Qualla: The Yuba County Five

The Yuba County Five: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jack Madruga, Bill Sterling, Ted Weiher, Jack Huett and Gary Mathias drove home from a college basketball game in Chico on a Friday night in February 1978. They never got home. Their families called them 'the boys,' though all five were grown men in their twenties and thirties, all of whom lived with mild intellectual disabilities or a treated mental illness, all of whom played together on a Special Olympics-style team called the Gateway Gators that had a tournament the next morning that they had been looking forward to for weeks. The route from Chico to Yuba City is a flat hour south down Highway 99. Madruga's 1969 Mercury Montego was found four days later seventy miles to the northeast, parked on a snowy logging road at 4,400 feet in the Plumas National Forest. Forty-eight years later, nobody has been able to say why.

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The Yuba County Five: The Gators

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jack Madruga was 30, the oldest after Weiher, the only one of the group who owned a car, a former Army soldier who his family said was unfailingly cautious behind the wheel. Bill Sterling, 29, was Madruga's closest friend. Ted Weiher, 32, lived with his mother and worked at a fee...

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The Yuba County Five: Friday Night

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

They watched UC Davis play Chico State at the Chico State gymnasium and left around 10 p.m. The clerk at a Behr's convenience store remembered them buying sodas, candy bars, and a quart of milk and being polite, in a hurry, mentioning the tournament. After that the trail goes col...

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The Yuba County Five: What the Car Showed

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Montego was not stuck. The keys were in the ignition. There was gas in the tank. The windows were rolled up. A map on the dashboard suggested the men had at least known they were lost. There was no sign of struggle inside, no blood, no broken glass. Their bagged snacks from t...

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The Yuba County Five: What the Forest Showed

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The snow began to retreat in June. On June 4, an off-roader stumbled onto a Forest Service trailer about 19 miles up the road from where the car had been left. Ted Weiher's body was inside, wrapped in bedsheets, his shoes set neatly nearby. His beard had grown out far beyond a fe...

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The Yuba County Five: Why It Still Hurts

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Theories are easy and most of them are unkind. Investigators in the years since have proposed everything from a panicked flight after a roadside encounter to a psychiatric episode in Mathias that somehow swept the others along. The Butte and Plumas County sheriffs' offices have f...

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The Yuba County Five: The Country

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Plumas National Forest covers more than a million acres of pine and granite in the northern Sierra Nevada. The Oroville-Quincy Highway climbs out of the foothills above Lake Oroville and crests over 4,000 feet before dropping into the old gold-rush town of Quincy. The stretch whe...

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