Files of the Unexplained (2024) s01e03 Episode Script

[gentle music plays]
[woman] The story starts
in this sweet way.
You've got five friends.
They are pals from a disability center.
And they head off to a basketball game.
And then no one quite understands
what happened after that.
I was a young reporter then,
but even then I knew
none of it made any sense.
[dramatic classical music plays]
[reporter] Yuba County lawmen called this
one of the more bizarre
missing person cases they've ever handled.
Families are panicking
because we got five young men missing.
The car has been found
70 miles in the wrong direction.
Somebody made them kids do this.
Did they get here on their own,
or were they brought here deliberately?
That's the million-dollar question.
[woman] Why do you start walking
in the freezing cold,
clearly having no idea where you're going?
How did anyone miss this trailer?
The sheriff's department
didn't take it serious.
How much longer will you search?
[officer] Until we find the rest of them,
or until there's no hope.
Someone has to know where they are.
[mysterious music plays]
[narrator] On the evening
of February 24th, 1978,
five men disappeared
after leaving a basketball game
in Chico, California.
Their car was found abandoned
seventy miles away from their homes.
For almost 50 years,
the case of the Yuba County Five
has perplexed investigators.
Nothing adds up.
[ethereal music plays]
Why did the men drive
so far in the wrong direction?
Why did they leave the car
and walk into the snowy night?
Were they lost?
Or did something more sinister happen?
[melancholic piano music plays]
[man] Yuba County to me,
it was just a beautiful place.
We'd go hunting and fishing.
You couldn't drive down the road
without somebody waving at you,
'cause you knew everybody.
I had no clue
what the high crime rate was until
It's all this stuff started.
[ominous tone plays]
[woman] This is the one I like.
I like that picture.
- That's Jackie, right?
- [man] Yeah.
From when he was like six, seven.
- Look at that hair.
- [woman] I know. He was so cute.
You and your brother had the same eyes.
[man] That's my mom.
That's me, and that's Jackie.
That looks like Christmas.
No date Oh yeah, it does.
Look at that, that's his last Christmas.
That was 1978.
[lighthearted music plays]
[Tom] My brother, Jackie,
Bill Sterling,
Jack Madruga,
Gary Mathias,
and Ted Weiher,
they first met
when they went to the Gateway Project.
- The Gateway Project helped autistic or
- Disabled.
Disabled people to learn sports
and learn how to mingle with other people.
Basketball was their big thing.
The The Gateway Gators,
they lived for that.
My big brother, Jackie,
he was 24 years old,
but he had the mindset of a 16-year-old.
He was slower than most of us growing up.
But nobody ever treated him slower.
He could write his name.
He could use the telephone.
- He had a girlfriend.
- Had a girlfriend.
Talked to her for hours on the phone.
[Claudia] Jackie didn't see people as bad.
You know, he was just always smiling,
always happy.
[Tom] My brother Jackie and Ted Weiher,
you'd think they were brothers,
they were together so much.
If you'd seen Jackie,
Ted wasn't far behind.
[man] Ted loved, uh, macaroni and cheese.
Fact, that's what my wife
got him for Christmas, so I mean, if he
if he had some macaroni and cheese,
you had one happy dog, man. [chuckles]
- Yeah, he was cuter than a button.
- [laughs]
But it His Just his mind
and the way he projected his self,
he just couldn't put everything together.
[peppy music plays]
Uncle Ted, I never thought of him
as being special.
Of course, they used
a different word back then, the R word.
He was the fun uncle.
Goofy, hairy, burly.
Curly hair.
He was the janitor
at a junior high school.
But he was ours.
And you protect your own.
And we loved him, and we knew he loved us.
Jack Madruga wasn't as outgoing
as my uncle Ted.
But they were friends.
Uncle Jack, he was very quiet,
socially awkward.
He'd get nervous speaking to people,
they thought
there was something wrong with him.
Well, he was just
a very, very reserved person,
but there was nothing
slow about him at all.
He went to Vietnam.
