TORONTO — The mysterious double deaths of a billionaire generic drug magnate and his philanthropist wife grew stranger still on Friday.

Six weeks after the bodies of Barry and Honey Sherman were found hanging in the basement of their mansion, the Toronto Police confirmed what the couple’s friends and family have maintained all along — that they died in a murder, not a murder-suicide.

The police found the couple’s bodies hanging from belts tied to a railing on the deck of their indoor pool on Dec. 15, two days after they had last been in contact with family and friends, the lead police investigator, Susan Gomes, told a packed news conference. But instead of holding to an earlier theory casting the deaths as a murder-suicide — leaked by unnamed police sources to news media outlets — the police now believe the deaths were a targeted, double homicide.

It was another bizarre turn in a dizzying case that has captured the country’s attention. The couple’s four children, furious at the police for leaking the murder-suicide theory, hired their own team to conduct a private investigation into their parents’ deaths — which experts expect will cost them hundreds of thousands of Canadian dollars.