Hunting The Ultimate Kill

by Jack Rosewood

  It was Clark who decided when and where the duo struck, but it was Bundy who got them arrested when she tried to go out and kill on her own.

  The events that took place leading up to, and after the arrest of the Sunset Strip Killers, was indicative in many ways of other tandem killers—the weakest of the duo was the first to confess, which then initiated rounds of finger pointing and further investigations.

  Just before the Sunset Strip Killers worked the streets of Hollywood, a pair of serial killers who became known as the “Hillside Stranglers” worked the outlying districts of Los Angeles. The duo, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr., raped, murdered, and tortured at least ten women in Southern California and the State of Washington. In the case of the Hillside Stranglers, the older and more physically imposing Buono was the obvious leader. He was the one who found the victims and came up with the hideous ways in which to murder them.

  As in the case of the Sunset Strip Killers, it was the weakest of the pair who led the authorities to capture them. Buono met a woman he wanted to get serious with, and he told Bianchi that their killing days were over. Not wanting the “fun” to end, Bianchi decided to continue his own reign of terror in Washington State, but he was quickly arrested after claiming two more victims on his own. Once he was arrested, Bianchi spilled the beans on the whole operation.

  Perhaps one of the strangest cases of serial killer duos was the case of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole.

  Both Lucas and Toole claimed to have killed hundreds of people across the United States during the 1970s and ‘80s, but authorities believe that number is actually much lower. Still, experts believe the pair was responsible for scores of murders. This pair is seen as particularly frightening, because they did not discriminate according to age, race, or gender. Lucas and Toole were itinerants, which made them extremely difficult to track and capture.

  A couple of notable points make the pair of Lucas and Toole different than many of the other infamous tandem serial killers. First, the two men seldom worked together. Lucas and Toole are believed to have killed together, but the majority of their murders were done individually. Secondly, it was the stronger of the two, Lucas, who eventually confessed the details of their reign of terror to the police.

  Another strange pair of serial killers was Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who killed up to twenty-five people in Northern California during the 1980s.

  Unlike the other pairs, Lake and Ng lured women to their home where they robbed and raped them, before brutally taking their lives. The pair thought World War III was imminent. They planned to survive the holocaust at their mountain retreat in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They captured women to use as household and sex slaves for the upcoming apocalypse, but interestingly, they never kept any of the women alive for very long.

  In the case of Lake and Ng, Lake was clearly the leader and somewhat of a father figure, albeit, an extremely twisted one to the younger Ng. Lake killed himself before Ng could follow through with the standard pattern of the weaker killer informing on the leader of the pair.

  More recently, many will remember the cross country murder spree perpetrated by John Muhammad and Lee Malvo—the “Beltway Snipers”—in 2002 that left seventeen people dead, primarily in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. In the case of the Beltway Snipers, the older Muhammad served as Malvo’s surrogate father, teaching the teen all he needed to know in order to become a notorious serial killer.

  Once captured, it was Malvo who turned on Muhammad in order to receive a life sentence. Muhammad was executed by the State of Virginia in 2009.

  One final case to compare with the Speed Freak Killers was actually a group of killers known as the “Ripper Crew” or the “Chicago Rippers.” The Ripper Crew was comprised of four young men—Robin Gecht, Edward Spreitzer, Andrew Kokoraleis, and Thomas Kokoraleis—who terrorized Chicago in the early 1980s by brutally murdering eighteen women in a series of Satanic murder rituals. Although the group was made up of four killers instead of two, the Ripper Crew exhibited all the psychological hallmarks of tandem killers. Gecht, who was the Ripper Crew’s leader, used a combination of charisma and intimidation to get the others to follow his homicidal plans. It was the weaker member of the group, Thomas Kokoraleis, who gave a full confession to the police about their activities, later.

  Most of the defining features of pairs and group serial killers have been exhibited throughout the lengthy killing careers of Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog.

  Shermantine and Herzog Take Their Place among the Other Tandem Killers

  In the future, when one discusses notable tandem serial killers, the names of Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog will surely be referenced. Although some aspects of the Speed Freak Killers case are yet to be unraveled, there is no doubt that the murderous duo are among the worst pairs of serial killers in history.

  In terms of longevity, the Speed Freak Killers clearly have most other duos beat. Beginning with their murderous spree in 1984—some investigators believe that Shermantine may have begun killing on his own in 1982—the pair did not stop until they were arrested in 1999. Few solo serial killers have been able to elude the authorities for this long, and it is almost unheard of amongst pairs of killers.

  The Speed Freak Killers also amassed a considerable body count.

  So far, only six murders have been positively attributed to Shermantine and Herzog, but the authorities believe they killed as many as seventeen people. Shermantine has bragged that his murder count is well over twenty. One inmate, who served time with Herzog, claimed that the duo were responsible for over 100 murders. Private detectives who worked on the case believe that the number is around seventy. Whichever number is correct, it is certain that the Speed Freak Killers left a mass of misery in their wake.