But he did very well in school.
Signed up for college all on his own.
He was more like a bigger brother
than an uncle.
We called him "Doc." [chuckles]
He used to haul me and all my friends
around all the time for us.
We'd ditch school,
I'd call him up, "Come and get us."
[laughs]
We were very close.
[George] Doc and Bill Sterling,
they were best buddies.
Bill Sterling, I remember
him giving me pointers
on how to release the ball in bowling.
He was a sweet guy and very friendly
and just wanted to help people.
Wanted to be be there for folks.
And Gary Mathias,
he joined the group a little later
than the rest of the guys.
But the five of them became a great team.
[man] Gary
As a little brother, I looked up to him.
Oh, he was an athlete,
or he was a musician.
He was all kinds of things
that inspired me.
He stood up for me a couple of times.
I was going to get my butt kicked,
and he stepped in.
See, that was the kind of guy he was.
He would back up his family, no questions.
[woman] When Gary was in the military,
he was given a medical release.
They believed he was schizophrenic,
and he got a new psych doctor,
and they changed his medications,
and they got him doing really, really well
that he started working
for our step-father.
Gary was a very caring person.
[Tom] All five of the boys,
they were friends for eight or nine years.
They would walk everywhere.
Until Jack Madruga got his car,
a '69 Mercury Montego.
That was Jack Madruga's pride and joy,
that car.
They would just pile in there,
all laughs, the windows down,
waving to people.
[somber music plays]
Their favorite team was UC Davis,
and UC Davis was playing Chico.
So, they planned to go watch this game.
And it was close,
I mean, just an hour drive.
And some of the families didn't want them
to go to that game that night
because they had a big game
the next day their self.
I mean, you cannot express the excitement
they had for their game, that next day.
They had already won
all their other games
- Yeah.
- To make it to this tournament.
It was the championship tournament
for the Gateway Gators.
Well, I remember
Jack Madruga pulling up in the driveway
in his Mercury Montego.
My dad told my brother
on his way out the door,
"No booze, no smoking, and no girls."
And my brother looked at my dad
and said, "Oh, come on, Dad."
He turned around and walked out the door.
They were all just happy
and hooting and hollering
about their favorite team,
and left to go to Chico.
[tense music plays]
The next day, my mom telling me,
"Your brother's not home."
I asked her,
"What do you mean, they're not home?"
I was an 11-year-old boy,
and I wake up on a Saturday morning,
and my mom says,
"Get up, we've got to go
to your grandma's house."
"Uncle Ted hasn't come home,
and your grandma's really worried."
Because of their special needs,
it sent up the alarms quick.
Something was up.
[telephone rings]
Families started calling each other,
"Hey, did you see Bill?"
"Have you seen Jack?"
"Ted didn't come home."
Now the families are panicking
because we got five young men missing.
My brother Jackie
did not stay the night anywhere, anytime.
He was home every single night.
He wanted to be home
where he had his comfort, safe zone.
They would have been home.
From that basketball game,
they would have been home.
[sparse suspenseful music plays]
When they did call
the Yuba County Sheriff's Office,
they said there was nothing they could do
'cause they were all over 18.
Well, you have to wait
this 24, 48-hour time frame
before you can report them missing.
And family members said,
"But wait a minute,
they all have intellectual disabilities."
Nothing they'd do.
Bullshit.
It's bullshit.
The families on February 25th
do what they can.
They're frantically calling people.
They're driving the highways.
There's no sign of the boys.
And at 8:00 p.m. they call back
the Yuba County Sheriff's Department
and say,
"Look, we need help finding these guys."
[man] The initial investigation tried
to retrace where they knew they had been.
They were supposed to be
at Chico State watching a basketball game.
And the editor of the newspaper in Chico,
he had been at the game that night.
He saw them. He very much remembered them.
[gentle suspenseful music plays]
So they were able to verify
they were present.
It was really quiet
for the first couple of days.
[tense music plays]
[Tony] February 26, February 27th,
no information.
