Boys will be boys.
At first glance, his family life appears to have been ideal in many respects. Wesley’s father was a successful building contractor in the Central Valley, which meant that he was able to buy his family the material possessions that most people in Linden could not afford.
“It was great growing up there,” said Dolly Shermantine, the sister of Wes. “We were all spoiled growing up.”
The Shermantine parents lavished Wesley and his two siblings with an array of luxury items. Wesley’s father built a game room in their home to house pool tables, dart boards, and the latest in video game consoles. The Shermantine children always had new clothes to wear to school, and they were given liberal allowances which made them popular with their friends.
Although Wesley was the middle child, he was more spoiled than his siblings. Most kids in Linden were lucky to get a hand-me-down car from an older sibling or from parents, but Wes was given a brand new car from his parents before he turned sixteen.
And the young Wesley Shermantine was not known to be modest.
As soon as he got his driver’s license, he picked up his sidekick Herzog and drove around San Joaquin County showing off his new ride. They drove through Linden multiple times, and then went to Stockton to show the car to some kids they knew
Although Wesley’s father was far from sensitive, and by Wes’s own accounts, they talked little about substantive topics, he did dedicate a lot of personal time to his son. Mr. Shermantine often brought Wesley and his best friend Loren Herzog on hunting and fishing trips where the duo learned how to track, kill, and clean game. Young Wesley Shermantine showed interest in few other things—he was never involved in extra-curricular activities at school and he had little interest in academic studies—but spending time in the outdoors was clearly something he was enthusiastic about. Young Loren Herzog also developed a love for the outdoors at an early age. Both Herzog and Shermantine continued their interests in hunting well into their adulthoods, and many experts familiar with the case, say the two men twisted their hunting interests to include hunting humans.
Shermantine and Herzog were often photographed with guns and Shermatine in particular, liked to brag about the animals he bagged. On more than one occasion, Shermantine alluded to killing humans. He said it would be the “ultimate kill.”
At the time, Shermantine’s and Herzog’s love of guns and hunting never raised an eyebrow in the conservative and rural San Joaquin County. Those activities were considered hobbies that healthy young men from the area did. To those who knew him, Wesley Shermantine was just a regular boy who happened to be spoiled.
But beneath the seemingly happy and peaceful façade of the Shermantine family, problems lurked that undoubtedly affected the young Wesley.
Learning Violence at Home
Besides the Macdonald triad of formative behaviors discussed earlier, many serial killers─ in fact many criminals in general─ have endured physical, sexual, and mental abuse at the hands of their guardians as children.
According to members of local law enforcement, as well as Dolly Shermantine, Wesley learned at an early age that violence, or the threat of it, was a legitimate way to get what he wanted out of life.
Although the Shermantine’s were known to be a hard working family, they were not particularly honest, and in many ways they believed they were above the law. If one member of the Shermantine family, including the extended family, had a problem with an outsider, then the rest of the family would circle their wagons around the trouble.
According to locals, the Shermantines had an uncanny way of putting themselves into conflict situations. Instead of trying to avoid conflict like most people did, the Shermantines seemed to relish conflict.
The Shermantines had no qualms about using threats, intimidation, or even physical violence to get their ways with others.
“I think they’re known as family that pretty much does what they want to do. If you got in their way, I think they probably dealt with you in a way that wasn’t to walk away or turn the other cheek,” said Cliff Johnson, a former sergeant with the Stockton Police Department who worked the case.
By the 1980s, the San Joaquin Sherriff’s Department was quite familiar with the Shermantine family. When people agreed to press charges against a member of the Shermantine family for assault or intimidation, the charges were usually dropped for mysterious reasons.
Most people around Linden believed it was better to give the Shermantines a wide berth instead of dealing directly with them. If a conflict with the Shermantines did arise, most people backed down from the situation.
The wrath of the Shermantine family was not just the purview of the men. Wesley’s mother was said to have instigated violence and intimidation towards others, even towards her own family members.
If Mr. Shermantine had business problems that she perceived as being the fault of someone else, Mrs. Shermantine often inserted herself into the situation with threats. Mrs. Shermantine was also willing to bring things to the next level, if threats did not work.
In one particular incident when Wesley was still a child, Mrs. Shermantine became enraged when one of Mr. Shermantine’s customers was late paying a bill. After several requests and many threats, Mrs. Shermantine decided to take matters into her own hands. She went to her family business, got into a bulldozer, drove it to the delinquent customer’s home, and proceeded to destroy it.
Most people would certainly go to jail for such a stunt. Due to the fear the community had of them, the Shermantines were always immune to adverse consequences.
Neither of the Shermantine parents was ever charged with a crime in the bulldozer incident.
The person left with the bulldozed house refused to file a police report. It was common in San Joaquin County during the 1970s for people to fear the Shermantines.
The police certainly knew about the Shermantines, but there was little they could do, because they could not find witnesses willing to file reports.
