Speed Freak Killers' murder toll a painful mystery
Melissa Huffine Woods has a terrible time getting close to people, and she says one reason for that sits in a Death Row prison cell 2,000 miles from her Tennessee home.
The other reason hanged himself in January.
The first reason is named Wesley Shermantine and the second was Loren Herzog. They are known as the Speed Freak Killers.
Investigators believe the pair killed Woods' aunt, Roberta "Robin" Armtrout, near Linden (San Joaquin County) in 1985. Armtrout, they say, was among the first in a long string of victims in a 15-year, methamphetamine-fueled murder spree.
But after the two were captured in 1999, they were convicted of killing just four people. Armtrout was not among them.
Neither were, by some counts, dozens of other slaying victims from the Central Valley to the Sierra foothills and beyond.
The pain of not having legal resolution to the killing of her aunt has haunted Woods, 37, since she was a girl.
"It's taken a messy toll on me," she said from her home in Oak Ridge, Tenn. "I fear getting close to people. I'm always afraid they're going to die.
"It's just something you never really get over, a murder like that in the family," Woods said. "And there just seems to be no way to ever get over it. I mean, nobody is ever going to be convicted of it, even though I know in my heart those two monsters killed my aunt."
Body hunt
Shermantine, 46, began revealing locations of the pair's victims from his cell at San Quentin State Prison in January. Herzog, who was on parole in Lassen County, promptly committed suicide after being told of the revelations.
So far, more than a thousand bits of bone - including six mostly complete femurs - have been dug up in Calaveras County and near the two men's farm-country hometown of Linden. Investigators continue to hunt for more.
But Shermantine is not saying he killed Armtrout, though Herzog repeatedly asserted during court hearings that he did. Herzog said he had merely watched.
Investigators to this day say they both killed the young woman - even though Herzog was acquitted of her murder and Shermantine was never charged with it.
Armtrout was a 24-year-old prostitute and methamphetamine addict, according to court records. Her corpse was found on a creek bank just outside Linden on Sept. 8, 1985. She was naked and had been stabbed 46 times.
Witnesses say she was last seen getting into a red pickup with Shermantine and Herzog. She now lies buried in Tracy, along with her mother and siblings. Woods is her closest surviving relative.
Conflicted portrait
Woods speaks glowingly of her aunt's kindness to animals and eagerly shares photos of a slim, red-haired woman whose smile seems out of sync with her anguished life.
The family believed a childhood fever damaged Armtrout's brain and led to her downward spiral. Woods laments that her aunt ended up with a rough crowd, including a husband who was hacked to death the year before she was killed.
But most of all, she laments the loss.
"When I heard about Herzog hanging himself, I had a big smile on my face and said, 'Thank you, God,' " Woods said. "My aunt Robin was really looking down on us that day. Back when they didn't convict those two of killing her I wanted revenge, and now at least some of us got some justice.
"But there's a lot of us in this awful club of survivors of the people those two killed. And there will never be enough justice for what happened to us."
Convictions tossed
Herzog's acquittal on charges of killing Armtrout came in 2001, but at the same trial he was convicted of murdering three other people.
A state appellate court later threw out the convictions, ruling that his confession had been improperly obtained. He then pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of one of the three victims, 26-year-old Cyndi Vanderheiden, and was paroled in 2010.
Shermantine was convicted in 2001 of murdering Vanderheiden, Chevelle "Chevy" Wheeler, 16, Paul Cavanaugh, 31, and Howard King, 35, and was sentenced to die.
Thomas Testa, the San Joaquin County deputy district attorney who prosecuted both men, said the unresolved killings left hanging in the case always nagged at him.
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