‘The Yuba County Five’ Now Available from Get Spooky

‘The Yuba County Five’ Now Available from Get Spooky

On February 24th 1978 in Yuba County, California, five men leave a basketball game to return home. Bill Sterling, Jack Huett, Ted Weiher, Jack Madruga, and Gary Mathias. All five men had been struggling with varying degrees of mental disabilities but were all quite high functioning. The five men were due to play in their own basketball game the next day. Before leaving to watch the game on the 24th, some had even laid out their uniforms on their beds. The last time the Yuba county five would be seen was leaving a convince store after purchasing snacks for the 50 mile road trip back to their homes. 

Police in Butte and Yuba counties began searching along the route the men took to Chico. They found no sign of them. However, a few days later a Plumas National Forest ranger told investigators that he had seen the car parked along Oroville-Quincy Road on February 25. Since many residents often drove up that road into the Sierra Nevada on winter weekends, he had not considered it significant. After he read the missing persons bulletin he recognized the car and led the deputies to it on February 28.

As the snow was beginning to melt, a gruesome discovery was made in a cabin 19 miles away from where Five’s car had been found. A front window of the trailer had been smashed in and the inside was thick with the smell of rotten decay. The source of the smell was identified as being the decomposing body of Ted Weiher. Afterward, a search of the area around the cabin revealed the skeletal remains of Sterling, Madruga and Huett. 

Gary Mathias Has Never Been Found. Additionally, the circumstances behind Ted Weiher’s death in the cabin have raised further questions. 

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We take a look at this strange missing persons case from 1978 in this week’s episode of Get Spooky. The details behind the discovery of the five men leave more questions than answers the further you look into it. Is this the mystery that finally gets us to throw in the towel? Probably not, but it’s another head scratcher that leaves the Spooky gang on the back foot. 

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