The private investigation team assembled by the four children of Barry and Honey Sherman announced a $10-million reward and something unprecedented in Canadian history: a “public-private partnership” in which the Sherman family’s detectives will obtain tips and information and pass them on to the Toronto Police homicide squad.

Catch the killer based on one of those tips and the tipster receives “up to $10 million,” Sherman family lawyer Brian Greenspan told media Friday.

“We want to light a fire under the Toronto Police,” Greenspan said.

The announcement was made just around the corner from where the Sherman children’s murdered father started his multi-billion dollar generic drug enterprise.

Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders said later he welcomed the offering of the reward, but did not wholeheartedly endorse the Sherman family’s plan.

Saunders said he has concerns with how the integrity of any evidence or information obtained by investigators not with the police would be handled.

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In launching what he called a new “initiative” in the case, Greenspan is taking direction from Sherman children Jonathon, Alex, Lauren and Kaelen. They are the heirs to a fortune of about $5 billion.

The bodies of Barry and Honey Sherman were discovered in their basement pool room the morning of Friday, Dec. 15, 2017 by the Sherman’s real estate agent, who was leading another agent and two clients on a tour of the house on Old Colony Rd.

The Shermans had put the house up for sale two weeks earlier, at an asking price of $6.7 million.

Barry Sherman founded the Apotex generic drug firm in 1974 in a small building in northwest Toronto near factories. It’s the site of a growing complex of Apotex offices. The Greenspan press conference was held in one of those buildings. Long time Apotex employees, who say they they have been devastated by the loss of their founder, refer to the intersection the buildings radiate from as “the corner of Barry and Sherman.”

Last December, when the Shermans’ agent came upon the bodies in the pool room, she froze, then turned and hurried the clients and the other agent back upstairs. The Shermans’ agent asked a woman who was in the house watering orchids to go downstairs and confirm what she had seen. She did. The agent then alerted a family member who was in Florida, and, after some discussion, police were called to the scene.

Greenspan said the police, when they arrived, completely misinterpreted the crime scene. “They failed to recognize the suspicious and staged manner in which their bodies were situated.” He described how Barry Sherman’s “legs were outstretched with one crossed over the other in a passive manner, wearing his undisturbed eyeglasses and his jacket pulled slightly behind his back which would have prevented use of his arms.” The Sherman couple had their backs against a low railing that surrounds the pool, with leather belts around their neck and the free end wrapped around “a railing forcing them into an upright position,” Greenspan said.

In what Greenspan said was an early attempt to cooperate with police, he said he and his private team passed on information they discovered when they examined the Sherman home, following the police team’s own six-week examination.

Among that information, Greenspan said, were a series of “25 palm or fingerprint impressions” private detectives found on surfaces of the house. Greenspan said the police missed those during their examination. The meeting to pass on the palm print evidence was May 17 and according to Greenspan the police were receptive to the delivery of them. But the force has since retained a lawyer to figure out a way to handle future deliveries of information and there has been no further communication from the police on that issue, Greenspan said. As to what, if anything, came from police analysis of the palm prints, Greenspan says he does not know.

Greenspan was highly critical of the work of the Toronto police. He said when his private team was granted access to the Sherman crime scene, his team discovered that the locks had not been checked for tampering and the carpets in the home had not been vacuumed by forensic experts. Typically, vacuuming is done to find fibres and other evidence that would escape the naked eye. Greenspan said he does not believe police have yet completed an analysis of fingerprints found at the scene. People who were known to have been in the Sherman home, for innocent reasons, have yet to be fingerprinted, he said.

Greenspan also took issue with how, in the early stages of the case, Toronto officers made comments that left the “wrong impression that this was a self-inflicted crime, either a suicide or a murder-suicide.” He said the conduct of the police in the early days of the probe “fell well below the standard of how a reasonable officer in similar circumstances should have acted.”

