Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Due to the nature of this episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of violence, sexual assault, substance abuse, and descriptions of dead bodies. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. It's the middle of the night in the spring of 1978, but Lieutenant Lance Ayers of the Yuba County Sheriff's Department is wide awake.
He spent weeks on a baffling case of five men missing in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Now, those men have started invading his dreams. A blanket of snow just beginning to thaw has obscured the search area for weeks. Investigators have uncovered a few clues, but each is more baffling and bizarre than the last. It's a breeding ground for a host of strange theories.
Lieutenant Ayers investigates every tip, regardless if he finds it believable or not. He has to, for all he knows those men, including an old classmate of his, could still be out there, holding on to survival and waiting for help. So he hopes, more than anything, the answers come soon. Then he can put the strange theories to bed, and maybe he can sleep soundly too.
He has no idea that as investigators scour the mountain, they'll uncover more clues than they've gotten in months. Or that far from offering any explanation, those clues will prompt more questions. Like connecting the dots, only to create a picture that your eyes still can't make sense of.
Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. And be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
Today, we're exploring the mystifying story of the Yuba County Five. In 1978, five men went missing in the snow-covered forests of Northern California. The search for clues led detectives and loved ones on a strange, dark journey, one that still haunts the area to this day. Stay with us.
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- Bocas del Toro, Panama.
Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple. Survive. I'm Candace DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
This is a difficult story. It concerns five possible victims, all young men who had their whole lives in front of them. They also all had some form of mental disability. I can't be much more precise than that because this happened in the 1970s. The language we use to discuss mental health issues has changed since then, and the contemporary reporting on the victims' conditions was incomplete at best.
But we do know that these young men were especially vulnerable, which makes the injustice of what happened to them sting that much worse. As I said, it's a difficult story, but if you stick with it, it's also a fascinating mystery. It's 9:55 p.m. on February 24th, 1978. A clerk at Bear's Market in Chico, California watches the clock, counting down the minutes until his shift is over.
He's almost free to make his way home through the snowy roads of his small mountain town. He's about to lock the door when five men barge inside. The men talk amongst themselves as they shop, gloating about the basketball game they just attended. Their team, UC Davis, just beat Chico State, the local college. They're out-of-towners, and they're keeping the clerk late. He watches them, tapping his foot as they select their goods.
Altogether, they purchase two bottles of Pepsi, a quart and a half of milk, two pies, and two candy bars. They leave shortly after they arrive, and the clerk breathes a sigh of relief. He closes up and heads home, thinking it was just an ordinary interaction on a regular night. He's dead wrong. In fact, he's the last person who will ever see those five men alive.
Seven hours later, at 5 a.m. on February 25th, Imogen Weir wakes up in Marysville, California, about 50 miles south of Chico. She goes to check on her son, 32-year-old Ted Weir, but he's not in his bed. This is immediately concerning. Her son never spends the night away from home.
But the timing is especially weird. Ted plays in an intramural basketball team run by the Gateway Project, a sports league for people with intellectual disabilities. He's playing in a special Olympics tournament later that day. It's important to him. He wouldn't risk missing it. Imogen knows that the night before, Ted went out with four friends from his team.
Jack Madruga, Bill Sterling, Jack Hewitt, and Gary Mathias. She thinks of them as the boys, but they're all between the ages of 24 and 32. They traveled about an hour to Chico to watch a college game and were supposed to return late that night. But Imogen calls the four other men's families. None of them made it home. The parents spend the day on edge, hoping their sons will return.
When they miss their basketball game and still aren't back by 8:00 PM, the families report them missing.
Officers at the Yuba County Sheriff's Department open an investigation right away. They start by trying to pin down the group's last known movements. On the night they went missing, the group had been traveling in Jack Madruga's car, a turquoise and white 1969 Mercury Montego. Madruga was driving the group to and from Chico to attend the basketball game.
They also find out more about the exact nature of each man's disabilities. Of the five, 30-year-old Jack Madruga is the only one who's never been officially diagnosed with an intellectual disability or psychological disorder. Although his family describes him as, quote, slow in his thought processes, he's capable of managing his own affairs. He was in the army as a truck driver when he was younger and now works as a dishwasher.
As one of two in the group with a license, he often winds up driving his friends around. One of those friends is 32-year-old Ted Weir, the man whose mother first noticed him missing.
