The Yuba County Missing Five

The Boys

Friday February 24, 1978, 5 friends left a basketball game at California State University in Chico. All 5 of the "boys" loved basketball. Going from local games, to playing on a team of their own. They were part of a home basketball team for the local rehabilitation center for mentally disabled adults; the "Gateway Gators". In fact, the last they were seen, all 5 were wearing their beige team shirts.

The following day the 5 were schedule to play a game for a tournament in a chance to win a trip to Los Angeles. While they were known as "the boys", their ages ranged from 24 to 32. Basketball was very important to them. Family members of them recalled some of them being afraid they'd wake up late the next morning, missing their game. It would only make sense for the 5 to want to get home after the Chico game, so they would be fresh in the morning. But that would never be.

The boys never made it home. Jack Madruga's car, a turquoise 1969 Mercury Montego, was found 4 days later in the Plumas National Forest.

Nobody knows how they got there. After reading several accounts of the night of Feb. 24th, there are a few people who claimed to have seen the boys that night. There is plenty of speculation, but the truth is, no one knows what truly happened.

Later that evening, about 10 p.m. a worker at the "Behr Market" about 3 blocks from the college, said the boys came in. Their big purchases consisted of candy, Hostess pies and Soda. According to The Washington Post 1978- "(they were) mildly annoying the clerk (who was trying to close up), and bought one Hostess cherry pie, one Langendorf lemon pie, one Snickers bar, one Marathon bar, two Pepsis and a quart and a half of milk."

After that they got into the car and headed south away from the market, but somewhere along the way, their adventures took them east.

Another report was from a woman who worked at a store in Brownsville,30 miles from the spot where the car had been abandoned. Many believed they could have reached had they continued down the road from where they left the car. March 3, she saw fliers with the men's picture and information about the $1,215 reward from the families. She said that that four of them had stopped at the store in a red pickup truck, two days after the disappearance. The store owner corroborated her account.

According to the news paper clipping I will attach to the bottom of this article,the woman said she recognized the men as "out-of-towners" due to their "big eyes and facial expressions". She identified Huett and Sterling as using the phone booth outside while the other two went inside. Police said she was "a credible witness" and they took her account seriously.The store owner told investigators that Weiher and Huett came in and bought burritos, chocolate milk and soft drinks. According to Wikipedia: "Weiher's brother told the Los Angeles Times that while driving to Brownsville in a different car in apparent ignorance of the basketball game seemed completely out of character for them, the owner's description of the two men's behavior seemed consistent with them, as Weiher would "eat anything he could get his hands on" and was often accompanied by Huett more than any of the other four.However, Huett's brother said Jack hated using telephones to the point that he would handle his brother's calls from the other men in the group."

The next morning, Ted's mother Imogene awoke around 5 a.m. to see that his bed was still empty. As many of the other members of the boys family expressed, it was extremely uncharacteristic of any of the boys to be missing overnight.

Imogene phoned Bill Sterling's mother, Juanita. She explained that she had not seen Bill either. Juanita had just got done contacting Jack's mother, the story was the same. Imogene called Jack Huett's mother and her daughter walked down to speak to Gary's stepfather. All the boys were unaccounted for.

Even though legally all 5 were adults, the families of them knew them as "the boys". Each of them had some form of mental disability or illness. They all lived at home with their folks, and they always checked in.

After a long day of vigilance waiting by the phone, at 8 p.m. that evening when there was no trace of any of them, Jack's mother calls the police.

Days passed with no word. It wasn't until the following Sunday that the police took the report seriously.

Gary's voice, "Don't you let me oversleep." played through his mother's head over and over. The boys had looked so forward to their game that day, how would it be possible that all 5 decided that anything was more important? Why would they disappear without letting anyone know where they were?

The Car

It was snowing heavily on Feb 28th  when Joe Shones (Schons in some articles) was making his way through the Plumas National Forest. His Volkswagen when he began to slide off road. He got out to access the situation and attempt to pushing the car when he began having chest pains. He climbed back into his car fearing the worse, and he had every reason to. He was having a heart attack in a desolate region of the mountain. He laid down on his seat with the car running to keep warm.

After several hours, the gas ran out and he claims he began to hear "whistling noises". He thought he had seen a group of men and a woman with a baby, walking in the light of another vehicle’s headlights. Shones claimed he called out for help and the lights disappeared and everything had gone quiet. At one point he thought he had seen the lights of a truck and a car. He then said a few more hours later he saw flashlight shine into his car and he cried out for help again. He said the lights once again disappeared. Once he had rested for sometime, he walked eight miles down to get help at a place he had been drinking at earlier in the day called Mountain House, passing a strange abandoned blue-green colored car along the way.

