Wesley Howard Shermantine junior was born in 1965 and grew up in Linden, a small town in San Joaquin County east of Stockton. He and Loren Herzog were friends from primary school, hunted together, and by their twenties were both heavy methamphetamine users. The newspapers eventually called them the Speed Freak Killers.
From about 1984 they killed people, mostly at random and mostly in Calaveras and San Joaquin counties: hitchhikers, young couples parked in cars, women picked up on the street, a sixteen-year-old girl walking home. Chevelle Wheeler, sixteen, disappeared in 1985. Cyndi Vanderheiden, twenty-five, in 1998. Howard King and Paul Cavanaugh were shot in a car in 1984. Investigators' estimates of the total have ranged from fifteen to over seventy.
Both were arrested in 1999. Shermantine was convicted in 2001 of four murders and sentenced to death. Herzog was convicted of three, but in 2004 an appeal court held that his lengthy confession had been improperly obtained, and he pleaded to voluntary manslaughter and was released in 2010, to live in a trailer outside a prison in Lassen County because no community would take him. In January 2012, hours after being told that Shermantine had announced he would reveal where the bodies were, Herzog hanged himself.
Shermantine then dealt. He sent hand-drawn maps to a bounty hunter, Leonard Padilla, who had offered him money, and in February 2012 investigators excavated a disused well on a property near Linden and recovered more than a thousand human bone fragments, along with Chevelle Wheeler's and Cyndi Vanderheiden's remains from other sites. Identification of the well fragments is not finished. He remains on California's death row.