Unsolved: The Yuba County Five

On the night of February 24th, 1978, The Yuba County Five were cheering on the UC Davis basketball team during an away game held in Chico. All five men were participants at a place called Gateway Projects which was an organization aimed at supporting adults with developmental disabilities, intellectual impairments, and mental health conditions, providing training to help them find employment. These guys weren’t just basketball fans; they were pretty good players themselves, and they all had spots on the local Gateway Gators team who had an important match scheduled for the very next day.

So this made it all the more puzzling when none of them returned home that night. And from that point onwards, the puzzles just kept on coming thick and fast.

Dark discoveries were made over three months later in the surprising location of Plumas National Forest, around seventy miles in the complete opposite direction to home. But whilst four of them perished under baffling and illogical circumstances, the fifth member of the group has never been found to this day.

One of the last witnesses reported to have seen the men alive talked of strange sights and sounds in the forest late that night, including peculiar whistling noises in the air. But he was already quite preoccupied with other things as he was having a heart attack at the time.

The families of the victims are convinced that foul play was afoot in the Plumas National Forest, with one chief suspect being a former local town bully turned Pastor who once admitted to his own flock that he had blood on his hands. But no charges have ever been brought against anybody.

It’s a mystery which has sparked literally thousands of theories on Reddit alone, but as is so often the case, these amateur online sleuths are very rarely working with all the right information.

So was the tragic story of The Yuba County Five a coldly calculated murder case carried out by someone remarkably close to the group? Was it a bizarre encounter with whistling aliens descending from the skies? Or was it just a cascade of deeply unfortunate and freakish events that spiralled into terrible accidents? And could one of the Yuba County Five still be out there somewhere with all the answers?

Basket Case

It seems that not everyone was a strong supporter of Gateway Projects. The non-profit organisation was first set up in 1970 to serve the Yuba and Sutter counties in California. The initial goal was to move a thousand enthusiastic adults with disabilities off the unemployment line and into work with the help of skill-building workshops and social integration activities. You’d think most people would consider this to be a perfectly commendable idea, but somebody in town appeared to have a grudge.

In early 1975, one of the Gateway workshops in Yuba City was intentionally set ablaze in the night, burning everything inside to a crisp and causing around $150,000 worth of damage. Just two weeks later, some dickhead lobbed a Molotov cocktail through the window of the main Gateway building whilst people were actually working inside. Thankfully nobody was seriously hurt and the damage was minimal this time.

The following month, the opening day of a new Gateway facility turned out to fall a bit flat when everybody had to be evacuated following a bomb threat. And an even more alarming event would unfold just five days later which we’ll return to much later.

The reassuring news is that by the time the Yuba County Five were attending Gateway in the late 1970s, this kind of thing had calmed down quite a bit, and they weren’t constantly glancing at the window and getting ready to duck from a raging dumpster bonfire flying through the glass.

Four of the group had been at Gateway for some time, and they were made up of two pairs of very close friends. The first pair – 30-year-old Jack Madruga and 29-year-old Bill Sterling – were never actually officially diagnosed with a disability, although they were both considered to be slow learners with low IQs. Jack Madruga had served a stint in the US Army and had a driver’s licence – he could often be seen cruising in his turquoise and white 1969 Mercury Montego over which he was fiercely protective.

In more recent years, Jack had been working as a dishwasher at a dried fruit company. He’d tried to get his buddy Bill a job at the same company but that sadly didn’t pan out well as Bill struggled to get to grips with the dishwashing equipment.

Bill Sterling perhaps wasn’t quite as independent and on-the-ball as his mate. He was apparently a deeply religious soul who frequently spent hours staring into The Good Book, and would occasionally participate in religious programs designed to spread the word of the Lord in psychiatric hospitals. Some might say that these programs were praying for the vulnerable, whilst others might say that they were preying on the vulnerable.

The other pair were Jackie Huett and Ted Weiher. Jackie was the youngest of the group at 24, and whilst he was diagnosed with just mild learning disabilities, he is often reported to be the one who struggled the most with everyday life. He was incredibly shy with a minor speech impediment and a slight droop to the head.

He couldn’t read or write very well, and had great difficulty in using a telephone. Fortunately for Jackie, he was very much looked after by Ted Weiher, the oldest of the group at 32. Described as the gentle giant of the group, Ted was also diagnosed with mild learning disabilities, and he acted as a kind of guardian angel to his best mate Jackie who very much looked up to him in both a figurative and literal sense.

Former janitor Ted was a pretty independent and sociable kind of bloke who needed to stick to a strict routine. Maybe he was a little too sociable for this grumpy old world. He would often wave in excitement at complete strangers and couldn’t always grasp why not all of them waved back.

His family also reported incidents of slightly odd behaviour from time to time. He once went into a shop and bought $100 worth of pencils, despite having no urgent need for a single pencil. And on a more worrying note, he once had to be dragged out of bed against his will when his bedroom caught fire.

Whilst everything around him was burning, Ted was more concerned that he might be late for work the next morning if he didn’t stay in bed and get a proper night’s sleep.

Gary Mathias was a relative newcomer to this group when he first arrived at Gateway in around 1977. Aged 25, Gary had much in common with Jack Madruga in that he was the only other member of the group to hold a driver’s licence, and he had also served a stint in the US army. However, Gary had led a pretty tough life and had often found himself on the wrong end of the law.

Whilst serving in the army, he was an undiagnosed schizophrenic who had developed a problem with illicit drugs. He was eventually discharged from the army after suffering a number of “psychotic episodes” and finally getting his overdue diagnosis. But it sounded as if he was very much on the right path by 1978, and his schizophrenia was fully under control now that he was on the right medication.

Gary was helping out at his stepfather’s gardening business, and he had bonded with the other four guys at Gateway who were now collectively known by locals as “The Boys.”

Some have pointed out that this is a faintly patronising term to describe a group of grown men with mixed degrees of disabilities, but I feel that it was more of an affectionate term to describe a group of men who were generally well-liked. And it’s surely not that uncommon for a male to announce that he’s going for a night out “with the boys” without casting any aspersions on their intellectual capabilities.

A mutual passion for basketball helped newcomer Gary integrate into the group. All five of “The Boys” were members of The Gateway Gators who were playing in a tournament sponsored by the Special Olympics. The top prize for the tournament winners was an all-expenses-paid trip to Los Angeles, and the Gators were strong contenders who were taking this very seriously.

The day before their big match – Friday 24th February 1978 – The Boys intended to make the 50-mile trip to Chico to support the UC Davis basketball team in an away game against Chico State. But even before they made this journey, most of them had already laid out their kits in preparation for their own big match. All five lived with their parents who had been told in no uncertain terms to set several alarms that night to make absolutely certain that the players got up in plenty of time.

In the case of Ted Weiher, it was clear that not even a house fire was likely to interrupt his sleep schedule.

That evening, Jack Madruga drove the gang to the away match in Chico in his treasured 1969 Mercury Montego. The match finished just before 10pm with a triumphant victory for the UC Davis team. Factoring in the 50-mile drive back home to Yuba City and any potential stops for snacks, they would have been expected back home at some point between 11pm and midnight.

When The Boys had still not made it back home by 2am, the worried families began telephoning each other as this was highly unusual under any circumstances, even without the prospect of their big game the following day. Tragically, The Boys – or as they were to become more commonly known, The Yuba County Five – never made it back home from that basketball game.

The Investigation

An obvious starting question here: Do we know for sure that they even made it to the game in Chico? The answer is yes. Bill Lee was the editor of the Chico Enterprise newspaper and he attended the match that night. When the five were first reported missing, he instantly recognised their faces as he had been sat quite close to them. As far as he could remember, they stayed right until the very end and nothing of any note took place.

Not only that, but surveillance cameras from a convenience store called Behr’s Market in Chico captured the last known footage of the Five just before 10pm. They had clearly popped in there straight after the match to stock up on snacks before the journey home. The store clerk remembered them well as he was getting ready to close the store. He told the police how he was actually quite annoyed that a big group of men had wandered in so late and were taking their time over choosing what they wanted.

