Five Men Went to a Basketball Game and Drove 70 Miles the Wrong Way. The Yuba County Five.

On the night of February 24, 1978, a man named Joseph Schons was stuck in the snow on a mountain road in Northern California.

He was in pain. He was having a heart attack, although he did not know it yet. He sat in his car with the engine running, trying to stay warm.

At around midnight, he heard voices. He saw headlights, and flashlights.

He called out for help.

And the voices went silent. The lights went out.

Nearby, investigators would later find a car belonging to five young men who had gone to a basketball game that night, seventy miles away. Four of them would be found dead months later. The fifth has never been found.

The five

The five men all lived in Yuba County, California, about forty miles north of Sacramento.

Gary Mathias, twenty-five. Bill Sterling, twenty-nine. Jack Huett, twenty-four. Ted Weiher, thirty-two. And Jack Madruga, thirty.

They were friends. They played together on a basketball team for adults with disabilities.

Weiher and Huett had intellectual disabilities. Sterling and Madruga were described as slow learners. Mathias had served in the U.S. Army in West Germany, and after his service he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. By 1978 he was in outpatient treatment and taking his medication. His doctors described him as a "sterling success."

The game

On February 24, 1978, the five drove to Chico, about fifty miles north, to watch a college basketball game. UC Davis was playing Chico State. They were big fans of the UC Davis team.

Jack Madruga drove. He was the only one with a driver's license. They went in his 1969 Mercury Montego.

After the game, shortly before ten p.m., they stopped at a small store in Chico called Behr's Market. They bought snacks, sodas and milk. The clerk remembered them, because they came in just as she was trying to close.

They were wearing light coats.

They were expected home that night. They never got there.

The car

When the men did not come home, their families called the police the next morning.

On February 28, deputies found the Mercury. It was on a remote road in Plumas National Forest, about seventy miles from Chico, at roughly forty-four hundred feet of elevation. A ranger had seen it there on February 25, but had not thought much of it.

It was nowhere near the way home. The drive back to Yuba County was a straight run down the valley. The car was up in the mountains.

The car was stuck in snow. There were signs that someone had tried to spin the tires to get free. Police believed five men could easily have pushed it out.

The keys were gone. When police hot-wired it, it started right away. It had about a quarter tank of gas.

The car was unlocked, with a window rolled down. Inside were food wrappers, basketball programs, and a folded road map of California.

And one more strange detail. The road up was rough. But the underside of the car had no damage, and no mud. Some investigators wondered if whoever drove it knew the road well.

A snowstorm moved in. After about two days, the search was called off.

The man in the other car

Then Joseph Schons came forward.

He was a man from Sacramento with a cabin in the area. At about five-thirty p.m. on February 24, his car got stuck in the snow, about a hundred and fifty feet up the road from where the Mercury was later found.

He started to have chest pain. He stayed in his car with the engine on for heat.

About six hours later, he heard voices and saw headlights. He also saw flashlights moving nearby.

He called out for help. The voices stopped. The lights went off.

At first he said a pickup truck may have parked behind him. Later he said he could not be sure, because he was in so much pain.

His car ran out of gas in the early morning. He walked about eight miles to a lodge, and the manager drove him home. On the way, they passed the Mercury.

Doctors later confirmed he had suffered a mild heart attack.

The Brownsville sighting

On March 3, a woman who worked at a store in Brownsville, about thirty miles from where the car was found, said four of the men had come into the store in a red pickup truck on February 25.

Police called her a credible witness. The store owner backed her up, and remembered two men, possibly Weiher and Huett, buying burritos and chocolate milk.

But the sighting has never been confirmed.

The families pooled together a reward of twelve hundred and fifteen dollars.

The trailer

On June 4, 1978, a group of motorcyclists came across a U.S. Forest Service trailer in the mountains, about nineteen and a half miles from where the car had been found.

The front window was broken.

Inside was the body of Ted Weiher.

He had died of starvation and hypothermia. He had lost nearly half of his body weight. Investigators believed he may have survived in that trailer for as long as three months. His feet were badly frostbitten. He was not wearing shoes. His body was wrapped in bedsheets.

What was in the trailer

And this is the part of the case that haunts people.

There was a fireplace. It was never used, even though there were matches and paperback books nearby that could have been burned.

There was heavy winter clothing in storage. It was never touched.

There was a locker full of dehydrated food, enough to last a long time, and a butane gas valve for heat. Neither was touched.

What had been eaten were thirty-six cans of military rations. They had been opened with a P-38, a small military can opener. Mathias and Madruga had both been in the military.

Gary Mathias's tennis shoes were in the trailer.

And the bedsheets wrapped around Weiher's body suggested that someone had been there with him. Someone who tried to help.

The others

On June 5, the bodies of Jack Madruga and Bill Sterling were found on opposite sides of the road, about eleven miles from the car.

Around June 7, the remains of Jack Huett were found under a bush about two miles from the trailer. He was identified by dental records. His death was attributed to hypothermia.

Gary Mathias was never found.

His photo was sent to mental health facilities across California, in case he had turned up somewhere. He never did.

What we still don't know

The most common theory goes like this. The men took a wrong turn, possibly on the way to visit friends in a nearby town. The car got stuck. In the dark, they decided to walk, maybe following snowcat tracks, hoping to find shelter. Madruga and Sterling died along the way. Huett died not long after. Mathias and Weiher reached the trailer. At some point, Mathias left, perhaps believing Weiher was already dead.

But that theory leaves a lot unexplained.

Why did they drive seventy miles in the wrong direction? Why did they abandon a car that still ran, with gas in the tank? Why did they walk nearly twenty miles uphill through deep snow, past the road back down? And why, in the trailer, did nobody light the fire or open the food?

Foul play has never been ruled out. It has never been proven, either.

What we know is that five friends went to a basketball game and never came home. Four were found. Gary Mathias is still missing.

What do you think happened on that mountain road?