Loren Herzog was one of two men from the small town of Linden, east of Stockton, California, whom the press called the "Speed Freak Killers." He and his boyhood friend Wesley Shermantine were arrested in March 1999 after a young woman who had left a bar with them in November 1998 was never seen again. Investigators came to believe that the two, both methamphetamine users, were behind many more deaths in California's Central Valley from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s. Estimates in the reports of 2012 ranged from about 15 to 25.
Herzog's legal record is narrower than that reputation. A jury convicted him in 2001 of three first-degree murders, but a state appeals court overturned the verdicts in 2004, finding that investigators had illegally coerced the statements he gave them. Without those statements prosecutors offered a bargain, and he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Cyndi Vanderheiden and to being an accessory in three other killings. He was paroled in 2010 to a trailer on the grounds of a state prison in Susanville, after victims and witnesses blocked his return home and two local governments sued to remove him. In January 2012 he was found dead there, hours after a bounty hunter told him that Shermantine was about to lead investigators to the bodies.
Herzog and Shermantine grew up together in Linden, a town in San Joaquin County about 10 miles east of Stockton, according to the Associated Press. They graduated from Linden High School in 1984, CBS Sacramento's timeline of the case records. The same timeline places the first killings later linked to the pair in that same year.
Little else is recorded about Herzog's early life. News reports gave his age as 44 in September 2010 and 46 when he died in January 2012. In adult life he was married with three children, the Associated Press reported in 2010 and 2012. He had a sister in Elk Grove, near Sacramento; the Court of Appeal later noted that the state had considered paroling him near her. Cyndi Vanderheiden knew him by a nickname, "Slim," according to Herzog's own account in a 1999 jailhouse interview later reported by CBS San Francisco.
Both men used methamphetamine, and the nickname the press gave them came from that drug. Authorities said, in the words of a 2012 Associated Press report, that the two went on methamphetamine-fueled killing sprees in the 1980s and 1990s. Herzog's lawyer saw it differently. In 2010 the San Joaquin County public defender Peter Fox told the Associated Press that his client had been a bystander who took no part in the killings but helped cover them up, and that Herzog was "guilty of having the world's worst friend."
The first deaths later tied to the two men came in 1984. Paul Cavanaugh, 31, and Howard King, 35, were shot to death in a car parked off a remote road late at night, according to the Associated Press report of Shermantine's 2001 verdict. Tracks at the scene matched the tires of Shermantine's pickup. An Associated Press report from 2012 described the two men as drifters who had been sitting in a car about two miles west of Stockton when they were robbed and killed. Shermantine was convicted of both murders in 2001.
In a 1999 jailhouse interview, the substance of which CBS San Francisco reported in 2012, Herzog described a shooting in which, he said, Shermantine fired from the driver's side, emptied the gun, which Herzog said was his own, and then pulled the victims out and went through their pockets. The robbery, Herzog said, came to $11. Which case he was describing has never been established.
On October 16, 1985, Chevelle Wheeler, 16, known as Chevy, went missing from Stockton. She had told friends that she was skipping school to go to Valley Springs, in the foothills, with a male friend, later identified as Shermantine, according to CBS Sacramento. He was not arrested in her death until 1999, when DNA tests found that blood in his mountain cabin was almost certainly hers. Shermantine was convicted of her murder in 2001. Her father, Raymond Wheeler, later told the Associated Press that he did not believe a word Shermantine said.
Two other Stockton girls disappeared in those years. Kimberly Billy, 19, was last seen on December 11, 1984. Her grandmother reported her missing about two weeks later, when she did not get in touch with her family over Christmas. JoAnn Hobson, 16, was last seen on August 29, 1985, in her neighborhood in east Stockton. Investigators long suspected Shermantine and Herzog in Hobson's disappearance but never had enough evidence to charge them, the Associated Press reported in 2012.
Cyndi Vanderheiden was 25 and lived in Clements, a small community near Linden. Her father owned a local bar in Linden where Herzog and Shermantine were regulars, according to ABC10 in Sacramento.
On November 14, 1998, she left a bar with Shermantine and Herzog and disappeared. In the account the Associated Press gave in 2010, the two men lured her to a cemetery with the promise of methamphetamine. At his trial Herzog testified that he hid in the back seat of Shermantine's car while she was attacked. In his 1999 jailhouse interview, as CBS San Francisco reported it, Herzog blamed Shermantine for her death and said she had called out to him by name, asking him to help her and to do something. He said he wished he had not seen what he saw and that she would stay on his mind for the rest of his life.