The police investigation had swung into action pretty quickly the next morning following frantic calls from the parents. Lieutenant Lance Ayers from the Yuba County Sheriff’s office took a lead role in the search, and there was a personal connection here as he had attended high school with Ted Weiher and his older brothers, although he didn’t know them particularly well.

The search was hampered by a relentless blizzard, and despite the participation of over forty police officers, and the deployment of snowmobiles and helicopters, nothing was found for four days. Meanwhile, the families had pooled together their limited resources to come up with a reward of $1,200 which was highlighted on a hundred missing person posters plastered all around Chico.

Slightly weirdly, Jack Medruga’s mother, Melba, had called in the help of a self-proclaimed psychic very early on in the search. Dr Gloria Daniel of the Church of Tzaddi met up with Melba and other family members, later revealing that she had a few hunches including a strong feeling that the Five were currently in an unspecified old mine shaft. The family may have been better off hiring the services of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.

At least he would have led them to the right mine shaft. Yuba County Undersheriff Jack Beecham made it clear to the press that the ongoing investigation was based on logic rather than the vague musings of psychics, but it later transpired that the search team had frequently acted on the suggestions of Dr Gloria Daniel, and this had included the search of every known mine shaft in the area. Beecham later glumly admitted: “She wasn’t really much help.”

But then a more solid breakthrough emerged on the 28th February. A Plumas National Forest ranger had recalled seeing a vehicle in a fairly remote area of the forest on the previous Saturday, parked just off Oroville-Quincy Road at an elevation of around 4,500 feet. He didn’t really think too much of it at the time. During the winter, it was fairly common for cross-country skiers to park up in this area before heading out to the trails in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

It was only a few days later that he made the connection with the story of the missing men whilst watching a local news bulletin. The abandoned vehicle was a turquoise and white 1969 Mercury Montego.

The Abandoned Vehicle

There wasn’t much of interest to be found in the car. The doors were unlocked, the keys were nowhere to be seen, and the driver’s window had been rolled down. The seats were covered in empty wrappers which matched the descriptions of the snacks bought at Behr’s Market, as well as a basketball program for the match between UC Davis and Chico State.

The real headscratcher was the actual location of the car. After the game, the men should have headed south for the straightforward 50-mile journey home, mainly through Highway 70 and then Highway 99 through the flat Central Valley. But instead, they appeared to have driven around 70 miles in the complete opposite direction, and then drove a long distance up a rough mountain road before abandoning the vehicle.

We might assume that the challenging wintery weather explained why the vehicle had been abandoned. There was evidence that the car had been stuck in a snow drift and that the driver had tried but failed to spin his way out of it. But the officers on the scene reckoned that the snow wasn’t particularly deep, and that five athletic basketball players could easily have pushed the car out of the snow without even breaking into a sweat.

There was nothing wrong with the vehicle, either. The tank was still a quarter full of gasoline, and when the officers resorted to hot-wiring the car in the absence of any keys, it sprang immediately into life.

Another potentially curious thing: The undercarriage of the vehicle was remarkably free of even the slightest scratch or scrape, despite the fact that the presumed driver, Jack Madruga, would have been completely unfamiliar with such a bumpy makeshift road riddled with potholes on which he was driving late at night. Either he was an amazingly good driver who had taken quite exceptional care, or the car had actually been driven by someone who knew exactly where they were going.

The search for more clues intensified for several days in Plumas National Forest, but again the efforts were severely hampered by the brutal weather which at one point almost led to a further incident as two members of the search team got themselves into a situation where they had to be found and rescued themselves. Later on in March, the difficult decision was taken to suspend the search until either new leads were found or the snow melted, as it was deemed too hazardous and inaccessible to continue.

Things were looking increasingly grim for the families of all five, as it was now well established the men didn’t know the area, didn’t have much money, and didn’t have any winter clothes with them. The stepfather of Gary Mathias also expressed his concern that Gary hadn’t taken any extra medication with him for his schizophrenia, so even if he was still alive, he would be in very poor condition. They would all have to wait until the thaw of summer before any more answers could be unearthed from the forest.

Witness Sightings

In the meantime, there had been endless reported sightings of the group over the following weeks and months from all around the country, the vast majority of which were investigated and dismissed as total bollocks by Lt. Lance Ayers. But there were two in particular which were of significance.

Most online sources get the name of the first alleged witness wrong. The 55-year-old man from Sacramento was actually called Joseph Schons, and he’d been out on that mountain road on the Friday evening in his Volkswagen. He’d apparently been scouting round the area to see if the weather might be suitable for a family trip up there the next day.

The answer to that would seem to be a negatory good buddy, as his car got stuck in the snow at around 5:30pm. Still, no problem. Even though Joseph wasn’t in the best of health, he still felt confident that he could shift it out of the snow himself and turn back, again begging the question why five younger and fitter men didn’t try the same trick with their vehicle.

It turns out that it wasn’t a particularly good idea for Joseph though as he ended up experiencing the early symptoms of a heart attack, something which was later confirmed by the local hospital.

He gave it up as a bad job and got back in the car where he waited alone in agony for at least six hours with the engine still running to try and keep warm. But then it seemed that help might be on the horizon.

He saw a car pull up about 150 feet down the road but couldn’t make it out clearly. He believes he saw a group of men hanging around the car, along with a woman holding a baby. Joseph cried out desperately for help but the strangers completely ignored him before turning off the lights in the car.

In one version of his admittedly hazy story, he also says that he saw a red pick-up truck near the other car, whilst in another version he described hearing eerie whistling noises coming from down the mountain road. Joseph readily admits that his memory of events might not be perfect as he was trying to deal with a heart attack at the time. But he’s pretty sure that a couple of hours later, the headlights of the car behind him were turned on for a while, prompting him to cry out for help once more. Again, his cries were ignored and the headlights were promptly switched off.

Eventually, during the early hours of Saturday morning, Joseph’s car ran out of gas but he now felt well enough to leave his Volkswagen and start wandering down the road in search of medical help. Along the way, he passed what he presumed to be the same car he spotted earlier, about 150ft away from his own. He could now identify it as a turquoise and white Mercury Montego, but there was no longer any sign of life within the abandoned vehicle.

Joseph Schons went on to find medical help and make a full recovery, but the planned Sunday outing was definitely off. And the police find it entirely credible that he was the last man to have seen the men from Yuba County alive. Whilst Ted Weiher’s mother insisted that her son would never have ignored a cry for help, we have no way of knowing if any of the men were in a position to offer any.

Another slightly odd pair of sightings were also taken seriously during the investigation. They were odd because they’re the only faintly credible claims that the men may still have been in good shape a couple of days after they went missing. The first was reported by a guy called Carroll Waltz who was the owner of Mary’s Country Store in Brownsville, about 30 miles away from where the car had been abandoned. After clocking one of the flyers offering a reward for information, Carrol got in touch with police to report that he had seen two of the men in his store on both the Saturday and the Sunday, matching the photographs of Ted Weiher and Jackie Huett.

A woman who worked at the store also claimed that she’d seen four of the men – everyone except newcomer Gary Mathias – in the store on the Sunday. She said she had served two of the men in the store, whilst the other two were making a call from the phone box outside. She recalled that a man matching the photograph of Jackie Huett was making the call which lasted around fifteen minutes.

Another weird point is that whilst neither of these witnesses recalled seeing a Mercury Montego, the female employee did recall that a red Chevy pick-up truck was parked outside the store whilst the men were there. This appears to throw up a connection with the statements from Joseph Schons, although neither of the witnesses at the store mentioned anything about a woman holding a baby or freaky whistling noises.

Some of the family members found the store sightings to be plausible, as the witnesses described how the men were eagerly grabbing all kinds of goodies and snacks from every aisle, which seemed very much in character. But the brother of Jackie Huett pointed out something that was very much out of character. Jackie was meant to have been seen spending fifteen minutes on the phone, but Jackie was the member of the group who struggled to use a phone. In fact, he absolutely hated phones.

Jackie’s brother would usually deal with any calls for him from the other members of the group. And on the rare occasions when Jackie was compelled to use the phone himself, he would awkwardly speak about three words before hanging up. So the idea of him happily chatting away for fifteen minutes doesn’t really ring true.

