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The Current Transcript for October 29, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: They were madly in love with each other. They still walked hand-in-hand. They had everything in life to be looking forward to.

LAURA LYNCH: Fred Waks said Barry and Honey Sherman had everything to live for, so it was a shock when they were found dead in their home in Toronto almost two years ago. Investigative journalist Kevin Donovan has written a book about the murders, and we'll talk to him in half an hour. Also today.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Here it is in a small office next to mine. It's not heralded. It's not in a showcase and it should be a shrine for this country.

LL: Happy birthday, internet. Leonard Kleinrock, a pioneer in the field is celebrating the computer and the system he helped give birth to 50 years ago today. We'll check in with him in an hour for his thoughts on what the internet has become over half a century. But first, to California, where fire and wind are once again forcing people to flee. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current.

Bioclimatologist says drought plays a huge role in California wildfires

Guests: Karen Maley, Park Williams

SOUNDCLIP

[Sounds from wildfires in California]

VOICE 1: All the models we've run are showing with very high confidence that any ignition that does happens will travel extremely fast.

VOICE 2: It's scary. I mean, last night we thought for sure we were going to lose this place, but the water dropping helicopter saved it.

VOICE 3: I looked back and I saw the roof on fire and solar panels caught fire. And I mean you just, you're not going to stop it.

VOICE 4: Within like 10 minutes we started to see the fire and the smoke getting darker by our house. And then that's when my brother started shouting out to me to get in the car. We got the dogs in the car. And the fire was literally on our backyard.

LL: The sounds of destruction and fear in northern California and the images, red and orange flames snaking through wooded hills, engulfing cars and homes and lighting up the smoky sky seemed terrifying. Nearly 200,000 people have fled their homes and possibly millions are without power due to preventative blackouts. In a minute, we'll hear from a bioclimatologist about the root causes of and what steps might guard against future wildfires. But first, I'm joined by Karen Maley. She's the general manager of the Robert Young Estate Winery in Sonoma County. She normally lives just down the road from the winery, but the fires forced her to leave and go to a friend's place 35 kilometres to the east. And that's where we've reached her today in Calistoga, California. Hello.

KAREN MALEY: Good morning.

LL: What is the situation like there today?

KAREN MALEY: Well, I'm actually sitting in the pitch blackness speaking to you now. The power is out in Calistoga. We were under an advisory evacuation, but not a mandatory one. But the situation continues to be very serious and fluid.

LL: OK, so the winery where you work was actually nearly overrun by fire. Tell me what happened.

KAREN MALEY: So this we were actually at sort of the start of the fires on Wednesday night. So everybody, the family, the Robert Young family, they all live on the ranch and work on the ranch. So Wednesday late at night, we had a very high wind warning over 70 miles per hour. And we started to see on the ridge up above us. The fire glow. And within 20 minutes, as the winds picked up, it was at the perimeter of the property. So by that time, very luckily, a strike team of surrounding firefighters were on the scene and they there was a brush fire that swept right through the winery. But because of the firefighters on scene, all of the buildings were saved and everyone was safe. We were one of the lucky ones.

LL: Wow, that is amazing. And in fact, the vineyards themselves can act as a bit of a firebreak, is that right?

KAREN MALEY: Exactly. So the ranch itself, it's about 450 acres, about 320 of those acres are planted to vines and the rest is brush. So what happened was when the fire sweeps through, it'll sweep through on the brush and vegetation and then the vineyards actually act as a fire block and suppresses the progression of the fire.

LL: So you left, but are there people at the winery who are still there?

KAREN MALEY: Yes. So, you know, this is hard to understand. And this is if anybody finds themselves in a fire, this is not advisory. But when you're a rancher, this family has been on this ranch for over 160 years, so in their sixth generation. They also know the property better than anybody. They've got a water tank on the property. We've got ponds and reservoirs on the property. So several of the family members chose to stay and they have not left the ranch since Wednesday. But on Wednesday night, they were fighting sort of side by side with the firefighters through the night to save the ranch. And since then, they've been working to clear all the brush and the broken limbs and try and get the property back to normal.

LL: Is that unusual though, for people to ignore an evacuation order?

KAREN MALEY: It is not. It should not be the case with residents in residential homes, and in fact, they've come out several times, they've evacuated entire cities, not just portions of cities, as they did back in 2017. We had another fire that went through the area at that time. And the police and the firefighters and the press have been clear to say that one of the reasons that the firefighters in the last few days have been so effective at stopping the fire with the wall is because they have not had to deal with people with evacuations of the residential areas. When you're out in the unincorporated areas though and you're on a 450 acre ranch, it is not unusual for people to stay and fight for their land.

LL: OK, but how is the fire then affecting the day to day operations? This is the middle of the harvest, isn't it?

KAREN MALEY: This is exactly in the middle of the harvest. So in the in the two weeks before the fires hit, we had brought in all the grapes from the field and they are sitting in our winery fermenting. And so each day. Well, we don't have power. There's no power to the area. We're on a generator system in anticipation of the power going out, regardless of the fires. PG&E, our electrical company had already advised the area that they would be doing that. And we've also got roadblocks. So we have the National Guard. As a matter of fact, I tried to get in there by our winemaker tried to get in yesterday. We were successful, but we are pushing our way through a number of roadblocks to get to the winery each day.

LL: And so you are returning to the vineyard to help?

KAREN MALEY: Yeah. As a matter of fact, I'm meeting in the winemaker at about 8:30 this morning and we're going to be doing punch downs and punch overs. And that's a process that helps the grapes during fermentation.

LL: It's a bizarre thing to think about just going through the motions of making wine in the midst of all of this destruction.

KAREN MALEY: It is. But I'll let you know that from our perspective, sometimes when sometimes people see the wine business as a luxury business, when you're when you're in the marine business, it's an agricultural farming business. And so for us, this is sort of just another day, another day. You know, on on the ranch, it's not necessary.

LL: Does this is this starting to seem normal to you?

