On February 24, 1978, at 10 p.m., as a basketball game ended at California State University, Chico, five young men got into a white and turquoise 1969 Mercury Montego and drove out of the parking lot. They were fans of the winning team.

The guys stopped outside a Behr's Market store, slightly annoying the clerk (who was trying to close the store), and bought one Hostess cherry pie, a Langendorf lemon pie, a Snickers bar, a Marathon bar, two Pepsi shots, and a liter and a half of milk. They then left the store, got into their car, drove south and disappeared.

The boys were waiting at home. They had an important basketball game the next day.

Ready-made clothes were already lying around the house on the evening of February 24 - beige T-shirts with “Gateway Gators” on the chest.

Weicher asked his mother to wash his new white, high-shanked sneakers before the tournament. Matthias buzzed his mother's ears with talk of the game. “We have an important game on Saturday,” Gary repeated. - “Don't let me oversleep.”

As you can see, the boys had important things to do and plans to make. They had absolutely no plans to “disappear.”

Three of them suffered from mental retardation. All lived with their parents but led independent lives.

Jackie was already 24 years old and not working.

Ted was 32, working as a janitor, but his parents discouraged him from working, stating that his disability hindered him. The man helped Jackie in his daily life, was like an older brother to him.

Madruga, who was 30, had no official diagnosis, but his mother thought he was slow. He worked as a military veterinarian.

Matias once suffered from schizophrenia and psychotic depression and drank pills, but he had not had any exacerbations for the past two years. Matthias is 25 years old. He served in West Germany, had problems with illegal substances and was discharged from the army. He sometimes worked part-time as a gardener at his grandfather's firm.

Bill Sterling, who was 29, studied religion at the local library. He often spoke about religion at the local mental hospital.

Saturday began and ended, but there was no information from the boys. The police started a search.

On February 28, police found Madruga's car 110 km from Chico on a mountain road. The car was stuck in shallow snow, but five grown men could have easily pushed it out. The gas tank was a quarter full, there were maps of California in the glove compartment and candy wrappers on the seats. The cops couldn't find any keys. But they were able to start it easily by connecting the wires. So the reason for the stop was clearly not a breakdown.

The police thought it was odd that the car had no scratched underbody and a low muffler. Although there were five men in the car. The terrain was mountainous, lots of rocks, easy to hit the underbody. Either the driver was very careful or he knew the road.

But Madrugi's relatives said that he didn't like to drive through the woods and had never been here. Each of the boys was generally a fan of home life, so it remained a mystery why they suddenly decided to turn off the highway at night and drive through the forest uphill.

On February 28, 23 centimeters of snow fell, and a storm developed, so the search operation was interrupted. It was resumed several times afterward, but no one found anything. The search was led by Yuba County Lieutenant Lance Ayers. He went to high school with Ted and his brothers.

Ayers was hot on the case. Leads came in from all over the country. The boys were seen in Ontario; the boys were seen in Tampa; the boys were seen entering a movie theater in Sacramento, accompanied by an elderly man. In desperation, he even consulted psychics: one told him the boys had been kidnapped in Arizona and Nevada; another said they were in Oroville, in a two-story red brick or mortared wood house. Nothing yielded results.

Things didn't get moving until June 4, when things melted decently in the mountains and a small group of motorcyclists decided to go for a ride and happened to find an abandoned Forest Service trailer camp 30 kilometers from the car the Five had left behind.

That's where Ted Weicher's body was found.

On a table by the bed were a nickel ring with the name “Ted” engraved on it, a gold necklace, a wallet with cash inside and a gold Waltham watch. These, according to the families, did not belong to any of the five men.

The overgrown beard on his face indicated that he had been living in the trailer for about two or three months. Why didn't he try to come out to the people?

The men got into the trailer through a window. No one tried to start a fire, although there were matches, paperback books and wooden furniture everywhere, all of which could have been used for a fire.

There were twelve open canned food jars from a neighboring warehouse lying outside. One had definitely been opened with a P38 army can opener that only Madruga and Matias, who had served in the army, knew how to use.

But no one opened the locker in the neighboring warehouse, which was stocked with Mexican dinners, smoothies, and other assorted foods. With these supplies, the five missing men could have been fed for more than a year.

The propane tank in another shed outside had never been touched, either. “All they had to do was turn on the gas,” Ayers said. - “And they would have had heat in the trailer.”

The next day, the bodies of Madruga and Sterling were found 18 kilometers from the abandoned car. Forensics showed that the cause was hypothermia.

A few days later, Hewett's body was found.

But there was no sign of Gary Mathias. His shoes were left in the Forest Service trailer, leading investigators to believe he had taken them off to put on Weicher's leather boots. But that was only an assumption.

State mental health agencies got a description of Mathias - slender, dark-haired, double vision without his glasses. He didn't have his wallet or I.D. with him. If he's still alive, he's been without the meds he needs for the last four months. He took them every week or he'd become uncontrollable and go crazy.

Why abandon a perfectly serviceable car to go into the woods at midnight? Why trek 30 kilometers through snowdrifts in the dark to get into a locked, unheated trailer? Why go there at all? And how? If someone was chasing them, why wasn't the car damaged? It didn't add up.

Neither investigators nor relatives could understand what the men were afraid of. Did they see something in the parking lot and decide to run away?

To this day, no one knows what happened to Gary.

According to one version, the five had gone to visit Matthias' friends in a neighboring town. Madruga supposedly took a wrong turn and kept going straight instead of turning around. But the friends the boys were supposedly traveling to visit denied everything.

A less popular version is that Mathias had a seizure and attacked Madruga and Sterling.

The story is strange and mysterious. Yes, almost all of them had mental illness. But half of them could think straight. Why didn't at least one of them escape and try to reach the humans? It wasn't very far.

Why did they abandon a serviceable vehicle and walk away from the highway? Didn't even those who had served in the army have enough sense?