These puzzling sightings were chewed over for quite some time, but after the snow finally melted in Plumas National Forest, more substantial evidence finally began to emerge during the beginning of June. And it wasn’t good news.

Last Night on Earth

A small group of motorcyclists were pissing about in the forest on the 4th June in an area called the Daniel Zink Campground, when they came across a forest service trailer which was around 19 miles up from where the abandoned Mercury Montego had been found. This wouldn’t normally have stopped them in their tracks, were it not for the sight of a window on the trailer which had been partially shattered, and more significantly, the terrible stench that was flowing out of it.

Further investigation led to the discovery of a body, tucked up in sheets on a bed in the trailer. It was the decomposing remains of the gentle giant Ted Weiher. His bare feet were severely frostbitten. The big guy had lost almost half his weight before death, whilst the growth of a beard indicated that he may well have still been alive between two to three months after he disappeared, possibly until just a few weeks before he was discovered.

We’ll return to the trailer in more detail in just a moment, but there were further grim discoveries to be made very shortly afterwards.

Following a fresh comb of the whole area by police officers, volunteers, and members of the families, the remains of two more bodies were found further back down the mountain road, around 12 miles away from the car. A local man with tracking dogs came across the badly decomposed remains of the driver Jack Madruga. The car keys were found in his pocket, and he was clutching a watch in one hand. The other arm had been partially bitten off, presumably by wild animals.

Just on the other side of the road, the scattered remains of the religious member of the group, Bill Sterling, were found. His father was on the scene when the discovery was made. After he was informed of the news, he was given his son’s wallet which had been found on the ground, containing photographs of his twin sisters.

The father of the phone-shy Jackie Huett was also on the scene, and it was he who came across the first discovered remains of his son two days later. All he initially found was a backbone under a manzanita bush, alongside Jackie’s jeans and distinctive shoes. The scavenging animals had clearly been at work on all three of these victims, and it wasn’t until the following day that a deputy sheriff found Jackie’s skull, later confirmed by dental records. Whilst it was difficult to determine the exact cause of death from the remains of these three bodies found outside in the forest, the autopsies concluded that Madruga, Sterling, and Huett had all died from hypothermia due to exposure.

No remains have ever been found of the fifth member of the group, Gary Mathias. But something belonging to Gary was found back up in the trailer, near the body of Ted Weiher. A few of Ted’s personal items had been found on a bedside table, including a nickel ring with his name engraved on it, alongside a gold watch that none of the families recognised. But whilst the trailer contained all the clothes that Ted had been wearing when he set off to the basketball game, one thing was conspicuous by its absence: His leather shoes.

There were actually a pair of tennis shows found in the trailer, but they didn’t belong to Ted. They belonged to Gary Mathias.

The Trailer Mystery

The scenario becomes harder to fathom when you consider Ted’s cause of death whilst taking into account everything else that was either inside or just outside the trailer. It’s usually reported today that his cause of death was a combination of starvation and hypothermia, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Officially, the cause of death was pulmonary congestion – or wet lung - which essentially floods the lungs with water and causes severe shortness of breath.

This condition would have been brought on by exposure. But that’s not to say that he wasn’t also clearly starving to death, as he had lost almost half his body weight before he succumbed to pulmonary congestion.

Just outside the trailer was a shed containing dozens of tins of C-rations or Combat Rations - prepared wet food predominantly used by the US military for much of the 20th century. Around 36 of these tins had been opened and discarded, so it seems that Ted hadn’t gone completely hungry after arriving at the trailer. But the shed also contained a separate locker – by most accounts, unlocked and easily accessible – which contained a further massive stash of C-rations that had been left completely untouched.

It’s been suggested that there was enough in there to feed all five of the group for a year which is probably an exaggeration, but there was certainly enough to keep them going for a while. Yet Ted remained in that trailer, starving and freezing to death.

Another nearby shed was connected to a full butane tank with a valve which would have powered up the trailer’s heating system if only the valve had been opened. There were also matches in the trailer, along with enough paperback books, wooden furniture, playing cards, and other materials to keep a good bonfire blazing for quite some time. Yet these again went untouched, whilst Ted was freezing to death with frostbitten feet. As a confused Lt Lance Ayers puts it: “All they had to do was turn that gas on and they’d have had gas to the trailer and heat.”

So…from what we can gather so far, it looks as if the five men abandoned the Mercury Montego and went venturing uphill through the snow, but at least three of them perished before the trailer was found. Afterwards, at least one of them sat starving and freezing to death in the trailer whilst surrounded by unopened food and sources of heat. And this naturally throws up one or two questions. Or maybe at least eleven.

After leaving the basketball match in Chico, why did they drive for 70 miles in the wrong direction from home and continue up an unfamiliar mountain road? Why just abandon a perfectly good vehicle and continue on an uphill trek on foot when they could have just used their collective muscle to shove the car out of the snow? Were they really spotted by a mid-heart-attack Joseph Schons whom they completely ignored amidst a cacophony of whistling noises?

Who was the woman holding the baby? Were they still alive days later and buying snacks from a store in Brownsville? And how come a red pick-up truck kept popping up in the most credible witness accounts?

How did at least one of them know the way to a random forest service trailer 19 miles uphill? Why was Ted Weiher starving and freezing to death in a well-stocked trailer with access to heating? Was all this just a series of mishaps or were they led to their doom?

Finally, where in time and space is Gary Mathias, and what role could he have played in all of this?

As this is an “unsolved” case, the most honest answer to most of those questions is that we don’t really know. Well, alright, we can have a go at trying to put together some pieces from the limited information available, but I think we’ll end up a long way off from coming up with a definitive answer on this case. Perhaps the first question of why they travelled in the wrong direction is the fundamental one. That’s why I’d like to leave it until last and kick off instead with the reliability of those sightings.

Evaluating the Witnesses

According to locals, Joseph Schons was a bit of a funny sausage. Nobody was quite sure what he did for a living. He claimed to be a substance abuse counsellor, but nobody ever saw him or his wife go out to work. It is known that they had a few goes at setting up illegal marijuana farms on other people’s land without actually telling them, but predictably this never ended well.

In fact, Joseph had a habit of pissing off the locals and making enemies. Banned from most of the bars in the area, he was invariably described as “a wet brain alcoholic,” “a pathological liar,” and “a blowhard who rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.”

It sounds as if he really did have a heart attack on that Saturday night whilst stuck in the snow on the mountain road. And it’s very possible that he had some kind of encounter with the five men in the Mercury Montego. But the exact circumstances are anyone’s guess. Theories abound that he may have been involved in some kind of road rage incident with the men, scaring them out of the car and driving them up the hill.

Or perhaps he got involved in a fistfight with the Five, provoking the heart attack which again scared the men into fleeing the scene, under the impression that they had killed him.

But that all sounds quite extreme. Whilst Joseph Schons was an annoying and obnoxious drunk, it seems unlikely that he was directly involved in the deaths of the men. It’s just difficult to place too much weight on anything said by a known bullshitter who was having a heart attack and readily admits that some of his conflicting memories may have been hallucinations as he was drifting painfully in and out of consciousness. The whole thing with the whistling, the woman with the baby, and the red pick-up truck may have originated from either his feverish imagination, his tendency to tell tall stories, or even from separate and entirely unconnected events.

Still, it’s pretty curious that a red pick-up truck turned up again in one of the accounts of the witnesses at Mary’s Country Store in Brownsville. And it’s also interesting that the still-missing Gary Mathias was the only one not spotted by either of those two witnesses. But unless something utterly incomprehensible was going on here, I’d be very tempted to disregard both of the witness statements from the store as a case of mistaken identity.

It already sounds a bit unreliable that the man supposedly seen chatting on the phone was the only member of the group who couldn’t bear to use a telephone. But the main point is that unless everything else we think we understand about the case is wrong, then the sightings at the store just don’t make a shred of sense. It would seem clear that the group got into serious difficulty shortly after arriving at Plumas National Forest, and they didn’t really have the capacity to just nip over to Brownsville a couple of days later to stock up on snacks before returning to the forest to perish.