The case turned on Shermantine's car. It was repossessed in 1999, and when it was searched investigators found Vanderheiden's blood in it. The Associated Press report of Shermantine's 2001 verdict said her blood was allegedly found on a headrest and in the trunk. After DNA tests confirmed it, Herzog and Shermantine were both arrested on March 17, 1999, for her murder and for other killings, according to CBS Sacramento.
Each man blamed the other for planning the killings, the Associated Press reported, and both kept doing so. Herzog talked to sheriff's investigators at length. What he told them, in a series of detailed statements that came close to a full confession, became the core of the case against him and, in time, the reason that case fell apart. Until his death, the Associated Press reported, Herzog maintained that Shermantine was responsible for the killings. In his 1999 jailhouse interview he called Shermantine a cold-blooded killer and claimed that his friend had killed more than two dozen people, among them two hunters, according to CBS San Francisco.
The Associated Press later wrote that the two men had been implicated in six murders at the time of their arrest and were suspected in at least a dozen more unsolved cases. Witnesses said that Shermantine had boasted of killing 19 people.
Shermantine was tried first. Because of the publicity around Stockton, his trial was moved to Santa Clara County. After three months of testimony and eight days of deliberation, a jury convicted him in February 2001 of four murders: Cavanaugh, King, Wheeler and Vanderheiden. The San Mateo Daily Journal's report of the verdict noted that there were no witnesses to the killings and that only the first two victims' bodies had been found.
The prosecutor in both men's cases was Thomas Testa, a San Joaquin County deputy district attorney. He told Shermantine's jury that Shermantine had boasted of killing as many as 22 people, and he called the verdict "15 years too late." Shermantine offered to reveal where Vanderheiden's body was in exchange for $20,000 for his sons; her family refused, according to CBS Sacramento's timeline. Prosecutors then offered to drop the death penalty if he would show where the bodies were buried. He declined, and he was sentenced to death in March 2001. At the time of the verdict the Daily Journal reported that Herzog was charged in three of the killings and in two others and was awaiting a trial that was also likely to be moved.
Herzog's trial was also moved from San Joaquin County to Santa Clara County because of pretrial publicity, according to the Lassen County Times. Peter Fox, the San Joaquin County public defender, represented him.
On October 23, 2001, the jury convicted him of three murders and of being an accessory to a fourth, according to CBS Sacramento's timeline. The Associated Press reported that the convictions were for first-degree murder, among them the murder of Cyndi Vanderheiden, and that his jury rejected the death penalty. He was sentenced to 78 years in state prison. Some later reports described the term as 78 years to life, one Associated Press report gave it as 77 years to life, and the Lassen County Times gave the conviction date as December 2001; the accounts do not agree.
The verdicts rested heavily on Herzog's own words. The Associated Press summarized it bluntly in 2010: once his confession was gone, prosecutors had little evidence against him.
On August 18, 2004, a California appeals court overturned Herzog's convictions, according to CBS Sacramento. The court ruled that investigators had illegally coerced the detailed statements that amounted to his confession. The Associated Press reported that the court found the investigators had ignored his requests for a lawyer. Another Associated Press account described the problem as coercive detective tactics used to obtain a taped confession. The ruling, in the description of the Lassen County Times, threw out the three murder convictions and much of the evidence. CBS Sacramento's timeline adds that the coercion finding did not reach the Vanderheiden case, and ABC News reported that the court ordered a new trial.
That retrial did not go ahead as a contested trial. Without the confession, the Associated Press reported, prosecutors had little evidence and offered a plea bargain. Herzog pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the 1998 death of Cyndi Vanderheiden, to three counts of being an accessory to a felony and to one count of transporting a controlled substance, according to the Lassen County Times and ABC News. A judge reduced his sentence to 14 years, avoiding a new trial. He began serving the 14-year term on December 8, 2004, with credit for the jail and prison time he had already served.
The Court of Appeal, describing the case in 2012, said Herzog had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter and of being an accessory to three murders committed by Shermantine. That is his final legal record. He was never finally convicted of murder.
Credits for time served and for good behavior meant that the prison system could no longer hold Herzog by 2010. Corrections officials scheduled his release for July 25, 2010, then canceled it, saying they had miscalculated his sentence, the Associated Press reported. The state's Division of Adult Parole Operations learned in July that he would complete his sentence on September 18, 2010.
