Jury Convicts Loren Herzog, Wesley Shermantine's Boyhood Friend, of Three Murders
Herzog was also found guilty as an accessory to a fourth killing, but the jury rejected a death sentence. His murder convictions were thrown out on appeal in 2004.
Published
Eight months after Wesley Shermantine was convicted, a jury found his boyhood friend guilty too. On October 23, 2001, Loren Herzog was convicted of three murders and of being an accessory to a fourth.
The trial had been moved to Santa Clara County from San Joaquin County, where Herzog and Shermantine grew up across the street from each other in the small town of Linden, about ten miles east of Stockton. The two were arrested in March 1999, after DNA tests showed that the blood of Cyndi Vanderheiden, 25, was in Shermantine's car. She had last been seen with both men in November 1998, and her body had not been found. In February 2001 Shermantine was convicted of four murders, hers among them, and sentenced to death.
Among the killings in Herzog's conviction was Vanderheiden's murder. According to a later Associated Press account, the two men lured her to a cemetery with the promise of methamphetamine. Herzog testified that he hid in the back seat of Shermantine's car during the attack and helped put her body in the trunk, but did not know what Shermantine did with it afterward. The prosecutor, San Joaquin County Deputy District Attorney Thomas Testa, did not believe him. Herzog's attorney, Public Defender Peter Fox, portrayed him as a bystander led by a dominant friend who carried out the killings.
Testa was disappointed when the jury rejected a death sentence for Herzog. A judge sentenced him to 78 years in prison on the three first-degree murder convictions.
The convictions did not stand. In 2004 the California Court of Appeal threw them out, ruling that the detailed statements Herzog made to investigators after his 1999 arrest had been illegally coerced, because investigators ignored his requests for a lawyer. Without his videotaped confession, prosecutors offered a deal, and Herzog pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Vanderheiden's death and to three counts of being an accessory to a felony. His sentence was cut to 14 years. He was paroled in September 2010 and died by suicide on January 17, 2012.
A CBS News timeline dates the verdict to October 23, 2001, while a California corrections department release reported by the Lassen County Times says Herzog was convicted in December 2001. News reports spell Vanderheiden's first name both Cyndi and Cindi.
Sources
- Speed Freak Killers Timeline, CBS13 Sacramento (CBS News)
- Of pair dubbed 'Speed Freak Killers,' one to leave prison on parole, other is on death row, Fox News (Associated Press)
- Once convicted killer Loren Herzog to be paroled in Lassen County, Lassen County Times
Related News
- February 14, 2001: Jury Convicts Wesley Shermantine of Four San Joaquin Valley Murders
- January 17, 2012: Loren Herzog, Paroled After His Speed Freak Killers Murder Convictions Were Overturned, Dies by Suicide