Hunting The Ultimate Kill

by Jack Rosewood

  Although the Vanderheidens still owned the Linden Inn in 1998, Cyndi did not spend much time there during that period. According to her friends and family, when she was not working, she spent most of her time with family.

  “She spent a lot of time with my parents. She didn’t really go out on dates that much. Her relaxing time was sunbathing or just hanging out with her cat and her nieces.” said Cyndi’s sister, Kim.

  To her family and friends, it seemed as though Cyndi Vanderheiden had turned a new page in her life and had left behind the chaos of her drug use forever. Because of her new attitude, her family was not in the least suspicious when she stopped by the Linden Inn for a few drinks on the evening of November 13, 1998.

  “Let It Go Naturally”

  November 13, 1998, happened to be a Friday, which meant that the Linden Inn would be the most happening place in town. Since it was “Friday the 13th”, many bars were offering “unlucky” drink specials in an effort to draw larger crowds. The Linden Inn was packed that night with patrons trying their hand at singing karaoke. Most of the people there seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  Two customers who were not singing, but instead, were drinking heavily, were Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog.

  Shermantine and Herzog began their weekend late in the afternoon by smoking meth and drinking a few beers at Shermantine’s home, before heading to the Linden Inn. It was just another night for the duo, who according to Herzog, had not planned to kill anyone that night. They planned to do a little partying, possibly sell some meth, and perhaps entice a woman to have sex with them.

  The duo meant to go with the regular plan—Herzog would do most of the talking and Shermantine would offer meth to the woman when the time was right.

  But as has been revealed numerous times in this book, the Speed Freak Killers committed many of their murders without planning and forethought. If the time and place were right, Shermantine and Herzog would strike.

  More than likely, the duo did not do well that night at the bar, because by 1998 their reputations had preceded them. After years of bragging about committing acts of violence, it was little wonder that most people in Linden wanted nothing to do with the pair—both men and women avoided the two like the plague. By the late 1990s,. Shermantine in particular, had become a pariah in San Joaquin County because a handful of women had accused him of sexual assault. Although more than one report was made to the San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department, charges were never brought against Shermantine due to a lack of evidence.

  The only people who would have anything to do with Herzog and Shermantine by this point were drug users, prostitutes, and those who had known them for a number of years—and most of those people also tried to avoid the pair.

  So the two kept drinking until Loren Herzog spotted Cyndi Vanderheiden.

  Herzog said hello to Cyndi and invited her to sit with him and Shermantine.

  She accepted his invitation.

  Cyndi’s decision to join the serial killer duo is not as strange as one might initially think. Although she knew the two from bars around town and she was familiar with their violent braggadocio, she, like her father, thought that it was all harmless talk. After all, she had known both Shermantine and Herzog for most of her life, and they never assaulted her or anyone she knew.

  Cyndi’s sister Kim also knew the pair well, especially Herzog.

  It is now known that Loren Herzog’s wife was not the only woman in his life. Besides the numerous women and girls that he raped and murdered, Herzog also had consensual sex with a number of women during the course of his marriage. One of the women he had an affair with was Kim Vanderheiden.

  Kim and Loren were close in age and often moved in the same social circles in San Joaquin County. The two developed a friendship that later became a romantic affair while Herzog was married. Eventually, they called off the affair amicably with Kim moving on and getting married.

  Loren went back to his wife and raped and killed more women on the side.

  When Herzog approached Cyndi on the evening of November 13, she had nothing to fear; at least that is what she thought.

  Cyndi Vanderheiden had no idea that Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog had been rebuffed by several women that night, and they were working on “Plan B,” which to them usually involved abduction, rape, torture, and murder.

  It was beginning to look like Cyndi Vanderheiden was the Speed Freak Killers’ Plan B.

  According to Herzog, the trio had a few drinks and engaged in trivial conversation before Shermantine moved the discussion to his primary area of interest—crystal meth.

  Although Cyndi had been free of meth for several months, the power of the drug was still strong and the temptation was too great when she was offered meth for free. The fact that she had been drinking also no doubt lowered Cyndi’s inhibitions.

  Cyndi agreed to meet the Speed Freak Killers at a local cemetery, ironically, where they would transition their party from drinking to smoking meth.

  The events of what followed have been pieced together by homicide investigators through a combination of Herzog’s confession, eye witness reports, and the available forensic evidence.

  Cyndi left the bar in her own car, with Shermatine and Herzog following in Shermatine’s car. The trio ended up at the local cemetery in Linden where they smoked meth and drank a few more beers. After partying for a while, Shermantine decided to make his move.

  When Cyndi refused Shermantine’s advances, he punched her a number of times and pulled out a knife and put it to her throat. Shermantine forced Cyndi to give him oral sex at knife point.

  Although it is unknown if Shermantine planned to kill Cyndi Vanderheiden as soon as he saw her that night, her fate was sealed when she refused his sexual advances. Wesley Shermantine is known to have had sex with many women over the years, primarily prostitutes and drug addicts, but few who refused his advances are known to have lived.

  Once he raped Cyndi, Shermantine knew that he had to eliminate her as a witness, As he cut her throat with his knife, Shermantine whispered, “Let it go naturally.”