  Although the Speed Freak Killers exhibited many of the same features of other notable duo killers, they also diverged from other paired killers in notable ways. Shermantine and Herzog’s mode of operations often varied widely from crime scene to crime scene. Sometimes they shot their victims in isolated areas and left the bodies, which were later found by passing motorists. At other times, they abducted victims and tortured them. When they were done with their victims, they disposed of the bodies in one of the many abandoned mine shafts, caves, and decommissioned wells in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California.

  Shermatine once told a neighbor in a trailer park where he lived: “Listen to the heartbeats of people I’ve buried here. Listen to the heartbeats of families I’ve buried here.”

  The Speed Freak Killers’ reign of terror was full of extremely random killings.

  Like most serial killers, Herzog and Shermantine took most of their victims from their own racial/ethnic group (white/Caucasian), but they are known to have killed at least a handful of people from other ethnic groups. They killed both men and women, and all age ranges from children to the elderly.

  Truly, Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog were one of the most deadly and deranged serial killer pairs in history.

  Chapter 2:

  Two of a Kind

  One of the most important contextual aspects of the Speed Freak Killers case is the area of the country that the duo called home. Both Shermantine and Herzog grew up, and later did most of their killing, in the area of California known as the Central Valley. The Central Valley extends from just south of Redding in the north to just south of Bakersfield in the south. The valley is sixty miles across in its widest parts and has a length of about 450 miles.

  The central section of the Central Valley, which is where Shermantine and Herzog lived, is often referred to as the San Joaquin Valley. The largest city in the San Joaquin Valley is Stockton, which is also the county seat of San Joaquin County.

  The Central Valley

  Despite being an agricultural area, the Central Valley is home to millions of people and has a number of fairly large cities, including Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, Fresno, and Bakersfield. The most populated
section of the valley is served by California Highway 99, while Interstate 5 runs through the less populated area to the west.

  As a region of its own within the state, the Central Valley is quite different than the other more well-known sections of California. The Central Valley lacks the glamour and glitz of Southern California and falls short of the cultural attractions of the Bay Area. It also lacks the scenic beauty of other parts of the state, although it is a short drive to the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

  The fact that the Central Valley is often seen in a less favorable light than the Bay Area or Southern California has to do with the significantly lower median incomes in the valley compared to the other areas of the state. The differences in the various parts of California have led to a certain amount of rivalry, and sometimes conceit, by those from the Bay area and Southern California toward the inhabitants of the Central Valley. For their part, many from the Central Valley view it as a source of pride that they are different than other Californians.

  American pickup trucks and tractors are a more common sight than foreign cars are on the roads and streets of the Central Valley. The area is more conservative politically than the rest of the state, with Bakersfield often being listed as one of the most conservative cities in America. Many who are familiar with the region say that Bakersfield—owing to its conservative political leanings and influence from the agricultural and oil sectors of the economy—is closer to Texas than it is to California.

  The Central Valley has long been an agricultural center, not just for the State of California, but for the entire United States. California’s top agricultural output in many categories, especially fruits, is the result of the Central Valley’s dry, warm climate, good soil, and its hard workers.

  Many of the whites who currently live in the Central Valley are descended from a variety of nationalities. One of the most common is the “Oakies” who came to the region from the plains state during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era, looking for new opportunities. These people and their travails were the subject of many of John Steinbeck’s writings, including The Grapes of Wrath. Many of the Oakies made a hard scrabble living working on the farms of the Central Valley, and many went on to buy their own ranches and farms. When the children and grandchildren of the Oaky migrants left the farms of the valley for college and work in the cities, they were replaced by Mexican workers during the 1960s and ‘70s.

  When the demographics began to change in the Central Valley, other big changes began to affect its people.

  The people of the Central Valley have always been a hearty, tough lot. Men of the valley have never been afraid to get into a fist fight if they needed to, but major crimes were rare in most cities of the valley, and organized crime was never a problem until the late 1970s.

  The rise in violence and organized crime in California’s Central Valley happened to coincide with the beginning of the crystal meth epidemic in America.

  Amphetamines have been around in pill forms for decades, but by the 1970s, underground chemists devised new ways to make the drug cheaper, in a form that was easy to carry and conceal, giving a user the ability to ingest it in a variety of ways. Their creation was crystal methamphetamine, also known as “meth,” “crystal,” “glass,” and “ice.”

  By the late 1970s, the Central Valley became ground zero for the production and distribution of crystal meth in the United States. Mexican-American street gangs, outlaw biker gangs, Mexican cartels, and even prison gangs such as the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Brotherhood were operating meth labs in the cities and small towns of the Central Valley by the 1980s. Since these groups were by their very nature criminal, they committed a host of crimes, from armed robberies to extortion and drug trafficking, to establishing their labs in the Central Valley.

