The Well

In rural California, a new team of detectives launches a hunt for the undiscovered victims of boyhood best friends turned serial murderers, Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog. The so-called “Speed Freak Killers” were accused of murdering six people in the 1980s and 1990s, but it’s believed they may have killed dozens more, many of whom have never been found.

Welcome to Linden, a small farming community in California's San Joaquin Valley and the childhood home of Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog. The pair grew up exploring and hunting game in the fields and orchards around town, but just after high school, they turned their sights on humans. The rural expanse provided the perfect backdrop for the duo's killing spree. It also turned the search for their victims into a decades-long mystery. The detectives narrow in on two case files involving the remains of unidentified women with possible links to Shermantine and Herzog. One of the victims, dubbed the Lady in the Fridge, was found stuffed in a refrigerator floating in the county delta in 1995. The other woman's remains were recovered in 2012 alongside other victims at the bottom of an old well.

Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog could be among the most prolific killers in American history, but the detectives struggle to separate the men from the myth. With so many missing persons cases on their desk, they attempt to make sense of the killers' chaotic and unpredictable methodology. The investigators narrow in on another case with potential ties to the killers: The disappearance of Phillip Martin. Martin's car was found burned to ash in an orchard after he mysteriously vanished without a trace in 1993. Martin's daughter still can't let go of her father's disappearance, nor the anger she harbors for the original detectives who labeled her dad a runaway. The sheriff's new team is drawn in by the apparent crime scene and a concrete connection to Shermantine and Herzog. As they probe Martin's disappearance, a break in another case gives the Lady in the Fridge her name back.

When a Linden farmer finds a bone inside an old well, the community is left wondering if the Shermantine and Herzog case is about to break wide open once again. Any mention of bones and wells in Linden brings back haunting echoes from the past. More than a decade ago, Shermantine's hand-drawn maps from death row sparked a series of recovery missions steeped in controversy. What should have been a major triumph, however, turns into a nightmare that traumatizes the victims' families, silences Shermantine, and permanently stains the department's reputation. Families watched with horror as the department clumsily pulverized the victims' remains with a backhoe, as the gruesome scene played out on live television. The present day team grapples with their department's past failures as they stumble into another hurdle on their quest to find more victims.

The detectives find themselves stuck in Shermantine's twisted game, struggling to find a path forward without help from the killer himself. Is this a game they can ever win? Sergeant Jimenez and her team make an unexpected and controversial move, hoping to find the missing information that could finally lead to the discovery of more victims. What they uncover provides a unique window into the mind of a serial killer, but it also puts their relationship with him at risk. It's a relationship already deeply damaged from the department's botched well dig in 2012, which now comes into full focus alongside corruption allegations that dogged the former sheriff and helped lead to his ouster.

A stunning and controversial move from California Governor Gavin Newsom opens the door to a death row meeting between the detectives and Wesley Shermantine. It could be the team's best and final hope of finding more victims. The visit yields two new locations where Shermantine claims he buried more victims decades ago: A dense orchard up the road from Shermantine's childhood home and an old abandoned frontier town known as Lost City. All these years later, the detectives question the killer's memory and consider the possibility that he's still playing games. In light of their promise to exhaust every last lead they can, the detectives set out with cadaver dogs and a forensic team to see what buried secrets the earth might yield.