page_title: Disappearance of Michaela Garecht
section_title: Loren Herzog
hierarchical_section_title: Disappearance of Michaela Garecht / Timeline / Later developments and suspects / Loren Herzog
caption_attribution_description: English: Loren Herzog
context_page_description: Michaela Joy Garecht was nine years old when she was abducted in Hayward, California, in broad daylight at the corner of Mission Boulevard and Lafayette Avenue.
  Sketches of Garecht's abductor were distributed along with missing person flyers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area within 24 hours of her disappearance, but search efforts proved fruitless. Her case was featured in national media, including profiles on the documentary series Unsolved Mysteries.
  After the 2009 discovery of Jaycee Dugard, who had been kidnapped in Meyers, California, and held captive by Phillip and Nancy Garrido for nearly two decades, renewed interest was brought on Garecht's case, and Garrido was interviewed regarding Garecht's abduction. In 2012, Wesley Shermantine, a convicted serial killer who committed various murders with his accomplice, Loren Herzog—known collectively as the Speed Freak Killers—brought to the attention of law enforcement that the original sketches of Garecht's abductor bore a striking similarity to Herzog, who had committed suicide while in prison in January 2012.
context_section_description: In August 2012, Wesley Shermantine, one of the so-called Speed Freak Killers duo, wrote a letter to The Stockton Record after his partner in crime, Loren Herzog, committed suicide in January 2012, in which he pointed out that Herzog bore a resemblance to the composite of the person who kidnapped "that Hayward girl." Shermantine and Herzog, who were apprehended in 1999, are suspected of having committed up to 19 murders in Northern California. Commenting on the likeness Herzog bore to Garecht's kidnapper, witness Katrina Rodriguez commented: "I thought then and I think now he could be the kidnapper...  I think there are features that look very much like the man...It seems like a strong lead."
  At Shermantine's direction, law enforcement began excavating an abandoned well in rural Linden, California in February 2012, where Herzog and Shermantine disposed of their victims. Thousands of bone fragments belonging to five different individuals were recovered from the well, some of which were believed to potentially belong to Garecht. However, DNA analysis completed later that year excluded Garecht as a possibility; the bones believed to have been hers were determined to be those of 19-year-old Kimberly Billy, who had disappeared in 1984. In January 2013, further excavations of abandoned wells in the area were completed, but yielded no further remains.
  In 2015, a legal motion was filed by attorney Mark Geragos on behalf of a detective who was informed by a San Joaquin sheriff's deputy that a pair of Mary Jane shoes discovered in one of the Linden wells bore similarity to the shoes Garecht was last seen wearing. According to the detective, San Joaquin police refused to show him the shoes, both physically as well in photographs, and, as of March 2015, the shoes had not been examined by the Hayward Police Department.
caption: Loren Herzog, one of the Speed Freak Killers, bore a strong resemblance to the police sketch
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