Wesley Shermantine was convicted in 2001 of four murders committed between 1984 and 1998 in and around San Joaquin County, California: two men shot in a car in 1984, a 16-year-old girl who vanished in 1985, and a 25-year-old woman who disappeared in 1998. He and his childhood friend Loren Herzog, both from the farm town of Linden, were known in the press as the "Speed Freak Killers" because of their methamphetamine use. Prosecutors convicted him of two of those murders without bodies. He refused for years to say where the two young women were buried.
In 2012, from death row at San Quentin, he began drawing maps in return for money promised by a Sacramento bounty hunter. The maps led searchers to the remains of the two women he had been convicted of killing and to an old well that held the remains of two more missing teenagers, an unidentified woman and a fetus. He was never charged over those deaths. Herzog, who had been convicted of three murders and then freed after an appeals court threw out his confession, hanged himself as the searches began. Shermantine's automatic appeal was still before the California Supreme Court in 2025. He died on death row on September 17, 2026, aged 60. How many people the two men killed has never been established.
Shermantine and Herzog were the same age and grew up across the street from each other in Linden, a community of about 1,100 people roughly ten miles east of Stockton, according to an Associated Press account of the case published in 2010. They graduated together from Linden High School in 1984. The Associated Press described them as hunting partners as well as friends.
Witnesses later testified that the two were trouble almost from the beginning, and that they drank and used drugs. In a 2026 account of the case, the Los Angeles Times said that as children they killed animals and later explored abandoned mines and wells, looking for places to hide bodies; Thomas Testa, the San Joaquin County deputy district attorney who prosecuted both men, said in 2010 that the two "were so tight and they did everything together."
Shermantine's parents owned land in Calaveras County, in the Sierra foothills east of Linden, and he had a cabin in the mountains. Both facts would matter later. By 2001 he had two sons, and by 2012 both of his parents had died. Herzog married and had three children.
According to court records cited by the Associated Press, the two men first killed three months after their 1984 graduation.
Investigators believed the first victim was Henry Howell, who was killed in September 1984 on a lonely highway in Hope Valley, in the Sierra, according to the Associated Press in 2012. No jury convicted Shermantine of his death. Howell's killing was later charged against Herzog: in 2001 a jury rejected the murder charge but found Herzog guilty as an accessory, according to the Associated Press and the Lodi News-Sentinel. That verdict was overturned with the rest of Herzog's convictions in 2004.
In a 1999 jailhouse interview with detectives, shown on CBS television in 2012, Herzog blamed Shermantine for the killing of two hunters and described a robbery that he said netted $11.
In November 1984, Howard King III, 35, and Paul Cavanaugh, 31, were shot to death while they sat in a car off a remote road west of Stockton, late at night. They had been robbed. The Associated Press described them as drifters. The case went unsolved for 15 years.
Prosecutors later tied it to Shermantine through tire tracks at the scene, which matched the tires on a red pickup he drove. In Herzog's 1999 interview, as broadcast in 2012, he described a shooting in which, he said, Shermantine fired, used Herzog's gun after emptying his own, and then took the victims out of the car and emptied their pockets. CBS did not say which killing that passage concerned. King and Cavanaugh were the first two of the four murders of which Shermantine was convicted.
Chevelle Wheeler, called Chevy, was 16 and a student at Franklin High School in Stockton. On October 16, 1985, she told friends she was skipping school to go to the mountains with a male friend. Investigators later identified the friend as Shermantine. One CBS account says she told friends she was going to Valley Springs; another says she was going with him to his family's cabin in San Andreas. Both are Calaveras County towns. She was never seen again.
Her family later moved to Crossville, Tennessee, where her portrait hung in their home. The case against Shermantine for her death was built without her body. Blood drops found in his mountain cabin were shown by DNA tests to be almost certainly hers, the Associated Press reported in 2001.
Two other young women from Stockton disappeared in those years. Kimberly Billy was 19 when she went missing in 1984. JoAnn Hobson was 16 when she left her Stockton home in 1985 and did not return. Investigators long suspected Shermantine and Herzog in Hobson's disappearance but did not have enough evidence to charge them, the Associated Press reported in 2012. Neither man was ever charged over either young woman.