The only other explanation could be that they didn’t arrive at Plumas National Forest until later than we thought. But this would mean we’d have to completely dismiss the alleged sighting by Joseph Schons on the Friday evening. And the idea of them just happily mooching around Brownsville over the weekend for no apparent reason when they were all meant to be competing in an important match for the Gateway Gators just doesn’t sound right, either.

I really don’t think that the witnesses at the store had clocked the right men.

The Abandoned Car Revisited

So then what are we to make of the abandoned Mercury Montego, and who was likely to have been driving it? It might seem peculiar that the undercarriage was devoid of the slightest scrape if Jack Madruga had been driving along a bumpy and unfamiliar road late at night under hazardous conditions. Perhaps he was just an excellent driver, but it would still have been quite an extraordinary feat to get away without a single tiny blemish on the vehicle.

His nephew George later declared that Jack would always drive with meticulous care and attention on rough roads, mainly because he didn’t want to damage his cherished car. If anything, this might suggest that Jack was far more likely to have been in the driving seat than literally anyone else who may not have been so bothered about racking up a few dents. And let’s not forget that the keys were found in Jack’s pocket.

But George also revealed that Jack would flat-out refuse to drive on an unfamiliar and questionable road if he didn’t like the look of it. This was a point backed by Bill Sterling’s sister who recalled a time when Jack had refused to give her brother a lift home because he didn’t like the slightly dodgy road that led to his house. But maybe Jack didn’t have much choice on this occasion.

It also seems suspicious that Jack Madruga abandoned his treasured car with the window wound down and the doors unlocked to embark upon a treacherous journey on foot, when it shouldn’t have been too difficult to get the car moving again. His nephew George reckoned that Jack would never just abandon his car like that unless he had been forced or coerced to do so.

After the vehicle was so carelessly abandoned, it’s again quite extraordinary that the men somehow managed to head in the general rough direction of a forest service trailer 19 miles away, despite not being remotely familiar with the area. An obvious conclusion to draw is that somebody else was showing them the way or pushing them forward. There might be another explanation, though: It was later confirmed that a forest service Snowcat had made a similar journey the previous day.

The mighty vehicle had been travelling to the trailer to clear snow from the roof, and it had left behind some pretty big tracks. Although the group would have been lost in the unfamiliar forest, it’s quite feasible that they decided to just follow the tracks of the Snowcat in the hope that it would lead to shelter or even help from the forest service.

Judging by the fact that three of the group’s remains were found along the way, it’s reasonable to assume that Jack Madruga, Bill Sterling, and Jackie Huett never made it as far as the trailer, unless they headed back down the hill afterwards. Whilst Ted Weiher is the only one whom we can be absolutely certain gained access into to the trailer through a broken window, there’s a little bit of confusion over the theories as to whether or not he was accompanied by Gary Mathias at some point. And some of that confusion boils down to can openers.

You would usually require a very specific type of foldable can opener to open these military C-rations, and it’s known as a P-38. At least some of the cans had been opened by a P-38, and it’s often suggested that only Gary Mathias and Jack Madruga had the military experience to know their way around one. As it seems fairly probable that Jack died before getting there, this must point to the presence of Gary Mathias in the trailer at some point, as Ted couldn’t have opened the rations himself.

However, I’m reliably informed that it’s really not that hard to figure out how to use a P-38. I mean, I would probably struggle. I once nearly died just trying to use a normal tin opener to open a Fray Bentos Pie.

But I reckon Ted would have been able to manage it. And even if he couldn’t, there’s another little detail from the police files that often gets missed. Whilst a couple of cans had been opened with a P-38, the majority of them had been opened by a standard church key opener which even a non-military type – myself excluded - should have had no problems in using.

Of course, the piece of evidence that points more strongly to the presence of Gary Mathias is his pair of tennis shoes found in the trailer, and the absence of Ted’s leather shoes. This suggests that at some point, Gary decided to leave the trailer but swapped his old tennis shoes for more durable footwear that a seriously ill Ted may no longer have been in any position to use. Gary was a smaller size than Ted but his own feet may have swollen from frostbite.

Assuming that Gary was there for a while, it does seem odd that he never bothered to turn on the gas or start a fire, but I suppose he may not have been firing on all cylinders himself, particularly as he would have been out of medication. But the unopened C-rations are perhaps less of a mystery. It seems feasible that as Ted Weiher had become seriously ill in the trailer, he was in no fit state to even move after he laid on the bed with severely frostbitten feet.

Gary Mathias was the only one opening the cans, and when he left the trailer, Ted was unable to do anything further himself. Even if a billion cans of C-rations had been stacked up in that shed, along with a few thousand KFC buckets, they would have been no good to Ted.

And this does lead us to a somewhat uncomfortable question about Gary – one which has been voiced by relatives of the victims. Did Gary Mathias have something to do with the deaths of the other four?

Know Your Enemy

There do seem to be a few worrying elements regarding the potential involvement of Gary Mathias. He was the only one not to be found and so could in theory still be out there somewhere in hiding. Whereas the other four had been friends for years, Gary was the newcomer and possible outlier of the group.

Ted Weiher’s brother, Dallas, also grew suspicious much later in the 1990s when he claims all the family members were invited to participate in a proposed episode of NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries dedicated to the case. Whereas all the other relatives agreed, the family of Gary Mathias declined the invitation, even though it could potentially have led to fresh clues on the missing man. Dallas said: “That’s just suspicious.

I’m not saying they knew, but, well, you can probably guess what I think.” Gary’s sister, Tammie, denies that they were ever contacted, and claims that they would have jumped at the opportunity.

But things might feel a little more alarming when we take a slightly deeper dive into the background of Gary Mathias. We mentioned near the top that he’d previously found himself on the wrong end of the law before signing up with Gateway Projects. In fact that would be putting it very mildly.

Gary’s parents split up when he was very young, and he and his siblings lived with their mother Ida, who at one point filed a restraining order against her husband Garland. None of the siblings had any further contact with their father until almost a decade after Gary’s disappearance. He showed up out of the blue at the house of Gary’s sister Sharon and enjoyed a meal with the grandchildren he was meeting for the first time. Literally just a few days later he took his own life.

Fifteen years later, Sharon would also take her own life. Her husband believed that Sharon, Garland, and Gary all shared the same mental illness.

Revelations about Gary’s own history only emerged as recently as 2019 after the newspaper The Sacramento Bee was granted access to police records from the case at Yuba County Office. According to the records, he landed himself in jail in 1973 after he went AWOL from the army, during which time his cousin accused him of attempting to sexually assault his wife in their own home.

Eight days after his arrest, he was causing a commotion in his cell and calling out for the attention of two sergeants. When they opened the door to find a completely naked Gary Mathias, the prisoner punched one of the sergeants pretty hard in the face, drawing blood. When questioned as to why he’d done this, Gary is reported to have said: “I’ve been in the Army, and I don’t like it, and I thought that if I hit a cop, maybe they’d let me out.” The charges of attempted sexual assault was later dropped as part of a plea deal, but Gary was sentenced to six months in Yuba County Jail for smacking a sergeant in the chops.

Over the years, Gary had been admitted to a number of mental health facilities but didn’t seem to like the idea of hanging around for too long. He made various daring escapes down drainpipes in the middle of the night, often while just wearing a hospital gown. Following one particular great escape, he was missing for five weeks before turning up at his mother and stepdad’s house, having apparently walked for 540 miles. He reportedly looked like death warmed up, and had survived by eating cat food and stealing milk bottles from porches.

The list of incidents just goes on and on. He’d been arrested for driving without a licence, driving at night without headlights, and disturbing the peace. At one point, he broke into the occupied house of a Yuba County couple, informing them that he was looking for a ring to return to Satan. As you do.

It’s not known for sure how much of this was known by the families of the other men at the time, but it seems that at least some of them always had concerns about Gary Mathias. Yuba County Undersheriff Jack Beecham later revealed that some of the victims’ parents had told him without any qualms that they believed Gary was at the centre of the deaths. Beecham said that Gary had styled himself as the new ‘leader’ of The Boys, but the parents had felt that he didn’t quite meld with the other four.

