Loren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine, the Speed Freak Killers, were convicted of four murders in the San Joaquin County, California area in the 1980s-90s. They are thought to have killed upwards of 72 people based on some of Shermantine's statements. Their nicknames came from their methamphetamine habit. Herzog was born in Linden, California on December 8, 1965 and Shermantine on February 24, 1966. The boys grew up on the same street and were friends from early childhood as the neighborhood had a lack of other children their age to hang out with. Shermantine's father was a well-off contractor and real estate developer who spoiled his son with gifts and money.
The boys were both avid outdoorsmen who spent a lot of time roaming the countryside in San Joaquin County. They graduated high school in 1984 and had a reputation around town as alcohol and drug-using bullies who took pleasure in tormenting other people. Both were known meth users and regular customers at the Linden Inn, a bar owned by the father of a woman named Kim Vanderheiden, whom Herzog had a short-lived relationship with. Shermantine was suspected in the disappearance of a Stockton teenager named Chevy Wheeler in 1985 and several women had accused him of rape, but he didn't have any criminal record.On November 14, 1998, Cyndi Vanderheiden, Kim's 25 year old sister, disappeared. Cyndi was staying temporarily with her parents until her temp job became full-time. She was last seen alive by a friend on the evening of the 13th pulling into the driveway in her new '98 Cavalier coupe, which she had bought a few months ago. Her mother Theresa checked her bedroom the next morning and noticed she was gone and the bed was neatly made up. Theresa believed Cyndi was off to work and departed for her own job. A few hours later, her father John was heading to work when he spotted her Cavalier in the parking lot of Clements Glenview Cemetery. The parking lot was deserted and nobody was around.Cyndi didn't show up for work and her father went back to examine her car. Her purse, a pack of cigarettes, and her cell phone were all inside, but her keys had vanished. So was Cyndi, and nobody would ever see her alive again.
A large search party formed around Clements, which expanded quickly--it was a tiny village where everyone knew everyone else and the Vanderheidens had lived there since the early 1970s. Her sister Kim, who was living with her husband and daughters in Wyoming, traveled to California to assist in the search, which grew wider and wider, soon to be drawing in tips from around the country. In the meantime, Shermantine and Herzog were being watched, in part because they'd been suspected in the disappearance of Chevy Wheeler 13 years ago and because Shermantine was an experienced outdoorsman who knew survival skills.Shermantine eventually bragged to his sister about how he and Herzog hunted anything they could, including "the ultimate kill", which was taken as a code word for humans. Investigators attempted to trace every last location the pair could have been to, including citations and hunting permits, then searched those areas extensively. The search went over hillsides and river beds and mineshafts based on accounts Herzog made of them exploring abandoned mines when they were kids. In the Clement area were some 47,000 mineshafts, some of which could be perilous to search in.On March 18, 1999, the pair were arrested in connection with the murder of Cyndi Vanderheiden and several others. Shermantine's '85 Cressida had been recently repossessed and was impounded by detectives. John and Theresa Vanderheiden offered to give blood samples for DNA testing since no samples from Cyndi were available. Their DNA was found to be a close match for dried blood found in Shermantine's car.
Their trial began in Santa Clara County on November 22, 2000; the venue was changed due to the publicity in San Joaquin County. Shermantine said that for a payment of $20,000 he would tell where Cyndi's remains could be found. Her parents found the idea of having to bribe him into giving up this information horrifying and refused to do it. Shermantine was found guilty of four counts of murder on February 14, 2001 despite the lack of Vanderheiden or Chevy Wheeler's remains and he was sentenced to death. He maintained his innocence and said Herzog did everything. Herzog went on trial in August in Santa Clara, was found guilty on three counts of murder October 23, and was sentenced to up to 78 years in prison as the jury declined to ask for the death penalty.During the trial, several women testified how Shermantine had brutalized them over the years. Five said they were forcibly raped or sodomized, including a babysitter who was attacked when she stopped to collect money owed to her. Another victim said Shermantine rear-ended her car, then when she pulled over abducted her at knifepoint. She jumped from his moving vehicle and escaped. Yet another said Shermantine tried to rape her in a trailer park and that he held her head to the ground and said "Listen to the heartbeats of people I've buried here. Listen to the heartbeats of families I've buried here." Shermantine's estranged wife was brutally beaten by him for years, including when she was pregnant or holding her child in his lap. Shermantine once claimed to have murdered 22 people in California, Nevada, and Utah.
Herzog appealed on the grounds that detectives had used third degree interrogation to get him to confess and in August 2004 an appeals court agreed and tossed his convictions. He agreed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and being an accessory. Herzog was re-sentenced to only 14 years.Herzog confessed to several murders he and Shermantine had committed. On September 1, 1984, they were driving along H-88 in Hope Valley when they encountered 41 year old Henry Howell, a Santa Clara resident, pulled over by the roadside. Howell was drunk and stopped his vehicle there. Shermantine got out, shot Howell with a shotgun, and robbed him. On November 27, they were driving around Roberts Island and passed an '82 Pontiac Grand Prix parked by the roadside. They shot the occupants of the car, 35 year old Howard King and 31 year old Paul Cavanaugh, and robbed them. Tire tracks found at the scene would later be matched to Shermantine's truck. On December 11, Kimberly Billy, 19, vanished from Stockton.
