Linden, San Joaquin County -- They are four people with radically different motives but one common purpose - locating the bodies of people slain more than a decade ago by a pair of methamphetamine-addled country boys known as the Speed Freak Killers.

For the murderer spilling his secrets, it was about getting enough cash to buy candy bars and other prison-life goodies. The bounty hunter wanted glory, the ex-FBI agent wanted to ease the anguish of victims' relatives.

And for the newspaper reporter, it was all about refusing to give up on a good story.

If their interests hadn't converged, there would have been no investigators in a field on the edge of this tiny farm town, pulling more than 1,000 human bone slivers, jewelry and moldy clothing from an abandoned well last week.

And there would not have been, at last, the promise of answers to a mystery this area has lived with for a generation: Just how many people died at the hands of the Speed Freak Killers, and where did they hide the remains?

"I'll tell you this, they're going to find a lot of people down in those holes, and they're just scratching the surface," Leonard Padilla, the bounty hunter, said last week as he watched a backhoe work the abandoned well. "There will be at least 30 bodies. Maybe more."

Padilla, 71, proclaims he is "outstandingly self-centered, flamboyant and an egomaniac," and he cheerfully admits that his main reason for getting involved in the Speed Freak Killers case was fame.

It was the $33,000 that Padilla agreed to pay to Wesley Shermantine, the surviving Speed Freak Killer, in exchange for his secrets that helped break open the case - that, and the determination of ex-FBI agent Jeff Rinek and Stockton Record reporter Scott Smith to drag as much information out of the killer as they could.

At least 4 murders

Shermantine, 46, has been on San Quentin Prison's Death Row since being convicted of murdering four people from 1984 to 1998. His boyhood buddy, Loren Herzog, was originally found guilty of three of the murders but ended up pleading guilty to one count of manslaughter after his convictions were thrown out on appeal.

Investigators have long been convinced, however, that the pair were actually responsible for killing as many as 20 people as they trolled bars and roadways around their hometown of Linden for prey. Their favorite weapons were shotguns and knives.

With his reduced sentence, Herzog was paroled in 2010. He hanged himself last month with a bedsheet in his Lassen County trailer.

The killer's suicide came one day after Padilla called to tell him that Shermantine had agreed, for the $33,000, to reveal the locations of their victims. Herzog, 45, left behind a wife and three children. His suicide note read simply, "Tell my family I love them."

Shermantine's agreement to spill his secrets didn't come easily.

His first offer to reveal burial locations came right after he was arrested, when he hinted to investigators that Herzog may have stashed a body in a mineshaft. Less than a month after he was convicted in 2001, he offered to reveal the location of four corpses if authorities dropped the death penalty against him and paid him $20,000.

An opportunity

Padilla had just run for Sacramento mayor - something he is doing again - and sensed an opportunity. He offered to raise the cash for Shermantine, but the deal never gelled.

Then, last summer, the killer sent a letter to Smith at the Stockton Record, offering again to reveal body locations. Smith, 40, had written to him in 2007 as part of a project to contact all dozen Death Row inmates from San Joaquin County, and the two had been corresponding since.

"He just got it in his head that he wanted to make a deal," Smith said. "He wanted $10,000, a new typewriter and some other things, and in exchange he'd say where Chevy was buried."

Chevy was Chevelle Wheeler, who was 16 when she disappeared in 1985. Shermantine was convicted of murdering her, although her body had never been found.

"I said we don't pay for stories," Smith said, "but I'd be happy to take his story and pass it on." Shermantine balked.

Then Padilla called Smith.

The bounty hunter had been grabbing as many headlines as possible since first talking to Shermantine in 2001 - he posted bail in 2008 in Florida for Casey Anthony, who was eventually acquitted of murdering her 2-year-old daughter - and he'd also kept tabs on Shermantine. He'd heard of the killer's offer to Smith, and he wanted in.

Hand-drawn map

Padilla said he still had the $20,000 from 2001 and could raise the rest.

