When police arrive for a welfare check at the home of a Vancouver fashion store owner, they're confronted with the lifeless bodies of two women lying on the kitchen floor, their faces covered with dishcloths. It looks as if Doris Leatherbarrow and her daughter Sharon Huenemann were killed just as they were serving up dinner for two mystery guests. Who were they? And where had they gone?This is an episode from Canadian True Crime, The Huenemann and Leatherbarrow Murders - Part 1.Listen to Part 2 now – search for Canadian True Crime wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music. You can also stream episodes from the Canadian True Crime website.
Chapter 1: What is the Canadian True Crime podcast about?
This is a CBC Podcast. Canadian True Crime is a podcast hosted by Aussie-Canadian Christy Lee as she delves into the dark underbelly of the Canadian justice system, piecing each case together from court documents, news archives, trial reporting, and input from victims and survivors. With a range of cases from historic to recent, well known to obscure.
Canadian true crime episodes are detailed, factual, and nuanced, going beyond the superficial to examine the underlying causes of crime. This episode is all about the murders of Doris Leatherbarrow, the owner of a successful chain of women's fashion stores in Vancouver, and her daughter, Sharon Huneman.
It looked as though the two women were ambushed in the kitchen just as they were about to serve dinner for two mystery guests. But as the investigation progressed, an even more shocking tale emerged. Now, here's part one of Canadian true crime series, The Huneman and Leather Barrow Murders.
Chapter 2: What happened to Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Huneman?
Hi everyone. Today's case has been requested many times over the years. It's a complicated story from British Columbia, and we've pieced it together from multiple court documents and the news archives, particularly the reporting of the Times colonist, the Vancouver Sun, and the province. As always, please respect the privacy of the people involved in this case.
It's a Friday night in October in the province of British Columbia, and Ralph Huneman is waiting for his wife Sharon to arrive home for Thanksgiving weekend. They live on the southern end of Vancouver Island, but Sharon has been on the mainland for a couple of days helping her mother, who owns a small chain of clothing stores. Sharon always catches the same 7 p.m. ferry back.
It takes about 90 minutes, arriving at the terminal on Vancouver Island just after 8.30 p.m. She would typically collect her car from the parking lot and drive home to the Victoria area, arriving at about 9 p.m. It's a little past that time and Ralph figures his wife has probably just been held up. It's 1990, well before everyone had cell phones. There's nothing he can do but wait.
Chapter 3: What led Ralph Huneman to call the police?
At about 10pm, someone arrives home. Ralph gets his hopes up, but it's not his wife Sharon. It's Darren, her 18-year-old son from her first marriage, although he was only about four or five when she married Ralph Huneman. The teenager tells his stepdad he's going to bed. He'll catch up with his mum in the morning.
Growing more worried by the minute, Ralph eventually decides to call Sharon's mother Doris at home on the lower mainland area of Vancouver. Doris usually drives her daughter to and from the local ferry terminal, so she'll at least know if Sharon actually got on the ferry. But the phone just keeps ringing. Ralph continues to wait up, trying Doris's number again periodically,
but there's still no one home. He decides to call the Delta Police on the lower mainland and asks them to do a welfare check at Doris's home. It's now past midnight. Sharon should have been home about three hours ago and Ralph is extremely anxious as he waits for word his wife is okay.
Chapter 4: What did the police find at the crime scene?
On the mainland, officers with Delta Police arrive just before 3am and enter the home of Sharon Huneman's mother, Doris. It looks like it's been completely ransacked. There are scattered dresser drawers everywhere, with the contents dumped and strewn about. When officers enter the kitchen, they're confronted by the lifeless bodies of two women lying on the floor.
Their faces are covered in dishcloths, and they each have a large gash across their throats. There's blood everywhere. The older woman has an 8-inch knife still embedded in her throat. It's 69-year-old Doris Leatherbarrow, and the other woman is her 47-year-old daughter, Sharon Huneman, who has another knife lying on her chest.
They've suffered an extremely violent attack and it looks like it happened right as they were about to serve dinner. The microwave oven door is open with four servings of lasagna ready to be served. There's veggies in a pot on the stove and four plates on the counter with salad ingredients.
Chapter 5: What was the timeline of events leading to the murders?
It looks like the women had two guests over for dinner and someone killed them just as they were serving up. But who were the guests and where were they now? A few hours later, back on Vancouver Island, Ralph Huneman rushed to the front door when he heard a knock.
