I didn’t
I never said I believed they were strangled with the belts. I believe they were strangled with something else. My only point was that it was possible that they were strangled with a ligature AFTER the belts were attached. I am currently wearing a 1 inch wide leather belt. My neck is approx. 4 inches high. So there was a lot of room on the neck for someone to strangle them aside from the space taken up by the belt. In fact there is a 75 % chance that the ligature line was not in fact under the belts when they were murdered. After the murders, the bodies could have slumped so that the belts partially obscured a portion of the ligature marks, who knows?If they were strangled after the belts were attached, no need for the killer to have to drag bodies and hoist them into a sitting position.mooHow would one propose the thin line could have been underneath the belts? How was Honey's belt successful in killing her if the pressure point was at the back of her neck?
Seated on the floor, she is tipped back at the waist to a position that I estimate from the photos is a 20- to 30-degree angle. (Ninety degrees would be seated upright.) The belt that is looped around her neck has its pressure point at the back of her neck. Decomposition (the bodies were there for 36 hours) could account for her body shifting down somewhat, but likely not too much. While there are rare cases of people hanging themselves in a seated position, the second pathologist to look at the bodies (Dr. David Chiasson, hired by the Sherman family) determined this is not what happened, according to the Star’s sources.
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Like Honey, Barry is seated, rear end on the pool deck, his torso tipped back but at a less severe angle than Honey. His head is slumped forward slightly, with the belt tension under his chin.
Where the belt tension is located is important, sources say, because the later examination by the forensic pathologist hired by the Shermans factored that in to his examination — determining that the location of the belt, plus the fact that there was relatively little weight pulling against the belts, made it highly unlikely that one or both committed suicide.
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Chiasson also took note of a thin line underneath where the belts were wrapped around the Shermans’ necks, indicating to him that they were killed with a thin ligature — the belts were merely used to hold the bodies up afterward. This indicates the Shermans were killed prior to the belts being attached to their necks. No thin ligatures were found at the crime scene.
Pickup, the first pathologist, had made these observations, but it did not cause him to make a determination on the manner of death. It took Chiasson, the more experienced pathologist, to make the determination of double homicide.
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The Star saw the Sherman crime-scene and autopsy photos. How could a pathologist and police call it a murder-suicide?
Photos, notes raise new questions about how investigators made their mistaken determination in the Barry and Honey Sherman case.www.thestar.com
(Note: For those that can't access The Star's article, it is accessible via pressreader.com by entering search term Barry Sherman crime scene photos)