George Madruga, the brother of Jack, publicly claimed that he believed that Gary was the key to the whole mystery. Meanwhile, Jack’s niece, Cathy Roberts, told the Netflix series Files of the Unexplained that the others had actually been quite scared of Gary and didn’t even want him to go to the game with them in the first place. Mind you, Cathy also came out with a very weird story in which she claimed to have spotted Gary Mathias drinking in a bar owned by her parents, almost a year after he disappeared.

She apparently went rushing round to the back of the bar to tell her parents who immediately phoned the police, but when she returned to the scene, there was no sign of Gary. Make of that what you will.

As far as I’ve been able to uncover, Bill Sterling’s relatives are the only ones to have publicly declared that they do not believe Gary Mathias to be responsible. Gary’s relatives have perhaps unsurprisingly reached the same conclusion.

And there’s a fair argument here that casting any aspersions at all on Gary Mathias might seem in very poor taste, particularly when people speculate that he was bound to be responsible because he had schizophrenia. As far as things stand, Gary is still missing and his family have no idea what happened to him. Whilst there’s speculation that he might still be alive, the fact that he hasn’t popped up again at any point over the last 48 years – aside from what may have been a cheese dream in a local bar – his current state of health doesn’t seem particularly promising, and he could well have perished in a very similar way to his friends.

It’s true that he certainly had a troubled history, and on that basis alone, it’s perhaps understandable how people have grown suspicious about his involvement. But we also have to take in account the difference in the state of his mental health during that troubled period and in the years that immediately led up to the disappearances. For the most part, Gary Mathias was an undiagnosed schizophrenic during those earlier years, and the undiagnosed bit is hugely important.

After he had finally received his diagnosis and started taking regular medication, he’d finally been able to get a grip on his life and turn it around. He hadn’t been in any kind of legal trouble for over two years. He was doing well and making new friends at Gateway Projects.

He was holding down a job at a gardening business owned by his stepfather who also ensured that Gary took his medication every day without fail. So this was a very different Gary Mathias to the one we’ve just been hearing about. After more than two years of making excellent progress, it would now seem wildly out-of-character for him to randomly go haywire after watching a basketball game with his new mates.

His sister Tammie is of the firm opinion that if anything, Gary was the heroic character on that night, even though his efforts were in vain. She feels that Gary was powerless to save the other three before making it to the trailer, but he managed to haul a dying Ted up there and did all he could to look after him. That included opening plenty of C-ration cans for him and making sure that he was as comfortable as possible.

It’s worth emphasising that the body of Ted was found very neatly wrapped up in bed, as if somebody had been taking great care of him. Eventually, with the situation looking increasingly hopeless, Gary slipped on Ted’s shoes and went out to try and get help, but it was a doomed final effort from which he would never return, presumably suffering the same fate as his friends but in a different location in which his remains were never found. As Tammie puts it: “I do believe he didn’t make it out of there any more than the other boys did.”

I suppose it’s possible that some of the other three – perhaps even all of them - also made it to the trailer, and left with Gary to find help. But I find this unlikely, just because if some of the others were there, surely it would have made more sense for at least one of them to stay behind and look after Ted whilst the others went to find help.

Out there in National Plumas Forest, Gary Mathias may have been just as much a victim as his friends, and whilst the debate rages on about his potential involvement, many agree with Tammie that his actions on that night were more likely to be heroic than hostile.

Gateway Under Attack

But if it wasn’t Gary Mathias, could somebody else from outside the group have been guilty of foul play? Rewinding back to the beginning, you’ll remember that we were discussing some very disturbing events centred on Gateway Projects, including bomb threats, the lobbing of a Molotov cocktail through a window, and a devastating arson attack on one of the workshops. And that wasn’t quite the end of it.

During this period in the mid-1970s, the director of Gateway was a guy called Donald Garrett who was naturally deeply alarmed at what appeared to be frequent targeted attacks on the facility. The Yuba County Five never got to meet Donald Garrett as he was knocking around a few years before their own time at Gateway. But there was a dark reason why the director’s job had very suddenly become vacant in 1975.

Just weeks after the arson attacks, and a mere five days after the bomb threat, 43-year-old Donald Garrett was chilling out in his Sugar House apartment in Yuba County. He’d only recently moved into the new apartment following a separation from his wife. He answered a knock on the door just after 8pm, and it would be the last thing he ever did.

An unknown assailant threw a load of flammable liquid in his face, followed by a lit match. The police were quick to arrive at the scene following a call from a neighbour, but Donald was already dead with severe burns on over 60% of his body. The identity of his murderer was never discovered.

Acting Sergeant Ronald Harnish initially expressed his belief that the murder and arson attacks were related. He told the press: “Apparently someone really has it in for Gateway Projects, for some reason or another. Aside from that, we don’t have much else. We have to assume the attacks are all related because they were all associated with Gateway.”

The campaign of terror against Gateway could feasibly have been carried out by someone with a grudge against disabled people in general, as sadly such feeling was not exactly uncommon back in the 1970s. Whilst this decade marked the height of the US disability rights movement, it also provoked backlash from the kind of people who thought that disabled people should remain largely excluded from society on the grounds that they were dangerous, or burdensome, or unsightly. This was during a time when some US cities still had “Ugly Laws” in place which banned people with visible disabilities from public spaces on the grounds that their appearance might be offensive or upsetting to brain-dead idiots.

Facilities such as Gateway were often the target of hate campaigns from people who believed that the very idea of offering support and employment training to people with disabilities was distasteful. And this has led to the idea that the Yuba County Five were targeted on that night by people who simply didn’t approve of Gateway or anyone who attended, perhaps even the same people who were either setting fire to buildings or murdering the director.

It was only a few days after the director’s murder that the police changed their tune on the motivation behind the attacks, suggesting that this may have been more of a personal vendetta against Donald Garrett, perhaps even some kind of love triangle in which the recently separated man had become entangled.

The attacks on Gateway finally came to an end in August 1975, suggesting that this nasty flurry of concentrated activity was probably not connected in any way to the disappearance of the Yuba County Five well over two years later. But we still can’t discount the idea that the five men were in a more vulnerable position than most at that basketball match, and they could have had an encounter that spiralled out of control with a group of thugs who were offended by their presence in a public space.

This is all a little vague though, as nobody has ever been arrested in connection with the case, and we have no names of suspects to pull out of the hat, unless we’re counting Gary Mathias and, at a push, the ‘wet brain alcoholic’ Joseph Schons. There is one other name that keeps popping up, though: A man with close connections to Gary Mathias who somehow evolved from the town bully into the town pastor…

The Town Bully Turned Pastor

The man named Gary Whitely has never even been questioned by the police about the case and, as far as we know, has never been considered a serious suspect by authorities. His role in the case is largely confined to unconfirmed rumours, local gossip, and several hundred online rabbit holes that I fell into whilst researching this. Based on that alone, I wouldn’t usually have mentioned him at all as it’s obviously far more reliable to stick with official documentation, press reports, and solid facts. But I’m making an exception here, partly because of the sheer frequency that this name keeps popping up, but mainly because some of the relatives of the victims have stated that they believe this guy was involved.

During the 1970s, the man known as The Town Bully was married to Gary Mathias’ sister Sharon, but they were going through a divorce. Whitely apparently never got on with Gary, and things between them didn’t exactly improve when Gary’s sister filed for the divorce.

The Town Bully apparently caused mayhem around the whole area throughout the 1970s. It’s reported that he was arrested for offences relating to drugs, carrying firearms, assaulting a police officer, and generally being a little shit. What we know for sure is that he was banged up for four years in 1979 after being convicted of assaulting a woman and inflicting great bodily injury. He ended up finding God whilst in prison – a grumpy omnipotent being who allegedly created the universe in six days – and he was apparently a reformed man when he was let back out in the wild, taking on the role of local pastor by the 1990s.