He's known around town as kind and open-hearted. At the same time, he often struggles to understand instructions, and he doesn't always realize when he's in danger. For example, one night when his family's home caught fire, his brother had to physically drag him out of the house. Weir didn't understand how dangerous the fire was. He was more focused on getting a full night's sleep for work the next day.
29-year-old Bill Sterling has a similarly significant intellectual disability. He used to have a job as a dishwasher at an Air Force base, but his mother discovered the airmen were taking advantage of him. They'd pretend to be his friend, get him drunk, then steal all the money he'd made working. Since then, Sterling only spends time with his real friends, like Jack Hewitt, who's
Of the group, 24-year-old Jack Hewitt's intellectual impairment is the most significant. He's also the most shy, perhaps because he has a speech impediment and can't read or write. Madruga, Weir, Sterling, and Hewitt are all well-liked around town. Among their peers, they're seen as athletic and popular jocks. None of them have ever gotten into any trouble with the law.
But there's a fifth member of the group. Gary Mathias is a relatively new addition and he doesn't have an intellectual disability. Instead, he's been diagnosed with schizophrenia, a psychological disorder typified by hallucinations, delusions, and cognitive problems that can make day-to-day functioning difficult. At the age of 25, he's already had several run-ins with the law.
Like Jack Madruga, Gary Mathias also has military experience but was discharged from the army after a few years. The Yuba County Sheriff's Department makes note of Mathias' name. They know he has a criminal record, but ever since he started taking antipsychotic medication two years ago, he hasn't had any issues.
And regardless of his past, he's also missing. Mathias could be a victim in this scenario. He's just as vulnerable as his friends. If they're going to get any answers, the sheriff's department needs to find all five men. And they need to do it before the weather gets any worse. They start by patrolling the 50 miles of mountain roads between Marysville and Chico.
They peer deep into snowdrifts that tower up to 15 feet above them. They brave the elements, looking for any sign of a car accident or broken down Montego, but they find nothing. In the meantime, the men's families console each other. They still can't think of any reason that their boys would choose not to come home. They wanted to play in their basketball game, and they didn't like being out overnight.
The fact that they're still gone means that something terrible must have happened. The Sheriff's Department puts out an all-points bulletin for every law enforcement organization in the area. The next two days are spent searching to no avail. Then, on Tuesday, February 28th, the winds bring a rolling snowstorm back into the mountains. Snow blankets the roads and the countryside. In some areas, it falls 10 inches deep.
This is devastating for the search and rescue teams. The mountains were already blanketed with snow, so the men's tire tracks and footprints would have been visible, but now their tracks are covered, gone for good. The search already seemed like a long shot, now it feels impossible. However, as the sun moves across the sky, the storm passes and something unexpected happens. A forest ranger makes his way through the Plumas National Forest,
A two and a half hour drive east of Chico, the country roads are winding and isolated. That's when he notices a car parked on the road covered in snow. He's seen it before. It's been sitting in that spot for three days, ever since the 25th. He thought nothing of it before. People often drive into the forest, park their cars and go skiing, but they don't usually leave their vehicles unattended for days at a time.
He wipes the snow off. It's a turquoise and white 1969 Mercury Montego. He checks the plates and discovers the car belongs to a missing person. Jack Madruga. This is a major clue. The first trace of Jack Madruga and his friends in three days.
but it's also pretty confusing. The Plumas National Forest is about 60 miles east of Chico. Marysville, where the five men live, is around 60 miles south, meaning they must have driven over 50 miles in the opposite direction of their homes for their car to end up here. The forest ranger reports the discovery, and pretty soon the area is swarming with law enforcement.
They closely examine the vehicle, hoping for anything that can help them make sense of the situation. The inside is filled with empty food wrappers and one half-eaten marathon bar. The remnants of the food the group purchased at Bear's Market on the night they disappeared. The sheriff looks for the keys, but they're nowhere to be found. He and his team wonder if the group abandoned the car after it died. Perhaps it ran out of gas or got stuck.
But when the officers try to hotwire the vehicle, they make a startling discovery. The car starts without issue. Even after three days in the freezing cold, the battery hasn't died. The gas tank is still a quarter full. The tires are fully inflated. It isn't even stuck in the snow. The officer's last thought is perhaps the car got damaged as the men went up the bumpy dirt roads. They check the undercarriage, but it doesn't have a scratch on it.