And on February 28th,
the Forest Service says,
"We found a car
in the Plumas National Forest."
Basically, 70 miles
in the wrong direction,
up in the mountains.
[dramatic classical music plays]
It's a 1969 two-door Mercury Montego,
and it matches the car of the missing men.
The Plumas National Forest
is a very rugged area.
It's very mountainous.
Where they disappeared
is about 4,000 feet above sea level.
There were major snow drifts up there,
up to ten, twenty feet in spots.
There are drop-offs in certain areas
where you could just lose your footing
and fall a thousand feet.
Nobody goes up that way.
That's no man's land.
[Tom] When I walked in the house,
my mom was sitting
on the kitchen floor crying,
saying that they found the car
but none of the boys.
[narrator] The men were known
to adhere to rigid schedules.
It was unheard of for them to do something
as spontaneous as drive into the mountains
in the middle of the night.
What could possibly
have brought them there?
[mysterious music plays]
[Brian] The boys,
this is not common for them.
They shouldn't have been there
in the first place.
There was no reason
for them to have gone to the snow.
When they left their house,
they were very lightly dressed,
for a basketball game in a gymnasium.
The car was,
for the most part, unremarkable.
No damage, nothing to suggest
anything bad had happened.
The keys were missing.
[mysterious music intensifies]
What they did have in there
were milk cartons, candy wrappers.
Things that you'd more likely associate
with children partying
than you would with adult men
traveling from a basketball game.
One of the investigators
contacted the distributor of the milk
and found out
who their local vendors were.
So, they started at Chico State
and went to those stores one by one,
looking to see if anybody recalled
seeing the boys in there that night.
They came across the Behr Market in Chico,
and fortunately, they were able
to speak with a woman
who was working the night of the 24th,
and she did recall them.
They were at Behr's Market
right around closing time.
Which puts them there
probably around ten o'clock at night.
From there, they disappeared
between Chico and Marysville.
[menacing music plays]
[Tony] It could be possible that sometime
between 10:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m.,
they exited off of the highway
into a town called Oroville.
From there, they drive
into the Plumas National Forest,
and probably sometime around 11:00 p.m.,
maybe 11:30 p.m.,
they drive up a rutted, snow-covered road
in the middle of nowhere.
And their car gets stuck
in probably five to six inches of snow.
And at that point,
these guys wearing tennis shoes,
blue jeans, and lightweight jackets,
just run into the darkness,
snow, freezing temperatures,
for no reason.
[intriguing classical music plays]
[woman] When I set out to do the piece,
I was able to talk to the investigators
and really sit down
and spend time with the families.
The questions that I remember
being most bewildered by
Why do you make that turnoff?
Why do you stop the car there?
Why do you get out of the car?
Why do you start walking,
clearly having no idea where you're going?
[musical arrangement intensifies]
The thing was,
is they had their game the next day.
[buzzer sounds]
Some of them had their uniforms
laid out on their beds.
[forlorn music plays]
And they wouldn't do anything voluntarily
to miss that day.
Uncle Doc, he knew how to get to Chico.
He had done this drive hundreds of times.
The car was found
with the driver's window down.
His car was his baby,
and to leave his car there abandoned
with the window down, no way.
There's no reason for those men
to even get out of that car,
unless they were forced or scared.
To some folks,
they didn't know what they were doing.
Well, they didn't make a mistake.
[moody classical music plays]
[Tony] So this is the Bidwell Bar Bridge.
It crosses Lake Oroville and leads you
into the Plumas National Forest.
This is an obvious landmark.
But if the men saw this bridge,
they would know
that they were far, far from home,
and they were going the wrong way.
And then if they see
a sign for the Plumas,
they got to know better.
As you can see, the road is closed.
Eight miles north up the road,
that's where the Mercury Montego
was abandoned.
I mean, it was a logging road.
It didn't go anywhere.
Maps wouldn't have taken them this way.
There's no reason for them to be here
just on a joyride.
There's something
that brought them up this way.
There's no way they got lost.
This night, something was going wrong.
