Original subtitles

Yeah, it's at 9:00, so let's head over.

All right.

Well, good morning. Thank you all for coming today.

So we wanted to touch base with you and-- and our community,

uh, to address an issue that's come up in the past month.

Uh, we were alerted

by one of our citizens here in the community.

Uh, one of our farmers put a camera down a well,

and while checking the well,

uh, the camera went down hundreds of feet,

uh, into the water, and they spotted something

on a camera that they put down there

that appeared to be a bone.

In an abundance of cautiousness

with what's been going on in the past,

we're going to continue our investigation

to determine, uh, whether it is an animal or human.

As soon as we find out what it is,

you guys will find out what it is.

It's found-- it's found in a well

in, uh, San Joaquin County

is all we're gonna give at this time,

just in case it is a human bone.

- That's correct. - Okay.

We have, uh, personally not reached out

to, uh, Mr. Shermantine at this time.

Uh, as of this morning,

uh, I reached out to as many family members as we could

who had been victimized by the Speed Freak Killers in the past.

We're gonna be diligent and work hard and make sure

that, uh, we do whatever it takes to get the answers

that-- that need to be found

to help, uh, all of our families that are--

that have been looking for their loved ones.

So thank you all for coming today.

We-- we sure appreciate it. Thank you.

Hi, good morning, my name is Detective Shelvay.

I'm calling from the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office.

How are you today?

I'm calling in regards to Wesley Shermantine.

He's an inmate there.

We wanna inquire about monitoring his mail,

and I need to know what exactly I need to do,

uh, in regards to that process.

Thank you.

- Shelvay? - Yes.

Let's go pop in over there now.

Espresso. My precious.

How many shots are in that thing?

Just one. It's just an Americano.

Maybe you should only have half a shot.

I'm gonna-- I'm gonna have an energy drink later.

- Shh! - Oh, God.

Oh, that's right, they have all the new guys training.

Or testing, I guess.

Yeah, the agility.

Oh, the Academy. Don't you miss it?

No.

When I went through it, oh, my God.

Every day, "You're a girl.

- You don't belong here." - Mm-hmm.

And they weren't all that way, just there was,

you know, like-- I don't know.

But there was a lot that were

because they were still of the old school

'cause all those guys had to work in the jail

for, like, you know, seven, eight years

before they could even come out on the street.

So, you know, they were already disgruntled

and pissed off by the time they came out,

and then-- then, you know, like,

I was the first trainee for my guy.

Every day was like, "Hey, this isn't for you.

This isn't--" You know?

So, but I sucked it up and got through it.

I got, like, a half-assed apology, like, ten years later.

And I was like, "Whoa, dude, is that an apology?

He goes, "Oh, I wouldn't go that far."

I like it. I like it.

There's several different ways

to get to this location.

So it's really hard to, um--

- Control access. - Yeah.

And plus they're working in the-- in the vineyards here, so.

So there's, um, like, three telephone poles in a row,

kind of, and a small tree there.

That's right where it's at.

The stakes are very high.

Lots of pressure...

to get some answers for the families,

to find their loved ones and the ones that are missing

and have been missing for a very long time

that are believed to have been killed by them,

but, uh, their remains are still not located.

In our county and in the neighboring counties,

there's lots of wells.

A lot of those were dug in the 1800s for cattle ranching.

A lot of these old wells

aren't even documented with, like, the county office,

and so attempting to find these undocumented wells

out in these thousands of acres of fields is difficult.

A lot of these locations are private properties,

and without consent,

there's little that we can do without a search warrant.

And in order to get a search warrant,

you need probable cause.

With probable cause, you need to have

substantial evidence or corroborating evidence.

So it's not that easy.

Shermantine and Herzog grew up out in the Linden area.

In the '70s and the '80s, it was, you know,

typical for kids and teenagers

to be outside and go explore.

You're talking several large, large counties

that they had access to, and a lot of it rural.

So it allows you to do things in secrecy.

I went to Linden High School.

I graduated in '85.

Shermantine and Herzog graduated in '84.

Well, the eucalyptus trees,

that's where a lot of the farm kids used to party.

I know I seen Shermantine and Herzog

over there when I was younger.

Tough kids, you know? Especially Wesley.

Rather be friends than enemies.

These could be 1800s, probably.

Well, you can see a rock, how long it takes this rock

for it to get down there.

It's pretty deep.

It's got to be well over 100, 120 feet at least.