The intimidation and violence that the Shermantine parents perpetrated on people throughout San Joaquin County was not confined to outsiders. According to Dolly Shermantine, the three Shermantine children were often the target of their parents’ vitriol and abuse.
“She drank a lot. She abused all of us kids,” said Dolly about the situation at home.
Most of the abuse meted out by Mr. and Mrs. Shermantine towards their children was psychological in nature—referring to the children as worthless and stupid for example—but slapping was not uncommon when one of the kids angered the parents.
Wesley was often subjected to one particularly unique form of punishment.
When Wesley incurred the wrath of either of his parents, he was forced to stand still while one of his parents shot at his feet. If he moved, he had to stand longer.
Wesley Shermantine eventually learned how to take that particular form of punishment stoically, without moving.
One wonders if this is where Wesley Shermantine developed his lack of empathy for others; that is, if he was even born with any.
Hanging Out around Town
For the most part, the activities that Herzog and Shermantine took part in together as children were not much different than other boys around the United States. The two boys rode their bikes around the neighborhood and spent a considerable amount of time at the Shermantine house playing pool and video games.
Looking back, though, a couple of the boys’ pursuits seemed to foreshadow their future vocations as serial killers.
Family and friends of Shermantine and Herzog said that the duo would disappear for hours on end exploring the rural areas of San Joaquin County. The boys camped in wooded areas and hiked in the many caves within the foothills west of Linden, which were the same caves where Shermantine left many of his victims’ bodies later. It seems unlikely that either of the two boys was consciously preparing for a future of disposing of murder victims, but their outdoor skills and knowledge of rural Northern California, no d
oubt played a role years later in their careers as serial killers.
The two boys also became avid hunters, fisherman, and gun collectors.
As mentioned earlier, Wesley’s father brought the two boys on weekend hunting, camping, and fishing trips. When Wesley and Loren entered their teen years, they continued to hunt, fish, and shoot; but photographs from this period belied a more ominous undertone to their otherwise innocent pastimes.
Numerous photographs exist of the two boys, and later as men, posing with a number of firearms, knives, and other weapons. As they grew older, Shermantine and Herzog often bragged to their friends and anyone in listening distance, about their extensive weapon collections. Since the two were avid outdoorsmen, most people thought of their bragging as just being enthusiasm for their pastimes.
But some people have pointed out that they made off-hand comments from time to time about which of their guns would be better to kill someone with. They also bragged about their abilities to skin and gut animals, and they were overheard saying that with their skills it would be pretty easy to gut a human.
Besides spending a great amount of time together in the outdoors and playing games at the Shermantine home, Wesley and Loren were nearly inseparable from the first day they met.
The seemingly polar opposite personalities that the two boys possessed—Loren is remembered as quiet and polite, while most recollect Wesley as aggressive and violent—seemed to work well in tandem. Their personalities played off each other’s and one’s strengths were able to compensate for the other’s weaknesses. As Scott Smith said, in many ways they seemed to have a symbiotic relationship.
But to those who knew them, Shermantine was the one running the show.
“It seems that Wesley was sort of the domineering, aggressive, dominant figure in their relationship growing up,” said former girlfriend of Herzog and sister of the duo’s last murder victim, Cyndi Vanderheiden.
The personality differences were apparent to most people when the boys were young. More than one person recalled how the two boys acted very differently from each other on the bus rides to and from school. Herzog was quiet and never caused problems for the bus drivers, while Shermantine constantly gave the drivers problems and was characterized as the “school bus bully.”
Despite their major personality differences, both men came to see each other as brothers.
“They introduced themselves as brothers, they ran like brothers, they acted like brothers, and the protection aspect and everything, they’d lie for each other like brothers,” continued Cyndi Vanderheiden’s sister.
If the more meek and mild Herzog was being picked on at school or on the bus, Shermantine quickly interceded and beat up the tormentors. After a while, most kids knew better than to mess with Loren Herzog, especially if Wesley Shermantine was in the vicinity.
Likewise, if the young Shermantine needed an alibi to get himself out of trouble, Herzog was glad to help. Herzog, being the more likable of the two, was also the one who learned where the parties were, and he often introduced Shermantine to girls.
The symbiotic relationship that the reporter Scott Smith described Shermantine and Herzog as having, began at a very early period in their lives. This factor sets them apart from most other pairs of serial killers profiled in Chapter One of this book. Most serial killer duos meet later in their lives, and often through chance, unlike Shermantine and Herzog, who spent more time with each other than many married couples.
Although Shermantine may have been the more physically imposing of the two, some people familiar with the case, such as San Joaquin County Deputy District Attorney Thomas Testa, think their relationship played on each other’s strengths rather than being totally dominated by Shermantine.
In terms of how the duo picked up their female victims: “Loren was the good-looking, rockin’ roller. He opened the door,” Testa said. “Wes was the one who got them and killed them.”