Really wrong.
[somber piano music plays]
[Brian] Law enforcement agencies began
a comprehensive search of the area
immediately surrounding
where the car was found.
It was multi-agency,
at least four agencies involved.
Well over 200 people
participating in a search,
between horseback, on foot,
and vehicles that could go
some distance in the snow, and aircraft.
It was extensive.
My dad, Jack, went to where the car was
and started searching.
He was there every single day.
We hunted those areas.
We knew those areas up there.
Jack Sr. got out and he walked
for miles on the side of that mountain.
Jack told me, he stated out loud vocally,
"I will find you, son."
"I won't stop until I do."
All the families were out
searching the woods.
It was hell.
- I mean, you wake up every day
- Yeah.
Just not knowing.
That's the worst part, not knowing.
[morose music plays]
[Tony] The weather at the time
became very snowy
and became very treacherous.
The search and rescue teams would begin,
and then they'd stop.
March is their busiest time.
April, May,
things have slowed down considerably,
and by June they're not really looking.
We had hope every day.
Every day, you'd wake up,
and, "All right,
they they're going to find him."
"He's gonna be okay."
The silence would just
Unbearable.
[inhales sharply]
[sobs]
Sorry.
[ominous music plays]
Some motorcyclists, coming past
this Forest Service campground,
smell something awful.
There's a camp trailer
with its window smashed in,
inside of which they find
the emaciated body of Ted Weiher.
Ted Weiher's body is on its back.
His hands are crossed over his chest,
the way you would imagine someone
preparing a body for mummification.
He was wrapped very tightly
in, uh, several sheets,
almost as if y-you were swaddling a child.
It's not something
he could have done to himself.
[Tony] Ted had suffered
horrendous frostbite.
He was about six-foot, 220,
when he went missing,
and was probably down to 120 pounds
when he's found.
He was clean-shaven
when he had disappeared.
He had a full beard.
[Cynthia] Because of the beard growth,
the coroners who looked at him
were able to determine
that he had been alive
for some eight to thirteen weeks.
This got to me.
Slow death by starvation and hypothermia
over at least eight weeks.
[narrator] The trailer where Ted died
was 19 miles from the abandoned Montego.
Panicked questions arose.
How could police have missed this shelter?
And was it too late
to find the other men alive?
[melancholic music plays]
My Aunt Dorothy took me up
to the place where they found the car.
This is in March sometime.
And I can't help but thinking
that when we went up there,
he was still alive at that time.
It struck me [sniffles]
that I was that close to him.
[winces]
And he must have suffered terribly.
He was still alive.
[voice breaks] And they didn't try
hard enough to find him.
About seven miles south of the trailer,
they find the badly decomposed remains
of Jack Madruga.
Across the road,
they find the remains of Bill Sterling,
and they had been scattered
over an area by animals.
[George] Doc had the keys
in his pocket when he was found.
So, he was the driver, there's no doubt.
Grandma wanted to see Doc's remains.
And our dad told her,
"Mom, there's nothing left but bones."
And she collapsed then.
She wanted to see her son.
[voice breaks] Tell him goodbye.
[George's breath trembles]
I heard someone say,
"We found him. We found something."
And I turned and walked back.
And that's when I seen
Mr. Hewitt Sr. drop to his knees.
[voice breaks] And he was crying.
[sniffles] And he said, "I'm sorry, son,
I promised I was gonna find you."
[Tom] He
[both] He knew immediately
that it was my brother.
From the clothes that he was wearing.
And
[sighs]
they picked up a bunch of bones,
and my brother's backbone
fell out of the
his shirt that he was wearing.
And he still had his wallet in his jeans.
It was a hard day.
It was a hard day.
It's still a hard day.
It's like yesterday.
How my dad kept it together, I don't know.
When those they pull the search off here
that I didn't need their help.
I'd find my son.
And I believe I proved my point.
And, uh, I'm going to continue
till I help find the rest of 'em too
one way or the other.
That's all I got to say.