  Once the meth labs started popping up in the larger cities, it was not long before the smaller towns, and even the farms of the Central Valley, began to feel the wrath of the meth problem. Gangs fought with each other over territories and profits. Crimes committed by users high on meth, and those looking for money for their next fix, began to increase dramatically.

  Although agricultural goods were still the valley’s number one export, meth quickly made a play for the second spot.

  This was the world of the Speed Freak Killers.

  The Early Lives of Loren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine

  An examination of the early personal lives of Loren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine reveals nothing that definitively points to either of the two becoming serial killers in adulthood. Herzog was actually seen by many as a good boy, and although many remember Shermantine as tough and inclined to bully from an early age, nothing he did screamed out “serial killer.”

  For instance, the diagnostic Macdonald triad is often used by psychologists, psychiatrists, and criminologists as an indicator of future serial killers’ behaviors. Many serial killers exhibit behavior patterns from the triad, including cruelty to animals, pyromania, and bedwetting as children. Neither Herzog nor Shermantine exhibited any of these behaviors associated with the Macdonald triad, so criminologists were forced to look elsewhere for answers to their developmental behaviors.

  In the case of Loren Herzog, the search was especially difficult.

  Loren Joseph Herzog was born on December 8, 1965, to a middle-class family in the Central Valley town of Linden, California. Located just a few miles east of Stockton on Route 26, life in Linden is much the same today as it was during the 1970s when Herzog was a child growing up there—everyone knew the neighbors and life seemed to move at a snail’s pace.

  The cute blond-haired Herzog was well liked by nearly everyone who knew him. He was respectful and he got along with children and adults alike. He was an average student in school and he was rarely a problem for his teachers.

  As he developed in his teen years, Herzog transitioned from a cute little kid into a handsome young man who was never without a date. He liked to wear his hair long in order to show off his golden locks, which was one of the ways he attracted women. It also became a magnetic draw that he and Wesley Shermantine used later, to lure several of their victims into their traps.

  Herzog was quite articulate and “smooth” around women. After dating several young women from the Stockton area, Herzog married and started a family during the 1980s.

  Despite his smooth manners and seemingly pleasant demeanor, Herzog left behind many hints of his true nature, or at least what he was really doing in his spare-time, for those who dared to look.

  In the 1980s, Herzog began to adorn his body with tattoos. Today tattoos are quite common with both men and women, but during the 1980s they were still fairly rare and relegated to those on the fringes of society. Herzog had the words “Made and Fueled by Hate and Restrained by Reality” tattooed on the length of his left leg. On his right foot were the words “Made the Devil Do It.”

  When people asked Herzog about his tattoos, he replied that they were his philosophy of life. Herzog was never known to be a particularly “deep” individual, so no one questioned him further about his philosophical beliefs.

  When viewed on his own merit, it is difficult to see how Loren Herzog became one half of the Speed Freak Killers. The reality is that he may never have killed at all if he had remained on his own, but in order to understand his crimes, one must examine him in tandem with Wesley Shermantine.

  As Scott Smith, a writer for the Stockton Record who covered the Speed Freak Killers, wrote, “Really, it’s hard to talk about Loren without talking about Wesley, there’s sort of a symbiotic relationship there.”

  Actually, it is not just difficult, but impossible to talk about one without discussing the other.

  Wesley Howard Shermantine was born on February 24, 1966, to an upper middle-class family in Linden, California. Shermantine and Herzog attended the same schools throughout elementary and high school. They did most things together and were rarely apart. It became clear to all who knew the duo which one was the leader.

&nb
sp; In contrast to Herzog’s quiet demeanor, Shermantine could be loud and brash and was nearly always aggressive. As a child, young Shermantine was known to talk back to his teachers and elders. He often got into fist fights with other boys his age, and from an early age, Shermantine developed a stocky frame that he quickly learned to use to intimidate others. Wesley also learned at an early age, that when intimidation did not work, he could use his large frame to overpower most kids. Shermantine was known to cause problems on the school bus by starting fights and bullying younger, weaker kids.

  According to Herzog, Shermantine bullied him from time to time when they were children. After his arrest, Herzog told the police that he stood up to Shermaninte once, when they were in kindergarten, but his friend had beaten him so badly, he feared him from that day forward.

  “I’ve been scared of him for so long,” said Loren. “Only one person in the world scares me.”

  In retrospect, it is obvious that a young Wesley Shermantine had anger and violence issues. But what was the source of those issues and why did they turn him into a serial killer?

  On the surface, nothing about Shermantine’s early life seemed to suggest that he would become one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history.

  His early bullying antics, although unsavory behaviors most parents would teach their children not to do, was not that far out of normal behavior bounds for young boys.

  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.