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One-half of the notorious serial killing tag team, the Speed Freak Killers, has died in a California prison.
Authorities confirmed that Wesley Shermantine, 60, died of natural causes on Sept. 17.
His childhood friend and partner in crime, Loren Herzog, killed himself in 2012, as the walls began closing in. Cops suspected the pair murdered at least 20 men and women in the Golden State’s Central Valley.
“He got his punishment that he deserves right now,” victim Cyndi Vanderheiden’s father, John Vanderheiden, told ABC10, adding, “Shermantine shouldn’t have lived that long.”
Began by killing animals as kids
Shermantine and Herzog grew up together in the small San Joaquin County town of Linden, just east of Stockton, in the 1970s. Locally, the two friends were known for their raging methamphetamine addictions and abusive personalities.
Ominously, as children, Shermantine and Herzog began torturing and killing animals before moving on to hunting humans. The Speed Freaks passed their time exploring abandoned mines, wells and other locales where they could dump bodies.
From the mid-1980s to their 1999 arrest, more than a dozen people in the pair’s orbit mysteriously disappeared.
It was the slaying of Cyndi Vanderheiden, 25, in 1998 that drew the interest of cops to the two methheads. She was last seen leaving the bar at the Linden Inn with two men. The pair were identified as Shermantine and Herzog.
Cops discovered victim’s blood
When cops searched Shermantine’s car, they discovered blood and it matched Vanderheiden’s. Sometimes in detective work, two plus two does equal four and cops began pairing other missing persons with the two suspected killers.
At a well in a rural area outside Linden, investigators discovered more than 1,000 bone fragments.
Herzog and Shermantine were finally arrested in 1999. Shermantine was sentenced to death, but Herzog had his convictions overturned in 2004 when an appeals court determined some of his confessions had been coerced.
Californians exploded in rage when Herzog was granted parole — but there was a problem. No California county would allow the serial killer to reside within their boundaries.
For the rest of his life, home for Herzog was a trailer parked outside a prison in Susanville in northern California near the Nevada border.
Herzog killed himself when pal spilled beans
But there was no happily ever after for the Speed Freak Killer. Herzog learned that his partner in crime planned to reveal where the pair had dumped their victims’ bodies, which would mean back to prison, so he killed himself.
Shermantine had been on death row at San Quentin but the death penalty moratorium in the state allowed him to be moved to the California State Prison in Sacramento. That county’s coroner’s office is expected to determine the exact cause of death.
He made a deal with a California bounty hunter to provide directions to the killers’ dumping grounds. Shermantine wanted more creature comforts in his death row cell. Those demands? A TV and $33,000 to pay off his restitution order and purchase headstones for his parents’ graves.
The Speed Freak Killer kept his part of the bargain and cops followed crude maps he had drawn in his cell. He called the burial grounds “Loren’s Boneyard.” There, they dug up bones, skull fragments and teeth belonging to multiple victims.
bhunter@postmedia.com
@HunterTOSun