[ominous music plays]
[Brian] The pathologist report
ruled the death as because of exposure,
they succumbed to the elements.
But there was not enough of them
to where you could
really accurately know everything.
There wasn't enough left.
If there was blunt-force trauma,
if there was some other type of injury,
it was possible that would never be known.
Gary Mathias has not been found
at that scene.
They just don't know where he is.
It was very hard.
But it gave me hope.
I thought, "Well, the other ones
were found, we'll find Gary."
But after Jackie Hewitt's body was found,
it seemed like the Sheriff's Department
decided they didn't want to look anymore.
It was like, "We're done."
[Tony] By June 19th, the search teams
up there decide to call it a day.
The Sheriff's Department says,
"We did everything we could to find him,"
but there's nothing
that that they've been able to find
for the remains of Gary Mathias.
I stayed out there two more weeks
after they were gone,
my husband and I and my brother-in-law.
I hate to say it, but
it just didn't seem
like they did a very thorough to me.
The [exclaims] The families did more
than the law enforcement did.
[dark pulsing music plays]
There's reports that members
of the U.S. Forest Service claim,
"We told law enforcement
about those trailers,
and they never searched them."
[Tom] We were hunting fishermen
our whole life.
My dad could tell you
what kind of print was in a swamp.
And he seen four sets of tracks
leading away from that car,
going up the hill, north.
Not down,
where the Sheriff's Department thinks.
[Claudia] Jack Sr. knew
those trailers were there.
[Tom] They told 'em to go up there.
Jack asked them to go
to those damn trailers. He asked them.
And I remember him saying
he believes one person told him,
"Oh, they'd never make it that far.
They would never make it that far."
Like hell they wouldn't.
[Brian] The distance between the trailers
and the Madruga vehicle,
probably close to 20 miles.
I don't think anybody thought
those boys in that condition
in that weather could've made it that far.
So I'm not shocked that nobody went
all the way up to that fire camp,
which at that time probably was
under about five feet of snow.
They knew this cabin was up there,
and they didn't search it.
So, who's to say
that somebody couldn't have been saved?
[narrator] The men's capabilities
continued to be a point of contention.
And for many,
it casts a dark shadow over the case.
[music peaks, fades]
[Claudia] It makes you mad.
[Tom] Just the word pisses me off.
"Foul play suspected in disappearance
of five slightly retarded Californians."
- And do you think that that's the right
- Why would you say "retarded"?
- It's what they said back then.
- That's like
That's just not right.
A little bit slower than
If they would have said,
"Five championship basketball players
for Gateway got lost,"
they would have probably found 'em.
Instead of saying
this shit.
I think it would have went
a lot different.
They woulda looked harder.
[somber music plays]
[Claudia] These were not
25-to-35-year-old men
who were as capable of making decisions
and locating themselves
as they might have been.
That stigma of being called "retarded"
really shaded the whole incident.
The perception of these men were just
too stupid to turn around and come back
and just kept going up in the forest
was is absurd.
And I think this perception
spilled over into the the public's eye
and especially in law enforcement's eye.
They were just like,
"Well, should we put all this effort out
just to find
some retarded men that got lost?"
I think five young men
with diminished capacity
were excited about having seen
their winning basketball team do so well.
They stopped at a market
and got sugared up
with chocolate milk and candies.
And somewhere along the way,
they made a bad decision,
and they took a bad road
and they never recovered.
One bad decision led
to another bad decision
to another bad decision.
They's trying to make us believe
that it's stupidity
and, uh, because they were retarded
that they're up here on their own.
And there's no way
that they've done this on their own.
[suspenseful percussive music plays]
[Cynthia] One of the things that
completely perplexed the investigators,
there's a food locker outside the trailer,
and some C-ration cans, military food,
had been removed and eaten.
But there was a second locker
filled with enough canned food
that it could have kept them alive
for many months,
that had not been opened.
There was a propane heater
that had not been turned on.
So there was food there
that could have fed them.
There was a heater
that could have kept them warm.