KAREN MALEY: Oh, no. Well, that's interesting question. I don't think that you ever get used to this. This ever becomes normal. I mean, when you said in the opening, almost 200,000 people have been evacuated, as you know, entire towns the size of Oakville, Mississauga completely, completely moved in the space of, you know, a couple of hours and then watching on the news, the devastation and and hearing from people on Facebook or through texts that, you know, they can see the satellite maps. They know that they've lost their home with them with all of their contacts. I don't I don't know how you ever get used to that, but I understand that you're going to have somebody on after me that's going to explain some of the underpinnings. In most people's opinion, this is largely manmade and so therefore, the hope it's man-correctable.

LL: Right. And what you're referring to is the utility company and the blame that they have actually accepted some of the blame for problems with their own electrical infrastructure that has sparked some of the fires. But I'm wondering, you talked about using generators at the Vineyard. So does that mean that you're planning for this to be a regular occurrence?

KAREN MALEY: Well, yes. And so one of the one of the things that happened so we we had a fire that affected the area tremendously in 2017. And it was determined that it was a downed power line by PG&E, which is a privately owned company, but a monopoly in the state of California. And so as a result of that from two years ago and a result of a tremendous number of lawsuits that happened after the fact, PG&E has announced that for peremptory measures they were going to do to institute rolling blackouts on red flag days and red flag days are in the season where the temperatures are hot, the humidity is low and we have high winds come into the area and sort of not great conditions for four fire spread. So during those red flag days, they will pre-emptively cut out the power to hundreds of thousands of people in northern California. So and then in that when that happened, whether or not there was a fire that could last for anywhere from two days to five days. So about two months ago, a number knowing that this was going to be a possibility, a number of businesses and wineries have gone out and purchased or rented generators to the point where there was a real scarcity in the area. But again, it's also very costly. Can you imagine every business, you know, getting them, having to go out and buy a generator worth about $50,000 to $100,000 and then multiply that by all the businesses and homes. For smaller versions it's quite a burden.

LL: The new normal. Karen Maley, thank you.

KAREN MALEY: Thank you very much and also thank you to everybody. You know, the outpouring of support and best wishes and prayers has just been truly amazing. And it does mean a lot to the people that are here hoping for a good outcome and a change. Thank you.

LL: OK. You be careful. Bye bye.

KAREN MALEY: Bye bye.

LL: Karen Maley is the general manager of the Robert Young Estate Winery. We reached her in Calistoga, California. And we posted some pictures that Karen Maley took of the fire before she was forced to flee on our Twitter feed. You can find them there. We caught up with another person who was forced to evacuate yesterday. Laura Palmer and her family left their home in Sonoma County early Sunday morning.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: At four o'clock in the morning, the sirens rang and we realized that we too were being evacuated. It was pitch black because there were power outages. There was smoke, there was embers, there was debris across the area. We actually are camping in a tent outside of the shelter. We just thought that we were lucky enough to be in a place where we had more time to prepare than other people. And so we already are avid campers and outdoors people anyway and we had all the equipment and brought it with us. And we felt that that could be better utilized for the more vulnerable populations, elders. I think one of the emotionally hardest things is how do you decide what matters and what's meaningful? Obviously, your family and your pets, but then you look at some of your belongings and it really makes you assess. I remember speaking with my mom and she was like well did you get any food and I was like, you can buy food, but you can't buy the baby's blankets and photo albums and things like that.

LL: And that was Laura Palmer in Sonoma County, California. The word tinderbox often comes up when describing California's Kincaid wildfire. And one of the factors causing those tinderbox conditions is drought, something my next guest focuses on in his research. Park Williams is a bioclimatologist and associate research professor at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, and we have reached him in New York. Hello.

PARK WILLIAMS: Hi there. Thanks for having me.

LL: When we talk about wildfires now, we talk about the impacts of climate change. But can you walk us through the various factors that are at play here?

PARK WILLIAMS: Yeah. These fires in California take a very specific recipe of meteorological conditions before climate change can have an opportunity to take it, to have an effect. As most people probably know, California just has one wet season a year and that really starts in in mid fall like early October, so generally and goes through spring and then summer is hot and bone dry. And as of this past spring, California was actually abnormally wet and fire dangerous is very low, but by the time you get to fall every year, things are pretty dry. And if you have a year like this year or one of the last two years, then things get very dry in fall because the fall rains or the winter rains are late in showing up. They still haven't shown up this year. And so then that gives way for a second thing to be able to be important and that is these strong wind events that are called the Santa Ana winds in Southern California and diablo winds in northern California. The important thing about these winds is they go in the reverse direction of normal. Normally in California, wind is coming off of the ocean. It's fairly cool and humid, but during these big wind events, wind is going in the opposite direction, from the high desert out toward the coast. And as it gets pulled from the high desert down to sea level, it's getting compressed under all the all the way to the atmosphere above it. And as air gets compressed, it gets warm and as dry desert air gets compressed, it gets warm very rapidly. As it gets squeezed through mountain passes, it gets moving very quickly. And so it's the convergence of these two things that is allowing these fires just to to ignite and spread so quickly. The arrival of winter rains, combined with these off shore high desert wind events and both of these things are perfectly normal. It is perfectly normal to have the late arrival of the rains and this is the season when we started getting these wind events occurring. And so this is really the the big fire season for coastal California because these two things can occur. Now, underlying all of that is the fact that the globe has been warming for over a century and right now, California is approximately 1.8 degrees Celsius warmer than it would be if global warming were not occurring. And so these naturally occurring things that drive fire in California are superimposed on this unnatural warming that has things dried out more than they would otherwise.

LL: Now, Scott McClain, who's a spokesperson for CalFire, which is the statewide fire department, spoke with CBC Radio yesterday, and he had this to say.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The Kincaid fire is now at over 66,000 acres, being the largest fire in this state this year so far. 95 percent of all wildfires start in the state of California are human caused, not arson. It could be a flat tire causing a spark when the rim hits the asphalt. It could be mowing when you shouldn't causing a spark. Again all these are causing sparks.

LL: So humans are causing the sparks, but how does that measure up against the role played by the drought and the winds?