Whoever drove the car here managed to navigate a dangerous rocky road without putting any damage on the vehicle. Even his five grown men weighed it down, which means the group drove an hour and a half away from home and into the mountains, then left their perfectly functioning car behind, all for no discernible reason. It just doesn't add up. As they step back from the car to take stock of the situation, the officers can't help but wonder,
What happened here? The discovery of Jack Madruga's abandoned, but strangely undamaged car in the Plumas National Forest raises immediate questions. But it does provide at least one answer, a solid lead towards the whereabouts of the five missing men. Since Madruga's car is in the forest, it stands to reason they might be somewhere nearby.
Police set up massive search parties and scour the surrounding woods. They bring dogs, horses, and snow cats, and even fly search and rescue helicopters over the forests. They comb through the snowy woods for five days, devoting a combined 6,000 man-hours to the task, and they find exactly nothing.
Finally, the Sheriff's Department is forced to admit defeat. The area they're searching is too large, the terrain too rough, the weather too punishing. If the missing men are somewhere nearby, they're most likely buried beneath several feet of snow and they may never be found. They call off the search.
As you might expect, the missing men's families aren't satisfied. They push law enforcement to keep looking, but combing the mountain just costs too much time and money. Over the next few weeks, the families are tortured by the absence of their sons. They try to understand what could have motivated them to go into the mountains in the middle of the night. Jack Madruga's mother is particularly mystified. His car was his most prized possession.
He never let anybody drive it. She thinks he must have been behind the wheel, but he also hated the mountains and camping. The Plumas National Forest is the last place he'd want to go. She tells the LA Times, quote, I'm sure he would have come home directly from the game. There is no way he would have gone voluntarily into the mountains at night. So if Jack Madruga didn't drive them up there by choice...
There's only one explanation that makes sense to the family. Somebody forced those men into the wilderness. It would be easier to accept this theory if the men had any enemies, but they don't. There's no one with a motive to hurt them. One possibility is that someone stole Jack Madruga's car. But even then, if a person purposely took the vehicle, they wouldn't have turned around and left it out in the woods. None of it adds up.
In the absence of any real information, each family is forced to come to their own conclusions. Gary Mathias' stepfather decides that his son is likely dead. He tells reporters, quote,
But not everyone accepts that. Ted Weir's mother Imogen is convinced the men have been taken captive. She speculates they are being held hostage in a cabin in the woods. Others think the group might have been kidnapped and then abandoned somewhere in the wild, maybe by Oroville Lake a few miles away. Frustrated with the police and desperate for answers, the families put together a reward fund.
About a week after Madruga's car is found, they offer $1,000 for information leading to their son's discovery. The community bands together and more than doubles the money. Tips come in from all over the area. The sheriff's department follows up on each one, but they're all dead ends. It seems like the reward mostly attracted people who are looking to make a quick buck. This only compounds the tragedy. Time ticks by.
and with every passing day the odds of finding the group gets slimmer hope fades and grief sets in the weather warms up and the snow starts to melt but the homes of the missing men get colder and more somber in their absence their story fades from the headlines without their full names constantly in the newspapers the group becomes known by a new moniker the yuba county five
Most people in the community remember them, but assume they'll never be found. Then, it happens. On June 4th, 1978, a little over three months after the Yuba County Five disappeared, a group of motorcyclists ride down the dirt roads of the Plumas National Forest...
They're having a grand time hooting and hollering until they come across an old ranger's trailer site. The trailer is big, 60 feet long. One of its windows has been broken, presumably to unlock the front door. The motorcyclists peer through the shattered window and see a man's body laying on a cot, decomposing. Terrified, they race back to Civilization and tell the Sheriff's Department what they found.
Yuba County undersheriff Jack Beecham travels to the site along with several recovery teams. On his way, he notices the access road leading to the trailer branches off the same road where Jack Madruga's car was found months earlier. While he drives, he measures the distance from that location to the trailer. It's exactly 19.4 miles.