The news brought strong protest. Cyndi Vanderheiden's father told the Associated Press that there was "no bigger injustice" and that the release forced him to live through his daughter's loss again. Families of other people who had disappeared were angered that Herzog would go back to his wife and children while they still did not know where their relatives were buried. Witnesses said they feared retaliation, and local politicians urged that he be kept in prison. Testa said he hoped the publicity would bring forward witnesses in the unsolved cases. Officials said they could do little to stop the release.
Under California law a parolee is normally returned to the county of his last legal residence. Victims, their next of kin and witnesses may ask that a parolee live at least 35 miles away from them. The Court of Appeal later set out what happened next. The state first planned to parole Herzog to San Joaquin County, but 17 victims and witnesses objected, and the planned site was within 35 miles of all of them. Elk Grove, near his sister, was within 35 miles of at least one victim. Modoc County was too remote for parole staff, and GPS tracking did not work there. Lassen County, in the far northeast of the state, had no victims or witnesses within 35 miles and a large law enforcement presence because of its prisons.
The state's choice became public on September 10, 2010, according to the Lassen County Times. On September 15 the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced that Herzog would live in quarters on state land outside the perimeter of High Desert State Prison in Susanville, and that he would be monitored by GPS and by regular visits from parole agents, with strict curfews and a no-contact list. He was paroled from the state prison at Norco, in Riverside County, and arrived in Lassen County on September 18, 2010. He moved into a fifth-wheel trailer on the prison grounds.
The Court of Appeal described the arrangement in detail. The trailer stood in a fenced compound on the prison grounds, and the department paid his living expenses. He had to be inside from 5:00 p.m. to 8:30 a.m., and again from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Staff escorted him on prison grounds outside the compound and to appointments in town. A GPS ankle bracelet alerted his parole agent if he moved more than 150 feet from the trailer, and he had to tell the gatehouse whenever he left or a visitor came or went. Anyone visiting had to get permission and pass through the prison gate, according to the Lassen County Times.
Lassen County reacted at once. Supervisor Jim Chapman put the release on the Board of Supervisors' agenda for September 14, 2010. More than 500 residents came, and the meeting had to be moved from the board chamber to Jensen Hall at the county fairgrounds. The board formally objected to his parole anywhere in the county and told county counsel to seek a court order. The board president, Bob Pyle, called the release "a slap in the face to all of us." Sheriff Steve Warren said the county had never agreed to the placement and that he had a duty to protect both residents and Herzog. Every speaker opposed him. Within days, Chapman said, 6,500 signatures had been gathered against the placement; the Court of Appeal later put the number at about 6,000. Assemblymen Dan Logue and Ted Gaines wrote to the corrections department urging that he be paroled somewhere else.
On September 28, 2010, the City of Susanville and Lassen County filed a petition for a writ of mandate to force the state to move him. Their lawyers, the city attorney Peter Talia and the county's Traci Witry, argued that the department had broken the law on notice. The Penal Code required 45 days' notice to local law enforcement, and the sheriff and the Susanville police chief, Jeff Atkinson, had been told only two days before Herzog arrived. The department answered that it had needed time to research victims' letters and distances and had given notice as soon as practical.
On November 8, 2010, Lassen County Superior Court Judge F. Donald Sokol granted the writ. He found the department's decision arbitrary and capricious, ruled that Herzog's living in Lassen County was not in the public's best interest, and ordered him moved out of the county immediately. ABC30 in Fresno reported that the judge found the department had not followed its own rules on parole release. "Mission accomplished as far as I'm concerned," Talia said.
Herzog did not move. The department appealed on November 12, 2010, which automatically stayed the order, and he stayed in the trailer while the appeal went forward. In their 2011 brief to the Third District Court of Appeal, the city and county argued that the state had made its choice in early September but did not deliver a release notice until September 15, never gave written reasons for choosing Lassen County, and had turned the county into a "dumping ground" for parolees. They also said there was no evidence the state had considered Santa Clara County, where he had been tried.
The Court of Appeal decided the case in March 2012, after Herzog's death. It chose not to treat the appeal as moot, because, in its words, "there is no doubt that issues of this type will recur." The opinion, written by Presiding Justice Raye with Justices Nicholson and Hoch agreeing, held that the Legislature had given the corrections department exclusive discretion over where parolees live, and that "neither the city, the county, nor the court can interfere" with that discretion unless it is abused. It found no abuse in the choice of Lassen County, reversed Judge Sokol's judgment, and said that the department's failure to give its reasons in the formal notice was not grounds for the writ, though "we do not condone the failure to subscribe to a clear statutory duty."
