After conducting a flurry of 238 witness interviews in the first three months of the Barry and Honey Sherman murder investigation, homicide detectives have taken almost no statements for nearly two years, court documents reveal.

Instead, a small number of detectives have been focused on analyzing large quantities of video and other data through court orders in an attempt to prove the homicide squad’s theory of the case.

Forget the image of Sgt. Joe Friday of TV’s “Dragnet” or Det. Mike Logan of “Law & Order” pounding the pavement, interviewing potential witnesses. Think detectives in front of a computer screen.

Is this a sign of a police investigation nearing its conclusion and building a case? Toronto police say the “investigation is very active,” but it is not in the “final stages.” While a Crown attorney has been “consulted” police say that is normal in a homicide investigation and “no Crown has been assigned to the case.” The involvement of a Crown attorney can be a sign that police are getting close to an arrest. One detective told the Star in October he is “cautiously optimistic” police are on the right track. They have a “working theory” that has not wavered for close to a year, the detective told a courtroom during the Star’s attempt to unseal search warrant documents.

Barry Sherman, the founder of generic drug giant Apotex, and his wife, Honey, were murdered during a three-hour window roughly between 9 p.m. and midnight on Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2017. They were strangled, their bodies found in a semi-seated position in their basement swimming pool room, held up by leather belts looped around their necks and attached to a low railing above. The bodies were discovered roughly 36 hours after the murders by a real estate agent touring people through the house on Old Colony Road in Toronto.

For two years, the Star has investigated. Part of the paper’s investigation has included arguing in court to unseal at least some of the police documents filed in support of search warrants and production orders. While the majority of the information remains sealed (Justice Leslie Pringle has said to release the information would jeopardize the case), the Star’s attendance in court every six months — four times in two years — has yielded information on the progress of the investigation. A Star reporter has on three occasions cross-examined homicide unit Det. Const. Dennis Yim, who is the only officer assigned full-time to the case. Two others are working on it, though they are assigned to other cases as well.

In a statement from homicide Insp. Hank Idsinga on Thursday, the Star was told that the relatively few interviews conducted in recent months is not necessarily indicative of the status of the probe.

“Interviews are only one component of any investigation and whether or not they are happening with the same frequency is not a reflection on the current status. With respect to the Sherman case, we would consider this investigation to be very active and while no one can predict what might happen tomorrow, to say it is in its final stages is not accurate,” Idsinga said in the statement.

There are clues into how the investigation has progressed in the numerical information provided during this court process.

By March 12, 2018, three months in, homicide detectives had identified 240 “witnesses” and interviewed most of them. Police use the term “witness” to describe any person with information about a case (not just someone who has seen something). Just over a year later, in April 2019, that number had grown only slightly, to 243. By October 2019, the number had again grown slightly, to 250. Confusingly, when Idsinga addressed the media in mid-December, he put the number of witnesses at 243, the same number Yim gave in October.

Regardless of the discrepancy — Idsinga explained this week that “things are changing daily” in the probe — it is clear from the court record that almost all of the interviews were done in the first three months. Those people include Sherman friends, businesss associates, some family members, the private pathologist who made the double murder diagnosis and others. Intriguingly, two people interviewed in the initial flurry were re-interviewed last summer because they brought forward new information to police. Court has also heard that there are people (no number or names were given) who have elected not to speak to the police.

Since police have not been conducting interviews, what have they been doing?

According to police, one focus has been reviewing four terabytes of video surveillance obtained in the first week of the investigation. That equates to roughly 2,000 hours of recordings (an approximate number because lower-quality video uses less storage, so it could be up to 4,000 hours). The video comes from home surveillance cameras near the Sherman house (the Shermans did not have their own cameras), from traffic cameras on highways (such as highways 400 and 401, possible routes Barry and Honey would have used to get home), and from Apotex’s own cameras.

The Star has previously reported that although video was seized from a home across from the Shermans’ and Apotex in the first few days of the probe, police did not view it until weeks later — when the case was officially deemed a double homicide.

Other numbers show that by using search warrants and other means, police seized “150 items” in the first week and sent them for forensic testing. That number has not changed in over two years.

The number of “judicial authorizations” had grown from 18 in the first few months to 38 by last October. No new judicial authorizations have been obtained since then, at least not as of mid-December when Idsinga updated the media. Judicial authorizations are requests for either search warrants (to go into a property, storage locker, etc.) or production orders — these are typically requests to obtain things like video surveillance, banking information and cellular phone or GPS tracking records. The majority of the court-approved searches have been production orders.

What police described in October as a “voluminous” amount of data was obtained in May 2019 and by early September civilian analysts with the Toronto police intelligence unit had provided a report on its analysis of the data. Asked if it was GPS or cellular phone data, or something else, police would not say.

Toronto police also have released a category called “investigative actions.” These are jobs detectives have to do — obtain a document, talk to a person, review previously obtained material. There were 474 in the first three months of the investigation, and as of last October there were a total of 709 investigative actions over the life of the probe. Yim told court in October that 56 were still to be completed.

Court has also heard that information concerning the estate of Barry and Honey Sherman is “embedded” in the police investigation. Yim said he was not allowed to explain this further as to do so would hurt the case.

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At his press conference in December, Idsinga said the amount of information they have to review is enormous. At the press conference, Idsinga asked for anyone who sent one of 343 tips directly to the now-defunct Sherman private investigation team to resubmit them to police, to make sure nothing was missed.

“I anticipate the next several weeks are going to be very, very busy going through a lot of information,” Idsinga said on Dec. 16. “We’ve been getting a lot of great information from a lot of different sources and … I anticipate we’re going to be getting a lot more information.”

On the issue of whether the police have a suspect or suspects, they refuse to say. In court last October, a Star reporter questioned Yim, asking why he would not say if there was a suspect or suspects, or a person of interest (someone who is not a suspect but may later fall into that category).

“If I speak in a general term I might be able to explain that,” Yim told court. “If in a case there’s only one perpetrator and that perpetrator knows that he is the only one, if I answer that we have a person of interest or we have a suspect, then that may alert the perpetrator that the police are onto him. And that’s why when you ask me that question, I’m reluctant to answer.”

Yim explained that when a production order is served, the “entity” that receives it (a bank or a telecommunications company, for example) is barred by a court order from revealing to the individual that a search was carried out.

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