  With Cyndi’s blood soaked copse sprawled out on the ground of the cemetery, Shermantine ordered Herzog to help him load her into the trunk of his car. Shermantine disposed of her in a decommissioned mine in Calaveras County.

  The Speed Freak Killers returned home to their wives and children like nothing unusual had happened.

  At first, Cyndi Vanderheiden’s parents thought nothing had happened.

  When John returned home from the bar that night, he did not notice that Cyndi’s car was not in the driveway. When he looked out the next morning and her car was not there, he was not immediately alarmed.

  “I looked out and Cyndi’s car was gone and so I thought she already went work,” said John Vanderheiden.

  After drinking coffee and having breakfast, John left the house to run errands. While driving, he saw something that alarmed him.

  “When I passed the cemetery I saw her car,” recalled John.

  John knew that there was absolutely no reason for Cyndi to park her car in the town’s cemetery, especially since it was so close to their home. He also knew that the cemetery had a notorious reputation for being a local drug haven. John alerted his wife and daughter to the situation and they began making phone calls to all of Cyndi’s friends and acquaintances.

  No one had seen her since the previous evening at the Linden Inn.

  The last two people she was seen talking to were Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog. When John Vanderheiden learned that, his heart sank. He knew that the two men were thugs and that if they were the last people to see his daughter alive, then something was terribly wrong.

  After a day went by and Cyndi did not call, and none of her friends and family had heard from her, her parents went to the police.

  They filed a missing persons report with the Linden Police Department and the San Joaquin Sherriff’s Department, but the law enforcement authorities believed that Cy
ndi decided to leave for a few days without telling anyone. Police officers made some inquiries, but when they learned of Cyndi’s troubled background, their investigation quickly cooled.

  Perhaps she met a man or she wanted time alone. Or maybe she was in Stockton using meth.

  But the attitude of the authorities quickly changed when they learned that Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog were the last two people with Cyndi. It was not a good sign. Shermantine was still the prime suspect in the disappearance of Chevy Wheeler more than thirteen years prior.

  The police began an intense surveillance of the Speed Freak Killers. In the meantime, the Vanderheidens did everything they could to find Cyndi.

  The Vanderheidens held more than one emotionally-charged press conference when they asked anyone with information about the disappearance of their daughter to come forward. They hired attorneys, private investigators, and media savvy individuals to expand their efforts.

  Within days of Cyndi’s disappearance, missing posters with Cyndi’s picture began to appear all over San Joaquin County, including in front of the homes of the Speed Freak Killers.

  The community’s suspicions were quickly turning toward Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog.

  The Vanderheidens organized a major search of the fields, wooded areas, and hills around Linden. More than 500 people showed up for the search, some with dogs and horses, but they could not locate any sign of the missing woman.

  Finally, the Vanderheidens offered a $20,000 reward for information that would lead to her discovery, dead or alive.

  As the Vanderheiden family actively searched for Cyndi, local law enforcement knew with almost certainty, who was responsible for her disappearance. The San Joaquin Sherriff’s Department became the lead agency in the investigation of Shermantine and Herzog, as it gathered evidence in multiple cases against the two men.

  Unfortunately, there was very little physical evidence that tied either Shermantine or Herzog to any of the murders. Most of their victims were dumped in unknown locations. Even if the remote dumpsites were located, the amount of extant forensic evidence would be minimal due to deterioration from the elements. In the cases where the bodies were left at the crime scenes, the killers used guns. They had little to no physical contact with the victims.

  The investigators needed something, anything, to break the case wide open.

  Instead of pressuring Shermantine and Herzog with visible, round- the-clock surveillance, the authorities decided instead, to watch the suspects from a distance and wait for them to make a mistake.

  At this point, Shermantine and Herzog maintained a low profile and played it cool. They only left their homes when they needed to, and they avoided the media and crowds. As the Speed Freak Killers did their best to avoid notice, the scant bit of physical evidence from their earlier crimes was being analyzed. The Chevy Wheeler investigation was reopened in 1998, and the San Joaquin District Attorney’s office was quietly building a case against Shermantine

  Had time and technology finally caught up with the Speed Freak Killers?

  Chapter 5:

  The Authorities Close In

  As the legal noose tightened around the Speed Freak Killers’ necks, they went about their lives as though nothing was wrong. Both men continued to work. They hit the local bars and continued to smoke meth, but they kept a considerably lower profile.

  Unbeknownst to the Speed Freak Killers, forensic technology had made great advances that were ultimately to be their undoing.

  When Wesley Shermantine abducted and murdered Chevy Wheeler in 1985, the only evidence the police had of foul play were a few drops of blood discovered in the Shermantine family’s cabin that matched Chevy’s blood type. The evidence was enough to make Shermantine the prime suspect in her disappearance, but was far from enough to bring charges against him.

  In the nearly decade and a half after Chevy’s murder, major strides were made in the area of DNA profiling that allowed her case to be reopened.

