February 24th, 1978. A Friday night. Five friends, members of the Gateway Gators basketball team, attend a game at California State University. The visitors, the team they support, win. Good times. Elated, but conscious that their team is playing their own game tomorrow - their uniforms already laid out on their beds at home - they climb into a turquoise and white 1969 Mercury Montego and begin the drive home.
Each of the five men have intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions. Retards, to use a word rightly consigned to the dustbin of history. But the men are much more capable than this ableist slur would suggest. Their families love them. They bring joy to people’s lives. Their match tomorrow is to be sponsored by the Special Olympics. The winning team receives a free week in Los Angeles. Plenty to play for.
The car’s owner, Jack Madruga, 30, drives. He, like Gary Mathias, 25, had once served in the US army. Mathias was discharged after substance abuse led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. They both have licences. Bill Sterling, 29, Jack Huett, 24, and Ted Weiher, 32, don’t. The five friends stop for sustinence three blocks away at Behr's Market – mildly annoying the clerk who is trying to close for the night - and buy one Hostess cherry pie, one Langendorf lemon pie, one Snickers bar, one Marathon bar, two Pepsis and a quart and a half of milk. They get back in the car. It’s a cold night. Only Gary is wearing a coat suitable for this time of year.
They pull out of the carpark, and into oblivion.
The car is found a week later, on a dirt path in a remote area of the Plumas National Forest. There are confectionary wrappers in the car. Programmes from the basketball game. The car is wedged in a snowpack, but five men could have pushed it out. The following June, when the snow thaws, Jack Madruga, Bill Sterling, Jack Huett, and Ted Weiher, are found dead on a mountain, 70 miles in a direction opposite to their route home. The remains of three of the men are found near to a trailer camp, 20 miles from the car. Jack Huett’s father, joining the search for the men, finds his sons bones.
Ted Weiher's body is found inside the trailer, alone, on a camp bed, with eight sheets wrapped around him, including his head. An autopsy would later state he died of starvation and hypothermia. He had a beard, suggesting he’d lived as long as thirteen weeks from the night he had gone missing, clean-shaven. The trailer contains a sizeable supply of unused food and fuel. On the table next to him is his wallet and jewellery - and a gold watch. The watch isn’t his. They can’t find his shoes.
The body of Gary Mathias has never been found.
Yuba Country Five, produced by Mopac Audio and presented by Shannon McGarvey, is an excellent episodic true crime podcast series that has recently entered a true crime podcast scene that has either ran out of compelling stories to tell or has largely forgotten how to tell them well. The pacing is perhaps strange – the story is presented chronologically, meaning a mid-season lag, when the theories that make America’s answer to the Dyatlov Pass Incident so compelling (a town bully turned felon turned preacher with a grudge against Mathias; KKK affiliated survivalists undertaking late night training missions; the complex backstory of Mathias himself) are saved up until late on. But the research on the story that has been done by McGarvey and co – surviving family members are spoken to, and they speak evocatively – is extremely impressive. And – and this is important this – the podcast is superb at fleshing out the stories of the five men involved, stories and lives that deserve to echo through the ages independently of the cosmos casting the five in a real-life mystery.
A note; the word retard is used throughout and often but in context - the past really is a foreign country – and it is here that the story takes on more resonance than just bingeworthy true crime fodder. Were searches conducted thoroughly, or prejudiced by ableism? And what of that ugly, though once medically diagnosed word itself? Here, a word that has thankfully faded from view is presented as one which had served as a shroud for nuance; a word often meaning something other than where it had been applied; a word here dragged into the light and given a reckoning.
An excellent podcast. A remarkable story. Where the hell did you go?