LINDEN, Calif., Feb. 13 (UPI) -- Authorities said they found 300 bone fragments and personal belongings in their search for long-ago victims of California's "Speed Freak Killers."
Law enforcement personnel searched a cattle ranch Sunday, the fourth day of their hunt for victims of childhood friends Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog, who went on a 15-year killing spree across the Central Valley in the 1980s and '90s.
San Joaquin County sheriff's crews used a backhoe to dig a 45-foot-deep pit and recovered skull fragments, bones, coats, shoes, a purse and jewelry from an abandoned well on the cattle ranch near Linden, Calif., about 60 miles from Sacramento, The Sacramento Bee reported.
"It's a gruesome sight, it really is," San Joaquin County Sheriff's Deputy Les Garcia said.
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Remains of two victims were found last week.
An unknown number of people were killed by the two men, called the "Speed Freak Killers" for their methamphetamine-fueled rampage. Some investigators put the apparent death toll at 15.
Officials said Shermantine, on death row in San Quentin, provided sheriff's deputies with maps and instructions that led them to possible mass burial sites in Calaveras and San Joaquin counties.
"This is going to be a lengthy, tedious endeavor," Garcia said.
Shermantine and Herzog were arrested in 1999 and convicted two years later of multiple murders. Shermantine was sentenced to death and Herzog received a sentence of 77 years. Herzog's sentence was reduced to 14 years after an appeals court ruled his confession was illegally obtained and threw out his first-degree murder convictions.
Herzog was paroled in 2010 and living in a trailer near High Desert State Prison when he hanged himself less than a month ago after being told that information about the burial grounds was released, authorities said.
Five years ago, Shermantine offered to provide the location of 10 to 20 bodies he said he and Herzog dumped near Linden in exchange for $33,000, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. The money would help pay off the remainder of his restitution order, buy headstones for his parents' graves and provide comforts for his cell, he said.
Shermantine's offer was ignored until Sacramento bounty hunter Leonard Padilla stepped forward and paid to hear the information about the bodies. Two months ago, Padilla told Herzog about the information he had obtained and the parolee hanged himself in January, authorities said.
