"Speed Freak Killer" Wesley Shermantine Dies on California's Death Row at 60
Condemned in 2001 for four murders and suspected in more than a dozen others, Shermantine died at California State Prison, Sacramento, on September 17.
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Wesley Shermantine, the Stockton man condemned in 2001 for four murders, died on the evening of September 17, 2026, inside California State Prison, Sacramento. He was 60. A doctor pronounced him dead at about 6 p.m. in the prison's central health building, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a release the next day. The Sacramento County Coroner's Office will determine the cause.
He was never executed. Shermantine spent a quarter century under a death sentence, convicted of four killings and suspected in more than a dozen other slayings. He and his childhood friend Loren Herzog had been known for years as the "Speed Freak Killers."
The case that finally caught them began at the Linden Inn. In the early hours of November 14, 1998, Cyndi Vanderheiden, 25, of Clements, was there with both men, according to later court testimony. That morning her father, John Vanderheiden, found her car at Glenview Cemetery in Clements. She was gone. DNA testing later put her blood in a crevice inside the trunk of Shermantine's car and on the pole of the passenger-seat headrest. Shermantine and Herzog were arrested in March 1999.
On February 14, 2001, a jury convicted Shermantine of first-degree murder in Vanderheiden's death and in three more. Chevelle "Chevy" Wheeler, a 16-year-old from Stockton, had disappeared in October 1985 after skipping school and telling friends she was going to Valley Springs with him. Howard King III, 35, of Lathrop, and Paul Cavanaugh, 31, of Stockton, were killed in 1984 while parked on Roberts Island, just southwest of Stockton. "This is the best Valentine present I could get," Vanderheiden's sister, Kim Wrage, said of the verdict.
Two weeks later the families spoke in court. "I will never be the same again," said Terri Vanderheiden, Cyndi's mother. "I do not go a day without crying." Chevy's sister, Marni Wheeler, said her life would never be the same without "my sister, my best friend." Jurors recommended death, and San Joaquin County Judge Michael Garrigan imposed it on May 15, 2001. "I think he deserved everything he got," John Vanderheiden said. Three days later Shermantine was received into state prison on condemned status.
Herzog's case unraveled. Convicted in December 2001 of the Vanderheiden, King and Cavanaugh murders and as an accessory in the 1984 killing of Henry Howell of Santa Clara, he won a reversal in August 2004 when an appeals court ruled his confessions had been coerced. He then pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and furnishing amphetamine in Vanderheiden's death and to being an accessory in the Cavanaugh, King and Howell killings, and he was paroled in 2010. Each man blamed the other.
In 2012, from death row, Shermantine offered to tell everything for $33,000, money he said would clear his remaining restitution, buy headstones for his parents' grave and put a television in his cell. That January, Herzog hanged himself after learning Shermantine meant to tell investigators where the bodies were. Shermantine drew a map. It led to a hillside near San Andreas and to a pair of abandoned wells in Linden, where searchers recovered more than a thousand bone fragments.
DNA matched remains from San Andreas to Cyndi Vanderheiden and Chevy Wheeler. "It does give me some sense of closure," John Vanderheiden said that March. "Ideally not what I wanted; bringing her home was bittersweet. But we do have her back on some level now." The Linden wells gave up two missing Stockton women whose deaths had never been tied to the pair: Joann Hobson, 16, reported missing on September 10, 1985, and Kimberley Billy, 19, reported missing on December 17, 1984. A third woman, and fetal remains, were still unidentified as of August 2012. Neither man was charged in those deaths.
Investigators named the two as possible suspects in several other disappearances over the years, but no court ever tested those suspicions. With Shermantine's death, both men are gone.
The corrections department's release says Shermantine was received from Santa Clara County on May 18, 2001; the Lodi News-Sentinel reports that he was tried and sentenced by a San Joaquin County judge, and the release does not explain the difference. Courtroom quotations, ages and the 2012 recovery details come from the News-Sentinel's account, which drew on The Stockton Record, the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times.
Sources
- Condemned Incarcerated Person Wesley Shermantine Dies, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
- 'Speed Freak Killer' Shermantine dies in prison, Lodi News-Sentinel (K. Cathey)