I heard stories.

That's why I was wondering about this one.

Waverly Road there goes across there.

I think they thought, "Well, man, that'd be a perfect spot."

You know, people could drive in by there.

We never had no locks on them gates back there.

So nobody could see you coming in there.

I don't even try to think about it,

because there's no telling what might be in there.

- You know? - You never know.

I've heard a lot of stuff, but I mean, it's--

it's hard to say if they're true or not, you know?

After the trial was over,

the bailiff comes up to me and he goes,

"Miss Shelley, I have a note for you."

And it was from Wesley.

And he asked me

if I would fill out a visiting form

so that I would come up and see him.

And I'm like, "Mom, you don't need to go.

You don't got to go to this guy. You don't got to do this."

"No, I'm gonna do it."

To go face to face,

knee to knee, toe to toe

with this killer

and strike up a rapport with him?

Amazing.

I had no idea what I was coming into

when I first met him.

I told him, "Wesley, you need to tell

where these other victims are

so that the families can have some rest and some peace."

I said, "You need to get this off of your soul."

"To think that I will pass away

and never be able to find my child,"

I said, "that haunts me."

And after I had talked to him about that,

boom, within a week he was talking.

I know Chevy is there,

so hurry up and recover her,

because I wanna move on to Herzog's boneyard

where Joann Hobson is,

and many other unnamed victims from what Herzog said.

Then and only then will I tell where Cyndi is.

In December of 2011,

I received a call from a guy named Leonard Padilla,

who is known in Sacramento

and I guess around the country as a bounty hunter.

Leonard Padilla was kind of a bigger-than-life character,

and so when this started getting more media attention,

you know, Leonard kind of wanted to get involved.

Leonard likes to be in front of the camera.

Bounty hunter Leonard Padilla

agreed to pay Shermantine $30,000 for information

on where other victims might be buried.

Bounty hunter Leonard Padilla is paying

for Shermantine's information.

At least that way it keeps the Sheriff's Department

enthused and keeps their attention.

Leonard calls me

and wants me to vouch for him

so he can get onto a property

in Calaveras County

and dig for a Speed Freak Killer victim

named Chevy Wheeler.

There had been a newspaper reporter named Scott Smith

on The Stockton Record who had been doing research

on death row killers and writing to all of them.

And apparently when he wrote to Wesley Shermantine,

Shermantine wrote him back.

Wes says, "Hey, ten years ago,

there was this guy that wanted to give me money for bodies.

Can you see if that's still available?"

So Scott contacted Leonard,

Leonard-- Leonard called me,

and the three of us sat down and talked again.

"We'll offer money to you

if you give us locations of bodies."

So the whole motivation at the time was money.

Shermantine started sending maps

of where the victims were.

So when Leonard called me,

he had a map of where Chevy Wheeler was

and he wanted to go digging for her.

And then I got a call

from a prosecutor in San Joaquin County

who told me that he had received a call

from Wesley Shermantine who was trying to contact me.

I went in alone, said, "All right,

what do you want to talk to me about?"

He goes, "Well, I want to help locate victims."

"And why do you wanna do this?"

"Because, uh, I have an arrangement

with Leonard Padilla that he'll give me money."

"Is there any other reasons?" He goes, "Yes, there is."

Because his partner and friend,

Loren Herzog, who was out on parole,

would not accept any of Wesley's calls

or call Wesley back,

and this was really upsetting him.

And then I said, "Is there any other reason?"

And he goes, "Yes." He goes, "I would like--

I think it's the right thing to do to return the victims."

And I said, "Wesley, I am here because of that reason.

I don't care about your money. I don't care about Loren Herzog.

I care about the pain for the victims' families stopping."

I said, "Wesley...

nobody believes you anymore.

We have to find a way to prove that you can do this.

So what is the fastest recovery you think we can make?"

At that point, he told me he felt

the easiest and fastest recovery

would be a victim, Cyndi Vanderheiden.

Get ready.

I'm gonna tell all I know about Herzog and all his victims.

Sure, I'm gonna get paid as well.

Plus, I'll get immunity on any other cases of his.

But I must testify in court on Herzog,

which I've agreed to do.

Still wanna be free,

but some people will have closure.

There had been rumblings that Shermantine

was gonna blame more things on Loren,

that they were trying to cook up a new prosecution on him.

Because Leonard Padilla had made all this happen,

he wanted the satisfaction

of Herzog knowing that he was the one who did this.

