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April 26, 2019 31 mins
The second and final instalment of S04 Episode 7: Called to the Forest
In February 1978, five men from the Yuba-Sutter Area in Northern California, took a short trip to watch their favourite basketball team play in a local derby. The heartbreaking story of how the men never returned home is not in doubt. What exactly happened to them however, remains to this day, unexplained...
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is unexplained and you're listening to the second and
final installment of season four, episode seven, called to the Forest.
After scouring everywhere within a five mile radius of the
abandoned Mercury Montego, the Yuba County Sheriff's Office had found nothing.

(00:36):
By the end of the day. However, they would have
their first significant lead. It came from a man named
Joseph Shns. Around five fifty pm on Friday February twenty fourth,
the night the five men went missing. Shahns was making
his way into Plumus National Forest along the Aureville to

(00:58):
Quincy Road. Fifty five year old Sons had been checking
to see if the road would be accessible for a
trip he planned to take that weekend when his Volkswagen
bug got suddenly stuck in the snow. After trying unsuccessfully
to push it out, Sons felt a painful tightening in
his chest and immediately got back inside the vehicle to

(01:21):
catch his breath. Unbeknownst to him at the time, he
had suffered a mild heart attack. Being in such discomfort,
he decided his best hope as to keep the engine
running and try to stay warm until it passed or
until someone else came by who could help. Drifting in
and out of consciousness as the pain in his chest intensified,

(01:45):
it was about eleven thirty PM when Sons was startled
awake by what he took to be two sets of
headlights driving in from behind him, one belonging to a
car and the other to a pickup truck by. Now
unable to move, he could only watch in desperation as
the lights passed him by and disappeared around the next bend.

(02:11):
Thirty minutes later, after hearing what he thought were people
whistling nearby, Shns gathered the strength to investigate. Stumbling along
in the dark, he followed what he now took to
be voices until he came across a car seemingly parked
up by the road and a number of silhouetted figures
moving about in front of its headlights. Shns later described

(02:36):
one of them as possibly being a woman who was
carrying a baby, with all the other figures being men.
When Shahns called out for help, the talking ceased immediately.
Moments later, the headlights switched off plunged into complete darkness.
Shons angrily called out again for help, but got no response. Suddenly,

(03:01):
feeling a little exposed, he swiftly turned round and headed
back to his car. A short time later, he caught
sight of what he assumed to be the beams of
flashlights moving about in the forest around him. Calling out
once more for help, he could only watch in desperation
as one by one the beams of light were switched

(03:23):
off in response. When Schonz's engine eventually cut out at
four am, he had little choice but to strike out
for the nearest inhabited place that he could find. Remembering
the vehicle he had seen from the night before, he
decided first to check if it was still there. Sure enough,

(03:44):
just where it had been the night before, he found
What he could see then was a turquoise Mercury Montego,
but no sign of its previous occupants anywhere. Despite suffering
from a heart attack at the time, Joseph Shns eventually
walked five miles to a nearby lodge house, from where

(04:05):
he was later taken home by its manager. When explaining
all this to the police later, although there was little
doubt he had seen the abandoned car, Shns cautioned that
since he wasn't entirely lucid at the time, not everything

(04:26):
he thought he had seen could be trusted. Either way,
it was certainly something to go on. What's more, if
a fifty five year old man suffering a heart attack
was able to walk five miles down the road to safety,
there was reason to hope that the five men from
Yuba County, Bill Sterling, Jack Madruga, Jack hewet Ted Weiher,

(04:51):
and Gary Matthias could have done the same, provided they
were indeed the men that Shans had seen. Under sheriff
of Jack Beecham received another break shortly after, when a
print dusting of the car revealed no other marks inside
apart from those belonging to the missing men. Though it

(05:11):
wasn't conclusive, it seemed to suggest at least that the
car had not been stolen. By the end of that
first day, nine inches of snow fell across the Plumous
National Forest region, further complicating the search. Buoyed by Schanz's
witness statement, however, the various local sheriff's departments expanded their

(05:34):
search to as far as Buck's Lake, some twenty miles
up the road from where the car was found. Having
discovered that Bill Sterling's family owned a cabin near the lake,
there was a chance that the men might have tried
to reach it, but again, no footprints, clothing, or any
other sign of them could be found. Back in the