PARK WILLIAMS: Yeah, that's all part of it as well. During the fall there is essentially no lightning in California. And so he's absolutely right. All of these fires have to be occurring because of people and there are just so many people in California that we can basically see the availability of sparks as a non limiting factor, meaning there's just always a spark from something like he was saying it could be from a car or from a tool or from a power line. And that those sparks are always available and it is the late arrival of the rains and the strong winds then that will take those sparks and turn them into large fires. Now, of course, if we had no humans living in California, then there would be no fire right now, no matter how severe the winds or the late arrival of the rains are. And so everything is part of the recipe here. You need to have a spark, of course, in order to have fire.

LL: Well, then when we talk about California and other areas that are prone to wildfires, what needs to change to guard against this happening?

PARK WILLIAMS: Well, guarding against these giant wildfires, it's important to put these in perspective. These wildfires when they really going are like the size of downtown city skyscrapers. The idea that we can just get in the way and put them out or prevent them from recurring is becoming quickly out of date. We were very good at putting out fires for about a century, but because of a convergence of problems, one being that climate is changing and things are drier these days than they were a century ago, combined with the fact that in many places we've been fighting fires for a century and each time we successfully fought a fire we pat ourselves on the back, but that allowed vegetation to continue growing in that place where it would have otherwise burned and therefore the fuels would have been eliminated. So we now have some places, far more fuels than they would have otherwise. And of course, we have people living all over the place in areas that we feel compelled to protect. And so I guess the way that I'm seeing this, just based on the statistics of the fires, and we see how inevitable the growth of these fires is because of these factors trying to end this age of endless fires, kind of like thinking that we could end a tidal wave in the ocean. It's unfortunately just bigger than humanity. I think that the first thing that needs to occur in California and across a lot of the west is the acceptance that fire is actually part of life out there. And it for a while is probably going to be increasingly so. And so decisions about where to move should start factoring fire into the equation. Decisions about the by insurance companies are increasingly factoring fire into the equation and decisions about how we fight fire. Right now anytime a fire gets going, we try and put it out, even though we know that that is unsustainable in some areas in the long term for the reason I said, if we fight a fire, it might miss a little fuel to accumulate to make next fire bigger. We know that it is so hard to actually change our behaviour when we have areas we want to protect. We still try and fight every single fire.

LL: So that means it sounds like you don't think anything's really going to change.

PARK WILLIAMS: Well, I think that un the natural system, in this system of vegetation and climate and fire, I don't think much is going to change. I think that it's dictated by physics and sure, we think we can be more careful with our emissions. They have a giant utility company, PG&E, who has decided to do these large scale blackouts to try and limit its own responsibility for the emission of fires. And so we can continue to get more careful on that end, but where things can change is with people getting more careful.

LL: Parker Williams, I'm going to have to stop you there. We're running out of time, but I appreciate your efforts to enlighten us about all of this. Thank you.

PARK WILLIAMS: Thank you.

LL: Park Williams is a bioclimatologist, an associate research professor at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. He is in New York. The CBC News is next. Then the mysterious deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Remember this. Our parents never left anyone behind. They were taken from us.

LL: At first, Toronto police thought they were dealing with a murder-suicide. From the beginning, the family said that was impossible. We will talk about that next. I'm Laura Lynch. You're listening to The Current.

[Music]

Police missed leads by concluding that deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman were a murder-suicide: author

Guests: Kevin Donovan

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

LL: Still to come, 1969 was a momentous year for so many reasons. You may remember Woodstock or the moon landing, but it was also the year the Internet was born. What did its inventors think what happened when they sent that first fateful message? We'll find out when I speak with one of them in half an hour. But first, the billionaire murders.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Toronto police are saying very little about what they found inside the mansion of pharmaceutical billionaire Barry Sherman and his wife, Honey. They left it to officials that the company Sherman founded 50 years ago.

LL: When news broke nearly two years ago that Barry and Honey Sherman had been found dead, it sent shockwaves across the country. Barry Sherman was one of the wealthiest men in Canada, the founder of generic drug giant Apotex Inc. His wife, Honey, was a prominent philanthropist who sat on the boards of several charities. Kevin Donovan has been investigating the killings and what went wrong with the investigation for the Toronto Star. His new book is called The Billionaire Murders" The Mysterious Death of Barry and Honey Sherman. And a warning, this segment deals with some disturbing details from the murder scene. Kevin Donovan joins me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

KEVIN DONOVAN: Hello.

LL: Let's start by talking about that crime scene. How were Honey and Barry Sherman found?

KEVIN DONOVAN: Well, it was obviously quite upsetting and dramatic at the same time for the people who found them. Both were sitting in their basement swimming pool room, legs outstretched away from the pool, backs up against a sort of a railing that goes around the pool, metre high. But most awful was the fact that there were men's belts looped around their neck and then tied to the railing just a few inches above them. And that kept them sitting upright. What was also noticed was that Barry Sherman's eyeglasses were sitting just perched on his nose and one foot was just casually bent over the other one as his legs were stretched out.

LL: And they were actually found by a real estate agent who was showing the house because the house was for sale. Is that right?

KEVIN DONOVAN: That's correct. They'd probably been in the house, dead for almost two days. But a realtor that works for the Sherman family brought in prospective buyers — the house was on the market — and just came down the stairs and around the corner and into the glass door that keeps people out of the pool, would have pressed a button that unlocked it and looked in and saw this very odd and horrifying tableau.

LL: And yeah, obviously macabre. Soon after the news broke, the media started reporting that the investigators believe the deaths were actually a murder-suicide that had been perpetrated by Barry Sherman. Why was that the police's original theory?

KEVIN DONOVAN: Well, the police are not giving out interviews on this one, but from what I pieced together, the Bruce McArthur case was ongoing at the time. We in the public didn't know about it yet, but a lot of homicide resources were spent on that one as they were zeroing in on Mr. McArthur.

LL: He being the person who had been a serial murder of many men in the village.

KEVIN DONOVAN: That's correct. And so the officers that caught the case — some were divisional officers — they came into this home, they saw this tableau, and for a reason that still escapes me, they decided that it was quite possibly a case of murder-suicide. Honey Sherman did have some marks to her face. Berry Sherman did not. And this was then passed over to homicide squad. And what I know from various court information that I received in the first six weeks, they were actually only looking at the murder of Honey Sherman. Police were not investigating the murder of Barry Sherman.