Why do you not eat the food?
Why do you not turn the heat on?
W Why do you lie in a bed
covered by sheets
as though someone is caring for you,
starving to death for weeks?
What happened?
[ethereal music plays]
Ted wouldn't have done anything
that he thought would be against the law.
If he was stea [winces]
I If he thought
he was stealing something,
he wouldn't have done it.
And he wouldn't have known
how to to turn on propane
in the first place.
Ted Weiher coulda not have tucked himself
into the bed like that.
Someone else was with him.
In the trailer were black tennis shoes,
and they were the shoes
that Gary Mathias was wearing.
Weiher's shoes were never found.
Either he lost them in the Plumas,
or Gary Mathias took 'em and went away.
[dramatic classical music plays]
Ted Weiher and Gary Mathias
both most likely made it to that trailer.
What happened to these men?
What happened to Gary Mathias?
[narrator] Evidence suggested that Gary
could have made it to the trailer.
And with no sign of his body,
suspicions started to rise.
Was Gary a victim?
A scapegoat?
Or something far worse?
[music peaks, fades]
[intriguing classical music plays]
I do know
[sighs] God forgive me.
Doc and the other guys
were scared of Mathias.
Gary was gonna go to the game with them,
and they didn't really want him to go.
But they were too scared to say anything.
I do know that for a fact.
And that came from my uncle.
[Cynthia] Gary Mathias was
under medication,
successfully had had
a very peaceful two years
before the events of that night.
But Gary Mathias had drug problems.
He'd had very checkered experience
in the army.
He'd had some violent
and very problematic outbursts.
The only explanation
that made any sense to me
was that Gary's psychosis had returned,
and that somehow,
he had persuaded these guys
that this is the right thing to do.
[fast-paced suspenseful music plays]
What would conceivably be
some other person's motive
for persuading five men
to do this long hike through the woods
and then go die in a Forest Service cabin?
[Tony] His schizophrenia
is easy to use as an excuse.
But there's no proof of Gary ever pulling
something like this before.
If they can get in a car,
drive to Chico without incident,
attend a basketball game without incident,
go to Behr's Market without incident,
how's Gary the problem? I don't buy it.
If he wasn't on his medication,
he cannot function by himself.
So, if he was not on his medication,
my dad woulda not let him go.
Period.
Law enforcement,
they really, really didn't treat
my brother fairly.
They snap judged him.
You were the first person ever in 45 years
to ever ask me a question.
No one in a police department.
No one from the media.
No one ever asked me for nothing.
I don't know what happened to him.
That's the part that bothers me.
I need to know where he is.
[narrator] More than 40 years
after the men's disappearance,
one crucial question looms over this case.
What happened to Gary Mathias?
[ominous music plays]
[Cathy] I have mixed thoughts
about what happened to Gary Mathias.
Our mother owned a bar
there in Browns Valley.
And within a year
after the bodies were found,
I had gotten off work, full bar.
Third bar stool down from the end,
there was this guy.
We locked eyes, and it was Gary Mathias.
And I went through the swing door there
that goes behind the bar.
And I told Mom, I said,
"That's Gary Mathias
sitting there at the end of the bar."
She goes, "Are you sure?"
I said, "I'm positive."
I called the Sheriff's Department.
Gary looked at us, and he jumped up
and took off running.
We could not catch him.
People told me that he had been seen
at Montgomery Ward's, Denny's restaurant,
7-Eleven parking lot,
so I really don't know what to think.
God strike me dead if I'm wrong.
There's a man driving
through the Plumas area in 1979
who claims
that Gary Mathias was hitchhiking.
But there's no mention of that
in the Yuba County
Sheriff's Department file.
There have been some reports
of Gary Mathias having been spotted
or seen after the remains were found.
Both in the area, out of the area.
We've had reports even out of the state.
Nothing that, uh,
we've ever been able to substantiate.
[somber classical music plays]
[Tom] I could tell you what I think.
But I don't think
Gary Mathias made it to that trailer.
