True Crime/Paranormal/Conspiracy Theories Part VII

Yuba County Five

The Yuba County Five were a group of young men from Yuba County, California, United States, each with mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions, who were reported missing after attending a college basketball game at California State University, Chico (also known as Chico State), on the night of February 24, 1978. Four of them—Bill Sterling, 29; Jack Huett, 24; Ted Weiher, 32; and Jack Madruga, 30—were later found dead; the fifth, Gary Mathias, 25, has never been found.

Several days after their disappearance, the group's car, a 1969 Mercury Montego, owned by Madruga, was found abandoned in a remote area of Plumas National Forest, on a high mountain dirt road that was far out of their way back to Yuba County. Investigators could not determine why the car was abandoned, as it was in good working order and could easily have been pushed out of the snowpack it was in. At that time, no trace of the men was found.

After the snow melted in June 1978, four of the men's bodies were discovered. Ted Weiher was found in a US Forest Service trailer some 12 miles (19 km) north from the car. Only bones were left of Jack Madruga, Bill Sterling, and Jackie Huett as result of scavenging animals; but Weiher had apparently lived for as long as three months after the men were last seen, starving to death despite an ample supply of food and heating materials nearby. Weiher was missing his shoes; investigators found Mathias' own shoes in the US Forest Service Trailer, suggesting Mathias also survived for some time beyond the group's last sighting.

A local man later came forward, claiming that he had spent the same night in his own car a short distance away from where the Mercury was found. The witness told police that he had seen and heard people around his car that night, and twice called for help, only for them to grow silent and turn off their flashlights. This, and the considerable distance from the car to where the bodies were found, has led to suspicions of foul play.

Background

While he was stationed in West Germany as part of his United States Army service in the early 1970s, Gary Mathias, a resident of Marysville, California developed drug problems. This eventually led to him being diagnosed with schizophrenia and being given a psychiatric discharge. Mathias returned to his parents' home in Marysville and began treatment at a local mental hospital. While it had been difficult at first—he was nearly arrested for assault twice and often experienced psychotic episodes that landed him in a local Veterans Administration hospital—by 1978 he was being treated on an outpatient basis with Stelazine and Cogentin and was considered by his physicians to be "one of our sterling success cases".

Mathias supplemented his Army disability pay by working in his stepfather's gardening business. Off the job, outside of his family, he was close friends with four slightly older men who either had slight intellectual disabilities (Sterling and Huett) or were informally considered "slow learners" (Weiher and Madruga, the latter also an Army veteran). The men lived in Yuba City and nearby Marysville. Like Mathias, each man lived with his parents, all of whom referred to them collectively as "the boys".

The men's favorite leisure activity was sports. Their families said that when the five of them got together, it was usually to play a game or to watch one. They played basketball together on a team called the Gateway Gators, a team supported by a local program for people with mental disabilities.

On February 25, the Gators were due to play their first game in a weeklong tournament sponsored by the Special Olympics for which the winners would get a free week in Los Angeles. The five men had prepared the night before, some even laying out their uniforms and asking their parents to wake them up on time. They decided to drive to Chico that night to cheer on the UC Davis basketball team in an away game against Chico State. Madruga, the only member of the group besides Mathias who had a driver's license, drove the group 50 miles (80 km) north to the Chico State campus in his turquoise and white 1969 Mercury Montego. The men wore only light coats against the cool temperatures in the upper Sacramento Valley at night that time of year.