Hundreds Of New Bone Fragments Found At Speed Freak Killers 'Bone Yard'

LINDEN (CBS13) - Dozens of sheriff'S investigators sifted through piles of dirt near an abandoned well in the town of Linden where serial killers Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog dumped dozens of murder victims.

Investigators say the search has yielded about 1,000 bone fragments so far.

"They're not all large femur bones, if you will," said San Joaquin County Sheriff's spokesman Les Garcia. "There was a lot of little, minute bones that we're having to sift through."

Some of the bones are back at the sheriff's department headquarters where anthropologists will likely try to trying to piece them together like a puzzle.

"They'll put together the bones and try to put a body together as best they can. So, as you can imagine, the work they're doing today is slow, lengthy, it's tedious, but they're determined to bring the loved ones home to their families," said Garcia.

That, along with DNA testing, will help investigators identify more of the victims and reach a body count.

Today, Chevy Wheeler's mother told CBS13 investigators preliminarily identified a body found Friday on the former Shermantine estate as the body of her missing 16-year-old daughter.

Wet weather caused searchers to stop searching Monday, and even though searchers were going to resume digging Tuesday, they couldn't because it was too muddy.

Most of the investigators are packed up and have sifted through the remaining dirt piles. They'll start the process over again until they finish the well. Once they finish searching the current well, they plan to move to two others.