Yuba County Five

Bill Sterling, 29; Jack Huett, 24; Ted Weiher, 32; Jack Madruga, 30; and Gary Mathias, 25, were young men from Yuba County, California, each living with mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions, who played together on a basketball team called the Gateway Gators. The team was set to begin a Special Olympics-sponsored tournament on February 25, 1978, but the night before, the five instead drove about 50 miles to Chico to watch a college basketball game between UC Davis and Chico State. After the game, the group stopped at a market in downtown Chico for snacks shortly before its 10 p.m. closing time. When the men had not returned home by morning, their families notified police.

Madruga's 1969 Mercury Montego, which he had driven to Chico, was found several days later abandoned on a remote dirt road in Plumas National Forest, about 70 miles from Chico and far from any direct route back to Yuba City or Marysville, where the men lived. The car was undamaged, even on its undercarriage, had a quarter tank of gasoline, and started immediately when police later hot-wired it; investigators could not explain why five healthy young men would have left a working vehicle rather than push it free of the shallow snowdrift it was stuck in. A search of the surrounding area was hampered by a severe snowstorm and turned up no trace of the men at the time.

In June 1978, after the higher-elevation snow had melted, four of the five men's bodies were located. Weiher's body was found inside a U.S. Forest Service trailer about 19 miles from where the car had been abandoned; he had lost nearly half his body weight and is believed to have survived just over three months before dying of starvation and hypothermia, despite a stocked but largely untouched supply of food and heating fuel in and around the trailer. The remains of Madruga and Sterling were found on opposite sides of the road roughly 11 miles from the car, and Huett's remains were found days later near the trailer; autopsies attributed all three deaths to hypothermia. Evidence in the trailer, including sneakers matching Mathias's and food opened with a military-issue can opener, suggested Mathias had also reached the trailer and survived for a time, but he has never been found.

A motorist who said he was stranded in his own car near where the Mercury was found later told police that he heard and saw people near his car that night, who fell silent and switched off their lights when he called for help; the account, and the distance between the car and where the bodies were later found, fueled suspicion that the men may have encountered other people that night. A store employee in Brownsville, a town down the road from where the car was found, separately reported that four of the men, riding in a red pickup truck, had stopped there the day after the group disappeared. Investigators theorized the group may have taken a wrong turn on the way back from Chico and followed a U.S. Forest Service snowcat's tracks toward the trailer in search of shelter, but no theory has been confirmed. The case remains unsolved, and Gary Mathias has never been located.