So he called Herzog the following Tuesday.

Leonard said to me that he told Herzog,

"You better get your attorney again,

because you're going back for more."

I had a January vacation that year.

I came back and I had a phone message from him

that said he wanted to talk to me.

You know, I wish I'd been there when he called,

but I wasn't.

By the time the message reached me, he was dead.

Loren Herzog died...

- ...found hanged to death... - ...committed suicide.

He had apparently learned of Shermantine's agreement

to reveal the location of the pair's victims.

There was a suicide note to his family.

And I remember his father saying,

"Nobody can touch him now."

As far as I'm concerned, he is a devil.

I hope he went down in the bowels of hell

where he crawled out of.

That's because I'm sure that's where he's at.

And I'm sure all the other families feel the same way.

Loren has died,

and Wesley has drawn maps.

So it becomes this one-way vacuum in the Shermantine case

of just Shermantine saying all of these things,

and it just turns into this kind of circus

that he plays off of for quite a few years.

I guess you know Herzog could not face the facts

that I was gonna disclose his boneyard.

He took himself out.

Now, with Herzog dead,

I know I hold all the information.

This is what I don't do well with,

is the "hurry up and wait."

- You know? - That's all this is, too.

You know, my feelings were-- were mixed.

Nervous and excited at the same time.

How are we gonna do this properly

and that we do it right,

don't make a mistake...

and how is it possible that a human could be placed

in that well and that far deep?

That might lead us to another victim.

Last time, the other sheriff

didn't explain anything to anybody.

He just stayed quiet, which is his choice, but I think

that tends to let everybody's imagination run wild.

We're trying to do our best to conduct that search,

collect those bones...

which later deter-- determined

were-- were animal bones and not-- not human.

I think the mood was-- overall was we were kind of disappointed

because I wanted to find more remains

and find more victims.

I think a direct communication with Mr. Shermantine

would be beneficial in general,

even if he is trying to, um,

send us down a different path, the wrong path.

Um, I think it's still beneficial

because then those are areas that we can rule out.

I placed an "X" down brush line where Cyndi is.

I did not kill her, Leonard.

I buried her.

We arranged to bring Wesley out

so he could point out where bodies were.

I started getting calls from everyone, including the FBI,

saying that a San Joaquin County Sheriff

whose name was Steve Moore had stopped everything.

On January 30th, Moore called a news conference

and said Rinek shouldn't be involved in bringing Shermantine

into his county or any county for safety reasons.

I didn't know who had spoken to Mr. Shermantine.

I didn't know what their involvement was.

The only notice I got was there was a plan in place

to bring Mr. Shermantine here.

San Joaquin County Sheriff put the brakes on a plan

to bring Shermantine out from death row

to assist in the search of three rural properties.

Shermantine claims he buried close to a dozen victims there.

It could be up to 25.

He didn't trust

the California Department of Corrections

to transport Shermantine through his county safely,

and as a precaution for the safety of his citizens,

he was not gonna permit it to happen.

And for me, this was intolerable.

I-- I was going crazy. I mean, when you think you can

locate a victim, it's not routine business.

It's-- you do it until you don't do it.

This was an issue of the San Joaquin County Sheriff

not wanting to do the investigation,

even with Wesley giving us very clear directions

to where Cyndi Vanderheiden was.

You are to take Leonard Road a quarter mile.

There is a dirt road.

You will come to a locked steel gate.

To the left of the gate is a ravine.

Cyndi is six to ten feet inside that brush.

If no one is gonna take me to point out victims,

then this is the best I can do.

The area of searching for both Cyndi and Chevy at the time

was the property owned by Wes Shermantine's parents.

He was last out of custody March 18th, 1999,

and now we're in 2012.

So, you know, his memory of what the place

looked like back then, things have changed.

They had gotten a map from Shermantine.

It showed a gate on this road that we were going up on.

Of course, the sheriffs had it there too,

so they went up to the gate before we went there.

And you could see where they were digging around

a little bit, but they couldn't find anything.

Sheriff's office goes to this gate.

They don't find nothing.

"Oh, Wes is full of it. Wes is full of it."

So Rob Dick and John Vanderheiden go back up there.

Wes, he's focusing where Cyndi's location is

off of a gate on a fire road.

None of us knew that the gate moved about a mile.

I said, "This is not right," and we walked up

and I said, "There's where the gate is supposed to be."