"So I went to prison on Oct. 2 and told Wes about Padilla," Smith said. "On Dec. 5, I got a letter telling me where to find Chevy, with a map hand-drawn on the back."

By the middle of December, Padilla, Smith and sheriff's deputies were searching the spots Shermantine had pointed out, near the Calaveras County town of San Andreas on land once owed by the killer's late parents. Nothing turned up.

That's when Padilla called the FBI's Sacramento office and asked for Rinek. The two had met in 1993 when they teamed up to rescue a child kidnapped from Sacramento, and Padilla thought Rinek could chip better information out of Shermantine.

Rinek, 59, had retired in 2006 after helping crack some of the biggest murder cases in recent years - including obtaining the confession of Yosemite killer Cary Stayner - but he still kept his hand in law enforcement. He drove from his home near Sacramento to San Quentin on Jan. 14.

"I told Leonard that in my opinion, Shermantine has been torturing the families of the victims over the location of their remains, and I'd help him if we could make him stop," Rinek said. "I thought we could get some answers."

What he got was a veritable trove.

Shermantine told him greater detail not just about the locations of the graves of Chevelle Wheeler and Cyndi Vanderheiden, 25, whom Shermantine was convicted of murdering in 1998, but about a well on an abandoned cattle ranch on the eastern edge of Linden where about a dozen bodies could be found.

"We agreed that we would try to get him a day out of prison so he could come out and show us these various sites," Rinek said. "I got very fired up."

Sheriff unhappy

Then they hit another snag.

Padilla said that by the time the negotiations with Shermantine were done, the killer's price for information had risen to $33,000 to buy the typewriter, headstones for his parents, and a lifetime of candy bars and other prison treats.

He, Rinek and officials from agencies including the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation set Jan. 18 as the day Shermantine would lead them to the grave sites. They dubbed the day trip "Operation Closure."

The snag came when San Joaquin County Sheriff Steve Moore was informed of the trip a day or so ahead of time. He hit the roof, Rinek and others said, and killed the plan.

"We had concerns about the setup, about security and other matters," Deputy Les Garcia said.

Deputies stymied

The ex-FBI agent and bounty hunter were soon excluded from any body-search scenarios. Reporter Smith said he continued to share "whatever I had in the letters with everyone" - but the county deputies were now stymied on some crucial details because, Garcia said, they couldn't talk to Shermantine.

"We've been told by the state public defender's office that we can't contact him unless we go through an attorney, and we're not doing that right now," Garcia said.

Rinek says Shermantine told him he didn't want to talk to the sheriff. The ex-agent also saw the trip cancellation more simply than Garcia.

"It was stopped for personal, ego reasons by the sheriff," Rinek said.

The roadblock finally crumbled two weeks ago, when Padilla persuaded Shermantine to send out yet another, more detailed map of the various locations - and it was intercepted by prison officials in the mail. The map promptly went to the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office.

Between that and details provided in letters to Smith, Garcia said, the deputies could roll again. On Feb. 9 and 10, investigators found what have tentatively been identified as the remains of Wheeler and Vanderheiden near San Andreas, and the next day they began dredging the well near Linden.

By Wednesday, they'd hit the well's 50-foot-deep bottom and had pulled up 1,000 pieces of bone, jewelry and filthy scraps of clothing. They are being processed for identification by state investigators, while sheriff's teams explore two other wells on the property.

'Loren's boneyard'

Shermantine has said there are more bodies in at least one of them - and he has taken to calling the entire site "Loren's boneyard," insisting his former partner is responsible for all the remains there.

Rinek said he thinks the killer has more to share.

"I look for the emotional door in someone I interview, and with Shermantine I did find it but I didn't go through it," he said. "He has more to say. Someone needs to get in there and get more information."

The victims' families don't really care how or why the answers came. They're just glad, sadly, that they did.

"That is helping us, even though it brings a lot of that bad stuff up all over again," said Vanderheiden's father, John Vanderheiden of Clements (San Joaquin County).

"None of this would have been possible without Padilla and that ex-FBI agent," he said. "They broke it open for us, and for that we are very grateful."