It was the Saanich police, sent to deliver the distressing news that his wife Sharon and her mother Doris had been murdered on the mainland. Ralph was devastated, and when Sharon's teenage son Darren heard the news, they both collapsed on the floor in a wave of emotion. It couldn't be real, but it was.
Initially, it was thought that they'd likely been dead for up to 20 hours by the time their bodies had been found. Investigators soon narrowed it down to less than nine hours. Sharon and Doris had last been seen at around 5pm at their clothing warehouse in Surrey, a city in the Metro Vancouver area located about 30 minutes drive from Doris' home.
With this information, investigators formed a theory that the women must have been murdered between about 5.30pm at the earliest and about midnight at the latest. Their bodies had been found just before 3am. Police had no immediate motives or suspects. At first, they thought it must have been a robbery, because the house had been ransacked and money had been taken from both women's purses.
But there was no sign of forced entry. There was expensive jewellery and other cash in the home left untouched. Investigators had found no forensic evidence at the crime scene, no fingerprints or anything else that could point them to someone who might have done it.
And with no obvious motive for the murders, investigators began by speaking to the people closest to the mother and daughter to get any information they could. Also a priority was to get their alibis for the time frame in question, Friday, October 5th of 1990, between 5.30pm and midnight.
In the small community of Tawasin on the mainland, Delta Police were speaking to Doris Leatherbarrow's neighbours, who reported that two teenage boys had been seen loitering about near her home at around 6pm that Friday night. Doris, of course, had a teenage grandson. Maybe it was him and there was a perfectly innocent explanation.
18-year-old Darren Huneman told the police he was on Vancouver Island the whole night, adding that he was very close to his mother and grandma and would never hurt them. He said that after he finished school that afternoon, he brought his girlfriend Amanda home with him. He recalled giving some polished rocks to a neighbour and made dinner for his stepfather Ralph at about 6.30pm.
Darren said he and Amanda drank tea and read tarot cards together and then a neighbour phoned to thank him for the rocks and enquired when his mother Sharon would be home. He told that neighbour that she'd be catching the 7pm ferry home as usual. Darren told the police that at about 8pm... He and Amanda drove to downtown Victoria to meet two of his school friends for dinner.
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Chapter 6: Who were the suspects in the murders?
But because he was only 18 years old at the time, there were the usual stipulations to withhold the bulk of the estate to give his brain enough time to mature.
The will stipulated that if both Doris and Sharon died before Darren turned 25, he would receive his grandmother's car, her house and its contents, and the proceeds of a $200,000 life insurance policy, but he would have to wait until he was 25 to access the rest of her estate. And he knew this.
Doris's sister told investigators that four days after the murders, Darren phoned her and quizzed her over the details of his grandmother's will. At this point, investigators realised that Darren Huneman had a very serious motive to want his mum and grandma dead, but there was no way he could have been the murderer.
Remember, it wasn't exactly easy to get between where the Hunemans lived on Vancouver Island and where Doris Leatherbarrow lived on the Lower Mainland. The only way to get between them was by boat, that ferry which took 90 minutes.
His stepfather Ralph had confirmed that Darren was mostly home on the evening of October 5th, apart from the period between about 8pm to 10pm where he and his girlfriend had dinner in downtown Victoria. It was barely enough time to catch the ferry to the mainland one way.
It would have been impossible for Darren to go to his grandmother's house, kill her and his mother, and then catch another 90-minute ferry ride back. To fully clear Darren, investigators set out to speak to his known acquaintances, starting with the two friends he and Amanda had dinner with in Victoria that night.
They arrived at the home of Derek Lord, a 17-year-old who attended Mount Douglas High School with Darren and worked part-time at Kmart. Derek was in the yard with some other teenagers when the police pulled up and he came over to the police cruiser. He was told they were investigating the murders of Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Huneman and wanted to speak with him.
Derek got in the cruiser and he was asked if he knew Darren's mother Sharon. He smiled and said she was a nice lady. Derek said he'd never been to Darren's grandmother's home in Tawasin on the mainland, but told police he'd gone shopping to the Tawasin Town Centre Mall about a week before the murders.
The 17-year-old said he caught the ferry over with a friend called David Muir and pointed to one of the other teenagers in the backyard. The police realized that this was the name of the other teenager who had dinner with Darren and Amanda that night. They would speak to him later.
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Chapter 7: What motives did investigators uncover?
In one, he would invade Borneo with an army of 10,000 men dressed in double-breasted silk suits. Investigators learned that Darren's suggested scenarios started to end with a character that he said represented his grandmother, and the game would end with him cracking that character's neck. Darren was heard mentioning snapping or cracking his gran's neck many times after that.