He did not report it.

A few days later a Plumas National Forest Ranger told investigators with Yuba and Butte counties, who were searching for the boys, that he had seen the Montego parked along Oroville-Quincy Road in the forest on February 25th.

Over 30 miles outside of Oroville and 70 miles from Chico, Jack Madruga's car came to rest empty on a desolate road in the High Sierras, stopping just on the snow line at 4,400 feet in elevation. The car was not stuck by any means, although there was evidence that their tires had spun some. The keys were missing and so were the boys.

There's no reason 5 men could not have pushed the car free.

The car was littered with candy wrappers and other evidence of their trip to Behr's Market. Nothing but a half of a Marathon bar was left. In the glove box was 4 maps, including one for the state of California. All of them were neatly folded.

According to The Washington Post, "And the car's underside was undamaged. This heavy American car, with a low-hanging muffler and presumably with five full-grown men inside, had wound up a stretch of tortuously bumpy mountain road - apparently in total darkness - without a gouge or dent or thick mudstain to show for it. The driver had either used astonishing care and precision, the investigators figured, or else he knew the road well enough to anticipate every rut."

The police hot wired the car and it started immediately. With a quarter tank of gas to spare, there's no reason the car should have stopped.

None of the boys aside from Mathias, cared for camping or other outdoor activities. Madruga's family were quite adamant that Jack never allowed anyone else to drive the car and he had never been to the area before. 

That night after the car had been discovered, a storm blew through and dropped 9 inches of snow through this section of the Sierras. Police combed the area as best they could in attempt to find a trace of the boys, anywhere. They eventually called off the search when conditions made it far too dangerous for them to continue. The snow-cats being used by police struggled to get through the layers of fresh powder.

The Trailer

It wasn't until June 4th, that a group of bikers checking out a desolate trail above Mountain House, noticed a foul stench in the air. The winter's snow pack had began melting away, revealing the world underneath it. They discovered what seemed to be an abandoned service trailer nearly 20 miles from where the car has been found.

Inside, lay the body of Ted Weiher outstretched on a bed. Over a half dozen of sheets had been tucked around his body and over his head, as if someone else had done it in effort of covering his body, post mortem.

His shoes were missing and his feet were frost bitten. According to police from the description family had given them, he had lost 80 to a 100 pounds from the last time he had been seen. Police believed that he had survived 8 to 13 weeks of the brutal Winter in the Sierras, because of the facial hair and substantial weight loss that he had endured.

From the same 1978 Washington Post article it said "Weiher, wearing a striped velour shirt and lightweight green pants, had walked or run, or been somehow taken in the moonlight through almost 20 miles of 4-to-6-foot snowdrifts to reach the locked trailer where he died.

The trailer had been broken into through a window. No fire had been built although matches were lying around and there were paperback novels and wood furniture that would have burned easily. More than a dozen C-ration cans from an outside storage shed had been opened and emptied - one had been opened with an Army P38 can opener, which only Madruga and Mathias who had served in the Army, probably knew how to use - but no one had opened a locker in the same shed containing enough dehydrated Mexican dinners and fruit cocktails and assorted other meals to keep all five alive for a year.

No one had touched the propane tank in another shed outside, either. "All they had to do was turn that gas on," says Yuba County Lt. Lance Ayers, "and they'd have had gas to the trailer, and heat."

The next day on the 5th, the bodies of Madruga and Sterling were found roadside nearly 5 miles from the trailer. Two days later, the Jack Huett's father found his son's backbone. It was a gruesome sight. The three bodies found outside the trailer had obviously been ravaged by hungry animals searching for food after the brutal winter they had just endured. Madruga had the keys to the car.

Lt. Ayers has discouraged the families from taking part in the search for this very reason.

"Madruga had been partially eaten by animals and dragged about 10 feet to a stream: he lay face up, his right hand curled around his watch. Sterling was in a wooded area, scattered over about 50 feet. There was nothing left of him but bones.

An assistant sheriff from Plumas County found a skull the next day, about 100 yards downhill from the rest of the bones. The family dentist identified the teeth as those of Jackie Huett."


No one knows why between 5 men, they decided venturing into the forest with nothing was a better option than turning the car around.

And where was Gary Mathias?

The Investigation

Leads took officers everywhere. From Canada to Florida, word about the then missing men was getting around. All the leads were easily knocked down until that June day. In a desperate move, the officers even turned to psychic mediums, who led them on wild goose chases.