Hobson's mother described her daughter in 2024 to ABC10: "She was a firecracker. She had her own mind. She loved people, loved everybody." The remains of both young women were found in 2012, in a well that Shermantine pointed searchers to.
Cyndi Vanderheiden was 25 and lived in Clements, a small town near Linden. Her father owned a bar in the area. He later said that Shermantine had boasted loudly of being a killer, talk he first wrote off as drunken bragging. A friend described her in 2020 as "a very, very good friend, a very good person."
On November 14, 1998, Vanderheiden left a bar with Shermantine and Herzog and disappeared. According to the Associated Press, the two men lured her to a cemetery with the promise of methamphetamine. Wire reports said she was sexually assaulted and killed. Her body was not found for more than 13 years.
After Shermantine's car was repossessed, investigators who examined it found Vanderheiden's blood in the trunk and, by another wire account, on a headrest. DNA tests linked the blood to her. Shermantine and Herzog were arrested on March 17, 1999.
Herzog was held in jail for four days before he saw a judge. Over those days investigators from several agencies questioned him about open murder cases. He was read his rights in several forms, often seemed confused, and said several times that he thought he should talk to a lawyer, but the questioning went on, the Associated Press reported. He described killings that he said he had watched Shermantine commit, believing, by the same account, that if police saw him as only a witness he would be set free. Asked near the end of the fourth day why he was cooperating, he said he hoped to "get that killer off the street." In the interview broadcast in 2012, he said that Vanderheiden had called him by a nickname and asked him for help, and that he wished he had not seen what he had seen.
Herzog said Shermantine had killed more than two dozen people. By the time of the arrests the two men were implicated in six murders and were suspects in at least a dozen more, the Associated Press said in 2010. Each blamed the other.
Because of heavy publicity around Stockton, Shermantine's trial was moved to a courtroom in Santa Clara County. It opened in 2000, and the evidence took about three months. Testa, who prosecuted, told the jury: "There are no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses, no smoking gun." No one had seen any of the killings, and only the bodies of King and Cavanaugh had been found. The case rested on the tire tracks at the 1984 scene, the blood in the cabin linked to Wheeler, the blood in the car linked to Vanderheiden, and witnesses who described Shermantine's own words.
Testa told the jurors that Shermantine had said to several people that "he had hunted the ultimate kill: humans." Witnesses said that while high on methamphetamine he threatened people and claimed he had "made people disappear." At various times, Testa said, he had bragged of killing 18 to 22 people, and he was a suspect in killings in California, Utah and Nevada. Other witnesses said he had boasted of killing 19.
Testa also described an earlier case. Shermantine had been acquitted of a 1998 sexual assault in Calaveras County; Testa said that on the same night he had sexually assaulted another woman, three months before Vanderheiden disappeared. Shermantine was never convicted of either allegation.
After eight days of deliberation, the jury convicted him on February 14, 2001, of all four murders: King, Cavanaugh, Wheeler and Vanderheiden. He sat quietly as the verdicts were read; relatives of the victims wept, as did two jurors. His lawyers would not comment. "This is the verdict, frankly, we expected," Testa said. "But to me, it's 15 years too late." Outside court he added: "No way would he stop."
Some relatives had driven 200 miles round trip to attend. Vanderheiden's parents still did not know where her remains were. "I'm glad, from now on, he won't hurt anybody," her father said.
During the trial Shermantine offered to reveal where Wheeler and Vanderheiden were buried if his two sons received $20,000 in reward money. Prosecutors refused. Testa then said he would ask the judge to impose life without parole instead of death if Shermantine revealed the two burial sites and what he knew of other suspected killings. Shermantine refused.
The jury of five men and seven women deliberated for more than four days on penalty and returned a verdict of death in March 2001. Testa had said only the day before that he feared the jury might deadlock. "He was a pig from the beginning to even offer it but he got what he deserved," said Chevy's mother. The Department of Corrections received him from Santa Clara County on May 18, 2001, as a condemned prisoner, and he was held on death row at San Quentin.
