By admin 
Condemned serial killer Wesley Howard Shermantine, one of the notorious “Speed Freak Killers” of the 1980s and 1990s, died Thursday at a state prison near Folsom, where he was on the state’s death row, state corrections officials announced Friday. He was 60 years old.
Read more Wesley Shermantine, one of California’s ‘Speed Freak Killers,’ dies on Death Row at 60
Shermantine was pronounced dead about 6 p.m. Thursday at California State Prison, Folsom’s central medical facility, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials said in a statement. The Sacramento County Coroner’s Office will determine the cause of death.
Shermantine was one of 563 condemned inmates in the California state prison system.
Shermantine and Loren Herzog were the pair of methamphetamine-fueled serial killers known as the “Speed Freak Killers,” suspected of killing more than 70 people in San Joaquin County.
The pair were convicted of murdering four people and were sentenced to die for the killings. In 2012, Sacramento bounty hunter Leonard Padilla persuaded Shermantine, then on San Quentin’s death row, to turn over maps showing locations where he and Herzog had buried their victims. Shermantine also told Padilla about a well where human remains were found.
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Herzog’s murder convictions had been overturned. He was on parole after his 2010 release from prison on voluntary manslaughter chargess when he died by suicide outside High Desert State Prison near Susanville in 2012. Herzog was 46.
Shermantine’s maps led investigators to hundreds of bone fragments in Calaveras County. Corrections officials in August 2012 took the rare step of escorting him under heavy guard to suspected burial sites to help investigators search for additional remains. DNA testing by the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office positively identified two of the victims, Cyndi Vanderheiden and Chevy Wheeler, whose remains were found days apart in 2012 in Calaveras County.
San Joaquin County District Attorney Ron Frietas said his office stood with the families of Vanderheiden, Wheeler, murder victims Howard King III and Paul Cavanaugh, and “everyone whose lives were shattered by the ‘Speed Freak Killers.’”
“For decades, these families have carried a heavy, unbearable grief,” Frietas said in a statement Friday. “While Wesley Shermantine’s death marks the final chapter of his legal sentence, it doesn’t erase the pain left behind. We stand with the victims’ loved ones today, and we will never forget the strength they’ve shown throughout this long nightmare.”
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This story was originally published September 18, 2026 at 12:00 PM.