LL: So how did that theory influence the way the police worked the case?

KEVIN DONOVAN: Well, they talk about the first 48 hours and certainly the first few days in a homicide investigation is so important, so critical. And with this time ticking by, things were missed. It looks like there were some fingerprints and palm prints that weren't taken. Even months later, it turns out that DNA and fingerprints were not taken from people who were actually with the Shermans the day they died. And the problem there is that that shows that the police were not trying to exclude potential suspects. They were quite muddled by this, I think, for a while and now here we are almost two years later.

LL: And there were also, there were people who lived nearby, who offered them video evidence that they didn't pick up on for days.

KEVIN DONOVAN: Yeah, there are actually two batches of video that wasn't looked at for six weeks. The first was, as you mentioned, the people who lived directly across the street and they provided it to police as soon as they could. Police took a while coming to collect it. Turns out they didn't actually look at it for six weeks. And then at Apotex where Barry Sherman worked, same thing. Video surveillance from the the surrounding areas of all the buildings was seized, but it was not looked at for about six weeks.

LL: The Sherman family were not too happy about hearing this declared to be a murder-suicide, or thought to be, suspected to be a murder-suicide. They went ahead and hired their own forensic pathologist to do a second autopsy on the bodies. Tell me what that second autopsy showed.

KEVIN DONOVAN: Yes, that was a key turning point in the investigation. Dr. David Chiasson — who is the former chief forensic pathologist for Ontario — he was hired by the family. And what he discovered is that, it really was, in his opinion, a case of double murder. He found evidence that their hands had been bound at one point, but no ties were found at the scene. He also found that — and this is a little descriptive — but he found that something called the hyoid bone, which we all have in our necks, was not broken. The earlier pathologist looked at that and said, well, that's an indication of a suicide, not like a vicious strangulation. But Dr. Chiasson had actually done a paper years before, an academic paper, that showed that it did not have to be broken to be indicative of one or the other. And so when he looked at everything, did all of his tests, and actually did have some help from the more junior pathologist — who was in the room at the time showing him photographs — he came quite quickly to the determination that it was a double homicide.

LL: And did he provide that information to the investigators?

KEVIN DONOVAN: They asked the investigators from the Toronto police to come and sit in at the autopsy. They declined. And what happened is when I got assigned to this by my editors at the Toronto Star, I was able to dig up information that I've just described. And we put a story on the front page. And immediately after — now, this is five weeks after, five-and-a-half weeks after the murders took place — the Toronto Police actually call up Dr. David Chiasson, the second pathologist and say, you know, we want to talk to you. He gives his findings. The junior pathologist then says: "Yes, I concur." And then they held, the police held a press conference saying this is a case of targeted double murder.

LL: They changed the theory based on all of that, weeks later. This was such a high-profile case. How could the police make such a basic mistake?

KEVIN DONOVAN: I don't have a good answer for that. All I can say is, it seems that they were, you know, sadly, it was very difficult year for the Toronto Police homicide squad, very busy. Officers that caught the case just made a mistake and now I think that they're back on track. But certainly they lost a fair bit of time in those first few weeks.

LL: Precious time. Now, how wealthy? Let's talk about the Sherman's a little bit. How wealthy were they when they died?

KEVIN DONOVAN: They're estimated by Bloomberg to be worth $4.7 billion Canadian. But from what I've heard from insiders that just relates to his holdings and Apotex, the generic firm which he owns almost completely outright. There's potentially another three or four billion dollars that he has in all sorts of places, anything from off shore holdings, because he did have offshore holdings to real estate in Toronto. So he could be worth between $9 and $10 billion.

LL: OK. So let's talk about Apotex because that's where his wealth is drawn from. How did it get its start?

KEVIN DONOVAN: It's a quite a fascinating story. Barry Sherman and a man named Joel Ulster in the 1950s were in high school in Forest Hill Collegiate. They always wanted to start a company. Fast forward to to the early 60s. Barry Sherman was studying to be a rocket scientist and actually became one at M.I.T.

LL: An actual rocket scientist.

KEVIN DONOVAN: An actual rocket scientist. And he was really quite fond of his uncle. His own father had died. His uncle, Lou Winter, had a at a company called Empire Labs, which was a fledgling generic pharmaceutical firm. And Barry worked there in the summer and then Lou Winter, his uncle, passed away quite suddenly and he made with his friend Joel Ulster. He made a bid for the company and purchased it. Lou Winter had four children. His own wife died shortly after that, as well. There's so many tragedies in this family. And with this Empire Lab company now owned by Barry Sherman and his friend, they set about building it up. And in a couple of years, they made it quite profitable. But then they sold it and then a year later, Barry Sherman just on his own, started Apotex.

LL: So there was a lot of family conflict around the founding of Apotex. Tell us what happened.

KEVIN DONOVAN: Yeah, I mean, there was no conflict back in the 60s and 70s, but in the 1990s, his uncle Lou, his late uncle Lou winters for children who are referred to as the orphaned cousins often, they started thinking, hey, what happened to dad's company? And so they started doing some digging. Two of them in particular and they found documents that suggested to them that perhaps they mounted a legal challenge, they would have a right, Empire Holdings was long gone, but they would have a right to Apotex. And in fact, they went to court and claimed that they had a right to one fifth of the holdings, which at the time of Barry Sherman's passing would have been almost one billion dollars. And they mounted a number of court challenges. They were never successful. Meantime, Barry Sherman, who had given them about $15 million, the four of them over the years to help them out. Eventually pulled the plug on that because of the lawsuit and just a few months before the murders, the Ontario courts ruled that Barry Sherman was the victor and nothing should go to the cousins. And in fact, there was an order of $300,000 in legal fees that the cousins were ordered to pay just a couple of months before the deaths.

LL: I just want to play you some tape now. This is from February of 2018. This is Barry Sherman's cousin, Kerry Winters, speaking to the Fifth Estate.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I had opportunity. I had motive. I can see why the police might say this guy is also a nut.

VOICE 2: And he confessed to us he had indeed fantasized about killing Barry Sherman. Like I would talk about killing Barry and it was very graphic. The way I was going to do it wouldn't have been belts. It was going to be in the Apotex parking lot. That was my vision always that he'd come out of the building in Apotex and I'd be hiding behind a car and I'd just decapitate him. I wanted to roll his head down the parking lot and I'd just sit there waiting for the police.

