San Joaquin County Sheriff Steve Moore said preliminary evidence confirms the victims include 16-year-old JoAnn Hobson, who disappeared in 1985, and 19-year-old Kimberly Billy, who went missing a year earlier. Both girls were from east Stockton.
Their deaths add to the gruesome legacy in a expanding murder saga of two drug-abusing companions, Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog.
Led by Shermatine's claims to a Sacramento bounty hunter and a Stockton newspaper reporter of a "bone yard" teeming with victims, authorities began excavating the abandoned well near Linden in San Joaquin County.
Using a backhoe to carve open a 45-foot pit, they recovered more than 1,000 bones and fragments, plus jewelry, shoes, coats and a purse.
Moore said today that those remains are likely from just three people. The third victim is yet to be identified, he said.
Shermantine, sentenced to San Quentin's Death Row in 2001, claimed there were as many as 30 victims of the Speed Freak Killers - though he blamed all of the crimes on Herzog.
The two men were convicted in four killings that authorities initially pinned on them from the 1980s through the 1990s.
They included the 1985 killing of Chevelle "Chevy" Wheeler, 16, of Stockton and the 1998 murder of Cyndi Vanderheiden, 25, of Clements.
Wheeler's remains, including a partial skull and the lavender sweatshirt she was last seen wearing were found in a burial site in San Andreas on February 10, a day after authorities unearthed Vanderheiden's remains on a nearby property.
Herzog, who was paroled from prison last year, hung himself Jan. 16 at a trailer he was living in on the grounds of High Desert State Prison in Susanville. Hours earlier, bounty hunter Leonard Padilla had called Herzog, telling him Shermantine was providing new details on the pair's killing spree.
Shermantine's revelations came after Padilla agreed to meet demands for $33,000 - including $18,000 in court-ordered restitution payments to victims, plus money to support his child, buy headstones for his parents and a TV, painting supplies and other perks for prison.
Authorities also blamed the "Speed Freak Killers" for the fatal 1984 shootings of Paul Cavanaugh, 31, and Howard King, 35, on Roberts Island near Stockton; and Henry Howell, 41, in Amador County. Another alleged victim, Robin Armtrout, 24, was stabbed to death near Linden in 1985.
Moore said authorities delivered "bittersweet" news on the new findings to the families of Hobson and Billy. He said the family members were "grateful for the knowledge" their loved ones were found - but now "have to face the certainty" they were killed.
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