Greenspan announced that the family was offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the killers, while sharply criticizing the early police work — his team said it had documented fingerprint and palm-print evidence in the house that investigators had never collected. The parallel investigation ran for two years before winding down in late 2019, when Greenspan turned the private team’s files over to Toronto police. In November 2020, police said they had a “person of interest,” but no arrest followed. Enormous rewards have a mixed history in unsolved cases — decades of reward money never surfaced the truth about the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa — and the Sherman fund has so far gone unclaimed.

The Walking Man

In December 2021, on the fourth anniversary of the murders, Toronto police released grainy security footage of an unidentified figure walking through the Old Colony Road neighborhood during the window in which the Shermans died. Investigators pointed to the person’s unusual gait, hoping someone would recognize the walk. Hundreds of tips came in. The walking man was never identified. On the fifth anniversary in December 2022, son Jonathon Sherman added $25 million to the family’s reward, raising it to $35 million — one of the largest rewards ever offered in a criminal case in Canada — while his sister Alexandra Krawczyk made a public appeal for information. Police acknowledged that “several persons” had been implicated over the years, but none had risen to suspect status.

Estates, Lawsuits and a Vanished House

The house at 50 Old Colony Road was demolished in March 2019 at the family’s request, and the empty lot sold in 2020 for $4.25 million. Notorious addresses rarely shed their history — the Westfield, New Jersey home at the center of The Watcher case carried its own stigma for years — and the children preferred a bare lot. The estate generated its own litigation. Toronto Star reporter Kevin Donovan fought a years-long court battle to unseal the estate files, and in June 2021 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the newspaper’s favor; the unsealed documents valued Barry’s estate at more than $124 million in initial filings, split equally among the four children. The family sold Apotex to U.S. private equity firm SK Capital in 2023. In January 2024, Bloomberg reported that a dispute over a family trust worth more than $500 million had split the surviving relatives.

Where the Case Stands in 2026

In November 2024, Donovan reported on tense emails exchanged between Barry and Honey in the weeks before their deaths, including one in which Barry wrote, “You have been abusive to me for over 40 years” — a window into a strained marriage, but nothing that changed the double-homicide finding. By 2025, the file rested with a single investigator, Detective Constable Dennis Yim, who planned to run the case files through Microsoft’s Power BI software looking for connections human eyes had missed. The story has stayed in public view through the four-part 2023 Crave docuseries Billionaire Murders and a CBC podcast on the couple’s lives, and ahead of the eighth anniversary in December 2025 one of the Shermans’ daughters spoke publicly about living without answers. As of September 2026 there have been no arrests, no named suspects and no claim on the $35 million. Like the Setagaya family murders in Tokyo, it is a case where killers left a houseful of evidence and investigators still cannot say who they were.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Sherman murders tested the assumption that wealth buys protection, and then tested whether it can buy answers. It could not do either. Two parallel investigations, second autopsies, a Supreme Court precedent on open courts, one of the largest private rewards in Canadian history — none of it has produced a suspect. The case also left a mark on how police handle high-profile deaths: the early murder-suicide leak, and the evidence the private team said was missed, became a public lesson in how quickly a first theory can harden and how much that can cost.

Somewhere in the walking man’s ordinary life, someone knows that gait — and after nearly nine years, two investigations and $35 million on the table, no one has yet said his name out loud.

Related Cases

• The Setagaya family murders — a Tokyo family killed at home, evidence everywhere, no arrest
• The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa — America’s most famous vanishing, still unsolved after five decades
• The Watcher — the Westfield house whose menacing letters made it unlivable

Sources

• Narcity — Who Killed Barry and Honey Sherman? Everything We Know Nearly 8 Years Later
• ABC News — The Billionaire Couple’s Son Is Offering $35 Million to Catch the Killer
• CBS News — Family Offering $35 Million to Catch Killer 5 Years After Murders
• NBC News — Private Investigation of Billionaire Murders Comes to an End
• Bloomberg — Murdered Pharma Billionaire’s Family Split by Lawsuit Over Money
• CBC News — Daughter of Barry and Honey Sherman Speaks Ahead of 8th Anniversary

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