KTVU obtained police interviews with Loren Herzog as he gives his account of several of the so-called Speed Freak killings.

A KTVU reporter spent the past two weeks in San Joaquin County learning about the crimes of Herzog and Wesley Shermantine.

KTVU has the transcripts and more than 10 hours of videotapes containing the law enforcement interviews with Herzog, which chronicle a series of interviews that began the day he was arrested March 17, 1999, and span over the following five days.

In each videotape, Herzog reveals more details.

At one point, Herzog showed detectives how his boyhood friend Wesley Shermantine attacked a woman Herzog himself was friends with, Cyndi Vanderheiden.

"He had her like this," Herzog said as he made a stabbing gesture to investigators, "took her to the ground."

Herzog painted his boyhood friend Shermantine as a cold-blooded killer.

On the tapes, Herzog told investigators Shermantine killed as many as 24 people and admitted that he was with him for some of those crimes.

Shermantine recently revealed the location of an abandoned well in San Joaquin County that he called Herzog's boneyard. Authorities unearthed as many as 1,000 bones and bone fragments there.

Shermantine also provided information that led to the recovery of two bodies in Calaveras County.

One was Cyndi Vanderheiden

On the tapes, Herzog claimed that Shermantine alone carried out the killing.

He said Vanderheiden asked for help and admitted he didn't stop the killing.

"What type of words was Cyndi saying to him?" said the investigator. "Please don't kill me," Herzog answered.

In a subsequent interview two days later, investigators asked Herzog why he never did anything to stop Shermantine.

"What kept you from going to the police at that point and time and saying,  'Look, my friend's a psycho. Here's what he just did?'" asked the investigator.

"The psycho himself," Herzog responded.

The detective then asked if it was because he was concerned for his own safety, to which Herzog said, "Hell yeah."

Shermantine and Herzog were each convicted of several killings, including the death of the 25-year-old Vanderheiden.

Herzog was paroled in 2010 after many of his conviction was overturned on appeal.

His attorney told KTVU some of Herzog's confessions were coerced.

Herzog still lived on the grounds of the prison in Susanville as a condition of his parole. He killed himself last month after learning about Shermantine's plan to reveal the locations of victims' remains.