Canada’s Healthcare Billionaire Murder Still Hasn’t Been Solved

Whether you’re celebrating the murder of the CEO of health insurance provider (or often, according to their history of claims denial, non-provider) UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, or coming down on the side of not doing that, we can all agree that the NYPD hasn’t covered themselves in glory in the aftermath. After the person believed to be the assassin managed to flee to the bus station on an e-bike in one of the most surveilled cities on Earth, they were mostly seen taking a leisurely stroll through Central Park. It took five days to track him down to a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, and only then because a McFlipper called it in. Unless that employee was Natasha Lyonne, it’s just not a good look.

But at least there’s been some resolution to the case. The same can’t be said for the 2017 murder of Barry Sherman, CEO of Canadian pharmaceutical giant Apotex, and his wife, Honey. On December 15th, two days after they are now believed to have died, their bodies were found, with their arms restrained and leather belts tied around their necks, in their Toronto home by the real estate agents they’d hired to sell it. Eerily enough, that’s actually the example given in the dictionary when you look up “foul play,” but the police publicly theorized that Barry Sherman had killed his wife in a murder-suicide. He’d staged his own death suspiciously just to mess with them, apparently.

By the time the couple’s children said, “Hey, maybe don’t be so quick to declare our dead dad a murderer,” and procured a second autopsy and the Toronto police finally accepted its conclusion of double homicide, more than a month had passed. That’s several eternities in murder investigation time, allowing all the people who routinely came and went from the Sherman home or knew how to get in (especially since the real estate agents had recently installed a lockbox for showing access) to scatter like Timbits crumbs in the wind. It didn’t help that Mr. Sherman has been described as “combative,” “litigious,” and less politely, “deplorable” with “no redeeming features” for Apotex’s price-gouging practices. 

Basically, they needed all the help they could get when it came to narrowing down the suspects, and the window to get that help had largely passed.

As a result, the trail has gone cold. Over the years, 37 warrants have been issued in relation to the case, but no arrests have been made (the once-”prime suspect,” Sherman’s cousin Kerry Winter, attested that he was watching Peaky Blinders and attending a Cocaine Anonymous meeting on the night in question and was cleared on the grounds of being too cool). Two years later, police realized they’d even gotten the timeline of the murder wrong, as if the mystery needed another wrinkle. The only updates given by the police are that they have “an idea of what happened” and identified “numerous ‘persons of interest.’” 

In other words, they’re pretty sure that somebody definitely did a murder. It’s enough to make the NYPD look like the Hollywood version of the NYPD.