Herzog was tried separately, also in Santa Clara County after a change of venue. In 2001 a jury convicted him of the murders of Vanderheiden, King and Cavanaugh and found him guilty as an accessory in Howell's death; it rejected the murder charge over Howell and rejected the death penalty. He was sentenced to 78 years. At trial he said he had hidden in the back seat of Shermantine's car while Shermantine attacked Vanderheiden, and that he had helped load her body into the trunk but did not know what was done with it afterward. His public defender, Peter Fox, called him a bystander led astray by a dominant friend: "He is guilty of having the world's worst friend."
In August 2004 the California Court of Appeal overturned Herzog's convictions, ruling that his statements to investigators had been illegally coerced because they had ignored his requests for a lawyer. Without the videotaped confession, prosecutors said, they had little evidence. In late 2004 Herzog pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Vanderheiden's death, to being an accessory in the three other killings, and to a drug charge connected with her, and received 14 years with credit for time already served.
With good-behavior credit, the prison system could no longer hold him by 2010. Several counties, San Joaquin among them, refused to take him. On September 18, 2010, he was paroled in Lassen County to a trailer on the grounds of High Desert State Prison near Susanville, under GPS monitoring and a curfew. "There is no bigger injustice," Cyndi Vanderheiden's father said.
In January 2012 the Sacramento bounty hunter Leonard Padilla told Herzog that Shermantine was about to disclose an old well and two other sites. "I could hear him catch his breath when I mentioned the well," Padilla told the Associated Press. On January 16, 2012, Herzog was found hanged at his trailer; he was pronounced dead early the next morning, aged 46. Evidence at the scene was consistent with suicide, the Lassen County Sheriff's Office said.
"We just lost half of our knowledge base," Testa said. Cyndi's sister said it was the first chance she had had to say "rest in peace" for her sister.
Shermantine had made offers before. In December 2011 he again proposed to reveal the locations of victims in exchange for money, and on January 13, 2012, he called Testa collect. "He sounded genuine and wants to help," Testa said. Padilla promised him up to $33,000: $18,000 for the location of Chevy Wheeler's remains and $15,000 for Cyndi Vanderheiden's, according to the Lassen County Times. Shermantine said he wanted the money to pay off a restitution order of about $15,000 to $20,000 (reports differ), which kept him from buying small items such as candy bars in prison, and to buy headstones for his parents' graves. Testa said he was not trying to get off death row.
Searchers began digging on January 27, 2012, following hand-drawn maps from his cell. On February 9, specially trained dogs on loan from Santa Clara County led them to a skull and bones near land once owned by Shermantine's family in Calaveras County. Dental records identified the remains as Cyndi Vanderheiden. "There will be closure after that," her father said while awaiting DNA confirmation.
The next day the same dogs found a partial skull and bones on a wooded hillside nearby. Chevy's mother said the sheriff's office told her the remains were wrapped in a blanket where Shermantine had said they would be, and that the clothing appeared to match what Chevy had worn the day she vanished. "This is a happy day," she said. "We can finally have some closure." The family planned to cremate her and take her home to Tennessee. Days later she said the remains had been positively identified.
The third site was an abandoned well on an old cattle ranch near Linden, about 45 feet deep, where Shermantine said Herzog had put ten or more bodies. He reportedly called it "Herzog's boneyard." By February 13 searchers had found more than 300 human bones, with clothing, a purse and jewelry. By the next week about 1,000 bone fragments had come out of the well and gone to the state Department of Justice for DNA tests, and a sheriff's hotline for families of missing people had taken more than 50 calls.
The well had also been used to dump heavy objects and dead animals, so the bones were badly broken and mixed, said Sari Miller-Antonio, a forensic anthropologist at California State University, Stanislaus, who worked on them. She identified three females who appeared to have been teenagers when they died, as well as fetal remains. "I feel like I get to know them in a unique and very personal way," she said.
On March 30, 2012, San Joaquin County Sheriff Steve Moore announced that two of them were Kimberly Billy and JoAnn Hobson. The reports did not identify the third woman. In all, the FBI said later, Shermantine's information aided the recovery of five victims in February 2012, together with the fetus.
Shermantine blamed Herzog for the bodies in the well. By late February 2012 he had sent Padilla a letter saying Herzog was responsible for Hobson's death. In a letter to CBS13 in Sacramento dated February 14, 2012, he wrote: "Their (sic) have been nothing but lies. 90% are lies." In a third letter in March he wrote that he was "holding the best for last," and that he doubted Padilla would pay.
In May 2012 Shermantine gave CBS13 reporter Koula Gianulias a two-hour interview on death row. For 14 years he had blamed Herzog. At the end of the interview he said, "I had an active role." He added, "I'm sorry for the murders," and "My intention is not to cause all this pain." Asked whether he would confess to specific killings in a book he said he was writing, he said, "Some of them, I'm gonna have to."
Cyndi Vanderheiden's father was unmoved. "He'll never get any forgiveness as far as I'm concerned," he told CBS.
Efforts to move Shermantine from San Quentin into investigators' custody, under heavy guard, so he could point to sites in person stalled when a local sheriff objected. In July 2012 the state Senate unanimously passed AB 2357, a bill giving the corrections secretary authority to release him temporarily, under guard, to help find remains, until January 1, 2013. Senator Elaine Alquist, who carried it, said new searches could reopen "as many as 72 missing persons cold cases" in up to 21 Northern California counties. Governor Jerry Brown signed it. Assemblywoman Cathleen Galgiani, whose district included Linden, had written it and pressed the Department of Corrections to act. "I'm sick and tried of the department of corrections dragging their feet while my families in my district suffer," she said in August.
Shermantine was taken from San Quentin to San Joaquin County under guard in August 2012. Padilla said Shermantine pointed out four wells in one open field, was fairly confident remains would be found there but not certain, and enjoyed the fresh air. He had been working at night, on drugs, in the dark, Padilla said, which affected what he remembered. By then the bounty hunter had paid him, by a Fox News account, under a $28,000 arrangement.
FBI agents surveyed a field off Flood Road in September 2012, about half a mile east of the well where Hobson and Billy had been found. Among the families following the search was Phil Martin's. Martin, a carpenter, had disappeared on September 30, 1993, after dropping his wife off on his way to work in Stockton, and his children believed he had crossed paths with the two men. "Unfortunately, these people are thrown away like my dad, like garbage, and it's time to bring him home," his daughter said.
Preparation at a second Flood Road well began on January 7, 2013, and hand excavation on January 17. The FBI said the site Shermantine had named, which he gave a 70 percent chance of holding remains, lay about 200 yards from one of two wells on that stretch; landowners said there were no wells under a culvert or a driveway, the other spots he had described. Shermantine wrote to CBS13 that the FBI was digging in the wrong place on someone else's "BS information."
On February 21, 2013, the FBI ended the dig. Its team had removed all the fill from a hand-dug well nearly 100 feet deep and found only animal bones and trash. It was the third FBI search based on Shermantine's information; earlier ones had looked at a backyard garbage pit and a former orchard. Herbert Brown, the special agent in charge in Sacramento, said that since February 2012 Shermantine's claims had "lacked necessary specificity" and that "He now refuses to meet with us, stymieing future investigation and excavation."
The way the first well was dug became a grievance. JoAnn Hobson's mother sued San Joaquin County and Sheriff Moore in federal court, saying deputies had mishandled her daughter's remains by digging them out with heavy equipment in 2012. In January 2014 U.S. District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. heard arguments over who held rights to the remains, the sheriff or the mother.
In early 2020 a farmer checking a well with a camera before leasing it saw what looked like a bone, and Sheriff Pat Withrow said his office would work out how to recover it lawfully. Of the 2012 excavation under his predecessor, he said, "I feel it was handled very badly." Galgiani, by then a state senator, said Shermantine had assured her there were many more victims, though he did not remember names or details. No outcome of that inquiry was reported.
Governor Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on executions in 2019, and California has carried out none since 2006. As the state moved condemned prisoners out of San Quentin, Shermantine was transferred to California State Prison, Sacramento, in Folsom, by May 2024. His lawyer declined to comment then because his appeal was still pending. Vanderheiden's father said, "We have no justice. We don't have any closure, because he's still alive." The California Supreme Court's minutes for May 22, 2025, show the automatic appeal, People v. Shermantine, S097668, still in briefing.
On September 17, 2026, at about 6 p.m., a doctor pronounced Shermantine dead at the prison's central health building. He was 60. The Sacramento County Coroner's Office was to determine the cause. San Joaquin County District Attorney Ron Freitas named the four victims in the convictions, Cyndi Vanderheiden, Chevelle "Chevy" Wheeler, Howard King III and Paul Cavanaugh, and said: "While Wesley Shermantine's death marks the final chapter of his legal sentence, it doesn't erase the pain left behind." The reports of his death did not say what became of the pending appeal.
The number of victims. Shermantine was convicted of four murders. The remains of four more people and a fetus were recovered in 2012 from sites he mapped, but he was never charged over them. Witnesses said he boasted of 18 to 22 killings, or 19; Herzog said more than two dozen; the Associated Press in 2012 cited investigators who said the pair may have killed as many as 20; the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2026 that investigators believed the figure was anywhere from 12 to 72. The figure of 72 traces in the reporting to Senator Alquist's 2012 estimate of missing persons cold cases that new searches might reopen, not to a count of proven deaths.
Who did the killing. Each man blamed the other. Herzog's account was given in interviews a court later ruled coerced, and he pleaded only to manslaughter and accessory charges. Shermantine blamed Herzog for years, then said in 2012 that he had "an active role" without saying which killings.
Other cases. Testa said Shermantine was a suspect in killings in Utah and Nevada; none was charged. ABC7 reported that the pair were examined as possible suspects in the disappearance of Michaela Garecht, 9, of Oakland, an investigation that led to the 2020 arrest of a different man. Phil Martin's family believes he was a victim. None of these links has been proven.
1984: Shermantine and Herzog graduate from Linden High School.
September 1984: Henry Howell killed in Hope Valley; investigators later link the two men; Herzog's accessory verdict is overturned in 2004.
1984: Kimberly Billy, 19, disappears.
November 1984: Howard King III and Paul Cavanaugh shot to death in a car west of Stockton.
1985: JoAnn Hobson, 16, disappears from Stockton.
October 16, 1985: Chevelle "Chevy" Wheeler, 16, disappears after leaving with Shermantine.
November 14, 1998: Cyndi Vanderheiden, 25, disappears after leaving a bar with both men.
1999: Shermantine's repossessed car is examined; her blood is found in it.
March 17, 1999: Shermantine and Herzog arrested.
2000: Trial opens in Santa Clara County.
February 14, 2001: Convicted of four murders.
March 2001: Jury returns a death verdict.
May 18, 2001: Received by CDCR as a condemned prisoner.
2001: Herzog convicted of three murders and as an accessory; sentenced to 78 years.
August 2004: Court of Appeal overturns Herzog's convictions; he later pleads guilty to voluntary manslaughter and accessory charges for 14 years.
September 18, 2010: Herzog paroled to a trailer at High Desert State Prison.
January 16, 2012: Herzog found hanged.
February 9 and 10, 2012: Remains of Vanderheiden and Wheeler found in Calaveras County.
February 2012: About 1,000 bone fragments recovered from a well near Linden.
March 30, 2012: Remains of Kimberly Billy and JoAnn Hobson identified.
May 2012: Shermantine tells CBS13, "I had an active role."
July 2012: State Senate passes AB 2357.
August 2012: Shermantine taken out under guard to point out sites.
January 7 to February 21, 2013: FBI excavates a second well; no human remains found.
January 2014: Federal judge hears the suit by JoAnn Hobson's mother over the handling of her daughter's remains.
2019: Moratorium on executions.
May 2024: Moved to California State Prison, Sacramento.
May 22, 2025: Automatic appeal still in briefing before the California Supreme Court.
September 17, 2026: Dies on death row, aged 60.