Toronto Police Chief Saunders responded to these criticisms, saying that police never reached a “premature conclusion” that it was a case of murder suicide. The reason police initially said that “there was no sign of forced entry” was because the north Toronto neighbourhood where the Shermans lived had seen a spate of break-ins and the officer was trying to reassure the public. “That community was incredibly alarmed,” Saunders told the media.

On Greenspan’s criticism of the police probe, Chief Saunders said “we conclude that the investigation was done well.

“Everyone is entitled to their opinion,” the chief told reporters gathered at police headquarters. “But we don’t deal in opinions; we deal in facts.”

The Toronto Police Services board issued a statement late Friday saying Saunders has their complete confidence in regards to the Sherman murder probe.

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Saunders said he supports the Sherman family decision to offer a reward. “Hopefully, there are people out there that have an understanding of information that can help with this investigation …. Anything that helps lead to a successful conclusion, I think, is a good thing.”

Departing from protocol around rewards offered by police or CrimeStoppers, lawyer Greenspan did not provide a police number to the public. He provided two dedicated numbers set up by the Sherman family.

The tip line was up and running at 2 p.m. Friday. Greenspan has set up a panel of experts to review the tips, and said he has invited Chief Saunders to provide an officer to join that review panel — an unusual partnership between police and private investigators. Greenspan said he knows of no other instance in Canada where there has been a similar partnership. He said his notion is that by providing Sherman-paid resources it will “free the public purse from the burden of the investigation” at a time when due to other cases the Toronto homicide squad is “overtaxed”

Asked if he would accept Greenspan’s invitation, Chief Saunders said he wants to see the terms of reference, and added police are open to being involved if the process would withstand the scrutiny of the court of law. “If it meets the test than definitely we’ll be involved,” he said.

As previously reported by the Star, the police did not rule the case a double murder until after a Star story revealed that the Sherman family’s pathologist had made that determination. The family’s pathologist determined it was a double murder after taking note that the Sherman’s wrists had been bound, but no ropes or other ties were found near the bodies. The information from the second pathologist would not be considered by police for almost five weeks, until a story in the Star revealed those details.

The Shermans were last spotted leaving Apotex headquarters two days earlier on Wednesday, Dec. 13 — Honey at about 6:30 p.m. and Barry at about 8:30 p.m. They had a late-afternoon meeting with architects for a new home in Forest Hill. Police theorize they both died that evening.

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Police have conflicting thoughts on whether a reward helps in a criminal case, and what the right time is to offer a reward. Some officers, whom the Star spoke to on background because they were not authorized to speak for the force, said there is always a concern a reward will “bring the crazies out of the woodwork.” Assessing the veracity of tips from people who may not have real information takes valuable police resources, they said.

Other officers and groups are in favour of rewards.

The CrimeStoppers program invites people to submit information anonymously and offers modest rewards of up to $2,000 if a tip leads to an arrest. A 2011 Star story revealed that often the rewards for providing legitimate information to CrimeStoppers go unclaimed.

One of the few examples in Toronto of a reward being paid out in a murder case was the 1986 murder of 11-year-old Alison Parrott. Several people gave tips to police at the time of the killing, but the killer was not arrested until a decade later. A $50,000 reward was paid out in that case.

The Toronto Star’s continuing investigation has revealed shortcomings with the way the police investigation has progressed.

The Star has learned that police were slow to take DNA samples and fingerprints from the many people who passed through the Sherman home in the hours before the Shermans died. Police typically do this to eliminate suspects and focus on DNA and fingerprints that are foreign to a place where a crime was committed. In one case, a friend who was at the Sherman home with the Shermans that Wednesday was not asked for fingerprints and DNA until September, nine months after the murders.

The Star has also interviewed numerous people regarding their own interviews with police. These people have said that detectives told them they were perplexed at who did the crime. In one case, a woman interviewed by police in the last two months said an investigator said, “we are at loose ends.”

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