(Real) Unsolved Mysteries

the american dyatlov pass

*warning: this is long*

Some mysteries and unsolved crimes seem destined to remain buried out in the wilderness, all potential witnesses gone, their myriad clues floating out among the trees that whisper amongst themselves of the things we can not see. Such unexplained crimes are often infused with bizarre clues that no one can figure out and no one can shed any light on, seemingly doomed to remain specters, crawling about the wilderness to taunt us in some sort of twisted afterlife. One such case that has defied understanding for decades and seems forever banished to the limbo of uncertainty and cold cases is that case of a group of friends who went out to see a basketball game and ended up dead and vanished in a cold, unforgiving wilderness, surrounded by enigmatic clues and unsolved to this day.

The whole bizarre story starts quite innocuously enough, as some of the most mysterious cases often do, with a group of friends simply headed out for a good time, unaware of what awaits them. Gary Dale Mathias, Jack Madruga, Jackie Huett, Theodore (Ted) Weiher and William Sterling were five good friends between 24 and 32 years of age from Yuba City, California, who all shared an intense interest in sports, especially basketball, and on February 24, 1978, they all piled into Madruga's turquoise and white 1969 Mercury Montego to go see a college basketball game played at California State University, Chico, about 50 miles north of Yuba. They were a rather motley crew, with all of them having some mental disability ranging from severe to minor, and indeed they knew each other from a day program for mentally handicapped adults, but they were all functional in society and especially Madruga was considered just a bit slow and Mathias just had
schizophrenia, which he took regular medication for. Indeed Mathias and Madruga had both served in the military and could drive, so there was no particular reason to think anything would go wrong, and no one would have suspected at the time that they would drive off in that car and into the annals of great unsolved mysteries all the same.

The men did make it to the game, which ended at 10 PM that evening, and went to a nearby gas station to buy some snack food before getting on the highway home, this much we know. However, they did not return, and when they missed a basketball game of their own that they were scheduled to play in the following day for their local team "The Gateway Gators," their families became concerned. The county sheriff's department began a search of the route the missing men had taken, expecting that they had just decided to stay an extra day or had simply gotten lost or delayed, but no sign of the men or their vehicle was found.

It would not be until three days later, on February 28, when a park ranger totally unrelated to the official search called in to say he had found the missing vehicle on a remote, winding dirt road up in the mountains of Plumas National Forest, contacting the proper authorities after reading the missing persons bulletin. It was quite odd because that road was nowhere near the route they should have been taking home, nowhere near anything really, and considering that they had not been dressed for the cold it seemed odd that they should to have wanted to go there into the snowy wilderness in the first place. When authorities arrived they found that it was even odder still. The car was unlocked, missing its keys, with one window wide open to the chilled wind, and was stuck in the snow, but it was deemed that the five men would have been easily able to push it out, and it was in perfectly good working order and undamaged. Within the car were the discarded wrappers of the junk food that they had bought at the gas station and some maps of California but of the men themselves there was not a trace.

No one in the men's families could figure out why in the world they had taken that bizarre detour up into the mountains at all. None of the missing had been familiar with the area to their knowledge, and the missing men themselves had made no mention at all of going there, saying that they were just going to watch the game and come home. They were indeed looking forward to their own big game the next day and had wanted to get back as early as possible to sleep up for it, so why would they go driving up into the middle of nowhere on an isolated, treacherous road in the mountains? Also baffling was why they had left the car there in the first place, as it was such a remote, little-traveled area, that was additionally snowed over, and they had been in totally inadequate clothing for the conditions, wearing just light jackets. Why leave a perfectly good car to go off traipsing around in the frigid, forbidding wilderness at night like that? It didn't make sense. Unfortunately, weather conditions and further heavy snow presented a hurdle to investigation at the time, but this was only the beginning of the weirdness to come.