On November 14, 1998, Cyndi Vanderheiden, twenty-five, of Clements, California, left the Linden Inn with Loren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine and was never seen alive again. The bar belonged to her father, and her sister Kim had once had a brief affair with Herzog. In mid-January 1999 Shermantine's car was repossessed and searched by the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Department, and Cyndi's blood was found in it. While the DNA was being confirmed, detectives turned to Herzog and questioned him at length.
Loren Joseph Herzog was born on December 8, 1965, and Wesley Howard Shermantine Jr. on February 24, 1966. They grew up on the same street in Linden, a town of under two thousand people ninety-five miles east of San Francisco, and had few other friends. Both were keen hunters and fishermen who explored the San Joaquin County countryside as boys. They graduated from Linden High School in 1984, and in an apartment in Stockton they drank, bullied people and used drugs, above all methamphetamine, which gave them their name, the Speed Freak Killers. Linden knew them as meth users and as regulars at the Linden Inn.
Under questioning Herzog gave up detail after detail about Shermantine: that he had shot a hunter they came across in northern Utah in 1994, a killing Utah police confirmed was unsolved; that he had stopped beside Henry Howell, forty-one, parked on Highway 88 in Alpine County, grabbed Howell's shotgun, killed him and taken what little money he had; and how he had stabbed Robin Armtrout, twenty-four, found naked by Potter Creek near Linden. Both men were arrested and charged with murder on March 17, 1999. Each blamed the other for everything.
In 2001 Shermantine was convicted of four murders, Vanderheiden's, the 1984 killings of the drifters Howard King, thirty-five, and Paul Raymond Cavanaugh, thirty-one, found shot in a car on Roberts Island, and that of Chevelle Wheeler, sixteen, who left Franklin High School in Stockton in 1985 saying she was going with him to his family's cabin. He was sentenced to death. Herzog had been charged with five murders. His jury convicted him of three, Vanderheiden, Cavanaugh and King, found him guilty only as an accessory in Howell's death and acquitted him of Armtrout's, and he was sentenced to seventy-eight years.
In August 2004 an appeals court overturned all his convictions, ruling that three of his four confessions had been coerced, and ordered a retrial in the Vanderheiden case. It never happened. Under a plea bargain he admitted voluntary manslaughter and furnishing amphetamine in Vanderheiden's death and being an accessory to murder in the Cavanaugh, King and Howell cases. His sentence was cut to fourteen years with credit for time served, and with good behavior he was eligible for parole after eleven. Victims' families protested fiercely, and no California county would accept him, so in September 2010 the Department of Corrections paroled him to a trailer outside the front gate of High Desert State Prison in Susanville.
In January 2012 the bounty hunter Leonard Padilla told Herzog that Shermantine was about to disclose a well and two other places where the pair had buried their victims. On January 16, 2012, Herzog hanged himself inside his trailer, at forty-six. Until then no victim's body had been found.
Padilla had promised Shermantine thirty thousand dollars. In February 2012, following Shermantine's map, investigators dug out an abandoned well on Flood Road near Linden, one he had already named in letters to his sister in 2010 that the sheriff's department had not pursued. More than a thousand human bone fragments were recovered, and on March 30, 2012, they were identified as Kimberly Ann Billy, nineteen, and Joann Hobson, sixteen, Stockton girls missing since the mid-1980s, along with an unidentified victim and an unidentified fetus. At two sites near land once owned by Shermantine's parents in Calaveras County, the remains of Cyndi Vanderheiden and another unidentified person were found. A further search in 2012 and 2013, paid for with another $28,000 from Padilla, turned up nothing, and the FBI ended it in February 2013. Families and a state senator, Cathleen Galgiani, have accused the sheriff's office of hampering the search. In a 2012 letter to a reporter Shermantine suggested the pair may have killed as many as seventy-two people. He died at sixty on September 17, 2026, at California State Prison, Sacramento.