So him and Rob take off, they go up to the gate.

They go 50 yards down the mountain.

They brought a dog in,

and as soon as the dog got there,

he hit on Cyndi Vanderheiden's remains.

Which confirmed what Wesley said.

He's telling the truth.

So they knew that they had found Cyndi right then.

Rob Dick and John Vanderheiden found Cyndi Vanderheiden.

The sheriff's office absolutely did not find Cyndi Vanderheiden.

Searchers dug up a human skull today.

The remains were found on a rural property in San Andreas.

And that's when they found the skull

and the jawbone and the leg bone.

And that's all they've ever told us that they found.

Finding out where Cyndi was was important to our family

because we needed the closure.

We should not have that-- that voice

in the back of our heads saying, "She's still alive."

Or, "She's dead, but we're never gonna know where she's at."

We needed to put her to rest.

I thought it was bad

when I lost my mother at 16, but...

this was worse.

It's a child.

I mean, she might have been an adult,

but she was still a-- she was still our child.

She had a cat named Topaz,

and when Cyndi first went missing,

the cat and I sat on that sofa

and looked out that window for days.

Actually, the day we brought her ashes home,

that evening, that cat died.

It's taken 13 years before someone believed me

that Herzog has more victims.

I buried Chevy Wheeler for Herzog in 1984, '85.

It was Herzog who took her to my parents' property.

Chevy lies six feet on the north side of that oak tree.

I buried her there,

fully clothed and three feet down.

Investigators uncovered a skull and bones

buried about three to six feet under

in the backyard of the former Shermantine estate.

The remains may be that of 16-year-old Chevy Wheeler,

the Stockton girl vanished in 1985.

I was at work.

It was on the 14th, Valentine's Day.

And, uh...

Ray had gotten the call

saying that it was her.

He called me on the phone

when I was just down the road.

And, boy, I just jammed.

90 miles an hour. We got home.

All we could do was just hug...

and thank God she was finally found.

We were gonna have a memorial for her

where all her friends-- her friends could go...

and, uh, say goodbye.

And, uh, they all showed up.

She had a lot of friends.

- Huh? - She had a lot of friends.

She had a lot of friends.

Boy, they didn't have enough seats to sit all the people.

I didn't realize she was quite that popular.

When we got done with the service,

we all wrote notes on balloons for Chevy,

good wishes for her, and, uh...

we all just let them go.

It was a sad day.

But it was a good day.

We were able to bring her home.

We've got a poster-sized picture of her

above the mantle with her name on it.

She'll be there the rest of her life. Our lives.

Thank you.

Now let's find the stuff.

Getting up to speed on this investigation takes months.

I've been a part of the unit for years,

and there's still details that I find out all the time.

Yes.

Part of that is listening to original interviews.

First things first, we're gonna look at these...

the interviews,

which are in the unlabeled one.

All right.

I'm looking for any new information

that we haven't come across again.

If there's new locations,

if he talks about any other victims.

We're also listening for what works with him,

what didn't work with him,

what things that we might be able to play off of later

- if we do interview him. - Yeah.

So this is the very first FBI interview that we're aware of

with Wesley Shermantine at San Quentin.

Yeah.

Yeah?

Shermantine seems very good about getting off-topic.

They do the whole building him up thing,

and then they also allow him to trail off onto these...

not so relevant stories about meth and stuff like that.

They're basically just allowing him to get comfortable talking.

Sort of squirrels off and they kind of follow him

and they don't really come back to,

"What exactly was that again that you were talking about?"

So it's interesting.

Well, regardless.

Yeah.

All right. Well--

I think he is somewhat charismatic.

He's easy to talk to, it sounds like.

It's really hard to read him, for me, anyways.

That's why, you know, I wanna go back to,

like, who is missing in our county still

and what information do we know about those people,

and are there any other cases that he might be related to?

Because I'm wondering if he just keeps going back

to the same knowns because that's all there really is.

For our county, anyways.

Well...

Okay.

Yeah.

Today I'll be talking about

this case that I worked on.

"Why Forensic Anthropology is Important:

Speed Freak Killers, Backhoes, and Commingled Remains."

These two individuals, their names were

Loren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine.

They did a lot of methamphetamine

and were convicted of murdering several people.

They were called the "Speed Freak Killers" by the media.

The decades-old "Speed Freak" murder mystery

is breaking wide open after a convicted serial killer's

death row confessions to a bounty hunter.

