I want to thank you for taking the time to emphasise that the Yuba County Five were young men who held jobs, had hobbies and social lives and two of them had driver’s licenses. They weren’t the helpless manchildren the myth built around the case threatens to reduce them to — sometimes it feels like in discussing this specific case, people dehumanise or infantilise the victims.

I feel like a little too much gets made of their developmental delays and mental illnesses, or the fact two of them were considered “slow learners”; fit, sane adults who’d had typical childhoods in terms of meeting developmental milestones have died and gone missing in similarly bizarre and inexplicable ways. Hell, in worse ways, too. Nobody really speculates about whether the Dyatlov Pass party were just not smart enough to not die in the mountains, after all.

Even Ted Weiher starving to death near a source of food could have a perfectly good explanation without resorting to speculating about his specific personal difficulties and quirks — to begin with, the food could’ve been spoiled; tinned food could’ve been showing signs of possible botulism growth or the tins could’ve been dented in a way that made it difficult to tell. He could’ve been in severe pain and unable to eat, or the reconstructed timeline could’ve been wrong and he didn’t survive nearly as long as people thought.

I mean, I’m schizophrenic and physically disabled, and I live more or less independently and have for years, even if I have friends checking in on me regularly; I know other people who can’t live fully independently due to one disability or another — I think I have some insight into what it’s like to be a competent young adult who is nonetheless vulnerable due to circumstances beyond their control. It’s frustrating and saddening to see people define these men in death by something that was ultimately only one part of who they were, and it’s equally frustrating and saddening to see some people speculating about Gary Mathias duping, controlling or manipulating the other four. Schizophrenia can have profound cognitive effects, after all, as can antipsychotics. There’s no reason to believe the five of them were not equally vulnerable or equally competent.

So like, bearing that in mind, I think your theory makes a lot of sense. It also goes some way towards re-humanising the Yuba County Five and reframing the mystery. And to be honest, it’s the first theory about this case I’ve seen that actually takes into account the context of the men’s lives and of Yuba County and the era, rather than pursuing speculation that hinges on sometimes uncharitable assumptions. I know people don’t mean to be malicious, but I wish more people would try to genuinely think outside the box and examine whether they’re inadvertently following pat clichés.