An ‘urban explorer’ entered Barry and Honey Sherman’s home before demolition and saw papers that ‘looked like evidence’ By Kevin DonovanChief Investigative Reporter Wed., May 27, 2020timer9 min. read One Saturday afternoon in May of 2019, when nobody was looking, a man slipped under the garage door of the late Barry and Honey Sherman’s home. The site of the Shermans’ murder 17 months earlier by ligature strangulation was slated for demolition. There is a subculture in Toronto, and elsewhere, called “urbex” or “urban explorers,” people who go where they are not supposed to go, sometimes for art through photography, simple curiosity, or thrill. “It took a bit of planning. I waited until the security cameras came down just before the demolition started,” the man said in an interview. “Then I went in.” What he found inside the home was surprising. Despite a major police investigation in the case, and one by a private detective team working for the Sherman family, the man found furniture and cabinets intact, and photos, papers and files scattered around. Among them, an upcoming dinner engagement scrawled on a note; another, a list of planned showings of the house, which had been for sale. “To me, a lot of it looked like evidence. I was surprised.” The Urbex man’s photos and videos also show beds, leather couches, tables and many keepsakes, plus a very large box of medications (mostly with Honey’s name on the label), some with Apotex labels, some not. The medications are for sleeping disorders, muscle pain and spasms, arthritis and chest pains. The excavators and workers arrived two days later, knocking down the house and burying everything. It is now a vacant lot. Barry and Honey Sherman were found murdered in their basement swimming pool room on Friday, Dec. 15, 2017, having been killed in the evening two days earlier. The case, still unsolved, attracted international attention. Barry was the founder and owner of Apotex, a generic pharmaceutical company. He and his wife, Honey, were major charitable donors in the Jewish community and to non-Jewish causes. Toronto police initially investigated the case as a murder suicide. Six weeks after the bodies were found, following a storyin the Toronto Star that revealed that a second set of autopsies determined it was a double murder, the officer then in charge of the case announced it was a “targeted” double murder. Toronto police this week said the case remains an open and active probe. Police have a “theory” of the case and an “idea of what happened,” but will not say if they have a suspect or suspects. Court challenges by the Star to seek information on the investigation — now two and a half years old — have been postponed due to the pandemic’s shuttering of the court system. The Sherman home — a 12,000-square-foot house they built in the 1980s — was at 50 Old Colony Rd., just east off Bayview Avenue and south of Highway 401 in the north end of Toronto. Representatives of the Sherman family applied to North York municipal authorities in early 2019 for permissionto knock down the house. An agent representing the Sherman family had written to the city saying, “the house has been vacant for the past year … along with bad memories and a stigma attached due to the incident that took place. It is the family’s desire to level the house, clean up the site, fill in the pool and put the lot up for sale.” Construction hoarding went up around the home, and Lions Demolition was hired to do the work in May 2019. Though Barry and Honey had never had surveillance cameras on their home — Barry scoffed at the idea and told friends “if they are going to get you they are going to get you” — high-tech security cameras were installed after the bodies were discovered. Whether by Toronto police or the family, neither will say. It was those cameras that the Urbex man was watching throughout the month of May. When they came down — they were likely leased from a security company — he decided it was time. The Star has interviewed the Urbex man and agreed not to identify him as he is concerned that either the police or the Sherman family will pursue him for trespassing. He says he has no connection to the case or to the Sherman family. He took photos and video (the Star has seen them but he did not give permission for their publication) and nothing else, he says. The man published an account of his visit to the Sherman home on a Reddit post, which he has since deleted. The Urbex man went in mid-afternoon. He climbed over a wall on one side of the property. He did not think he would get inside the home, figuring all the doors would be locked. The Sherman home had a 10-car underground garage accessed by a ramp on the right side of the house. It is likely that Barry Sherman drove down that ramp on the night of Wednesday, Dec. 13, shortly before he was murdered. Seventeen months after the crimes were committed, with nobody around, the Urbex man walked down the garage ramp and tried the door. It lifted up easily. Power had been cut, so there were no lights. He brought with him a battery-operated worklight and his camera. To understand the phenomenon of urban exploration you have to put aside the rules that govern society. Entering a home, even a home abandoned for so long, is something that most people won’t do. In a blog post by another urban Canadian urban explorer, this is how the person describes what he does: “Urban Exploration Photography can take on any number of descriptions and wear many hats. It is a hobby performed by a person with an interest in exploring the parts of civilization that are typically off limits, such as abandoned places, underground drains and rooftops. But it doesn’t end there, some Urban Exploration enthusiasts go so far as to infiltrate active buildings, ships, train tunnels and power plants, and it also goes as small as a simple abandoned farmhouse on a back road.” It was dark in the Sherman garage. The urbex man pulled the door down behind him, and switched on his light. His pulse rate was up slightly, he noticed. While he had done this sort of thing many times, this was different, given what had happened. There was nothing to see in the garage so he left through a door that opened onto a spiral staircase heading up to the first and second floor. It’s one of two staircases it is believed the attacker or attackers used to take Honey Sherman (who was likely surprised on the first floor by an assailant) down to the basement.
[last edit 5/30/2020 4:35 PM by yokes - edited 1 times]
|