The confusing thing here is that there appear to be two contradictory accounts of why this man may have murdered at least one of the men. In 1994, the local forestry employee William J. Prater reported to the Sheriff’s office that the Town Pastor had made some startling confessions to his flock during congregation. As well as claiming that he had once murdered a girl, the Pastor went on to make the curious admission that he was responsible for the “death of two of seven mentally disabled men in the hills 17 years ago.”

The date certainly matches up, but the numbers are a little confusing. It’s not clear who the other two men were supposed to be, or which two of the seven Whitely was claiming to have killed.

However, whilst some observers of this case feel outraged that no action was ever taken against Gary Whitely in light of this extraordinary confession, I think we need to slow down a bit. Firstly, William J. Prater may have reported the confession to the Sheriff’s office, but it turns out that he hadn’t actually been present himself in church when the Pastor was supposed to have made them. He’d just heard it second-hand from somebody else who claimed to be there.

You would assume that if the Pastor really had made such jaw-dropping statements in front of a big crowd of bible bashers, then more witnesses would have come forward to the Sheriff’s office. But nobody ever did.

It’s not clear if Whitely was ever questioned by police over the allegation, but all this really boils down to is little more than a bloke sharing a story that he heard down the pub. Maybe one of the congregation just got a bit confused about a parable that the Pastor was sharing - they can be a bit cryptic at the best of times, especially the one about the talking donkey.

The contradictory account relating to Whitely is interesting because it would suggest that Gary Mathias never actually made it to National Plumas Forest, having already plunged to his death following an incident known as The Brawl at Behr’s Market. Gary’s sister Tammie has played a pretty big role in putting forward this story as she claims to have talked to at least one witness who saw the whole thing.

To cut a fairly short story even shorter… We know that the last confirmed sighting of the Five, backed up by CCTV footage, was at Behr’s Market in Chico where they stopped to stock up on snacks after the basketball game at around 10pm. The story goes that the men bumped into The Town Bully and a few of his cronies in the store who began hurling vicious insults at Jackie Huett, and later started slapping him in the face. Gary Mathias jumped in to defend his friend, leading to a massive brawl in the store between all the men.

This spilled out into the streets where Whitely and his gang got the upper hand in the fight, and somehow forced or coerced the Five into making the drive to Oroville Dam. Once there, they beat up Gary Mathias and threw him over the bridge, before forcing the rest of the men to take the long drive to National Plumas Forest.

Parts of this story were apparently related to Tammie by one of the Town Bully’s cronies who was apparently wracked with guilt, but he died of a heroin overdose two days later which wasn’t very helpful. Jackie Huett’s brother Tom has speculated that there may be some truth in the story, and that the rest of the group took Gary’s shoes with them on the drive to the forest, which would explain how they were found in the trailer. But this is kind of where the whole story falls apart at the seams for me.

Assuming that somebody thought it necessary to take off Gary’s shoes before throwing him into Oroville Dam, why would the group feel the need to pick them up? More to the point, after leaving the vehicle in the National Plumas Forest and preparing to embark on a big hike through the snow without any bags, why on Earth would one of the group feel it necessary to carry a dead man’s shoes in their hands?

That’s not the only niggle here. There are plenty. The guy on duty at Behr’s Market distinctly remembers feeling a bit annoyed that a big group of customers had turned up so late and were taking their time in choosing their snacks. But he doesn’t recall a massive punch-up breaking out in the store, which you’d think would be a slightly more memorable way of ending your shift.

And there are no news reports or police files relating to any kind of disturbance at Behr’s Market, so again we’re again relying on slightly dubious third-hand accounts and idle gossip.

Several other relatives of the Five have expressed that they still believed that Gary Whitely was responsible, even though there are simply no hard facts to back any of this up. Meanwhile, some of the relatives are still convinced that the men were victims of foul play even if they don’t necessarily know the identity of the perpetrators.

The parents of Bill Sterling and Jack Madruga insist that their sons didn’t particularly enjoy the great outdoors and absolutely hated cold weather. Bill’s father once tried to take him fishing but Bill thought it was shit and declined every subsequent invitation. Jack’s parents also stressed that he never stayed out overnight, he was always keen to get back home at a reasonable time, and on the very rare occasions that he was running late he would call and keep them up to date. The idea of suddenly taking a random trip in the wrong direction when they had such a big game on the next day was just inconceivable.

Jack’s mother, Melba, told The Washington Post: “There was some force that made ‘em go up there. They wouldn’t have fled off in the wood like a bunch of quail. We know good and well somebody made them do it.”

Brain Stew

There’s an alternative argument that we’re all just being a bit over-dramatic here. Couldn’t there be a much simpler explanation for the surprise trip to the forest which doesn’t include sinister activity from a town bully, a confused pastor who can’t even count, or someone within the group itself?

According to the principle of Occam’s Razor, the simplest explanation is usually the most likely. So what if the Yuba County Five were chased the wrong way home for 70 miles by a whistling alien spacecraft into the forest where they all got devoured by Bigfoot? Alright, we can probably go a bit simpler than that. But the problem in this case – with the greatest of respect to William of Ockham and his theoretical facial lawnmower – is that the simplest explanations perhaps make the least sense of all.

And it all boils down to that fundamental starting point: Why would the five men drive 70 miles in the wrong direction? And I’m not sure we’re any closer to a logical answer here. Not by a whisker.

Armchair detectives seeking a more straightforward and less creepy solution often put forward the idea that the men just took a wrong turn on the way home and ended up getting lost. A slight variant on this idea is that Gary Mathias had some good friends in Forbestown, and he insisted on taking a pretty big detour to the mountain town on the way home. The others may not have been entirely up for the idea but Gary may have been particularly insistent. And it may have turned out to be a disastrous move if after leaving Forbestown, the group got hopelessly lost on the rural return journey.

Taking that one step further and venturing back into slightly sinister territory, another theory is that the group had a very specific reason for visiting Forbestown, and that was to score something that they couldn’t get back home. I’m told that mountain towns such as Forbestown are surprisingly big on weed and meth, and at least one of the group – possibly Gary who tends to cop the blame for everything – wanted to visit some friends or acquaintances there who could supply him with exactly what he was after. Whilst it’s again possible that the guys got lost on the way back, it could be that they had some kind of argument with the shifty purveyors of sunshine in a bag. They managed to get back in the car but got caught up in a terrifying car chase that led them to National Plumas Forest.

Well, let’s park up for a minute and work our way backwards. Gary Mathias was the only one with a history of substance misuse, but he’d been clean for a few years and now stuck exclusively to his prescribed medication which was clearly working out well for him. It seems quite doubtful that the others were ever interested in buying illegal drugs or even buying alcohol. They just weren’t the type to attend all-night parties, go to bars, or get off their heads in the woods whilst pumping out a bit of Pink Floyd.

Instead their lives were centred around home, family, the Gateway Project, basketball, and early nights. Their biggest vice was gorging themselves silly on the kind of snacks they bought at Behr’s Market.

So again, we’re picking on Gary here as the most likely culprit to have deviated from the path. But as the others would surely have been dead set against any last-minute changes to the plan and just keen to get home, he would have struggled to persuade all four of them to go along with his daft idea, particularly as he wasn’t even the one behind the wheel. Even if things turned a bit nasty and physical, he couldn’t have overpowered all four of them, unless he was carrying a weapon.

And this is where I think we could be getting a bit carried away. By the sounds of it, Gary was just as excited as the others about the big basketball match the next day, and just as keen to get home for a good night’s sleep. His family claim that he had been talking about literally nothing else but the basketball match for weeks. It just doesn’t seem to make sense that he’d suddenly turn on his four friends after a visit to Behr’s Market.

It’s true that Gary did used to have friends in Forbestown, but randomly turning up on their doorstep unannounced at around 10:30pm with a bunch of people they didn’t even know might not have been an entirely welcome move, and would certainly have been out of character for Gary. Besides, when police questioned the friends, they all said that they hadn’t heard a peep from Gary for over a year, and they assumed he had kind of drifted away into his new life.

So we keep wheeling back to the simplest explanation of all: They just took a wrong turn and got lost. But I’m not buying into that, either.