By late 2011 Shermantine, still on death row at San Quentin, was again offering to reveal burial sites in exchange for money, according to CBS Sacramento. In letters to the Stockton Record, the Associated Press reported, he offered to lead authorities to Wheeler's and Vanderheiden's bodies and to a covered well holding at least 10 more. Leonard Padilla, a Sacramento bounty hunter who had followed the case for years, agreed to pay him a little over $30,000 if bodies were found, hoping to recover the money from family rewards. At least two families had each offered $20,000. Later reports put Padilla's promise at $33,000.
Shermantine blamed Herzog. He referred to the Linden well as "Loren's boneyard," the Associated Press reported, and in a one-page letter to Padilla, according to CBS San Francisco, he said Herzog was responsible for the murder of JoAnn Hobson.
On Monday, January 16, 2012, Padilla telephoned Herzog. He told him that he was in contact with Shermantine, that Shermantine was offering to lead investigators to bodies and planned to blame him, and that he should hire a lawyer. Padilla told the Associated Press that he had not wanted the news to come as a surprise, and that Herzog "knew what was coming down the road." He told CBS Sacramento that he had worried Herzog might do something desperate, since the new information could send him back to prison.
That night Herzog's GPS ankle monitor warned his parole agent that its battery was running low. The agent could not reach him by phone and asked staff at High Desert State Prison to check on him, according to ABC News. Staff went to the trailer and found him unresponsive. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation notified the Lassen County Sheriff's Office, and deputies who responded pronounced him dead at 12:30 a.m. on January 17, 2012. He was 46.
The sheriff's office said in a written statement that the evidence at the scene pointed to a hanging death and suicide, but that the official cause would not be determined until the investigation and autopsy were complete. Sheriff Dean Growdon told the Associated Press that "all evidence indicates" suicide. CBS Sacramento reported that he was found hanged from a bed sheet behind his trailer. He left a note on a table that read "Tell my family I love them"; the sheriff said it made no reference to his crimes or to any victims. The Lassen County Times later reported that the preliminary autopsy finding was hanging, with the official cause awaiting toxicology results, and that prison staff said he had been dead for some time when he was found. The death was reviewed by the Lassen County District Attorney's Office, the sheriff's office and the corrections department's investigative services unit.
The reactions were blunt. Her father told the Stockton Record, as relayed by ABC News, that he wanted proof Herzog was dead. Testa told the Lassen County Times that he had at first suspected murder, and that Herzog's death had taken away a key source of information about where the victims' remains were.
Within days of Herzog's death, the San Joaquin County sheriff, Steve Moore, the Calaveras County sheriff, Gary Kuntz, and the San Joaquin County district attorney, James Willett, met in French Camp with state corrections officials and the FBI and agreed to ask the state for help working with Shermantine, CBS Sacramento reported. A planned trip to take Shermantine out of prison to point out sites was halted by Sheriff Moore, who cited security. A search of a ravine near San Andreas on January 27, without him, found nothing.
Shermantine's maps did the work instead. On February 9, 2012, remains found on land in Calaveras County once owned by Shermantine's family were identified through dental records as Cyndi Vanderheiden's. The next day searchers found a second set of remains in the same area, which authorities told Chevy Wheeler's parents was where she was believed to be buried. Tests later confirmed both identifications, CBS News reported.
By February 11 searchers were digging out an abandoned well on an old cattle ranch near Linden. Within two days they had recovered more than 300 human bones from about 45 feet down, along with clothing, a purse and jewelry. Shermantine had said that 10 or more bodies could be in the well. About 1,000 bone fragments were removed in all.
On March 30, 2012, Sheriff Moore announced that two of the people in the well had been identified as Kimberly Billy and JoAnn Hobson. A forensic anthropologist believed the fragments came from three people, and the third had not been identified. "We are shifting gears," Moore said, from missing person cases to homicide cases. A 2013 Associated Press report described the well as having yielded three women and a fetus. It also reported that the sheriff's office had excavated the well with heavy machinery, which mixed the remains together, and that Hobson's mother had filed a federal lawsuit in Sacramento alleging emotional distress.
No court ever tested whether Herzog had any part in the deaths of Billy and Hobson. He was dead before their remains were found.
