What Happened to the Yuba County Five?

Dallas Weiher, Jr. describes his 12th birthday as “just a house full of sad people.”

That’s because only five days prior, on February 24, 1978, his uncle, 32-year-old Ted Weiher, had gone off to watch a college basketball game in Chico, Calif., and never came back.

The four men with whom Ted had gone with to the game—Jackie Huett Jr., Jack Madruga, Gary Mathias and Bill Sterling, all 24 to 30 years old—were also missing. But the car they had been traveling in had been located, abandoned on a snowy mountain road high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Once the snow melted three months later, four of the men’s remains would be discovered, including Ted’s, badly decomposed in a broken-into park ranger’s trailer about 20 miles from the vehicle.

To this day, no one knows what took their lives.

“For 47 years, you have had whole families of people carrying the weight of not knowing,” Dallas tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “We have no closure.”

All of the Yuba County Five had mild cognitive impairments. They had met while playing organized basketball together with a Yuba County, Calif., nonprofit that helped people with disabilities.

The day of their disappearance, the five men traveled in Madruga’s car approximately 50 miles from Marysville, Calif., to the game at California State University, Chico. After the game, they stopped at a convenience store in Chico to purchase snacks.

The next morning, after the men failed to come home, their families reported them missing to authorities. On February 28, 1978, Madruga’s vehicle was found in shallow snow on the side of the Orville Quincy Highway in Butte County, Calif., approximately 70 miles in the wrong direction from home and far east of the Chico-to-Marysville route through Sacramento Valley. The snacks had been eaten, the doors were unlocked, one window was down, there was a quarter tank of gas in the car and the men and the car keys were missing.

On June 4, a motorcyclist off-roading near Plymouth County campground in Plumas National Forest discovered Ted’s body decomposing in a trailer ordinarily used by firefighting crews. The night he disappeared, Ted was clean-shaven, but when he was discovered, he had a full beard, implying he had survived for several weeks, if not months. He’d also appeared to have lost approximately 100 pounds despite food being found in the trailer.

In the days that followed, search teams discovered the remains of Madruga, Sterling and Huett, all between the trailer and the abandoned car. Wild animals had scavenged their bodies, rendering cause of death impossible to definitively determine.

Mathias was never found.

“None of this makes sense,” Tony Wright, author of Things Aren't Right: The Disappearance of the Yuba County Five, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

Wright spent four years researching the Yuba County Five. His conclusion: “We lack concrete evidence. Mostly it’s circumstantial stuff—town talk, rumors. This case is a journey into madness.”

There is no overt evidence of murder in the Yuba County Five deaths: no bullet holes, no stab wounds, no weapon. But Dallas feels certain that foul play was involved.

“This wasn’t a bunch of [people with intellectual disabilities] who got lost because they were too stupid to know what they were doing,” he says. “These guys had very specific wants, desires, talents and abilities. And what one lacked, the other had. There was a combined acumen there.” Dallas adds that the group had made the trip between Marysville and Chico multiple times, and that a turnoff into the mountains would’ve made no sense.

He further explains that, because the group had a big basketball game scheduled for the following day, it would’ve been out of character for them to make a sudden impromptu drive up into the mountains.

Wright agrees, highlighting in his book that the men all held steady blue-collar jobs as landscapers, dishwashers and janitors.

Even more, Madruga “knew how to get around,” Wright says. “He grew up in Northern California. He knew the area. He had no history of getting lost as a driver. And he was reliable.”

Given that Mathias was the only one in the group of five whose remains were never found, law enforcement suspected he may have been involved in the deaths somehow.

While the other four members of the group had learning disabilities, Mathias, an Army vet, had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He also had a past with violence, having been charged twice with assault. Furthermore, Mathias’s shoes were located in the trailer where Weiher’s body was discovered, while Weiher’s own shoes were nowhere to be found.

But Wright is dubious about blaming Mathias directly.

He says that it’s likely that Mathias swapped his shoes out for Weiher’s pair because they were better suited for the snow. Wright learned from the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department that, from 1975 onward, Mathias’s criminal activity slowed after he sought mental health counseling and started taking medication.

Wright further says that nobody noticed Mathias behaving strangely at the basketball game or in the convenience store afterwards, and that had he been having a schizophrenic episode, it would’ve likely drawn attention. And “there was nothing to link him to any ill will with the group,” Wright points out.

With so little forensic evidence and no reliable eyewitnesses after the men’s stop at the convenience store, no main suspect has emerged in the case of the men’s deaths.

Dallas suspects that the crime was perpetrated by Mathias’s brother-in-law. There is no strong proof in support of that claim, although the theory did make its way into the Yuba County Sheriff Department’s case file in 1994 on the loose basis of hearsay.

Whoever was responsible, Dallas continues to hope the perpetrator will come forward, saying that that’s what will ultimately be needed to solve the case: “That’s my prayer. It’s been my prayer since I was a little boy. Let whoever did this come forward and have his conscience clear.”

Dallas admits that, in the decades after his uncle’s death, he thought very little about the case. “Our family is the kind of family where when we bury someone, we bury them,” he says. “We don’t go to the cemetery and weep over the grave. We’re done.”

But in recent years, as media attention on the case has picked back up, it’s returned to the forefront of his mind.

“I’ve probably cried and felt more sorrow about it in the past five years than I had the previous 40,” Dallas says. “I sense that something evil is at the core of what happened to them.”