Kerry Winter went into Toronto Police’s homicide squad office at about 9 p.m.

He was out by 1 a.m.

“A four-hour interview,” he said Friday.

And after a day of massive media coverage in which he told numerous reporters that in the 1990s he was asked by Barry Sherman to hire somebody to murder his wife Honey, the disgruntled first cousin of the late Apotex billionaire was back at work.

“Everything went smooth,” he told me.

Police are treating the Shermans’ deaths as a double homicide and are running down leads to find the killer or killers. But out has popped 56-year-old Winter, who did interviews with CBC’s The Fifth Estate and foreign tabloids, telling them that police’s original thought that it was a murder-suicide, with Barry Sherman as the killer, is indeed what happened.

“Barry hated Honey,” he said.

Barry and Honey Sherman are shown in a handout photo from the United Jewish Appeal.

Needless to say, the children of the Shermans, who have already been hurt by the original suggestion of murder-suicide, are livid at Winter’s unusual and unfounded claims. People close to the family told the Toronto Sun that such suggestions were “cruel” and “fictional.”

And the Sherman children issued a statement, expressing their outrage at both Winter’s comments and media who reported it.

“We are deeply hurt, shocked and angered that Kerry Winter is using the tragedy of our parents’ homicides to make outrageous and baseless claims about our father. The family accepts the conclusion of the Toronto Police Service, and finds it regrettable that the media would give a platform to these completely absurd allegations.”

It’s an interesting point and tricky situation for media. It’s hard to avoid covering a person that is calling himself a potential suspect in high-profile double slaying. That said, the CBC says Winter failed a lie detector test on questions about whether Barry Sherman really talked to him about “whacking” his wife.

Winter told me Friday morning that he doesn’t consider the lie detector failure as fully credible. He said he doesn’t “believe lie detector tests are sound” and they are “clearly not a science.”

Toronto Police on scene after billionaire couple Barry and Honey Sherman were found dead in their North York mansion in Toronto on December 15, 2017.

The failing grade, he said, could have happened as a result of his past drug use and “possibly only because it happened over 20 years ago and my memory isn’t the best.”

Winter said he also did a second, independent lie detector test. “My lawyer arranged a polygraph after the CBC’s and I initially passed with flying colours” but “hours later it was inconclusive. Two tests, three results.”

He recalled “on the question that something happened, re: Barry asking me to arrange the murder of Honey, the examiner said there was truth, but l embellished.”

Homicide detectives likely asked him if he has ever been inside the 12,000-square-foot mansion where Honey and Barry Sherman were found slain. A friend of the Shermans said he will tell police that Winter was asked by Barry to go to the house more than a dozen years ago to look at the kitchen, which he was hoping to renovate.

Winter says this is not true. “I have never stepped foot inside of 50 Old Colony Road,” he insists.

Toronto Police forensic experts collected evidence in the house for six weeks, and on Thursday, retired forensic cop Al Benton was doing that as well on behalf of the Sherman family.

What homicide detectives asked Winter is unknown. When asked about Winter on Friday, Toronto Police spokesman Mark Pugash would only say, “We will not be commenting.”

What is known is that he left the building and at 1:38 a.m. texted: “No problem. No worry.”

jwarmington@postmedia.com