For more than a decade after he was condemned, Wesley Shermantine held the one thing the families wanted, which was the location of their dead, and in 2012 he began to trade it for money and comforts in his cell. He and his childhood friend Loren Herzog, called the Speed Freak Killers for their methamphetamine use, were suspected in anywhere from a dozen to seventy-two deaths in San Joaquin County and the Sierra foothills. Juries convicted both men before a single body had been found.
Wesley Howard Shermantine Jr. was born on February 24, 1966 and grew up in Linden, a town of fewer than two thousand people east of Stockton. Herzog lived on the same street, there were few other children to play with, and neither seems to have had another close friend through high school and after. Shermantine's father was a successful local contractor and real estate developer who kept his son supplied with gifts and money. The boys hunted and fished and roamed the county, and investigators later said they began by killing animals and passed time exploring abandoned mines and wells. They graduated from Linden High School in 1984 and moved into drinking, bullying and methamphetamine in an apartment in Stockton.
On November 27, 1984 Howard King III, thirty-five, and Paul Cavanaugh, thirty-one, two drifters, were found shot to death in a car off a remote road on Roberts Island. They had been robbed. It is the earliest of the four killings Shermantine was convicted of.
Chevelle Wheeler, known as Chevy, was sixteen and a student at Franklin High School in Stockton. On October 16, 1985 she told friends she was skipping school to go with a male friend; investigators later learned the friend was Shermantine. One account says she was going to his family's cabin in San Andreas, another says Valley Springs. She did not come back.
Two more names belong in this account although no one was ever charged over either. JoAnn Hobson was sixteen, a friend of Chevelle Wheeler at the same school, and vanished weeks before her. Kimberly Ann Billy was nineteen, from Stockton, and went missing in the mid-1980s.
Much of what is known about the rest came from Herzog, under questioning in 1999. He said Shermantine shot Henry Howell, forty-one, who was parked off Highway 88 in Alpine County near Hope Valley, using Howell's own shotgun, and took what little money he had; Howell's teeth and head had been beaten in. He described Shermantine killing Robin Armtrout, twenty-four, whose body was found stabbed nearly a dozen times on the bank of Potter Creek near Linden, and shooting a hunter the two ran into in northern Utah in 1994. Utah police confirmed an unsolved killing of a hunter there.
The case that ended it was Cyndi Vanderheiden's. She was twenty-five, lived in Clements, and on November 14, 1998 she left the Linden Inn, the bar her father owned, with Shermantine and Herzog, who were regulars there and whose drug use the whole town knew about; Herzog had once had a brief affair with her sister Kim. In mid-January 1999 Shermantine's car was repossessed and searched by the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Department, and her blood was found in it. Both men were arrested on March 17, 1999.
At his trial in 2001 the jury convicted him of four murders: Vanderheiden, King, Cavanaugh and Wheeler. Witness after witness described what he had done to them. Five women said he had raped or sodomized them, one a babysitter who had gone to collect money he owed her. His sister said both men had sexually assaulted her. A woman whose car he rear-ended said he held a knife on her when she pulled over to exchange insurance details, and that she got away by leaping out of his moving vehicle. His former wife described years of beatings, including while she was pregnant and while she held their children on her lap. He was sentenced to death, and was received on condemned status from Santa Clara County on May 18, 2001. At his sentencing he turned to JoAnn Hobson's mother and told her that Herzog had gone out with her daughter on the night she died.
Each man said the other did the killing. Herzog testified that Shermantine had claimed twenty-four victims. Herzog was charged with five murders and in 2001 convicted of three, Vanderheiden, King and Cavanaugh, found guilty of being an accessory in Howell's death and acquitted over Armtrout, and given seventy-eight years. In August 2004 an appeal court overturned all of it, holding that three of his four confessions had been coerced. Rather than face a retrial he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and furnishing amphetamine in the Vanderheiden case and to being an accessory in the other three, for fourteen years. With credit he served eleven. No county would take him, and in September 2010 he was paroled to a trailer outside the gate of High Desert State Prison in Susanville.
In January 2012 the bounty hunter Leonard Padilla told Herzog that Shermantine was about to reveal a well and two other burial sites. Herzog hanged himself in the trailer on January 16.
What followed was a transaction. In February 2010 Shermantine had written to his sister Barbara identifying an abandoned well on Flood Road near Linden, and she took the letters to the sheriff's department; the property owner said the wells had been sealed before the victims disappeared, and nothing more was done. In February 2012 Padilla promised him thirty thousand dollars, and Shermantine sent hand-drawn maps and letters to Padilla and to a reporter at the Stockton Record, who passed them to investigators. They pointed first to land in Calaveras County once owned by his parents, where two sets of remains were recovered. One was Cyndi Vanderheiden. The second is described in one account as Chevelle Wheeler and in another as an unidentified body.
The maps then led back to the Flood Road well. It held clothes, shoes, a coat, a purse, a woman's ring and more than a thousand human bone fragments, and the California Department of Justice tested them for DNA. The FBI's Evidence Recovery Team was called in that March, partly because of how the dig had been handled. On March 30, 2012 the remains were identified as those of Kimberly Ann Billy and JoAnn Hobson, together with an unidentified victim and a fetus. A hotline for relatives of missing people took about fifty calls in its first two days.
The dealing continued. He wrote from death row to a television station in Sacramento that ninety percent of what was said about him was untrue, and in March 2012 that there could be as many as seventy-two victims, details withheld until Padilla paid him thirty-three thousand dollars. "I've been holding the best for last," he wrote. Another report gives the claim differently, as a letter saying Herzog had killed the seventy-two. The money, by one account, was to pay off a restitution order and buy headstones for his parents' graves, alongside a television for his cell, and he later complained to the Record that Padilla was slow sending the promised television and candy bars. That year he told CBS Sacramento, from San Quentin, that he had some involvement in the killings, after years of blaming Herzog alone.
Assemblywoman Cathleen Galgiani, who had herself received a letter from him in 2010, visited him and pressed prison officials to act on a temporary law allowing him to help look for remains. In September 2012, after Padilla paid him another twenty-eight thousand dollars, he was taken out under guard to point out four more abandoned wells near Linden. The FBI began excavating one in January 2013 and on February 22 ended the search, saying two of his sites had produced nothing and other directions from him were misguided. He also claimed to know where other condemned men had buried victims in the Cow Mountain Recreation Area; the Lake County sheriff did not search. After that he refused to cooperate further.
The families came to blame the searchers as well. In 2014 the mother of a missing woman sued the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office over its handling of the well; in 2015 a retired FBI agent alleged the office had used a backhoe that mangled remains beyond identification. Galgiani said missing person records connected to the case had been deleted. In 2018 the incoming sheriff announced that the case would be reopened.
Governor Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on executions in 2019, and under the policy of dispersing condemned prisoners Shermantine was moved from San Quentin to California State Prison, Sacramento, at Folsom. When that transfer was reported in 2024 the families said publicly that they felt justice was being taken away from them.
He died there on September 17, 2026. A doctor pronounced him dead at about six in the evening; he was sixty, and the Sacramento County Coroner's Office was left to determine the cause. The San Joaquin County District Attorney, Ron Freitas, answered the news by naming the families of Cyndi Vanderheiden, Chevelle Wheeler, Howard King III and Paul Cavanaugh. The true number of victims was never established.
What the families have is photographs. JoAnn Hobson's mother said her daughter was a firecracker who had her own mind and loved everybody. Cyndi Vanderheiden's father said she used to call him daddy all the time, and that if she was in trouble it would be "Oh, Daddy, you know?" and then he would melt and that would be the end of it. They used to sing karaoke together at the bar.