The Yuba County Five: Five Men Drove Into the Mountains and Never Came Home

2026-02-02 · Unexplained Deaths · 2 min read

On the evening of February 24, 1978, five friends from the Yuba City area of California — Ted Weiher, Jack Madruga, Bill Sterling, Jack Huett and Gary Mathias — drove to Chico to watch a college basketball game. All five lived with mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions, and basketball was their shared passion: their own team was due to play in a Special Olympics tournament the very next morning, a game they had talked about for weeks. After the final buzzer they bought snacks at a gas station and headed home. None of them ever arrived.

Four days later, a forest ranger led deputies to Madruga's Mercury Montego, abandoned on a snowbound mountain road in Plumas National Forest — roughly 70 miles from their route home and far up into the mountains. Nothing about the scene made sense. The car was undamaged, had gas in the tank, and was stuck so lightly in the snow that a few men could have pushed it free. The keys were gone, and so were the five passengers.

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