The Yuba County Five: Five Men Drove Into the Mountains and Never Came Home
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.
A witness named Joseph Schons later told police he had been stranded on the same road that night, suffering a heart attack in his own car. Around midnight he saw headlights behind him and heard what sounded like voices and whistling. When he called out for help, the lights went dark and the sounds stopped. His account, given while he was in severe physical distress, remains both the best clue in the case and one of the most disputed.
The snow kept the mountain's secret until June 4, 1978, when motorcyclists found a Forest Service trailer about 19 miles from the car. Inside, on a bed, lay the body of Ted Weiher, wrapped in eight sheets. He had died of starvation and hypothermia — but not quickly. His beard growth suggested he had survived for weeks, perhaps close to three months, and he had lost around 100 pounds.
The trailer deepened the mystery instead of solving it. A locker nearby held enough food to sustain five men for a year; it was never opened. Matches, fuel and a propane tank sat unused while Weiher slowly froze. Someone had wrapped him in the sheets and apparently cared for him — and a pair of tennis shoes belonging to Gary Mathias was found in the trailer. In the weeks that followed, searchers recovered the remains of Madruga, Sterling and Huett in the surrounding wilderness.
Mathias, an Army veteran, has never been found. Nearly half a century later, the questions remain untouched: why did five men who knew the road home drive up a frozen mountain in the wrong direction? Why abandon a working car? Why did a man starve beside a locker full of food? And what happened to Gary Mathias? The case is still open — and still unexplained.