Imagine, for a minute, how Canada would look without universal health care, without equality of need and access to resources.
This is the two-tier system, applied to policing, that the Sherman heirs have constructed to support their parallel investigation.
Because they can.
Pshaw, countered Greenspan.
“The antithesis is true. What private resources do is assist the community by enhancing investigations. Not to have a two-tiered system, but to ensure investigations are conducted thoroughly and comprehensively and to free the public purse from the burden of the investigation that we contemplate so that, in this year of overtaxed resources within Toronto homicide, we can alleviate part of the burden by providing private forensic assistance.’’
It can take a year, Greenspan pointed out, for forensic evidence collected at a crime scene to be processed by the Centre for Forensic Science. But with their own elite professionals on the payroll, the Shermans can use private facilities.
Which is another way of jumping to the top of the list.
Because they can.
Greenspan wrapped the undertaking in altruistic sensibilities, as if everyone benefits. But there were 61 murders in Toronto last year — Barry and Honey Sherman but two of them — and 33 remain unsolved.
The families of those victims have to beg for investigative updates.
They’re not entitled to know what the cops know, to protect the “integrity’’ of an investigation.
The names of the slain don’t merit miles of media coverage.
They slip into the annals of the forgotten, cases still left open, maybe at some future date resurrected as cold case second looks.
In decades of covering crime, never once have I heard of a reward posted where anyone with information was not urged to take what they might know to the cops. Yet that’s what has been mounted here — come to us, we’ll take carriage.
“We believe that it provides the new initiative, the new opportunity to seek information,” said Greenspan. “It’s not as if leads have not poured into my office over the past 10 months. Every consideration is given to each of the calls, whether from a psychic or from someone who might otherwise prove to be untrustworthy.
“Many, many investigations are successfully concluded as a result of someone in either a criminal organization or someone who has been involved as an offender in the criminal community who is aware of information … and until and unless an incentive is provided to that person, either by leniency in a subsequent (court matter) or the offer of a significant award, they remain silent and remain committed to that silence within that community.
“This is the opportunity for those people to come forward. And as they become wealthy, their colleagues who are engaged in this crime become the subjects of a prosecution.’’
Appeal to greed. Because it’s what these exceptionally advantaged seekers of justice understand.
And, of course, the Sherman clan has one critical axe to grind: the colossal blunder, by the family’s reckoning, of an early investigative theory, bruited around un-sourced in media reports, that the deaths were a murder-suicide.
Police had noted last January that there were no signs of a forced entry at the Sherman Old Colony Rd. mansion and investigators were not looking for suspects.
The outraged family immediately hired private investigators and a pathologist to conduct a second, independent autopsy.
By last June, Det.-Sgt. Susan Gomes was publicly confirming that they were investigating a “targeted double homicide.”
Greenspan mentioned alleged lapses and sloppiness in the police investigation. “We have seen failings and deficiencies … which have prompted the family to take this action.”
On behalf of the family, he strongly advocated a public-private partnership between his gang of top-drawer investigators and the homicide squad, which has never been done before in North America.
He claimed the proposal had already been made, with no response. “We have certainly offered them what we know. But despite attempts to further the concept of private-public partnership, that has not been embraced in terms of sharing information with us.”
Of course, it is entirely possible, even likely, that police — they long stayed silent about the investigation, no updates — are playing their cards close to the vest because they’re loath to share information with family members who may still be viewed as suspects, although Greenspan dismissed that possibility out of hand.
Rewards don’t actually have a great history of success, anyway. And, despite what you’ve seen in the movies or on TV, or read in crime thrillers, private gumshoes rarely break open a case.
It must be agony for the Sherman family as the murders linger, unsolved, jammed in, with all the other homicide cases which haven’t been closed.
As if Barry and Honey Sherman were, you know, just like everybody else.
Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno