The Speed Freak Killers

Wesley Howard Shermantine Jr. and Loren Joseph Herzog lived in a small-town neighborhood where there weren’t many other kids to play with. The two boys lived on the same road in Linden, California, and quickly became inseparable. Even when Loren and Wesley, who was known as “Wes”, grew older, they didn’t see any point in making new friends. Instead, they stuck with each other through their teenage years.

Even if Loren and Wes had decided to branch out and make friends, they wouldn’t have had much luck. Their favorite hobbies weren’t exactly friendly; they found a lot of joy in bullying other students at their high school, and usually spent their spare time drunk or high. When they graduated high school in 1984, they moved from Linden to Stockton, California, and got an apartment together, where they were free to abuse methamphetamine as much as they wanted to. 

At the time, Linden had a population of less than 2000 people. Everybody knew everyone else’s business - and the rest of Linden’s permanent residents were well aware of Loren and Wes’ reputation as heavy drinkers and methamphetamine users. It didn’t matter what else was going on in their lives - even when they were in romantic relationships with women, or when Wes married and had several children, their first priorities were always drugs, and each other. Despite now living in Stockton, they regularly went to the Linden Inn bar to drink - and to talk to Kim Vanderheiden, the daughter of the bar’s owner, with whom Loren had a brief romantic fling. In 1998, Kim Vanderheiden’s sister, Cyndi, was seen walking out of the Linden Inn with Loren and Wes. After that, she was never seen again. 

For investigators, it was like they’d been handed two suspects on a silver platter. Loren and Wes had an incredibly unsavory reputation, and multiple witnesses placed them leaving the bar with Cyndi before her disappearance. When no signs of Cyndi turned up, the investigation continued into early 1999 until Wes’ car was repossessed. The San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department were able to search the vehicle, and found human blood inside. While the blood was being tested to confirm that it belonged to Cyndi Vanderheiden, the Sheriff’s investigation zeroed in on Loren, who was believed to be Wes’ accomplice.

During extensive questioning, Loren eventually folded and started revealing Wes’ criminal activities. However, he didn’t provide details about Cyndi’s disappearance - instead, he began incriminating Wes in other crimes that he had never been connected to. He told investigators that, in 1994, he and Wes had been vacationing in Utah when Wes shot and killed a man who was out hunting. The San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department reached out to the Utah police and asked if they had any cases that might match the details Loren had revealed. As it turned out, they did - a hunter had been shot to death in 1994, and his murder remained unsolved.

The Utah hunter wasn’t the only murder that Loren started talking about. In September 1984, 41-year-old Henry Howell had been found dead in his parked car. The case had gone cold, and Henry’s murder had been unsolved for more than a decade. According to Loren, Wes was the killer. They had driven past Henry while he was parked off the side of Highway 88, and Wes had pulled the car over, shot Henry dead with his own gun, and robbed him. Almost exactly a year after Henry Howell’s murder, the naked body of 24-year-old Robin Armtrout was found on a creek bank close to Linden. Loren confessed that Wes had killed Robin, too.

But Loren hadn’t just incriminated Wes in these crimes - by admitting that he had been there at every murder and had done nothing to stop it, he had also incriminated himself. In March 1999, both Loren and Wes were arrested, and each man faced multiple murder charges. Both of their trials took place in 2001, and despite being friends for decades, both men relied on one strategy in court: blaming absolutely everything on the other one, and maintaining their own innocence.

Loren was found guilty of three out of the five murder counts against him, and sentenced to 78 years in prison. Meanwhile, Wes was found guilty of four murders, including the killing of a 16-year-old girl named Chevy Wheeler, who had disappeared after telling her friends that she was going to hang out with Wes at his cabin.

The witness testimonies at Wes’ trial were brutal. Five different victims told the jury about how they had been violently sexually assaulted by him, including his own sister. One of the victims told the jury that Wes had rear-ended her car and then held a knife to her throat in an attempt to kidnap her. He managed to get her inside his vehicle, and she only escaped by jumping out of the moving car and running for her life. Wes’ ex-wife shared stories of the times that she had been violently abused by Wes, even when she was carrying their children. From the physical evidence against Wes, and testimony after testimony proving his character, there was no doubt in the jury’s mind that he could never be released. While Loren escaped with a lengthy jail sentence, Wes was sentenced to death.

In 2004, all of Loren’s convictions were overturned after the appeals court ruled that all but one of his confessions had been coerced. The only confession that the court believed was legitimate was for the murder of Cyndi Vanderheiden - but a retrial never occurred. In exchange for a guilty plea for accessory to murder and voluntary manslaughter, Loren’s sentence was reduced, and he only served 11 years jail time. 

Meanwhile, on death row, Wes was strategically revealing more information about his crimes. He sent his sister several letters, telling her that more bodies could be found in an old well near their hometown. The Sheriff’s department investigated the well, but they initially saw no need to investigate - the property owner told them that the wells had been sealed for years, long before any of Wes and Loren’s victims went missing.

After Loren was briefly paroled, a local bounty hunter reached out to him, telling him that Wes was going to lead the authorities to several locations where more victims had been buried. Knowing that he would be back in prison when more bodies were located, Loren committed suicide in 2012. 

After finding out about Loren’s death, Wes sent a letter to the media which heavily implied that Loren might have been the person who kidnapped 9-year-old Michaela Garecht in November 1988. Katrina Rodriguez, who had witnessed the kidnapping, stated, “I thought then - and I think now - [Loren Herzog] could be the kidnapper.I think there are features that look very much like the man…it seems like a strong lead.” However, none of the remains linked to Loren and Wes’ crimes matched Michaela’s DNA - and in 2020, a different man was arrested for Michaela’s kidnapping and murder.

That same year, investigators circled back to the abandoned well that Wes had pointed them towards. This time, they did search the well, finding more than a thousand fragments of human bone which belonged to three different people and one fetus. Two of the victims were identified as 16-year-old Joann Hobson and 19-year-old Kimberly Ann Billy, who had been missing for more than 30 years. The remaining person, and the fetus, were never identified. With the help of a letter that Wes had written to the bounty hunter, two more bodies were found - Cyndi Vanderheiden, and another unknown victim.

In 2013, the FBI announced that they would no longer be using Wes’ information to guide their search. They believed that Wes had been deliberately misleading them, and two potential burial sites that he had indicated showed no sign that human remains had ever been disposed of there. 

Despite Loren and Wes only being convicted of four murders each, the two men are widely believed to have at least 19 victims, possibly even more. In a statement that Wes sent into a news station in Sacramento, he claimed that the duo may have killed more than 70 people. For most of their adult lives, Wes and Loren appeared to have terrorized, assaulted and killed people for one main reason: they thought it was fun. Together, they went out on what they called “hunting trips” to find more victims, then disposing of the bodies by dumping them on remote hillsides, burying them underneath trailer parks, and dropping them down mine shafts.

While sexually assaulting one of his living victims, Wes held her ear against the ground of the trailer park she lived in, while telling her, “Listen to the heartbeats of people I’ve buried here. Listen to the heartbeats of families I’ve buried here.”