  DNA, which is an acronym for Deoxyribonucleic acid, the building block of living organisms, was first identified by Swiss scientist Friedrich Miescher in 1869. Once Miescher identified DNA, other scientists used the knowledge to study inherited and genetic diseases and disorders. The identification of DNA helped the medical field tremendously in the first few decades of the twentieth century, but most experts thought there was little use for it in the field of criminology.

  This attitude persisted until British scientist Alex Jefferys made an incredible discovery in his Leicester, United Kingdom laboratory in 1987. Jefferys discovered that each person has a unique DNA code that can be “fingerprinted” in much the same process as actual fingerprinting.

  If they were large enough, DNA profiles could be culled from blood, saliva, and semen samples.

  DNA profiling was first used in a criminal investigation to help capture British murderer and rapist Colin Pitchfork in 1987, which set the stage for DNA profiling to be used in crime labs across the world.

  After the successful prosecution of Colin Pitchfork, the Federal Government of the United States began using DNA to capture and prosecute suspects who had broken federal laws.

  It would take more time for each of the individual states to adopt DNA profiling.

  Despite the major leap forward that discovery of DNA profiling gave to police work, the process took several more years to be perfected. Very few police departments had labs capable of conducting DNA testing because the process was very expensive in its first decade. The process took several months to complete in its early years, and large samples were needed to obtain an accurate DNA profile.

  The blood drops taken from the Shermantine cabin were too small to get a DNA profile until the process had been improved in the late 1990s.

  Two Cases Converge

  The case of Chevy Wheeler’s disappearance was never far from the mind of San Joaquin County Deputy District Attorney Thomas Testa. When he attained his position in the late 1990s, one of the first things he did was to reopen the file of Chevy Wheeler’s case. Having children himself, he was immediately struck by the ability of someone to be so cruel as to take a young girl from her family. Testa began to empathize with the Wheeler family, and after having spoken with them on a number of occasions, he grew more determined to catch Chevy’s killer. Testa began reading through all of the files pertaining to Chevy Wheeler’s disappearance, and he interviewed investigators who were still in the sheriff’s department about the case. He also re-interviewed some of Chevy’s friends who were still living in the area. Once he assembled all of the evidence, Testa was able to paint a more complete picture of what actually happened to Chevy Wheeler on that fall day in 1985.

  It was a terrifying picture that depicted Chevy Wheeler as a murder victim and her supposedly friend, Wesley Shermantine, as her killer.

  Testa believed that Chevy met Shermantine that day under circumstances that were for the most part innocent, albeit, a bit mischievous. Shermantine manipulated Chevy’s trust, and when he did not get what he wanted, he killed her.

  In 1998, the science of DNA profiling had advanced significantly, but the process was still extremely expensive and only the largest and most funded police departments had their own labs for the process. Neither the Stockton Police Department nor the San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department had its own DNA testing lab, so they were forced to send DNA samples to another agency’s lab. Most law enforcement agencies at that time sent samples to the Department of Justice Crime Lab in Washington. Since the process was costly and slow in 1998, authorities were recommended by the Department of Justice to submit DNA only if they had a solid suspect.

  Testa, like most members of law enforcement in San Joaquin County, knew that Wesley Shermantine fit the crime.

  “I was on the homicide investigation team and that Chevy Wheeler case reopened as DNA became more and more acceptable in the courts,” said Testa. “It was decided to send those blood drops that were recovered from Wesley Shermantine’s pa
rents’ cabin to the Depart of Justice for DNA analysis and the preliminary results came back that it was Chevy Wheeler’s DNA and that would be enough to file charges . . . but I chose not to file it until we got the full results.”

  Testa’s reticence to file murder charges against Shermantine allowed the serial killer to claim his last victim—Cyndi Vanderheiden.

  When Testa learned that Cyndi Vanderheiden went missing the same night she was seen with Shermantine and Herzog, he felt sick to his stomach. He was determined to take the serial killers off the streets. He used the resources of the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department to conduct an aggressive investigation that ultimately resulted in the arrests of Shermatine and Herzog.

  By the beginning of 1999, the investigations of the disappearances of Chevy Wheeler and Cyndi Vanderheiden had coalesced into one that was pursued by a task force made up of the San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department, the Stockton Police Department, and the Linden Police Department. Individual officers from other agencies also added their expertise to help catch the Speed Freak Killers—human resources and funding were no longer obstacles to take Chevy Wheeler’s and Cyndi Vanderheiden’s killers off the streets.

  The hands-off approach that investigators employed in the weeks just after Cyndi disappeared were replaced by an aggressive investigation—it was common to see police cars parked in front of both Shermantine’s and Herzog’s homes, and word slipped out that the two could be arrested at any time.

  The two men were also asked by investigators with the San Joaquin Sherriff’s Department to give them interviews. Shermantine refused to give a statement, but Herzog agreed to speak with detectives on November 20, 1998.

  The interview was short and Herzog appeared uncomfortable, as he repeatedly shifted in his seat. The detectives got right to business and asked if he had anything to do with Cyndi’s disappearance, or if he knew what happened to her. Herzog admitted to seeing Cyndi that night, but he claimed that his conversation with her was brief and that he did not really remember much after that.