The Hungry Season

Five friends left a basketball game. Their car went into the mountains. Four were found dead. One was never found.

On the night of February 24, 1978, Ted Weiher, Jack Huett, Bill Sterling, Jack Madruga, and Gary Mathias stopped for food after a college basketball game in Chico, California. They were expected home. Instead, Jack Madruga's Mercury was discovered far from the ordinary route, abandoned on a snowy mountain road with fuel still inside and the keys missing.

Months later, the thaw revealed a landscape of contradictions. Ted Weiher was found beneath blankets in a remote Forest Service trailer, surrounded by food, matches, wood, and unused fuel. Three other men were recovered outdoors. Gary Mathias vanished without a trace.

What happened between the market and the snow?

The Hungry Season reconstructs the known timeline, the failed search, the disputed witness account, the trailer evidence, the families' decades of questions, and the theories that have grown around the case. Was it a wrong turn and a battle against the elements? An outside person? A crime? Did Mathias become a victim, a survivor, or the focus of suspicion because the evidence left no one else to question?

Written as evidence-led narrative nonfiction, this is not a manufactured solution. It is the story of five adults whose lives were overshadowed by an unsolved disappearance and of a winter that left behind fragments, but no final answer.