47 years later, the disappearance of the Yuba County Five remains an unsolved mystery
By Jonathan Ayestas
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MARYSVILLE, California (KCRA) — Monday marks 47 years since five Yuba County men with disabilities on their way to watch a basketball game vanished. To this day, their disappearances remain one of Northern California’s biggest mysteries.
The story of the Yuba County Five has recently become the subject of a Netflix docuseries called “Files of the Unexplained.” A number of podcasts have also tried delving into the case.
In 1978, five Marysville men who either had mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions wanted to watch Chico State University play against UC Davis in a basketball game.
The five were close friends and played together in a Special Olympics Basketball team. On Feb. 24, they made the drive to Chico but stopped at a convenience store on the way. However, no one ever reported seeing them alive again.
They were:
24-year-old Jack Huett 29-year-old Bill Sterling 32-year-old Ted Weiher 30-year-old Jack Madruga 25-year-old Gary Mathias
A search and rescue team tried looking for the five once their parents reported them missing. Crews found the car the five were in at a remote part of the Plumas National Forest on a high mountain dirt road. It was in working order and could have been pushed out of the snow from a snowstorm that happened the day after they disappeared, crews determined.
Family who spoke with KCRA 3 at the time believed multiple scenarios could have happened to them. They suspected that they might have had an accident on a levee road or in a mountainous area.
Melba Madruga, Jack’s mother, called their disappearance “very unusual.”
“He goes where he says he’s going to go and that he’s going to be late at all, he’ll call me and let me know,” Melba Madruga said. “And he’ll never stay out overnight. He’s never done that … He always wants to come home.”
Melba Madruga also believes it’s possible that the group picked up a hitchhiker who made the group divert course from Chico.
Plumas National Forest is around a three-hour drive from Marysville and opposite the direction of Chico if heading there from Marysville. Chico is about a 50-mile drive getting on Highway 70 and off Highway 99.
Crews did not find four of the five bodies until after the snow melted in June. They believed that Weiher may have lived for three months after disappearing before starving to death.
To this day, crews have never found Mathias’ body.
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