The search went on without him. In July 2012 the state Senate unanimously approved a bill, AB 2357, letting the corrections secretary temporarily release Shermantine to help investigators. Its Senate sponsor, Elaine Alquist, said the case could reopen as many as 72 missing person cold cases in up to 21 Northern California counties. Assemblywoman Cathleen Galgiani of Stockton wrote the bill, CBS News reported, and called the first trip "just the start of a long process." In August 2012 Shermantine was taken from San Quentin to San Joaquin County to show FBI agents possible burial sites.
In May 2012 sheriff's deputies and FBI teams dug on private land south of Linden after a tip from Padilla's team linking the case to the 1996 disappearance of Terri Ann Fourcher, a Reno woman. Padilla said Shermantine had told him that Herzog and a friend were connected to the property. Nothing was found.
In January 2013 the FBI began digging out a second well, about 200 yards from the first. It found nothing, and in February 2013 the FBI said it would stop actively searching. The FBI and the sheriff's office had spent a combined $200,000. Shermantine had written letters saying they were digging in the wrong place. Herb Brown, the agent in charge of the FBI's Sacramento office, said that Shermantine now refused to meet with investigators.
Several things said about Herzog were never proven in court.
His role. Prosecutors and a 2001 jury treated Herzog as a full partner in murder. That verdict did not survive appeal. His own account, from 1999 onward, was that Shermantine did the killing and he watched. His lawyer called him a bystander who helped cover up the crimes. Shermantine said the opposite and called the well "Loren's boneyard." No court ever decided which man, if either, was telling the truth about the killings that were never tried.
The number of victims. Estimates of the killings linked to the two men vary widely from report to report: as many as 15 (Associated Press, February 2012), 19 (Associated Press, January 2012), about 20 (CBS News, August 2012), and as many as 25 (CBS Sacramento, 2012). Shermantine was said by witnesses to have boasted of 19 and, by the prosecutor, of as many as 22. A state senator spoke of up to 72 cold cases that could be reopened. None of these figures is a count of proven killings.
Kimberly Billy and JoAnn Hobson. Both were long suspected victims of the two men, and their remains were found in the well Shermantine mapped. Neither death was ever charged against Herzog.
The $11 shooting. In 1999 Herzog described a robbery shooting that netted $11, which he blamed on Shermantine. The report of that interview does not say which case he meant, and the reports do not tie that account to a particular count of his plea.
Other names. Over the years the case was linked by investigators, family members and a bounty hunter to other missing people in Northern California and Nevada, among them Terri Ann Fourcher. Searches tied to those tips found nothing, and no charge resulted.
1984: Herzog and Shermantine graduate from Linden High School. Paul Cavanaugh, 31, and Howard King, 35, are shot to death in a car near Stockton (Shermantine later convicted).
December 11, 1984: Kimberly Billy, 19, is last seen.
August 29, 1985: JoAnn Hobson, 16, is last seen in east Stockton.
October 16, 1985: Chevelle "Chevy" Wheeler, 16, goes missing (Shermantine later convicted).
November 14, 1998: Cyndi Vanderheiden, 25, disappears after leaving a bar with Herzog and Shermantine.
March 17, 1999: Herzog and Shermantine are arrested after her blood is found in Shermantine's car.
February 2001: Shermantine is convicted of four murders in Santa Clara County; sentenced to death in March.
October 23, 2001: A jury convicts Herzog of three first-degree murders and of being an accessory to a fourth; he is sentenced to 78 years.
August 18, 2004: An appeals court overturns his convictions, finding his statements were coerced.
December 8, 2004: After pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter, three accessory counts and transporting a controlled substance, he begins a 14-year term.
July 2010: A planned release is canceled over a sentence miscalculation.
September 18, 2010: Paroled to a trailer outside High Desert State Prison, Susanville.
September 28, 2010: Susanville and Lassen County sue to remove him.
November 8, 2010: Judge F. Donald Sokol orders him removed; the state's appeal on November 12 stays the order.
January 16, 2012: Padilla tells him Shermantine is revealing burial sites. That night he is found dead in his trailer; pronounced dead at 12:30 a.m. on January 17.
February 9 to 11, 2012: Vanderheiden's and Wheeler's remains are found in Calaveras County; digging begins at the Linden well.
March 2012: The Court of Appeal reverses the order removing him from Lassen County.
March 30, 2012: Kimberly Billy and JoAnn Hobson are identified among the remains in the well.
February 2013: The FBI ends its active search.