As he nears the trailer, he is struck by the putrid scent of death. He and the recovery team find the door unlocked and go inside. Empty cans of food litter the ground. The man's body lies on the bed underneath eight layers of sheets. A scraggly beard has grown out on his chin. The recovery team removes the sheets. The man's hands are on his chest and his pants are rolled up. Five of his toes are black with frostbite.
His legs are scarred with gangrene and his veins are colored with blood poisoning. Physically, he's incredibly frail, nearly skin and bones. The investigators notice a leather wallet, a bead necklace, and a ring on the bedside table. The ring is engraved with a single word, Ted. They've found one of the missing Yuba County Five, Ted Weir.
Just like with the discovery of the abandoned car, finding Ted is simultaneously a big step forward and a bigger step sideways. It just raises more questions. To get from the car to the trailer, Ted Weir must have hiked 19.4 miles in the dead of night in the freezing cold. But why would he do something so drastic and dangerous? How long did he survive in the trailer without
And where are the rest of his friends? Bit by bit, investigators piece together what they can. Through an autopsy and forensic analysis, they determined Ted Weir died of a pulmonary edema or an excess buildup of fluid in the lungs. It was caused by prolonged exposure to freezing temperatures and the damage to his feet and legs. Based on the length of Ted's beard,
They approximate he survived somewhere between 4 and 13 weeks after he disappeared, depending on the reports, likely into the early days of April. During that time, he starved, losing nearly half his body weight. And this is where things get especially confusing. Investigators soon realize the trailer site is equipped with a storage locker,
It contains more than a year's supply of non-perishable food. The locker is easily accessible, but it's been left entirely untouched. Ted was starving, and there was food right there. To make matters worse, there's a propane tank connected to the trailer. It could have provided the heat Ted clearly needed, but it's never even been turned on.
Perhaps Ted didn't know how to open the locker or operate the propane tank. After all, he often struggled with understanding instructions and recognizing when he was in serious danger. There's no way to know what might have been going through his mind if he was on his own. But signs indicate he wasn't alone, at least not at first. Along with the storage locker, there are also lots of empty cans scattered around the trailer.
It looks like some of them were opened with a special army-issued P-38 can opener. The thing is, Ted wouldn't have known how to use a P-38 can opener. These are finicky tools. You have to be shown how to use them. And if you remember, Jack Madruga and Gary Mathias both had military experience. Either of them would have known how to use the can opener, which suggests that one or both of them likely made it to the trailer as well.
That's when investigators notice Gary Mathias has sneakers on the floor of the trailer. Interestingly, Ted Weir's shoes, ones made of sturdy leather, are missing. Putting all of this together, it seems likely Mathias was at the trailer opening cans and eating food. Then at some point, he traded his shoes for Weir's and left. Where he and the other three men went is still a mystery.
The Sheriff's Department organizes a 40-person search party. Two days later, on Tuesday, June 6th, they fan out from the trailer, combing the wilderness for the missing four. Four miles away, they find something. A pile of human bones is scattered on the side of the road. Some of them are still wrapped in old clothing, and a wallet is found.
The items in the wallet reveal that the bones belong to Bill Sterling, another one of the missing five. Across the road, they find another body ravaged by animals. One arm has been chewed off and the body has been dragged 10 feet to a nearby creek. The clothes are torn, but the keys to the Montego are still in one pocket. This is Jack Madruga.
Later tests find that he died from hypothermia. This puts more pieces of the puzzle together. It seems that after hiking 11 miles in the freezing cold that night, both Madruga and Sterling sat down to rest. They likely fell asleep and froze to death, while Weir and Mathias continued walking until they reached the trailer. The search team continues to scour the forest for Mathias and Hewitt, who are both still missing.
They don't find anything that day, but they aren't going to give up. Meanwhile, word spreads among the men's families. The Weirs, Madrugas, and Sterlings are devastated, but at least they know what happened to their loved ones. The Mathiases and Hewitts hold on to hope their sons might still be found alive.
Jack Hewitt Sr., in particular, wants to find his son more than anything in the world. He insists on joining the recovery team. Police think it's better for him to let them do their jobs and notify him if they find his son, but he won't be dissuaded. On June 8th, he drives up to the mountains to join the search effort. While authorities comb the road and woods, Hewitt Sr. goes straight to the trailer site.