LL: That's pretty graphic description of what he wanted to do. What do you know about Kerry Winter?

KEVIN DONOVAN: Well, I've met and interviewed Kerry Winter many times. I've heard him tell those stories. Kerry is presents as a very bright man who has, by his own admission, struggled with substance abuse most of his life. He's been clean for at least several years. And he said that in the in the 90s, he reconnected with his cousin, Barry Sherman and Barry was really good to him. And he speaks lovingly on one hand of his cousin, Barry Sherman, who gave him millions of dollars and helped him get started in the construction business. On the other hand, there's this tremendous enmity he feels that Barry should have at the very least, dedicated a hospital wing to his late father, Lou Winter. And he's really bothered by the way Barry has, in his opinion, carried on and been very mean to to him and to his siblings.

LL: So do police have a working theory of who killed the Shermans?

KEVIN DONOVAN: Well, they do. And I know they do, because last April, I was in court and asking questions of the detective who is the main detective on the case. And I was asking questions of him because we're trying to get access to the search warrant materials to see at least some of what the police have been up to over the last two years, because we want to put some public scrutiny on this at this point in the investigation. And the detective, the way he was answering questions caused me to say a detective, do you have a theory of the case? Do you have a working theory? And there was a very dramatic 20 second pause and then the detective said, yes, we do. And I said, well, what is a working theory? And he said, well, it's an idea of what happened. And then I asked, well, do you have a suspect or at least a person of interest, at which point the justice cut me often. And we were back in court last month and the same thing happened. What the police have said is that the working theory they had in April is the same today. They are building a case. They are, quote, cautiously optimistic that there will be result in the relatively near future. And I'm thinking in terms of months and the probably most interesting part is that they've just recently obtained and analyzed a major amount of electronic data. I'm assuming that it's probably some sort of locational data, cell phone, G.P.S. car track or something like that. They've analyzed that. And now in the next couple of weeks, they're going to be making requests for more search warrants. And I think it's possible that that will. Cause them to make some sort of move in this case or to determine that it's going to be a cold case.

LL: So the important thing is that if they have a working theory, you can't really have a working theory without having a suspect in mind for it. So there have been some crazy theories posited about who killed the Shermans. Which ones stand out for you as being the most outlandish?

KEVIN DONOVAN: Well, the most outlandish to me is that Bill and Hillary Clinton are the killers, or at least the Clinton Foundation. And every week or so, I will get a call from a seemingly quite sane person who is usually calling from a U.S. area code and they'll start putting together all these conspiracy theories to me. And then they'll say, you know, have you looked into the Clinton Foundation? The reason they're saying that and bringing in the Clintons is that Barry Sherman has in the past given drugs to the Clinton Foundation for relief efforts in places like Haiti. So that one's pretty outlandish. Another one I've heard is that there was somebody in the Mossad from Israel who decided they wanted him dead. Then there's talk of rival generic firms. Barry Sherman's involved in a ton of litigation. There's all sorts of people who sue. To me, those people are people who want to see him in court. They don't want to kill him.

LL: Let's get back to the real world then. In your view, was this a random burglary gone wrong or were the Shermans murdered by someone they knew?

KEVIN DONOVAN: I think they were murdered by somebody they knew. I think it was somebody who knew their movements. It was very unusual for Barry and Honey to be both home at the same time on an evening. There was always a charity event to go to. Bary usually worked very late. He came home a bit early that night, came home at about 8:30: Honey was home at 7:30. I think somebody had a sense of their movements and and also may have had a sense that the next day, Thursday, nobody would be coming to the house. And that's, I mention that because it was not until the Friday, almost two full days later, that the bodies were discovered.

LL: OK, so walk me through exactly what you think happened on the night of the murders, how it went.

KEVIN DONOVAN: Well, again, this is all me pulling together pieces of information that I picked up from, you know, over 250 people I've interviewed. But I think that they were at Apotex for a meeting with the architects of a new home that they were building in Forest Hill, meeting ends at 6:30pm. Honey leaves. I believe she goes to a local mall near where they live in north Toronto and purchases some Hanukkah gifts, as it was Hanukkah when this happened. And then she goes home and she gets home probably around 7:30 or 8:00. And then I believe she's attacked. I think she's attacked on the first floor. Her cell phone is found on the floor, in the bathroom, upstairs on the main floor. And then I think she's taken downstairs to the basement. The Sherman house has a underground garage, which is right beside the pool. I think Barry Sherman came home probably around 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. I understand from the people I've talked to that when the real estate agent that next morning or two mornings later was touring the couple through to look at the house, she's stooped down and scooped up some papers that were on the floor. The papers were a home inspection report that Barry had taken with him to the office that morning. It looks like he was grabbed when he came out of the garage and headed, normally, he would go along a walkway and upstairs to the main floor. I think he was grabbed on the basement floor in the hallway and then taken into the pool room. And then he was killed there. And then they were both just left.

LL: Do you think you know who killed the Shermans or who you believe killed the Shermans?

KEVIN DONOVAN: I mean, I have some certain ideas. One can only go so far in a book, I'm trying to just put things together. I don't think I'm ready to write a story saying that I know, but I think I have a pretty strong suspicion.

LL: Can we talk about what happened to Apotex in the wake of Barry Sherman's murder?

KEVIN DONOVAN: Yeah Apotex is still a thriving company. They have 6000 employees in Ontario and 11,000 worldwide. They've been, Barry was really trying to expand the company even before, just in the months before his death. He'd purchased a fentanyl plant in Florida. That plant was sold at a loss because when his son and the trustees of Barry and Honey's will took over the company, they decided, you know, if we're going to sell this company one day because the Sherman children don't want to run Apotex. They've never had an interest. They decided, let's start selling off pieces that are not profitable. So the Florida plant went, they've downsized their European operation. They're just they seem to be consolidating and trying to focus on the core business, which is selling, making and selling generic pharmaceuticals in Canada.

LL: So there are four children left who who inherited it essentially.