"One told him the boys had been kidnapped to Arizona and Nevada; another said the boys had been murdered in Oroville, in a two-story red house, brick or stained wood, with a gravel driveway and the number 4723 or 4753.

For two solid days Ayers drove every street in Oroville, looking for that house. It did not exist."
By late spring Lt. Ayers had memorized the description of the boys:

"Theodore Earl Weiher, brown eyes, curly brown hair, handsome beer-bellied, friendly in a trusting child's way (he waved at strangers and brooded for hours if they did not waveback); got a good chuckle out of phoning Bill Sterling and reading from newspaper items or oddball names from the telephone book; employed for a while as a janitor and snack bar clerk but quit at the urging of his family, who thought Weiher's slowness was causing problems.

Jackie Charles Huett, 24, 5 feet 9, 160 pounds, slight droop to the head, slow to respond, a loving shadow to Weiher, who looked after Huett in a protective sort of way and would dial the phone for him when Huett had to make a call.

Jack Antone Madruga, 5 feet 11, 190 pounds, high school graduate and Army veteran, brown eyes, brown hair, heavy-set, laid off in November from his job as a busboy for Sunsweet growers.

William (Bill) Lee Sterling, 5 feet 10, 170 pounds, dark brown hair, blue eyes, Madruga's special friend, deeply religious, would spend hours at the library reading literature to help bring Jesus to patients in mental hospitals.

Gary Dale Mathias, 5 feet 10, 170 pounds, brown hair, hazal eyes, 25, assistant in his stepfather's gardening business. Army veteran with psychiatric discharge after drug problems that developed in Germany five years ago."

Gary Mathias

Mathias, for the most part throughout my research, seems to be who most people grew suspicious of. Him and Joseph Shones.

Image of Mathias around the time of his disappearance
distributed to help find him Source Wikipedia

While the rest of the boys were just generally slow, Mathias had a bit of a more complex diagnosis. He had been under drug treatment for schizophrenia and psychotic depression. It had presented 5 years earlier before this incident and according to doctors for the 2 years prior he had been doing seemingly well. But if Gary had been off his meds for an extended period of time, how was his mental condition after having been in the forest for weeks?

Police sent out a description of Mathias to the state mental institutions - slender, dark-haired, double vision without his glasses. He left his wallet at home when he left for the basketball game, so he has no way to be ID'd aside from his face.

"Mathias took his medicine weekly, as he had for at least three years - stellazine and cogentin, both used in the treatment of schizophrenia. His family says the illness appeared five years ago, while he was in the Army in Germany. Police records show he had become violent on occasion - he was charged with assault twice - and there was a difficult period, after his return from Germany, when Mathias would fail to take his drugs and lapse into a disoriented psychosis that usually landed him in a Veterans Administration hospital. "Went haywire," is how Bob, his stepfather, puts it."

But, even if he had a history of these things, why would he want to hurt his friends?

This case, the further you look into it, the less it makes sense. These are my thoughts and questions as I'm reading:

