The case this article describes is one of the most bizarre and outrageous I’ve run across (Toronto Star, 9/7/10). Read the article, and while you’re doing that, know that what it describes is something like half of what Dan Major says his ex-wife Sherry has done to him and their children.
Dan and Sherry were married in Ontario in 1996. At 32, he was a high-earning director of memberships at the Mayfair Parkway Club and she was attending graduate school aiming at a doctorate in phsyiotherapy, or so she said. Their agreement was that he would fund her education and she would fund his early retirement. That sounds like a fair arrangement until you consider the fact that he was to pay up first while her obligations came much later. In fact, they came not at all.
To give an idea of the level of deceit that Sherry Major engaged in, consider the following: In 2000, Sherry told Dan and many of her friends that she had cancer and was undergoing treatment. When her abdomen began to swell, she said it was the result of the treatments. Two days before she gave birth, she announced for the first time that she was pregnant, but the child would be stillborn due to the treatments. Dan came home a couple of days later to find Sherry in labor. He assisted in the delivery of their daughter there at home and, lo and behold, the child was born alive!
In fact, Sherry had never had cancer and never gotten treatment. But so adept was she at lying that the Star ran a story on her and her “miracle baby.”
Dan had paid for her schooling, but had she attended? It’s hard to know, but she never received a doctorate. That small detail didn’t stop her from calling herself “Doctor” in the late 1990s.
Not long after the birth of their “miracle” daughter, the domestic violence allegations against Dan started coming. About the first one, Dan was told that, if he didn’t plead guilty, he’d be barred from seeing his daughter; if he did, he’d be allowed to go home that day. Dan took the bait.
But there were more to come – many more. Not long after the first DV allegation, Dan was visited at work by Detective Constable Terry Jordan of the York Regional Police, who arrested Dan on 14 counts of physical and sexual abuse, all levelled by Sherry. To Dan’s pleas of innocence, Jordan became verbally abusive. Dan spent six months in jail awaiting trial at which, in 2003, the judge dismissed all charges against him and called Sherry a liar.
Meanwhile Dan began feeling he had lost a good bit of weight – in his bank account. When he told the York constabulary that he suspected his wife of having filched $100,000 from his bank account, they ignored him.
That, plus the fact that Detective Jordan was reported by neighbors to be spending inordinate amounts of time at their house when Dan wasn’t there, led Dan to believe that there was more to YRP’s refusal to pursue any of his complaints against Sherry than met the eye. He believed that Jordan and Sherry were having an affair and that that explained YRP’s inaction.
Six years later, Dan produced the smoking gun that even YRP couldn’t ignore – love letters and emails between the two. By that time, Sherry had absconded with their two children to an eastern province where she lives under an assumed name apparently holding herself out as a doctor.
For his part, Terry Jordan was charged with “discreditable conduct” to which he pled guilty in June. Yesterday he was “sentenced” to be lowered one rank for 18 months.
Dan Major has a lawsuit pending against the York Regional Police in which he alleges that Sherry and Terry Jordan conspired to bring false charges against him and keep him in jail.
That’s the story as told by the Star. Next up; the rest of the story as told by Dan Major.