Yes it’s true that people take wrong turns all the time, and it’s not uncommon for drivers to get hopelessly lost as accusations start flying thick and fast about which numpty was holding the map upside down. But the point here is that the drive from Chico back home to Yuba County is a ridiculously simple, straightforward, flat, and heavily signposted journey across Highway 70 with practically no wrong turns to take. So what we would be suggesting here is that the Five went the wrong way right from the start, completely ignored all the signs, and kept on going the wrong way for seventy miles before eventually turning onto the forest service roads and climbing all the way up to an elevation of 4,500 feet. You’d think at some point on this journey, somebody would have questioned whether they might just have gone slightly off-course, particularly at the point where they were literally driving up a fucking mountain.

One point that’s often unfairly brought up here is that some of the men had learning disabilities, and this may have been a factor in why they were making some questionable decisions on that night. But there were five men in the car, only two of whom had actually been diagnosed with minor learning disabilities, whilst two others had simply been described as slow learners with low IQs. None of these men were the child-like simpletons that often got described in the contemporary press.

Two of them had served in the military. The same two were experienced drivers who knew very well how to get back home from Chico to Yuba County, particularly as it largely involved just turning around and going back down the same highway. As the driver’s brother, George Madruga puts it: “Upon the off chance that Jack may have taken a wrong turn, he knew to simply turn around and retrace the route and not drive aimlessly until the road ended.”

The men’s later behaviour at the forest also backs up the idea that the simplest and most innocent explanation is perhaps the least likely of all. We know that Jack Madruga took enormous pride in his 1969 Mercury Montego, and his family insisted that there is absolutely no way, even under the most dire of circumstances, that he would willingly leave the vehicle unsecured with the window wound down and all the doors unlocked. And if they were in charge of their own actions after leaving the car, they would surely have headed back down to civilization in search of help, rather than continuing up the mountain road in the darkness.

I suppose they may have spotted the tracks from the forest service Snowcat and figured that shelter might be very close by. When that turned out not to be the case, they just kept ploughing on in the hope that they’d find what they were looking for just around the next corner. And they kept doing that for about 19 miles.

But taking everything into consideration, it seems more likely to me that the Yuba County Five were far from in charge of their own actions.

The Official Investigation and Its Critics

The Sheriff’s office didn’t agree with me, at least not at the time. With the lack of any concrete evidence pointing to foul play, the case wasn’t elevated to a homicide investigation. Investigators leaned heavily towards the theory that the men had just taken a detour and got lost, although neither the police nor the coroner ever reached a definitive conclusion.

Critics have argued that the investigation was half-hearted and that some of the men’s learning disabilities had drawn the police to a hasty conclusion that the Five got themselves into this mess. Some have even suggested a cover-up and continue to ponder why Gary Whitely wasn’t investigated more thoroughly. To back up this argument, it’s pointed out that several officers involved in the case – including Lt Lance Ayers and Deputy Undersheriff Jack Beecham – later got their names slapped on The Brady List – a database of law enforcement officers with a history of misconduct or dishonesty which could undermine their credibility if they were ever called to testify in court.

The idea is that the likes of Lance Ayers and Jack Beecham must have been bent all along and weren’t the right men to be leading this case. Maybe they were all in the Town Pastor’s pocket.

That’s a bit of a stretch, though. Whilst no officer wants to get their name on this list of shame, it doesn’t mean that they’ve committed a criminal act or even lost their job. We don’t know the circumstances that got Ayers and Beecham onto The Brady List but there’s no reason to conclude that it had anything to do with this case to which they both seemed pretty devoted. It could just be that it was impossible to find evidence on who, if anyone, forced The Yuba County Five into National Plumas Forest, and that includes any evidence relating to the reformed Pastor deemed by many to be the main suspect.

There are still many who conclude that Gary Mathias was responsible, and it’s understandable how his troubling history raises more than a few alarm bells. I do wonder though if much of this suspicion is also spawned from the fact that his were the only remains never to be found, which if you think about, is probably massively irrelevant. Considering that none of the five men were wearing winter clothing, it seems almost certain that they all perished in the forest, including Gary.

There’s a nutty idea that Gary carried out this fiendish plot and then escaped to live a new life under a new identity, but how did he manage that? Did he have a helicopter waiting on standby near the trailer waiting to fly him to the French Alps?

If Gary was involved, it’s maybe more likely that it was a random unplanned incident, and he didn’t have any plans for an endgame. I still doubt it though, and lean more towards the theory that Gary Mathias was an innocent victim who went out of his way to help his friends but to no avail.

And it seems the Sheriff’s office now agrees with me on this point, although they didn’t want this information made public. We’ll return to that very recent minor development in just a moment. But don’t get too excited, it really is minor and doesn’t bring us any closer to what exactly happened on that night.

Alternative Theories

Frustratingly, all we can really do is speculate that the incident may have involved people who have never been identified. Maybe the group saw something at the basketball game that they weren’t supposed to see, and they were followed on the way out. They could have been apprehended after they picked up snacks from Behr’s store.

There’s a lot of support for the idea that the men were being pursued by another vehicle, and this is what led them to the forest. But that would be a pretty epic car chase spanning over 70 miles, and the police never found any evidence of what should have been a pretty noticeable pursuit. Besides, if the men were fleeing from their attackers, why would they flee the wrong way from home?

I suppose they could have been in a state of blind panic but it does seem odd to keep driving further and further away from home over such a long period.

Alternatively, it could have been that there was no car chase as such, but rather there was an extra person in the Mercury Montego forcing them to drive to the forest, and perhaps even an additional vehicle involved. You can comfortably fit six bums on seats in the 1969 Mercury Montego, even if one or two of the passengers were pretty big guys. But you’d assume that there must have been more than one aggressor as he would have been taking on five guys. There may even have been quite a few of them, far too many to squeeze into one vehicle.

In fact, carrying on from this, here’s what I find to be the most interesting theory of all. I’m certainly not suggesting it’s the most credible but it does provide potential answers to a couple of the more puzzling elements.

It still feels quite surprising that the Mercury Montego had no scratches or bumps whatsoever on the undercarriage, no matter how careful a driver Jack Madruga was meant to be. But what if the reason for this is because there was no driver at the wheel at all? What if the car was actually towed all the way there by, say, a red pick-up truck?

This could have been the admittedly quite outlandish scenario: The aggressors – who just may have not taken a liking to the men from Gateway – attach the Mercury Montego to the truck in which they’re travelling. Some of the boys might also have been dragged into the truck, whilst others are left inside the car. They’re towed all the way to National Plumas Forest, causing no damage to the underside of the Mercury Montego. At some point, the scene is observed by Joseph Schons but he’s so busy having a heart attack that he can’t fully grasp what’s going on.

In this scenario, the boys are marched all the way to the trailer which is known to the aggressors, and Jack Madruga isn’t even given a chance to wind down the window or lock the doors of the car he is being forced to abandon. The aggressors then dump the five men in the trailer and walk back down the mountain road to their truck. A little while later, Joseph Schons observes that the red truck has gone, but the Mercury Montego is still there.

The Boys stay put in the trailer for a while and get stuck into some of the C-rations, but some of the group are already falling seriously ill, particularly Ted Weiher. At least three of them decide to head back down the mountain road to get help, but die from hypothermia. Gary Mathias may also have been amongst them, or he may have hung on in the trailer for a while to look after Ted, only leaving the trailer when it became crushingly obvious that no help was coming. He reluctantly leaves Ted alone and walks down the mountain road via a different route to the others, finally succumbing to hypothermia in a remote location where his body was only ever discovered by wild animals.

Well, it’s a theory. And whilst parts of it might sound illogical or bat-shit crazy, I do wonder if that’s kind of the key to this whole mystery – something entirely ridiculous and random happened on that night which we would be nigh on impossible for anyone to guess.

A Secret Reclassification

But let’s finish this mystifying journey down at the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department. An internal letter composed in 2020 was only reluctantly made public in 2023 following requests made through the California Public Records Act. It’s only a short memo but it may carry quite a bit of significance as it seems to be a very quiet reclassification of the status of Gary Mathias in a case which is still regarded as open. It reads:

“Gary Matthias is believed to be a victim of foul play. This case remains open as a missing person/homicide case. It is in the best interest of all involved that this letter not be forwarded to the Matthias family.”