(05:57):
Uber City area, the families of the missing, crippled by worry,
continued to wait helplessly for any sign of their sons
and brothers. With the police continuing to draw a blank,
some of the parents suggested contacting a psychic, in the
expectation that even if they couldn't give them any clues,
it might at least give them some hope. Doctor Gloria

(06:22):
Daniel was a member of the Church of Zadi, an
organization that claimed to teach its members how to become psychic.
Although Daniel had not come officially recommended by the Yuba
County Police, it is said that she had successfully helped
them with similar cases in the past. On the morning
of Friday, March third, a handful of family members gathered

(06:46):
together with doctor Daniel and watched expectantly as she ran
her hands through a series of clothes belonging to the
missing men. Then she sat back and closed her eyes.
After a short pau with the relatives in wrapped silence,
Daniel began to speak. She could see people gathered together

(07:07):
in a shack or a cabin in a wooded hilly area,
somewhere near a body of water, she said. And something else,
a small detail, A row of men tucked into what
looked like green sacks made of canvas, sleeping bags. Perhaps,

(07:27):
she thought, So, they're still alive, asked one of the relatives. Hopefully.
Doctor Daniel hesitated, then opened her eyes. I'm afraid that
is all I can tell you, she said. By Saturday,

(07:51):
March fourth, as the search entered its second week, the
Butte and Plumas County sheriffs began to question the merits
of continuing. With the recent storms showing no sign of
letting up and the snow continuing to fall heavily, they
decided to pull back their resources for under Sheriff Jack Beecham,

(08:12):
who was supervising the entire search, and his superior Sheriff Grant. However,
there was no question of calling it off any time soon.
Not only did the men's lives depend on it, but
the entire reputation of the Uber County Police Department was
resting on it too. It was only the year before

(08:33):
that then Under Sheriff Lloyd Finlay was arrested on charges
of corruption, having been accused of stealing weapons, money, and
other valuable articles from the county evidence room. The dye
who had prosecuted him believed the crimes were merely symptomatic
of a corrupt undercurrent in local police practices which had

(08:53):
been left unchallenged for too long. The case had been
dragging on for almost a year by now, with it
looking increasingly lightly that Finley was indeed guilty, finding the
five missing men alive was the perfect opportunity to win
back the community's trust for under Sheriff Beecham, who had

(09:14):
been drafted in to replace Lloyd Finley and Sheriff Grant
facing reelection later that year. The personal stakes could barely
have been any higher. At the beginning of that second week,
having put posters up of the missing men all across
the Uber and Sutter area, and with the reports of
their disappearance a daily feature in the local news, the

(09:37):
pair finally had another lead to follow up. Carol Waltz
was the owner of a local store in Brownsville, another
foothill town of the Sierra Nevada just south of Oraville.
Waltz had been working on Saturday, February twenty fifth, the
day after the men had last been seen, when two

(09:58):
men matching the descriptions of Jack Hewett and Gary Matthias
came into her store. The pair were said to have
bought a variety of snack foods before heading back outside
to eat. A second witness also called that same day,
claiming to have seen at least four of the men

(10:18):
at the same store. The day after, two of them,
who she took to be Bill Sterling and Ted Weir,
were sitting in a red pickup truck, while two others,
who she assumed to be Jack Madruga and Jack Hewett,
were seen at a telephone booth nearby. Having previously focused

(10:44):
their search to no avail on the immediate vicinity of
the abandoned car, Beecham now feared that he had missed
a trick. In response to the possible sighting in Brownsville,
he promptly split the investigation into four parts, with the
Mountain search still continuing. One unit was instructed to go

(11:05):
back over all the evidence they had, tracing the men's
movements up to the night that they disappeared. Another would
focus on reinterviewing the family and friends, while the fourth
focused its energies on trying to locate any more witnesses
from Brownsville. Of immediate interest was the description of the

(11:26):
pickup truck, now mentioned by two separate witnesses. A short
time later. One friend of Garry Matthias's suggested he might
have taken the men to visit friends in nearby Forbestown,
but when the police contacted them, they claimed not to
have heard from Garry for months. A fund set up