When I was growing up in Marysville,
there were certain families
that you knew better than to fuck with.
And the bully of the town
was in and out of prison his whole life.
And I've seen him do things.
Very scary guy.
There was rumors that
this bully and a group of people
had bad blood with Gary Mathias
and took his vengeance out on all of them.
They started something with my brother.
Gary Mathias stood up for him.
And these people
beat the shit out of Gary Mathias
and threw him over the Oroville Bridge.
And then they made the other four boys
drive up that road.
And scared them enough
that they'd not come back down that hill.
One of the boys may have carried
Gary Mathias' shoes up to trailer.
That's why there was only four sets
of footprints going up that hill.
I could feel it in my heart
that my brother's the one
who wrapped Ted up in those sheets.
My brother
would have never left Ted alone,
not if he was alive.
[melancholic music plays]
[Tammie] There had to have been somebody
in that trailer taking care of Ted.
And I believe it was my brother Gary.
And I think him and Jackie
took off to try to find help.
But Gary was weeks
without his medication.
I think it was a little while
before he started losing his mind.
I think he just got lost,
and it was still cold.
I do believe
that he didn't make it out of there
any more than the other boys did.
[Brian] Anybody who's ever worked
a case like this wants to know.
Doesn't matter
how many times I read a report,
I'll find some little nuance
that just strikes me different.
I would bet
within the first 11 miles from the car,
Madruga or Sterling became fatigued,
which is the first symptom of hypothermia.
They were close friends.
If one was succumbing to the elements,
the other was likely to stay,
and together they perished.
The three were taking care of each other,
so they were destined to continue.
Jackie Huett's remains
were found along that path.
I don't think
he ever made it to the trailer.
Ted Weiher, obviously,
we know he makes it there.
I think it's a pretty significant chance
that, uh, Gary Mathias makes it there.
I think he was there
right up until Ted perished,
based on the way that he was swaddled.
He probably took the better pair of shoes
to try to make it away,
and likely didn't get very far.
[Mark] You can only speculate.
You may answer one question,
but you're going to bring up 20 more.
The only thing
that I could ask for right now
is please find his remains.
He needs to come home.
I don't believe in closure, I don't.
As long as there's an empty chair
at that table, nothing's closed.
[bittersweet piano music plays]
Knowing how all of them were,
it had to have been so scary for 'em,
and that that just eats at my heart.
[sobs] Couldn't be there to help 'em, huh?
They were worthy human beings.
Yes, every one of 'em.
[Mark] I can't even remember
what the last words were
that I ever said to my brother.
And I'm hoping it was, "I love you."
These were vulnerable guys.
How could that happen to to these guys?
Ted, he'd probably be living
with me if he
you know, if he was still here.
Yeah, I don't think
he could be on his own.
No.
Whoever had the most macaroni
and cheese is who he'd stay with.
[both chuckle]
He He He would have been with somebody
that that knew him and loved him,
to take care of him, and we did.
[music fades]
We were a very close-knit family.
But we weren't the type of family
that did the hugs and "I love you".
The first time my dad
ever told me that he loved me, uh
was the day my brother was found.
But we knew we loved each other.
We'd still like answers.
[Tony] The way that they were viewed
as incompetent, that's not fair.
Something brought them up to that mountain
where they met their death.
You just don't know what they were doing
and what was happening that night.
Where they abandoned their car
in the darkness
on a side road, and you come up here,
and you're more confused
than you've ever been in your entire life
about this case.
[Cynthia] They can't prove
there was foul play,
and they can't explain it if there wasn't.
[narrator] What exactly happened
to the Yuba County Five
on the night of February 24th, 1978,
may forever be a mystery.
Almost 50 years later,
the truth is still unknown.
[Claudia] Can you just imagine them
standing on the street corner,
drinking their pop?
- Yup, waving at everybody.
- [Claudia] Waving at everybody.
And everybody waving back.
Somebody out there knows
exactly what happened to those boys.
[Claudia] Let there be justice.
[mysterious music plays]