KEVIN DONOVAN: Yeah, there's four children. There's Lauren, who is the eldest. She lives out west in western Canada. Jonathan, who lives and runs businesses in Toronto. There's Alexandra, who is one of the younger sisters, and then Kalyn as well and at different times to my knowledge, different siblings are not speaking with each other. There's they've all decided that they're going to support their parents charitable interests and I've certainly heard from the community, the Jewish community, that they are still making significant donations. But this is not a family that seems to be working closely together. They stand to inherit, let's say, at least a billion dollars each and maybe two billion dollars each. So they have a lot of money and they're not, I mean, Barry Sherman was always looking for somebody to run his business to be his successor. And he would ask, you know, even children of his friends, do you want to run it? And they would say, no, I just like that's not my interest. And I've heard that he has said to people that, you know, my business will die with me.

LL: Briefly then, you think you know who did it. Do you think Barry and Honey Sherman's killers will ever be caught?

KEVIN DONOVAN: Well, one has to have faith in their public institutions. I, certainly I and the Toronto Star have been pretty tough on the Toronto police. From what I've heard on the witness stand from the detective, they are making progress and they seem to be doing a tremendous amount of work right now this fall. So, yes, I do.

LL: Kevin Donovan, thank you.

KEVIN DONOVAN: Thanks for having me on.

LL: Kevin Donovan is the Toronto Star's chief investigative reporter. His new book is The Billionaire Murders: The Mysterious Deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman. We asked the Toronto Police Service for a comment and received the following statement: "The Sherman investigation remains active. We will not be commenting further on the ongoing investigation.".

[Music]

LL: Coming up in our next half hour, it was 50 years ago today that one computer sent another a brief message and changed the world forever. We look back at the origin of the Internet with one of its inventors. I'm Laura Lynch. You're listening to The Current.

[Music]

This man sent the first online message 50 years ago. He's since seen the web's dark side emerge

Guests: Leonard Kleinrock, Walter Isaacson

LL: Hello, I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound of dial-up modem connecting]

VOICE 1: Internet is a growing grid of independent computer networks interlaced. It's evolved from a U.S. military bulletin board in the 1970s to a world wide computer switchboard. You need a computer and a phone.

VOICE 2: Imagine a world where every word ever written, every picture of a painting, every film ever shot could be viewed instantly in your home via an information superhighway.

VOICE 3: Over the Internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.

LL: Some attempts from over the years to help explain just what exactly this phenomenon of Internet or the Internet really is. Of course, today we don't need to use metaphors such as the information superhighway or a series of tubes, because the Internet just is. It's everywhere and everything. There's hardly an aspect of our lives that hasn't been touched and transformed by it in some way. And today is a good day to reflect on the ubiquitous net because today is its 50th birthday. It was the year of Woodstock and the first man on the moon, but the Internet's birth arrived with little fanfare when my next guest supervised the student who sent the first ever message between two computers from his lab on October 29, 1969. Leonard Kleinrock is a distinguished professor of computer science at UCLA. He is with us from Los Angeles. Hello.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: How are you Laura?

LL: I'm fine, thank you. And happy birthday first of all.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Thank you very much.

LL: Take us back to that day 50 years ago. Did you have the sense that this was going to be something you'd be talking about a half century later?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Well, yes and no. For months before that message was sent, there was a press release that came out of UCLA in which it quotes me as describing what my vision for this network would become. And basically what it said is that this network would be always on, always available. Anybody with any device could get on at anytime from any location, and it would be invisible. Well, what I miss, Laura, was that this is going to become a social network. That is that people talking to people and not computers, talking to computers.

LL: The human element. Let's go back to that first message. Tell me what it was.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Well, we wanted to test the network when we first had two nodes, and the idea of the network was you could sit at one computer and log on to the network to a remote computer and use its services there. So the first message we tried to send was to log in from our computer at UCLA to a computer 350 miles to the north at Stanford Research Institute. Now to log in, you have to type L-O-G and the remote machine is smart enough to know what you're doing. It will type the I-N for you. So all we had to do was type L-O-G. So we typed the L. We have to get the L, yup. Got the L. You get the O. Got the O. Type the G, you get the G. Crash. So an answer to your question, the very first message ever on the internet was lo as in lo and behold.

LL: How pressy into that. Lo and behold. Now I've seen the pictures of the actual computer you used for that first method. It is the size of a fridge. Have you held onto it?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: I had to hide it for years in my office because they wanted to throw it away. It is now on display in a special room, the same room that it served for so many years. And at the moment, it's in the hall at UCLA. We're about to hold a major celebration all day and it's on display for the entire audience to see.

LL: Can you briefly explain what you were working on in that lab? Why were you trying to get computers to actually talk to one another?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Well, as an MIT graduate student, years before I recognize I was surrounded by computers and I realized there was no effective way for them to communicate. No efficient way. So I did my dissertation, my research on the establishment in mathematical theory of how these networks would work. But there was no such network existing and AT&T said it won't work. And even if it does, we want nothing to do with it. So I had to wait around for years until the Advanced Research Projects Agency within the Department Defence decided they needed a network to connect together. The computer scientist, scientists, they were they were supervising and supporting. So the idea was to essentially put together this network to allow computers to communicate efficiently. The telephone network was woefully inadequate.

LL: OK. That early net connected researchers and scientists and different universities and labs and then it made the leap to the net that connects virtually everyone. How did it happen?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: It happened slowly. For 25 years that network was considered an engineering scientific research network and the people who were using it was scientists using we were sending files around, send an email around, using others resources. Whether it was special applications, we could run graphics on one machine, high performance computer another database on another, etc. So was a well organized community until some strange things happened. Basically, the dot coms began to see what was going on and they were interested mostly in e-mail. Al Gore helped basically create what you refer to as the information superhighway. A very high speed backbone network. And the web came out, which was an easy graphical user interface for the user. And so this thing began to leak out to the world as consumers and industry. And at that point, and rather interesting, an unfortunate event occurred. The first spam message was sent out on April 12th, 1994, by a couple of lawyers who were advertising their services. And we said, what, you can't use this for commercial purposes, you can't advertise on our network is a scientific research network. But at that point, the cat was out of the bag and suddenly big industry noticed this was not a system for doing scientific research. This was a money making machine. It was a shopping mall. It was basically a social hub, an entertainment centre. And so it began to move toward a monetization direction. And that dramatically changed how it operated and who had reached and yes, it reached out to. Billions of people at this point, but it happened largely at the point when it went monetised.

