On February 24, 1978, five friends from Yuba County, California, drove to Chico State University to watch their favorite college basketball team play. It should have been a routine trip: an hour north for a Friday night game, a stop for snacks, and then home to bed. The next morning, all five men were scheduled to compete in a Special Olympics basketball tournament, where the winning team would earn an all-expenses-paid trip to Los Angeles and tickets to Disneyland. They never made it to that tournament. They never made it home. In this episode of Disturbing History, we dive into one of America’s most baffling unsolved mysteries. Ted Weiher, Jack Madruga, Bill Sterling, Jackie Huett, and Gary Mathias vanished that February night. When their car was finally discovered four days later, it was found stuck in a shallow snowdrift on a remote mountain road in Plumas National Forest. The vehicle sat nearly seventy miles from where it should have been—completely the wrong direction from home—up a winding dirt track that led deep into frozen wilderness. The engine worked perfectly. The gas tank still had fuel. Five able-bodied men could have pushed it free. Instead, they abandoned the car and walked into the mountains.What investigators found months later, after the snow finally melted, would haunt them for the rest of their careers. Four bodies were eventually recovered. Ted Weiher was discovered in a Forest Service trailer nineteen miles from the abandoned car, wrapped in eight sheets. He had survived for somewhere between eight and thirteen weeks before slowly starving to death. Inside the trailer were matches, warm clothing, a propane heating system, and enough food to keep all five men alive for a year. None of it had been used. The other three men were found scattered along the mountain roads, victims of hypothermia. The fifth man, Gary Mathias, was never found. His tennis shoes were in the trailer, but Gary himself had vanished without a trace. We explore the lives of these five men, all connected to a vocational facility called Gateway Projects. We examine strange witness accounts, including a man who claimed he encountered the group while suffering a heart attack on the same mountain road, and store clerks who reported seeing two of the men the following day in a red pickup truck that did not belong to them. We investigate theories proposed over decades—everything from a simple wrong turn, to foul play, to the possibility that Gary Mathias, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, experienced a psychotic break that led his friends into the wilderness. We also uncover a dark chapter in Gateway Projects’ history that’s rarely discussed in connection with this case. In 1975, just three years before the disappearance, the facility was targeted by an arsonist the media dubbed “Weirdo the Fireball Freak.” A man associated with Gateway was found burned to death in his apartment. The perpetrator was never identified, and the attacks abruptly stopped. Is there a connection? There’s no evidence of one—but in a case this strange, every possibility deserves consideration. This episode runs long because the story demands it. There are no easy answers. There are no satisfying conclusions. What happened to the Yuba County Five remains one of the most inexplicable tragedies in American true-crime history. In October 2020—forty-two years after their disappearance—the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department officially reclassified the case as a homicide investigation. Someone, they believe, is responsible. Yet no suspects have ever been named, no arrests have been made, and Gary Mathias remains listed as missing. Nearly fifty years later, the families are still waiting for answers. The mountain is still keeping its secrets. And the boys who went to a basketball game and never came home have become America’s Dyatlov Pass—a mystery that defies explanation and refuses to be forgotten. This is Disturbing History. This is the Yuba County Five.