Darren started to mention in passing that his grandmother was quite wealthy, but he never said anything bad about her. In fact, he told the players that his gran had always been good to him, giving him a fully loaded $30,000 Honda for his 16th birthday and making sure he had all the clothes and money he wanted.
But Darren told the members of the Dungeons and Dragons group that if his grand were out of the picture, he was in line to inherit it all. At one point, he offered one player $10,000 to do the job. That player thought he was joking. They all did. By June of 1990, Darren had been in the D&D group for about a year, but things started to turn sour.
He wanted to change his usual character from priest to an evil wizard, but the group consensus was that he wasn't allowed to, so he quit the group in a huff. By that point, it was about three months before the murders. But Darren Huneman didn't confine his strange comments about his grandma to the D&D group.
A classmate at Mount Douglas Secondary School reported that in the months leading up to the murders of Doris Leatherbarrow and Sharon Huneman, Darren frequently mentioned the money he stood to inherit. That part was highly believable to his classmates. They could see that he had money and took a lot of pride in what he wore. He was often seen wearing suits and silk shirts to school.
The friend told investigators that Darren mentioned he'd get half his gran's money if he killed her, but if he also killed his mother, he'd get the rest of it. All of it. But once again, everyone thought he was joking. It was just too blatant to be anything else. That fall of 1990, Darren began grade 12 and started dating Amanda.
Classmates described him as a prominent figure in drama class, a gifted actor with a flair for the dramatic. At the time of the murders, he was in rehearsals for the school play. He was playing the lead role of Caligula, the cruel Roman emperor. By this point, the potential motive involving Sharon Huneman's dispute with the contractor who built her home had fizzled out.
Instead, investigators honed in on Darren Huneman as the prime suspect. But the 18-year-old's alibi was rock solid. If he was involved in any way, he couldn't have been the murderer himself. More people had to have been involved.
About three weeks after the murders, Delta Police learned that a taxi driver on the lower mainland had remembered picking up two teenage boys who'd just caught the ferry over from Vancouver Island to Tawasin. He picked them up from the terminal just before 5pm and drove them to the Tawasin Mall.
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Chapter 8: What were Darren Huneman's connections to the crime?
Investigators needed to go back to the Delta taxi driver to see if he could identify the two teenagers he picked up that night. They put together a lineup with photos of Darren Huneman, Derek Lord and David Muir, together with photos of other random teenage boys to make it as fair of an identification process as possible.
The taxi driver picked out the photo of David Muir and tentatively identified him as one of the two teenagers he picked up from the Tawasin ferry terminal and drove to the mall. The same lineup of photos were then shown to Doris Leatherbarrow's neighbors, who pointed to both David and Derek's photos as the teens they saw loitering outside Doris's home in the early evening after that.
And at around the same time, investigators also received some new information. The taxi company reported that at about 6.45pm that same Friday night, someone using the name Dave had requested a taxi to pick him up from the Tawassin Mall and drive him to the ferry terminal.
The driver who took the request told investigators that he picked up two young men who were in a hurry to make the 7pm ferry back to Vancouver Island. This was, of course, the very same ferry that Sharon Huneman was supposed to have caught that night. The taxi driver told police he pulled up outside the terminal with only minutes to spare.
And just before the two young men ran to catch the ferry, one of them tossed over a $10 bill as payment. The driver wasn't able to recall what they looked like. So investigators went to BC Transit to get a list of passengers on that 7pm ferry. One of them was a university student who remembered the journey vividly for two reasons.
It was the busy Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and the ferry was late arriving at Swartz Bay Terminal on Vancouver Island. And also, she saw a boy she went to high school with on that same ferry, Derek Lord. She told the police that she knew him from Mount Douglas High School.
It was at this point that 17-year-old Derek Lord and 16-year-old David Muir joined Darren Huneman as primary suspects in the murders of Sharon Huneman and Doris Leatherbarrow. In the meantime, believing the investigation had stalled, their remaining family members, friends and business associates pulled their funds to provide a $30,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.
It was by this point six weeks since the murders and investigators had a theory but they needed to gather more evidence. They obtained a warrant for a wiretap and within a few days they were intercepting phone calls made and received by Darren Huneman, Derek Lord and David Muir. Then they went to speak with Darren's girlfriend Amanda again and told her they thought she might be lying to them.
panicked she amended her statement slightly while she'd first told police that she and darren had dinner with the boys in downtown victoria that night she now admitted she actually ate dinner at home the police still believed she was lying but it didn't really matter the actual point of their visit was to rattle amanda enough to say something to darren
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