We’re in the dark as to what exactly prompted this update around 42 years after the disappearances. But those three short sentences, never intended for public consumption, are quite intriguing. For starters, it confirms that in the view of the Sheriff’s department, Gary Mathias was very much a victim rather than a perpetrator.

But it also states for the very first time that the department has reason to believe that he was specifically a victim of foul play, even though the original investigation was never elevated to a homicide case. And on quite a troubling note, it concludes by declaring that Gary’s family should not be informed of this reclassification.

Maybe we’re reading too much into this, but what was the reason for the secretive update and why didn’t the Yuba County Sheriff Department want the Mathias family to know about it? It’s often very tempting to round off a piece like this by stating the bleedin’ obvious and observing that we’ll probably never know the whole story and the whole truth. But in this case, I’ve just got a strong niggling sense that some people out there – maybe even those behind the badges – know a lot more than they’re currently willing to tell us.

Key Takeaways

• Five men from Gateway Projects disappeared after a Chico basketball game on February 24, 1978, leaving their families puzzled when they never returned home.
• Their car was found abandoned seventy miles in the wrong direction in Plumas National Forest, with no keys and an undamaged undercarriage despite rough terrain.
• Four bodies were discovered months later under bizarre circumstances: three died of hypothermia outdoors, while Ted Weiher starved in a stocked trailer with accessible heat and food nearby.
• Gary Mathias, the fifth member, was never found; his shoes were discovered in the trailer, but his remains have never been located despite extensive searches.
• A secret 2020 Yuba County Sheriff’s memo reclassified Gary Mathias as a victim of foul play, though the case remains officially unsolved with no charges ever filed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Yuba County Five and what organization were they involved with?

The Yuba County Five were five men who were participants at Gateway Projects, an organization aimed at supporting adults with developmental disabilities, intellectual impairments, and mental health conditions, providing training to help them find employment. The five men were Jack Madruga (30), Bill Sterling (29), Jackie Huett (24), Ted Weiher (32), and Gary Mathias (25). They were also members of the local Gateway Gators basketball team.

When and where were the Yuba County Five last confirmed to be seen alive?

The Yuba County Five were last confirmed to be seen on the night of February 24th, 1978, at a UC Davis basketball game in Chico. They were later captured on surveillance cameras at Behr’s Market in Chico just before 10pm, where they stopped to buy snacks before their expected journey home.

Where was Jack Madruga’s car found, and what condition was it in?

Jack Madruga’s turquoise and white 1969 Mercury Montego was found in Plumas National Forest, about 70 miles in the opposite direction from their home, parked off Oroville-Quincy Road at an elevation of around 4,500 feet. The car was unlocked with the driver’s window rolled down, keys were missing, and it was stuck in a snow drift. However, the car had no mechanical problems, started immediately when hot-wired, had a quarter tank of gas, and remarkably had no scratches or scrapes on the undercarriage despite the rough road conditions.

What were the circumstances of the discovery of the bodies in Plumas National Forest?

Over three months later, beginning in early June 1978, bodies were discovered in Plumas National Forest. Ted Weiher was found dead in a forest service trailer 19 miles from the abandoned car, having starved and frozen to death despite being surrounded by unopened C-rations and access to heating. Jack Madruga’s remains were found 12 miles from the car with keys in his pocket and a watch in his hand. Bill Sterling’s scattered remains were found on the other side of the same road.

Jackie Huett’s remains were found two days later, initially just a backbone under a manzanita bush. Gary Mathias has never been found. Madruga, Sterling, and Huett all died from hypothermia due to exposure.

What puzzling elements were found in the forest service trailer where Ted Weiher died?

In the trailer where Ted Weiher died, there were numerous puzzling elements: his severely frostbitten bare feet indicated he had lost his shoes; a pair of tennis shoes belonging to Gary Mathias were found but Ted’s leather shoes were missing; there were matches and materials for fire that went unused; a nearby shed contained dozens of opened C-rations but another unlocked locker contained a large stash of untouched C-rations; and another shed had a full butane tank with a valve that could have powered the trailer’s heating system if opened, but it wasn’t. Ted had lost almost half his body weight and may have been alive for two to three months after disappearing.

Who was Joseph Schons and what did he claim to have witnessed?

Joseph Schons was a 55-year-old man from Sacramento who claimed to have been on the mountain road on the evening of February 24th, 1978. His car got stuck in snow around 5:30pm, and he experienced heart attack symptoms while waiting in his car for at least six hours. He claimed to have seen a car pull up about 150 feet away with a group of men and a woman holding a baby, who ignored his cries for help.

In some versions of his story, he also mentioned a red pick-up truck and hearing eerie whistling noises. He later passed what he identified as the turquoise and white Mercury Montego with no sign of life inside. Police found him credible as potentially the last person to see the men alive, though his account was hazy due to his medical condition.

What was Gary Mathias’s background and why have some suspected his involvement?

Gary Mathias was a 25-year-old relative newcomer to the group who had served in the US Army but was discharged after being diagnosed with schizophrenia and developing a drug problem. He had a troubled history including arrests for attempted sexual assault, assaulting a police officer, breaking into a couple’s house claiming to look for a ring to return to Satan, and various escapes from mental health facilities. Some family members of the other victims suspected him because he was the only one never found, had styled himself as the ‘leader’ of the group, and some claimed the others were scared of him.

However, by 1978 he had been stable on medication for over two years, was working, and his family believed he was heroic in trying to help his friends. A 2020 internal Yuba County Sheriff’s memo, made public in 2023, reclassified Gary Mathias as ‘believed to be a victim of foul play.‘

Who is Gary Whitely and what connection does he have to the case?

Gary Whitely was a man married to Gary Mathias’s sister Sharon during the 1970s, known as ‘The Town Bully.’ He had a criminal record including drug offenses, firearms charges, and assault. He was imprisoned from 1979-1983 for assaulting a woman, found religion in prison, and became a local pastor by the 1990s.

In 1994, forestry employee William J. Prater reported to the Sheriff’s office that Whitely had allegedly confessed to his congregation about being responsible for ‘the death of two of seven mentally disabled men in the hills 17 years ago.’ However, Prater had only heard this secondhand, and no other witnesses came forward.

Some relatives of the victims believe Whitely was involved, but he was never questioned by police and no hard evidence connects him to the case. A contradictory theory suggested Whitely was involved in a brawl at Behr’s Market that led to Gary Mathias being thrown from Oroville Dam, but this lacks credible evidence.

What attacks had previously targeted Gateway Projects?

In the mid-1970s, Gateway Projects was targeted by a series of attacks: in early 1975, a workshop in Yuba City was intentionally set on fire causing $150,000 in damage; two weeks later, a Molotov cocktail was thrown through the window of the main building while people were working inside; the following month, a bomb threat evacuated a new facility opening; and five days after that, the organization’s director Donald Garrett was murdered when an unknown assailant threw flammable liquid in his face and lit him on fire. These attacks ceased in August 1975, and while initially thought to be related, police later suggested Garrett’s murder may have been a personal vendetta. There is no confirmed connection between these earlier attacks and the Yuba County Five disappearance over two years later.

What was the significance of the 2020 internal memo from the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department?

An internal letter composed in 2020 was reluctantly made public in 2023 following California Public Records Act requests. The memo stated: ‘Gary Matthias is believed to be a victim of foul play. This case remains open as a missing person/homicide case.

It is in the best interest of all involved that this letter not be forwarded to the Matthias family.’ This was significant because it quietly reclassified Gary Mathias as a victim rather than a potential perpetrator, and for the first time indicated the department believed foul play was involved, despite the original investigation never being elevated to a homicide case. The memo’s instruction that Gary’s family should not be informed has raised questions about what prompted this update after 42 years and why it was kept secret.

Sources

• Original Casual Criminalist video: Unsolved: The Yuba County Five
• Hero image source by Frank Schulenburg / openverse, by-sa.

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