Sherman home shocks urban explorer
House facing demolition had papers that looked like evidence, man says
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’ murder17 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. The Shermans 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 were major charitable donors in the Jewish community and to non-Jewish causes.
Toronto police initially investigated the case as a murdersuicide. Six weeks after the bodies were found, following a story in the Toronto Star that revealed 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 2 1⁄ 2 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. Family representatives applied in early 2019 for permission to knock it down.
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 house, and Lions Demolition was hired to do the work in May 2019. Although the Shermans 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 in a Reddit post, which he has since deleted.
He entered the property midafternoon by climbing over a wall. He did not think he would get inside the house, figuring all the doors would be locked. The home had a 10-car underground garage accessed by a ramp on the right side of the house. It is likely that Barry 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 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 wouldn’t do.
In a blog post by another urban Canadian urban explorer, this is how he 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. Although 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. That’s one of two staircases it is believed the attacker or attackers used to take Honey (who was likely surprised on the first floor by an assailant) down to the basement.
The pool where the bodies were found was just down the hallway, but “I wasn’t quite ready to experience that yet,” the man said in his Reddit post. He went upstairs.
What he found on the first floor, and then the second, surprised him. He wrote in his post:
“I figured a lot of stuff would have been taken out by Toronto Police, sent to an auction house or saved by family members, but that wasn’t really the case. There was stuff everywhere, furniture, clothes, artwork, books, personal letters, memos, photos of the deceased, the works. Pretty much every room I stepped into had me saying ‘jesus f---ing christ’ out loud to myself, wondering what I was getting myself into.”
A Toronto police spokesperson, told by the Star what the man saw, said police have no comment on the man’s observations, and are “only prepared to say that this is an active and ongoing investigation.”
The Sherman family, through its then lawyer Brian Greenspan, has previously criticized the police for not doing a thorough investigation of the crime scene, claiming the forensics team missed numerous finger and palm prints, and failed to appreciate in a timely fashion that it was a double murder. Police maintain they did a thorough investigation of the home and removed “150 bulk or packaged items” for analysis, according to statements made by investigating officers at press conferences and during the Star’s attempts to have search warrant documents unsealed.
Friends of the couple have expressed dismay to the Star that the home was knocked down, and that many items of sentimental or material value, or importance to the investigation, may have been buried.
However, the Sherman family has said they made significant efforts to remove items from the home.
In a letter to the Star after a story about a mysterious 911 call in the area around the time of the murders, Greenspan took issue with a paragraph that noted the large number of items in the home when demolition occurred.
Greenspan wrote that the “Sherman siblings spent countless days at 50 Old Colony sorting and donating everything which was salvageable.” Greenspan said, “Barry and Honey Sherman’s clothing were donated to a charity clothing auction that raised tens of thousands of dollars for that charity.”
The Urbex man’s account, his photos and video, and television footage of the actual demolition indicates there was a great deal left behind.
To put the state of the home in context, Toronto police forensic officers spent six weeks going through the house. After it was returned to the family, the Shermans’ private detectives and a retired forensic officer spent several days going through it. Greenspan, who himself toured the home, told the Star it was in “disarray,” with clothes that had been removed from drawers and closets left piled on the floor. In the Sub Zero fridge in the kitchen, Greenspan said he found a bottle of Moishes pickles and not much else.
Once the private analysis was finished in early 2018, the home was turned over to the Shermans’ four children: Lauren, Jonathon, Alexandra and Kaelen.
During his visit a year later, the Urbex man told the Star he noticed “walls in the master bedroom with holes punched through,” leading him to conclude that “somebody was looking for something.” Drawers were upended, their contents strewn on the floor.
He saw a notepad with dates and times for real estate showings in December. He also found a thank-you note from one of Honey’s best friends, thanking the couple for “extreme generosity” toward a cancer charity. There were other papers and notes regarding appointments in December, but he decided not to linger.
In the kitchen, the island was scattered with various items: packing tape, garbage bags, snack food. There was both an empty and unopened bottle of Stella Artois beer. In the living room were sheafs of papers lying on a glass coffee table.
He said it “seemed strange” that so much was left that, in his opinion, should be in a police evidence room.
The Star had earlier asked police if they were disappointed the family was tearing down the house. A spokesperson said police took no position. The Urbex man made his way down from the second floor to the first, then back to the basement, down the spiral staircase. He did not go to the front room, where two life-sized sculptures made of garbage (a gift from friends to Honey in the late 1970s) sat. A Sherman family member told the Star the four children found the sculptures “creepy” and they went down with the house.
A Star story revealed an eerie similarity between the sculptures and how the Shermans’ bodies were posed, in a seated position. Like the male sculpture, Barry had one leg crossed over the other.
Feeling a “terrible energy” as he walked down the hallway, the Urbex man entered the swimming pool room at the north end of the basement. The pool had been drained. He said the darkened pool area seemed “sinister.”
Then he heard a noise. The unmistakable sound of the garage door opening. Maybe a demolition worker? His heart pounding, he gathered his camera and light, quickly moved down the hallway, out a side door, and back the way he had come.
“It was nerve-wracking,” the man told the Star.
As he wrote in his Reddit post, “I’m still a bit rattled by it all. I’m also still wrestling with my conscience a little because I feel like I crossed a line into something that’s far darker than what I’m usually interested in, both as a photographer and as a human being.”
“There was stuff everywhere, furniture, clothes, artwork, books, personal letters, memos, photos of the deceased, the works.”
URBAN EXPLORER IN A REDDIT POST AFTER SNEAKING INTO THE VACANT SHERMAN HOME IN 2019