• Why would 5 men wander into the woods at midnight while it's snowing when they have an operable car to take them back down the hill safely?
• Why was only Gary not found? I can imagine that it would have been easy for an animal scavenging to make off with his body, and you'd think police would have somehow found the glasses he was so known for? Gary's shoes were found inside the trailer, but Weiher's were missing. Could he have survived and switched shoes out?
• Why wouldn't the men have built a fire, or figured out how to turn the gas on in the trailer? There was propane and books to burn. Why did it seem that Weiher had lost so much weight when there were enough rations in the storage outside to keep them alive for quite a long time?
• Weiher's feet were so badly frostbitten that most likely he was immobile from the 20 mile walk. But yet he had lived three months, which is longer than we can prove for anyone else.
• Who's gold watch with the missing crystal was found in the trailer? It may have been left by a prior ranger, but its place there still seemed strange as none of the family members recognized it.
• Why did they go up there in the first place? Especially when all the boys were looking forward to the next day's basketball game?
• What commotion did Shones hear as he laid down inside his car? Was he imagining things, sinking into delirium while under distress? Or was he hearing the ill fated 20 mile trip up the hill? Or,as some speculate......was he making up a story to avoid getting into trouble? Shones original description as "4 men with a woman carrying a baby". But after was theorized that the "woman" could have easily been one of the men with longer hair carrying something bundled in his arms, like a jacket. Why didn't he report the Mercury abandoned in the middle of the road? Why didn't the boys help him, unless something more devious was in the works? A Dr did testify that Shones had, had a mild atack via EKG.
• The step-father of Mathias doubts the sighting of the boys at Behr's market. He believed the boys didn't have any money on them. But wrappers of the items described by the clerk were found in the car.
• Who drove the car and did that person know where they were going? Why didn't they use the maps in the glove box?
• Although three of the boys were considered mentally handicapped, they were very high functioning and very healthy psychically. Madruga had never received a diagnosis of disability but was known to be "slow". Mathias was not considered mentally disabled, but mentally ill.
• Madruga never let anyone else drive his car, so it can only be assumed that he drove or was unable, or someone drove them by force.
• None of the bodies showed evidence, or could be used to prove or rule out foul play. The final word was they died of starvation and exposure.
• If Weiher had outlived the rest by nearly 3 months....who covered his body?
• Before leaving his house, Weiher's recommended for him to grab a jacket and he said he didn't need it. If they were planning a snow trip...why didn't they prepare for it?
• None of the boys liked outdoorsy things. According to Wikipedia and the prior Washington Post article, Madruga's parents said he hated camping and did not like the cold weather. They also said he had never been up into the mountains. Bill Sterling's father had once taken his son to the area near where the car was found for a fishing weekend  But according to the father, the youngest man in the party did not enjoy it and stayed home for future trips. Three years prior Weiher's friends took him deer hunting off the Feather River and according to his family he wasn't "keen" to it. All the men aside from Mathias were known to stay close to home.
• The keys were missing from the ignition, suggesting possibly the car had been abandoned because it might not have been functioning properly, with the intention of returning later with help. But when police hot-wired the car, it started immediately. The gas tank was a quarter full. Overall the car was in good shape.
• What about the additional sighting in Brownsville? Does it corroborate with Shone's description of two sets of vehicle lights from a truck and a car? Who was in the truck?

Conclusion

There are many theories out there about what possibly could have happened, but at the end of my research I feel I am left with more questions than answers. My theory after looking at all the information is this:

First, the reason for venturing I do not know. That is the biggest mystery to me. What happened after is also a mystery but by looking at the information available, this is my conclusion.

Perhaps the boys took a wrong turn somewhere around Oroville. Accidentally they continued east until they were completely lost. We did not have GPS then and Madruga, although he owned the car, may have been ignorant to the facts about the maps being there. It seems they were in good condition, perhaps they were new.

I have no answer to the truck, except that two separate individuals corroborated that a truck was around at two different times in the timeline. The Brownsville woman said that the boys were at the store in a red pick up, down the hill 2 days after the disappearance. But by this time, the car had been found and a storm had occurred. Why would they go back up there only for 2 to die on the way to the car and then 2 more sometime later. I'm not sure I believe this account, since a large reward had been released for grabs. On the other hand Joseph Shones was sure that he had seen 2 sets of headlights, one from a car and one from a pick up.

This is one of this things, I began to think I can make a decent conclusion and then I'm reminded by other facts that make me doubt my own thoughts on the case.

As for the reason they walked instead of driving, that the didn't properly feed themselves, or the other numerous inconsistencies. I imagine that Weiher was in pretty poor shape and unable to tend to himself. I imagine someone stuck around, I'm assuming Mathias, to help out. Maybe he left after switching to Weiher's heavier leather shoes, to try to seek help, only to succumb to the treacherous weather.

It's easy for me to believe that Mathias may have been blamed due to the stigma of schizophrenia, and the unusual circumstances. This is a very sad legacy as we cannot prove otherwise. With him off his meds, that he could have went from mentally ill, to debilitated by his condition. It is possible that like the others, that his body was scavenged by animals.

As far as Shones goes, I do believe the possibility of his encounter, but that his perception was distorted due to his condition.

Weiher's body, which was the only one that didn't get destroyed by animals, showed no sign of foul play. It showed that he most likely died of natural causes. We cannot prove that he was intentionally left to starve to death, except that someone may have stuck around to cover him after he expired.

Facial hair and weight loss could be attributed to the decomposition factor. Technology was not what is today. Perhaps the police didn't have the forensic experience and knowledge to make a determination? With the weather being cold, some of the decomp process could have been delayed or altered. I have read about bodies appearing to have had hair grow because of the shrinking of hair follicles. With the gaseous nature of the decomposition process, perhaps it exaggerated his appearance of weight loss.

So many questions and so many theories, but in the end, we will really never know unless Mathias were to pop up again...


What do you think?

Resources-

1978 Washington Post "5 'Boys' Who Never Come Back"

Disappearance of Gary Mathias

The Mathias Group from Yuba City - Strange deaths on U.S. mountains