LL: Now, for all the promise of the Internet, it has also developed some dark sides that I'm guessing pioneers like yourself, you never anticipated that?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: That's correct. We did not. I knew everybody on the Internet at that time, and they were all well behaved and they all believed in an open, shared free network. So we did not put in any security controls. We should have put it in a couple of leaks, but we didn't. And when the first spam e-mail occurred, we began to see the dark side emerge as this network reached nefarious people sitting in a basement with a high speed connection, reaching out to millions of people instantaneously, at no cost in time or money anonymously until all sorts of unpleasant events occurred, which we called the dark side. But in those early days, I considered a network going through its teenage years hacking to spam annoyance kinds of effects. And I thought that one day this network would mature and grow up. Well, in fact, it took a turn for the worse when nation states, organized crime and extremists came in and began to abusing, that would cause severe ways that you just referred to as the dark side. And yes, we're at that position right now with an awful lot of concern about what's going on in the network.

LL: And you're actually helping to launch a new lab at UCLA that is going to tackle some of those unanticipated consequences. What are you focussing on?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: Well, I'm focussing on all things related to connectivity. It's called the UCLA Connection Lab and it's going to focus on basic networking, on wireless, on IOT, Internet of Things, on mobility, on block chain technology, on machine learning. All things related to connectivity is an open, broad based interdisciplinary collaborative network laboratory. And that opens up tomorrow.

LL: Congratulations on that. I wonder though, because of what we've been talking about with the dark side, is there any part of you that regrets giving birth to this?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: No, absolutely not. The greater good is much more important. We should have put in some security controls early on. We should have put in a way to authenticate users, too. So I know that when I'm talking to Laura Lynch, it's really you. And by the way, at this point, I'm not sure.

LL: It's me.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: And I want to make sure that any file you send is what you intended it to be and hasn't been intercepted or altered. We didn't put that in and we should have.

LL: Now, you were often called one of the fathers of the Internet and the Internet is 50. You were talking about it being a teenager before. Does it feel like a middle aged person to you now?

LEONARD KLEINROCK: I would say a young adult because it has a long ways to go to really mature and rid itself of some of the problems we have, and it's not going to be easy. You know, when nation states come in and put boundaries around the Internet and stop communicating freely across those boundaries, we end up with a balkanized network. And I do feel and worry if that occurs, we're going to lose the free, open cross-border capability. However, there are many things going on now and things that the citizens can do. The scientists can do. Industry can do. Government can do to help correct somebody's egregious problems we have today. And I'm optimistic, but cautiously so.

LL: We will leave it there Leonard Kleinrock. Thank you.

LEONARD KLEINROCK: My pleasure.

LL: Leonard Kleinrock is a distinguished professor of computer science at UCLA. 50 years ago today, he supervised the setting of the first message between two computers, paving the way for the Internet as we know it. He was in Los Angeles.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: The web is incredibly exciting because it is the fulfilment of a lot of our dreams that the computer would ultimately not be primarily a device for computation, but metamorphosis into a device for communication. And with the web, that's finally happening. And secondly, it's exciting because Microsoft doesn't own it and therefore there's a tremendous amount of innovation happening. So I think that the web is going to be profound in what it does to our society. I think it's going to be huge.

LL: That was the late Steve Jobs, the Apple Computer visionary, peering into the future from the dial up modem days of the mid 90s and predicting that the web would be huge. He may have been onto something. Today, Steve Jobs is in the pantheon of digital revolutionaries who helped shape today's Internet and used it to shape our world. It's a world that history professor and bestselling author Walter Isaacson knows well. He wrote Steve Jobs's authorized biography and more recently, he's published The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. We've reached Walter Isaacson in New Orleans. Hello.

WALTER ISAACSON: Hey, how are you? Thank you for having me on.

LL: What is it like to hear that clip of Steve Jobs predicting the web would be huge by today?

WALTER ISAACSON: Well, the thing about Steve Jobs was that he really had a fingertip feel for where things were heading. He could see around corners. And not only did he understand what the web was going. He realized it was going mobile. And that was a huge invention, which was mobile, things like the iPhone or your smartphone and doing that with connectivity so that you could connect everything to a device in your hand.

LL: So what did he understand then about the power of the Internet that other people couldn't yet see?

WALTER ISAACSON: Well, one of the things he understands that we still don't understand today is that social networks can actually be very harmful if people don't take responsibility for what they put on their platforms or for what they say. And that's why Apple never had a social network like Facebook or Twitter, because it believed that people were Steve Jobs believed in his core, that people shouldn't be able to do things anonymously that were bullying and not have to take responsibility for their own words.

LL: The other day on Twitter, you posted and this is a quote, "Tuesday is the 50th birthday of the Internet. Happy birthday. We love you almost as much as the day you came into our lives." Almost. Let's start with the love. How would you describe that early promise of the web when it first came into our lives?

WALTER ISAACSON: It was able to connect you to anybody in the world, in any idea in the world. And even better. It allowed you any person anywhere in the world to post your own ideas and thoughts. So instead of having gatekeepers like I used to be when I was editor of Time magazine, who decided what news people would get, it allowed everybody to do peer to peer, as we call it. You could share things with anybody in the world. That was a huge advance. And it also made it so that, you know, growing up in New Orleans, any kid could get information that was available when I was very young, only to people whose parents bought encyclopedias and that sort of thing.

LL: I was going to ask you, do you remember your first encounters with the Internet?

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah. Very well. I was at Time magazine, a junior reporter writer there, and it was in the late 1980s. And somebody at the magazine said we should do a story about cyberspace and going online. This was before the Internet was open to the public. And we use something called the well, which like America Online and CompuServe, was an early online service. And I remember one night going online and typing away on bulletin boards and in chat rooms and realizing that it was a it was magical the way you could get information and communicate anywhere.