(11:46):
by the desperate families for any vital information raised almost
three and a half thousand dollars, but failed to yield
any significant leads. On and on, the exhaustive search continued,
entering a third and then a fourth week, but still
the men could not be found. The police also failed

(12:07):
to find any trace at the apparent pickup truck. On
March twenty first, nineteen seventy eight, under Sheriff Beecham had
no choice but to make the painful decision to call
off the search. After hundreds of hours, having used almost
one hundred personnel, sniffer dogs, helicopters and snowmobiles, the five

(12:32):
friends who had supposedly left home merely to watch a
game of basketball, had completely vanished off the face of
the earth. Are you always taking care of your family?
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(12:52):
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(13:14):
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(13:36):
Download the app or visit teledoc dot com Forward slash
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slash Unexplained Podcast. With the search having wound down, one

(13:56):
deputy was put in place of collecting any further information
that might come to light. Having gone to Marysville High
School with ted Weer and his brothers. Deputy Lance Heirs
had been affected by the men's disappearance, perhaps more than most,
taking it as his personal mission to bring closure to
the families, in whatever shape that may take. For the

(14:18):
next few months, Heirs spiritedly followed up on each and
every piece of information that came in, from apparent sightings
of the men in Sacramento to as far as Ontario
and Tampa in Florida. He chased them all to no avail.
When one local psychic claimed that the men had been

(14:39):
murdered in Oroville in a two story house numbered either
four seven two three or four seven five three, Airs
spent two days driving the streets for any sign of it,
but no such house existed. On some nights, Deputy Airs,
dreaming that he had found them, would find himself walking

(15:01):
toward them with open arms, only to wake up alone
in the cold darkness of his bedroom, his arms still
outstretched before him. By the end of May, even the
families had begun to lose hope of ever finding out
what had happened to their children. But high up on

(15:22):
the mountain, the snow was steadily beginning to thaw, and
soon it would be time to begin letting up some
of its secrets. On the afternoon of June fourth, three
bikers went for a week end ride through plumous forest.

(15:46):
Heading along the Oureville to Quincy road, they decided to
take a turn eastwards on to one of the narrower
forest roads that headed higher up into the mountain. A
short time later, the group pulled into the dawn annual
Zinc campground, located about three miles deeper into the forest
off the main road. The bikers pulled over and made

(16:09):
their way to a large forest service cabin at the
back of the site, hoping to find a map of
the local area. Approaching the building, having just noticed a
window that had been smashed in, the riders were hit
by a sweet, putrid stench coming from inside. Going in
to investigate further, the bikers soon located the source of

(16:33):
the smell. There, stretched out on a camp bed before them,
lying under multiple layers of darkly stained sheets, they could
clearly see the outline of a steadily decomposing body. When
the call came into the Yuba County Sheriff's office later
that day, under Sheriff Beecham grabbed his hat and made

(16:57):
his way to the nearest patrol car, arriving to find
forensics and deputies from the Plumous County Sheriff's Office already there.
Beecham could tell by the look on their faces that
they had found. One of them covering his nose from
the stench. Beecham made his way into the cabin and

(17:17):
approached the body. With the sheets now rolled back, he
could see the emaciated figure lying underneath the way the
cordroy trousers had been rolled up to reveal clear signs
of gangrene on the legs. Next to it, on a
side table lay a brown wallet, a bead necklace, and

(17:39):
a ring. Beecham picked it up and examined the engraving
on the inside, which read simply ted. The body would
later be formally identified as that of thirty two year

(17:59):
old Ted Weier, last seen alive almost a hundred days before.
The pathologist ruled the cause of his death to be
the result of a pulmonary edema brought on by exposure,
having survived for up to six weeks after he had
first gone missing. To get to the cabin, Wea would

(18:19):
have to have tracked almost twenty miles up hill in
minus temperatures through six foot snowdrifts in the middle of
the night. The shirt and Cordroy trousers found on his
body were the only clothes he had been wearing. What's more,
he had most likely been sheltering in the cabin alive
and reasonably well throughout the entirety of the original search,