The tips have already led to two sets of remains

in Calaveras County, but that may be just the beginning.

The search effort has relied on

Shermantine's hand-drawn maps.

So the maps that Shermantine provides

to Leonard Padilla, it starts this search.

So you have the Shermantine property in Calaveras County.

The other property is a well.

As I'm watching the news,

I see that there's a well in Linden

and there's a backhoe digging up the well in Linden.

And I was in disbelief.

I was familiar with the general background of the case

because of the media attention.

When I saw images of the backhoe,

I was very concerned.

Several colleagues of mine had asked,

"Your team's not involved with that, are you?"

And I said, "No, we were not contacted or asked."

I was just kind of shocked that they were digging

that deeply with a backhoe,

knowing that there was likely multiple victims in there.

One of the detectives, he said there's a possibility

that Joann could be in there.

And I got hysterical.

I said, "You will not dig up my child with those steel claws.

I will stop you."

I come home from work.

My daughter was calling on the phone.

She said, "Mama?" I said, "What?"

She said, "Do not cut on the TV."

And some gruesome work resumes this morning.

Sheriff's deputies dig for victims.

She said, "I'm telling you, please don't do it."

More bones were found just yesterday.

Believed to be the victims of two serial killers.

I said, "You tell me what's going on."

She goes, "Mama, they're digging."

Bulldozers creating a huge hole

at least 25 feet deep.

The main thing is, let's get these bodies up.

Going down in the ground,

they were lifting up the dirt,

bringing it over to the side,

and dropping it on the ground.

And you could see the bones and everything

just dropping on the ground.

And to me, I felt like

they had killed my child all over again.

Victims, some of whom have never been found,

and that's why the search...

I believed that Sheriff Moore,

he's going to destroy the remains,

he's going to destroy the crime scene.

If they're not excavated properly

by an osteologist with archaeological training,

then it's likely that the remains could be mixed together.

Anybody that's down there is gonna be crushed.

You know, you wouldn't--

I knew that in my brain.

You know, anybody with common sense would know that.

And then I saw a jacket that they pulled up,

and as they pulled it up,

an arm bone was hanging out of the jacket.

And I said, "Oh, my God, that looks like Joann's coat."

A set of remains were preliminarily identified

as Miss Joanna Hobson.

And today, investigators confirmed

through DNA tests that 16-year-old Joann Hobson

was found in that well,

along with 19-year-old Kimberly Billy,

missing since 1984.

Efforts are continuing to identify

the additional skeletal remains recovered

from the Linden well of a possible third person.

The three from the well were Joanna Hobson,

who was, you know, 16 years old,

Kimberly Billy, who was 19 years old,

and then this unidentified female who's estimated to be

in her late teens to early twenties,

who was pregnant.

From Shermantine's letters, you know,

he describes an African-American female,

mentions that she was pregnant.

The pregnant girl that they found in the well...

she's not Caucasian, and so they just--

they absolutely gave up looking to identify her under his watch,

under Sheriff Steve Moore.

It's my opinion that Sheriff Moore

did the well dig,

and his goal was to do it as inexpensively as possible,

as quickly as possible

to have it resolved as fast as he could

because he didn't want it interrupting his daily routine.

Within the department, we knew that the detectives

were telling us, "This is-- this is a cluster.

This is a real mess."

What really should have happened was

a more careful plan about how to engineer the excavation

to get the soil down to the level of where the victims were.

And that would allow you essentially to excavate

those individuals in their place by hand.

The embarrassment

as to what was being seen on the news at night

and what these families were going through

and how this administration was handling it.

After 50 feet, investigators hit

the deepest part of the abandoned water well.

They just wanted it done,

and they wanted this pushed out of the way,

and "We want this news to go away."

And knowing all along that we had experts

in our detective divisions

and experts in all the different fields

that should have been involved in this

not being allowed to do their job.

Dear Leonard.

Well, it looks like we've got the FBI's attention once again.

I have six demands.

I hate playing hardball...

but it's time I've stuck to my guns.

No one else has the information,

and if they did, they would never give it up.

Today's date is August 26th, 2012.

Time is approximately 7:00 a.m.

Recorded interview with Wesley Shermantine.

So it sounds like there was some public demand

for the FBI to get involved after what a lot of people

saw as an atrocity of the well dig, right?

So I think that's where they're coming in.

And so they're stepping into this

way after the fact.

All right.

- Yeah. - Okay.