It is difficult to ascertain which one of the two was the “brain” in the operation because neither did particularly well in school.
While in high school, neither of them showed much interest in academics or athletics. They were known to occasionally go to parties, but they spent most of their time with each other. As the two got older, they began to acquire reputations as drunks, drug abusers, and thugs.
During the 1980s, it would not have been uncommon to see one or both of the two men drinking heavily in a San Joaquin County bar, bragging about committing acts of violence, even murder.
The bar that the two men frequented most was the Linden Inn, which was located just down the street from where they were raised. Besides Herzog and Shermantine, the Linden Inn was known to attract unsavory individuals in the area who were involved in criminal activities, particularly drug trafficking. After Shermantine and Herzog developed addictions to crystal meth, the Linden Inn became the main spot where they bought and sold meth.
They often visited the bar when they were in the middle of long booze and meth binges, which made them open and talkative, even about their killing sprees.
“Herzog used to come into the bar,” said Linden Inn owner and father of the Speed Freak Killer’s final victim, Kim Vanderheiden. “He was a big guy with long hair and tattoos and wore cut-off shirts and I mean he kind of tried to act like a big guy, bad guy, and the girls seem to have thought he was attractive. I thought he was like a punk. He seemed to get along with everybody.”
As John Vanderheiden’s statement reveals, despite acknowledging the sometime violent natures of Herzog and Shermantine, no one really thought of them as anything more than a couple of local toughs. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, no one around Linden would have suspected either man of murder, no matter how uncouth or unsavory the two men may have been.
As Shermantine and Herzog were cementing their reputations as thugs and drug dealers in their early adulthoods, they had already exhibited signs of predatory behavior behind closed doors, as teenagers.
Halloween is traditionally a big holiday for children across the United States. The younger children go out with their parents or in groups “trick or treating,” while more mischievous older kids spend Halloween drinking alcohol and sometimes committing wanton acts of vandalism.
Wesley Shermatine and Loren Herzog celebrated Halloween together as children.
When the duo were younger, they took part in traditional trick or treating, but when they entered their teenage years, Hersey bars and M&Ms were no longer enough for them.
On one Halloween in particular in the early 1980s, Wesley and Loren spent the evening drinking illegally procured alcohol and engaging in minor acts of vandalism. Later, the duo met up with Wesley’s sister Dolly, and the three walked back to the Shermatine home to spend the night.
“When I was in junior high, we had all come back and Loren had spent the night at our house,” said Dolly Shermantine about the Halloween slumber party. “And he snuck into my room that night when I was asleep and held me down and raped me.”
As horrible as the incident was, it was compounded by the fact that no one in the Shermantine house was willingly to listen to the girl. Dolly later claimed that she never bothered telling her mother because she would not have believed her, or cared, and that her father was simply not available concerning such matters. To make matters worse, Dolly told Wesley, who was unconcerned about the incident.
She also claimed that Wesley later raped her.
If true, then Dolly’s rape would have acted as a sort of practice base for the two men’s anti-social activities later in their lives. Rape is a taboo act that is nearly on the same level as murder—and in Wesley Shermantine’s case, one could surely argue that incestuous rape certainly is—and the fact that both boys committed the act and got away with it, more than likely got a few wheels turning in their young, demented minds.
Like many sociopaths, Herzog and Shermantine may have thought that if they could get away with raping Dolly Shermantine, then they could certainly get away
with much more.
Earning Their Moniker
By the time Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog reached their teenage years, it was clear that they were very different from their peers. They had differing interests than most kids their age, and the sadism that the duo would later employ on scores of victims, slowly crept into their daily lives.
Besides Shermantine’s school yard bullying, the rape of Dolly Shermantine was the first significant sadistic act the duo committed.
But it would be awhile before the two men committed any more heinous acts. The potential was there for more, and as mentioned above, the rape of Dolly most surely helped push them over the edge. However, other influences also came into their lives.
Herzog’s and Shermantine’s love of hunting revealed that they were thrill seekers. They both talked about getting a rush from pulling the trigger on an animal.
But rushes can be found in many places.
Like many teenagers around the world, the duo liked to party.
For most young people, drug and alcohol use is a phase that they grow out of, but for Shermantine and Herzog, it became a way of life.
To the Speed Freak Killers, life was just one long party where anyone and everything around them was there for their amusement and pleasure. In their minds, if they wanted something, they took it
By the time the duo graduated from high school in 1984, they were already heavy drinkers and daily users of marijuana. Although they enjoyed the buzz from their daily binges, their highs were not extreme enough for them. They wanted the rush they felt when they were hunting.
Shermantine and Herzog needed crystal meth.
As the scourge of meth began to permeate the Central Valley in the early 1980s, Shermantine found the drug to his liking. He believed meth made it easier to talk to women, and it turned him into an even more intimidating character around town.
Hunting The Ultimate Kill: The Horrifying Story of the Speed Freak Killers (The Serial Killer Books Book 2) Page 3