(18:44):
but Beecham couldn't understand it. A cursory look around the
service cabin revealed thirty one cans of food that had
been taken from a storage locker and eaten, but an
entire other locker's worth that had been left untouched. Propane
gas linked to a heating system was also discovered, as

(19:04):
well as stoves and matches, but also books and furniture
that could easily have been used as fuel for a fire.
None of it had been utilized. And then there were
the missing shoes. Weir had been wearing a pair of
sturdy leather shoes the night he went missing, but when

(19:26):
they found his body, his shoes had gone. They did, however,
find another pair of shoes left in the cabin, a
pair of tennis shoes that had belonged to Garry Matthias,
a recently burned out candle, suggested that perhaps someone else
had also been there too, long after Weir had died,

(19:49):
but had since left. The discovery of Weir's body prompted
an immediate response from the Plumus and Uba County police,
reconvening the search they had called off three months previously.
Two days later, tracing likely lines from the service cabin

(20:13):
back to where the Montego had been abandoned, officers soon
uncovered another body, or what was left of it. It
was found roughly halfway between the cabin and the abandoned car,
lying face up next to a small stream. The face
and extremities had been eaten away by forest animals sometime

(20:35):
after death. Car keys found in the trouser pockets revealed
it to be the body of thirty year old Jack Madruga.
Later that day, not far from Madruga's body, more human
bones were discovered scattered across an area of roughly fifty feet.

(20:56):
It was all that was left of twenty nine year
old Bill Sterling that those three had now been discovered
was understandably devastating for the relevant families, but equally so
for those of Garry Matthias and Jack Hewett, with neither
having been heard from in over a hundred days. In
all likelihood, they hadn't made it out of the forest

(21:18):
alive either. Believing it to be only a matter of
time before the others would be found, scores of volunteers
joined the police to help speed up the search. On
the morning of June eighth, Jack Hewett's father, also named Jack,
arrived to help. Deputy Lance. Heirs, who had been entrusted

(21:41):
with the case after the initial search had been ended,
did his best to discourage him from joining in, but
Jack would not be dissuaded. A few hours later, searching
an area of roughly five miles from the cabin where
were had been found, Jack spotted something out of place
in the undergrowth. It was a faded Levi's denim jacket.

(22:04):
He immediately recognized it as his sons. When he picked
it up from the ground, a human spine fell out
of it. Jack recoiled in horror as police quickly gathered
round to take it from him. Hewett's skull was found
a further one hundred yards down the hill, barely a

(22:26):
quarter of a mile away. Investigators also found three wall
blankets and flashlights, which had likely been taken from the
service cabin but no matter how hard they looked, they
found no sign of Garry Matthias. After two further weeks
under Sheriff Jack Beecham called off the search for a

(22:48):
second time. The bodies, or rather remains, of the four
men that had so far been found had been placed
into green canvas bags after all, just as supposed psychic
doctor Daniel had apparently seen, only they weren't sleeping bags
but body bags. Bill Sterling, Jack Madruga, and Jack Hewett's

(23:14):
deaths were all found to have been the result of hypothermia,
with no apparent signs of foul play. That their bones
and bodies were in the state that they were was
thought merely to have been down to the animals that
got to them after they died. All that was left
for Beecham was to try and piece together exactly what happened,

(23:38):
and he knew just where to start. Beecham had his
doubts about the twenty five year old Garry Matthias from
the beginning. Where the others had intellectual disabilities of one
form or another, Matthias had no such thing. Early on

(24:02):
in the investigation, Beecham learned from Matthias's family that his
involvement with the Gateway project, and how he met the
others in the first place, was due to his struggles
with schizophrenia. What Beacham also discovered, however, was that his
history was a little more complicated than that. Matthias had

(24:23):
in fact been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since
the age of fifteen, first being committed after seemingly having
suffered an adverse reaction from taking hallucinogenic drugs. After being
drafted into the army at the age of eighteen, despite
his clear medical records, Matthias is said to have suffered
another psychiatric breakdown as the result of his continued drug use.