On August 29, 1985, Joann Hobson, 16, vanished from Stockton. In February 2012, searchers, acting on Shermantine's directions, found 300 human bones and a few personal items dumped in an abandoned well in Linden, which included the remains of Billy and Hobson. On September 8, Herzog and Shermantine met 24 year old Roberta "Robin" Armtrout in a Stockton park. They were going to go out drinking with her, but instead drove Armtrout to a farm near Linden where Shermantine beat, raped, and stabbed her numerous times before dumping her body on the bank of Potter Creek. A hunter found her nude body some time later and her mother recalled seeing her getting in Shermantine's truck.Chevelle "Chevy" Wheeler, 16, skipped school on October 16 and was seen getting in a red truck outside Franklin High in Stockton and claimed she was going to meet a man known as "Wes" in Valley Springa. A friend remembered that Chevy seemed slightly apprehensive and told her to let her father know if she didn't come back that evening. When she didn't return, the friend told him and he reported her disappearance to police. Blood and hair samples found in a cabin Shermantine owned in San Andreas would be matched to Wheeler. Herzog said that Shermantine told him Wheeler died in a similar manner to Armtrout.Herzog said the the two shot and killed a hunter they encountered in Box Elder County, Utah during the summer of 1994. Utah authorities confirmed that a dead hunter had indeed been found there and the murder was unsolved.
He and Shermantine met Cyndi Vanderheiden in a cemetery near her home after they left a bar around midnight. While driving back to Linden, Shermantine forced her at knifepoint to perform oral sex on him. He stopped the car near Waverly Road, raped Vanderheiden, and cut her throat. Herzog helped Shermantine put the body in the trunk, but said he didn't know what became of it after that. Investigators and the Vanderheiden family did not believe his story or that the two didn't both dispose of her body together.Herzog and Shermantine were also suspected in several other disappearances.On August 19, 1982, Ruth Leamon, 16, vanished from Modesto, California after going to meet two older men. She said she was going to a supermarket to purchase sodas. Leamon arrived at the store but only briefly and was not seen again. The two men who were supposed to meet Ruth the night she disappeared were questioned by authorities, but both of them denied any involvement in her case. Herzog and Shermantine are thought to be suspects in Ruth's case. Ruth and a female acquaintance travelled to the Calaveras County Frog Jump with Herzog before she vanished.Susan Bender, 15, left her Modesto home on April 25, 1986 to visit a friend in Carmel. she was seen using a pay phone at a Greyhound bus stop in Modesto and then getting in a green '77 Ford van outside the station. She was never seen again. On June 3, Sylvia Standly, 31, vanished from Modesto. She had just been released from the county jail that day and called her family to let them know she would get a ride home. Standly got into a blue or green truck and vanished.
Gayle Marks, 18, accompanied her mother to a mental health facility in Stockton on October 18, 1988 and then walked alone to the local DMV to get an ID card. The card was mailed to address a few days later, indicating that she did make it to the DMV; after leaving there, Marks called her mother and left a message. She disappeared and was never seen again.Phillip Martin, a 47 year old transient, vanished from Stockton on September 30, 1993. His daughter said that he worked with Shermantine and thought they'd used drugs together. Martin was never seen again.Herzog was a model prisoner and was scheduled for parole in 2010. The victims' families were outraged at this and no California county would accept him for parole, so the Department of Corrections was forced to parole him to a trailer outside High Desert State Prison in Susanville after his release on September 22, 2010. Herzog hanged himself in his trailer on January 16, 2012 after learning that Shermantine was going to tell authorities where some of the victims' remains could be found. Neither ever admitted to any of the murders and both blamed the other for it.
The search of the Linden well found over 1,000 human bone fragments including the remains of Kimberly Billy and Joann Hobson. Two separate burial sites in Calaveras County yielded the remains of Cyndi Vanderheiden and an unidentified body.In 2014, the mother of a missing women sued the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office for mishandling the remains found in the Linden well. A retired FBI agent corroborated her claims and said that the SJCSO purposely used a backhoe to dig up the remains, mangling them and preventing them from being identified because the sheriff's office had destroyed certain missing persons files and had attempted to cover this up by making the remains unidentifiable.As of 2025, Wesley Shermantine remains on California's death row in San Quentin awaiting execution.
>>18410390what kind of ultra trailer park redneck names his kid Chevy anyway?
>>18410400That is also some turbo trailer trash.
>>18410396>>18410400tf was wrong with boomers?
>>18410439they were Gen Xers. not that they were much better than boomers.
>>18410400https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/120061244/roberta_ray-armtroutapparently she was married to a dude over 20 years older than her and he had died a year before
>>18410388talk about a dyke
>>18410400Murdering people in the 70s-80s was so easy they practically let you do it.
>>18410416Much of California is a lot more redneck than you think, the media focuses too much on yuppie areas of the Bay Area and LA.
>>18410408lol imagine destroying human remains with a backhoe to cover up the fact that you mishandled some paperwork
>>18411671the FBI agent mentioned there said this action was totally unconscionable and people should have gone to jail for it
