Loren Joseph Herzog was born in 1966 and grew up in Linden, California, alongside Wesley Shermantine. The two were friends from childhood, hunted together, and by adulthood were both dependent on methamphetamine. The pair were called the Speed Freak Killers, after the methamphetamine both were using.
Between roughly 1984 and 1999 the pair killed an unknown number of people around Linden, Stockton and the Calaveras foothills, taking most of them at random. Estimates have run from fifteen to seventy. Both were arrested in 1999.
Herzog gave a seventeen-hour statement to detectives, and was convicted in 2001 of three murders and sentenced to seventy-eight years. In 2004 a California appeal court held that the statement had been obtained in breach of his rights and threw it out, and without it the prosecution had very little. He pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and was released on parole in September 2010, having served eleven years.
No town would have him. He was housed in a trailer on the grounds of High Desert State Prison near Susanville, under conditions amounting to internal exile, and was widely reported on.
On January 16, 2012, he was told by a relative that Shermantine had begun cooperating with a bounty hunter and intended to identify the burial sites. He hanged himself outside the trailer that day. He was forty-six. The excavations that followed a month later recovered over a thousand bone fragments from a well near Linden.