(24:48):
At one point, Matthias was arrested after going a wall
while waiting in his cell. He demanded to speak to
the officers on duty, only to attack them when they
opened his door. Matthias had stripped completely naked before carrying
out the attack. Around the same time, the nineteen year

(25:08):
old Matthias, now living back home in Olivehurst, went to
visit his cousin. At some point in the night, Matthias
was discovered sexually assaulting his cousin's wife while she slept.
After being charged with assaulting a police officer and intent
to rape. Matthias was facing up to twelve years in prison,

(25:29):
but eventually accepted a plea deal and served only eight months.
After his release, Matthias's behavior became ever more erratic. With
his drug use escalating, he found himself increasingly on the
wrong side of the law. There were a number of
bar fights, as well as complaints of disturbing the peace.

(25:51):
One time, Matthias is even said to have turned up
high at the house of a couple he knew, telling
them he was going to stab a woman in the jaw.
Two subsequent attempts to have him committed ended in failure
when Matthias managed to escape on one account by crawling
out of a storm drain. In nineteen seventy five, Gary

(26:12):
Matthias enrolled at Huber College, but struggled with both its
conventions and fitting in with other students. Eventually he moved
out to Oregon in Washington State to live with his grandmother,
only to turn up at his mother and stepfather's house
weeks later tired and disheveled. He had apparently walked the
five hundred and forty mile journey home, eating food he

(26:35):
found along the way to stay alive, all of which,
for Beecham, made Matthias not only a potential candidate for
the murder of the other men, or at least to
have led them astray, but also one who might even
have been capable of getting out at the forest alive.
That Gary Matthias has never been found only serves to

(26:58):
heighten this theory. It has also been speculated that at
least Matthias and possibly Jack Hewett had made it to
the service cabin with Ted Weir, only to leave soon after,
with Matthias being the one most likely to have taken
weird shoes. Unless Gary Matthias is found to have survived

(27:26):
after all, it is unlikely there will ever be an
answer as to what exactly happened on that mysterious night
in February nineteen seventy eight. Why five men found themselves
driving high up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains seventy miles
in the wrong direction. Why having gone as far as
they could, the men then seemingly abandoned their car and

(27:50):
undertook a treacherous journey through thick forest and six foot snowdrifts,
reaching ever higher into the mountains, only to find death
waiting for them at the end of it. Much has
been made about the men's intellectual capacities, suggesting this may
have been a significant factor in what could have been
little more than a horrifically wrong turn. Some have suggested

(28:15):
this might also account for why those who made it
to the forest to serve his cabin didn't eat the
food and engage the heating apparatus to survive. Others suggest that,
due to their innocence with such things, a worry that
they were breaking the law made them too afraid to
do so. As for Garry Matthias, despite under Sheriff Beecham's

(28:38):
reservations in the time leading up to his disappearance, he
appeared to have turned his life around. Not only was
he holding down a steady job, but having finally been
treated properly for his schizophrenia, of which most of his
erratic behavior was likely just a symptom, he hadn't suffered
any negative effects from it for over two years. Once

(29:00):
lost in the forest, however, we could only speculate how
quickly he may have deteriorated without his medication. Certainly, for
Garry's mother and stepfather, theirs was an especially difficult anguish,
Not only did. They never get closure, but in the
absence of it, they were also forced to endure the

(29:21):
inevitable suspicions that arose once Garry's past came to the
attention of the public. Like many of the other parents,
Garry's mother and stepfather had also joined in with the
search for the missing men. His stepfather, Robert, had spent
most of his time hunting for Garry's distinctive, thick, black

(29:41):
rimmed glasses, reasoning that if a bear had taken him,
it would have at least left those uneaten. In all
the time spent waiting for news of her son's whereabouts,
Garry's mother, Ida refused to turn on her television to
afraid of what she might find out. But no news

(30:01):
ever came. She would spend the rest of her life
looking for him. I'd like to thank Ryan Vaughn's in
New York for bringing this extraordinary story to my attention.
If you enjoy listening to Unexplained and would like to

(30:21):
help support us, you can now go to Unexplained podcast
dot com forward slash support. All donations, no matter how
large or small, are massively appreciated. All elements have Unexplained
are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and
rate the show on iTunes, and feel free to get

(30:42):
in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories
you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation
of your own you'd like to share. You can reach
us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or Twitter at
Unexplained odd and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward slash
Unexplained Now, it's time to take care of yourself. To

(31:14):
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(31:35):
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