Yuba County Five

The other notable report was from a woman who worked at a store in the small town of Brownsville, 30 miles (48 km) from the point where the car had been abandoned, which they would have reached had they continued down the road from where the car had been found. On March 3, the woman, who saw fliers that had been distributed with the men's pictures and information about the $1,215 ($5,000 in 2021 dollars), reward the families had put up, told deputies that four of them had stopped at the store in a red pickup truck, two days after the disappearance. The store owner corroborated her account.

The Yuba County Five were a group of young men from Yuba City, California, with mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions, who attended a college basketball game at California State University, Chico, on the night of February 24, 1978. Four of them—Bill Sterling, 29; Jack Huett, 24; Ted Weiher, 32; and Jack Madruga, 30—were later found dead; the fifth, Gary Mathias, 25, has never been found.

After the snow melted in June 1978, four of the men's bodies were found in and near a trailer camp used by backpackers as shelter, deep in the forest, 20 miles (32 km) from the car. Only bones were left of the three bodies in the woods, a result of scavenging animals; but the one in the trailer, Ted Weiher, had apparently lived for as long as three months after the men were last seen, starving to death despite an ample supply of food and heating materials nearby. Weiher was missing his shoes, and investigators found Mathias' own shoes in the nearby woods, suggesting Mathias also survived for some time beyond the last night they were seen alive.

While he was stationed in West Germany as part of his United States Army service in the early 1970s, Gary Mathias, a native of Yuba City, California, developed drug problems. This eventually led to him being diagnosed with schizophrenia and being psychiatrically discharged. Mathias returned to his parents' home in Yuba City and began treatment at a local mental hospital. While it had been difficult at first—he was nearly arrested for assault twice and often experienced psychotic episodes that landed him in a local Veterans Administration hospital—by 1978, Mathias was being treated on an outpatient basis with Stelazine and Cogentin and was considered by his physicians to be "one of our sterling success cases".

On February 25, the Gators were due to play their first game in a weeklong tournament sponsored by the Special Olympics for which the winners would get a free week in Los Angeles. The five men had prepared the night before, some even laying out their uniforms and asking their parents to wake them up on time. They decided to drive to Chico that night to cheer on the UC Davis basketball team in an away game against Chico State. Madruga, the only member of the group besides Mathias who had a driver's license, drove the group 50 miles (80 km) north to Chico in his turquoise and white 1969 Mercury Montego. The men wore only light coats against the cool temperatures in the upper Sacramento Valley at night that time of year.