LL: You've addressed this a little bit, but if you had to point to the greatest positive changes the Internet has brought about in the past 50 years, what would you say?

WALTER ISAACSON: I would say the free flow of information. And we believed and I guess we'll get to this when you say where's the downside? We believe that the free flow of information would bend the arc of history towards more individual liberty, towards more freedom to its more democracy, to more empowerment and entrepreneurship. And in many ways, it did, even when Steve Jobs just allowed people to. What apps on the iPhone might seem like a small thing. Within a year. That was a two billion dollar industry and you start seeing everything from Uber to air B and B to Yelp, all these new companies coming up because we connected the phone, the Internet, mobility, G.P.S., all these wonderful things that during the 1990s were invented.

LL: OK, then let's go back to the happy brthday tweet and talk about the how we almost love the Internet, the way we once did part. What has tarnished it for you?

WALTER ISAACSON: I was just listening to Tim Berners Lee, who was the person who developed the Web and you've been listening to Len Kleinrock, the person who helps in the first ARPANET message, which was really the first message on the Internet. What they did was they created something in which the packets scurry around and know how to get to their destination, but we never encoded where those packets come from. So in some ways, that was a bad flaw that's come back to haunt us. Meaning somebody could claim to be your sister and you know who's lost and lost their passport in some country and need you to wire money. And of course, it's a fake scam. Or they can pretend to be a housewife in Michigan. And really, they're a Russian troll in St. Petersburg, you know, Russian propaganda site. That anonymity, of course, extends all the way down to the kid in high school who may be getting bullied. I think having pure anonymity encoded in that, meaning that no packet can you really easily trace back where it comes from that made it so it's no longer a trusted way to build a social network. It's not verified. And in some ways and social networks depend on trust. And I think that's the biggest flaw of the Internet now.

LL: You've written a lot about the history of how the Internet came to be. And as you said, we were speaking with Leonard Kleinrock, but are there figures in the history of the Internet that you feel deserve more attention on this anniversary?

WALTER ISAACSON: Well, I think they all do. I mean, in the Innovators, the book I wrote about the invention of the Internet, you have obviously Len Kleinrock, but you also have Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who did the original Internet protocols. You have people like Steve Crocker, you know, young graduate students who figured out how the Internet would work. But the great thing about the Internet is that it decentralized power. It wasn't like it was controlled from the top. So everything created on the Internet from the very first day was done collaboratively, collaboratively. In other words, instead of saying here's a new order or new regulation, they call them request for comment so that everybody in the Internet community could work on it together. So there was no one great, whether it be Twitter or Facebook. There's no one great person who did things. It showed how creativity is a team sport. That's what the Internet is all about.

LL: Yeah, in fact you call them ecosystems.

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, absolutely. It's an ecosystem that sort of nurtures creativity. It's like a beautiful garden that's very fertile. And somebody tries to plant a flower and it becomes something either good or bad, something like Uber or AirBNB or Facebook. And it's a wonderful platform that, as Steve Jobs said, because he had a thing about Microsoft when he was running Apple, nobody really owns it. Microsoft doesn't own in. You know, Apple doesn't own it. So everybody gets to build on top of the Internet. To me, though, if we could have a trusted, verified version of the Internet, that would be a huge advance.

LL: Okay. Let's talk about that some more because are there companies who you think are more responsible for the problems and others? Do you hold Facebook responsible for spreading misinformation?

WALTER ISAACSON: Yes, they do spread misinformation. They put up false ads. They put up fake news. They allow the huge spread of not only false information, but very insidious, intentionally hurtful and harmful information. And I think Mark Zuckerberg knows that when you watch him testify, as we know, that's a problem. And I give him credit now. I think, you know, I watch him testify. I hear people like Noah Feldman, Harvard law professor, who's been advising him. I think he's trying to field his way to say, OK, we can no longer just be a set, a platform in which people can spread misinformation. We're going to have to go over the next decade, figure out ways to take responsibility, because in the end, in our political system, our civic system, Facebook is doing more harm than it's doing good because it's a platform that insidiously spreads intentional misinformation.

LL: Well then, do you blame the Internet for the deepening divisions in societies all over the world?

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, I think that one reason we've seen polarization, deep divisions and poisonous spread and uncivil discourse is because there's always been people who have these dark recesses of their mind. But now they not only have a platform, they have a megaphone, and they can do it with any without any fear of repercussion. You know, you can get online and spread very hateful things. So I think it enables a lot of good in society. But it's also led a lot of the dog demons out of the basement and operate anonymously. And yes, there's a deep polarization around the world that's happening partly because social networks and the Internet have enabled anonymous fake lies to spread.

LL: So we heard Steve Jobs making predictions about how the web would shape the future back in the 1990s. Your turn. Where do you see the Internet going from here?

WALTER ISAACSON: In my optimistic dreams, I see people like Tim Burners Lee, who came up with the protocols for the worldwide web doing what he's trying to do now. Likewise, Jim Clark, who was the greatest entrepreneur and, you know, thinker of some of the businesses of the Internet who founded Netscape. He's also working on this. They're working on ways to improve the Internet so that you're not depending on passwords or security. You're not defending depending on not being able to trace things back. If you could trace things back on the Web, it would mean people who produce content could have a loyalty system and be paid for it. There's so much you could do if you if you remove that original floor of the Internet, which is you can never be sure who's responsible for what's being said and you can't trace back where people are coming from. Jim Clark, Tim Burners Lee, they're working on ways to make a 21st century Internet that we'll be proud of.

LL: Alright. We will leave it there. Thank you for your time.

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you so much for having me on. It's an interesting show. I appreciate it.

LL: Walter Isaacson is a professor of history at Tulane University and the author of many best selling books, including The Biography of Steve Jobs and The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. He was in New Orleans. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Before we go we wanted to share with you some of CBC Radio's coverage of the early days of the Internet. Even though the technology was invented in 1969, it took decades before it was widely adopted. But by 1993, surfing the net was a growing phenomenon. And the late Peter Gzowski, then host of Morningside, wanted to know all about it. We will give him the last word. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Segment from Morngside featuring Peter Gzowski]

[Music: Theme]

Oct. 29, 2019 episode transcript

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