While making his way through the brush, he peers through the dense vegetation, looking for anything detectives might have missed. His eyes pass over branches and leaves. Then, two miles beyond the trailer, he sees something he recognizes. On June 8th, Jack Hewitt Sr. finds a jacket lying on the ground a couple miles from the trailer, the one he wore on the night he disappeared.
Tears well up in his eyes. As he lifts it up to get a closer look, he hears a rattle. A human spine drops out. His son's spine. Hewitt Sr. is shattered. He leaves the search to grieve. Meanwhile, law enforcement finds the rest of Jack Hewitt Jr.'s bones scattered around the area. They confirm his identity by checking his dental charts.
which means that four of the missing Yuba County Five have now been found. The Mathias family waits with bated breath. Police are confident they'll find their son's bones at some point too. The search party returns to the woods day after day. They check under every rock and bush for miles around the trailer. They search for two weeks straight, but detectives find absolutely nothing.
They've spent so long in the woods, they can no longer afford to keep searching. They call it off and the Mathias family is left without closure. The missing Yuba County Five has become the missing one. And even though four of their families are finally able to bury their loved ones, there are many questions left unanswered. Why did the men drive up a dirt road in the mountains instead of coming straight home?
Why did they leave a perfectly functioning car and hike miles in the freezing cold? Why did Jack Madruga and Bill Sterling sit down on the side of the road? And why did the other three carry on without them? Why didn't Ted Weir, Gary Mathias, and Jack Hewitt use the propane to heat the trailer or eat the food that was readily available? What made Jack Hewitt leave the trailer to die nearby? And the most pressing question of all...
What happened to Gary Mathias? Even with all the open questions, the families are vocal about one thing. They don't think their son's deaths and disappearances were an accident. They believe that someone forced them to go into the mountains, then into the woods. They don't have any proof of this though, and the investigation doesn't turn up any new evidence.
A year passes, and the families are still tormented by what happened. Four of them write a joint letter to the editor of the Marysville Appeal Democrat titled, Still One Missing, Still a Reward. It puts out a united front among most of the families as they remind people to keep looking for Gary Mathias. In one particularly moving passage, they write, quote, When your son leaves home with friends to go to a basketball game,
Do you always put your arms around him, give him a kiss and remind him how much you love him? You really should. He may never come back to you. But for all their pleas, there's nothing anyone can do. No one has seen Mathias or has any answers. The case goes cold. Years pass, then decades. Most of the men's parents pass away. The story of the Yuba County Five fades into obscurity.
But as time passes, old whispers start to resurface. In early 2019, 41 years after the men went missing, the Sacramento Bee decides to re-examine the case. Reporter Benji Eagle does a deep dive on all available sources, including police files, to see if he can piece together any clues that might have been missed in the initial investigation.
He discovers something that completely changes his perspective on the case. While no newspapers or reporters mentioned it at the time, it turns out that many of the investigators and family members had a theory about who was responsible. It all points to the only member of the Yuba County Five who was never located, Gary Mathias.
This shouldn't come entirely out of nowhere. If you remember, the police were initially suspicious of Mathias because of his criminal record. The other men's families never really trusted him either. And in their defense, Mathias' past behavior makes him look pretty dangerous. When he was young, Gary Mathias did common activities like playing sports and joining a band. But his home life wasn't perfect.
His parents went through a messy divorce, though it seemed like he was going to turn out alright. Then, in high school, things took a turn for the worse. Sometime during his sophomore year, Matthias experienced an episode of psychosis and was put in a psychiatric ward for the first time. Based on the way his parents described the event, it seems that it may have been triggered by an extreme reaction to psychedelic drugs.
Whatever initiated the episode, Matthias was released from the psychiatric ward soon after, but his mental health continued to suffer. In the early 1970s, after he was out of high school, Matthias enlisted in the army. Somehow, he managed to find and use drugs even while he was in the service. After a few years in the military, Matthias abruptly abandoned his post in 1973, and
The sheriff's office arrested him for going AWOL and gave him a short jail sentence. From behind bars, Matthias called out to the officers. They went to check on him, but when they opened his cell door, he strolled out naked and punched one of them in the nose. Soon after this incident, Matthias was medically discharged from the army with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.
The next few years of Gary Mathias' life were marked by increasingly strange and violent incidents. A cousin accused him of sexually assaulting his wife while staying at their house. Another friend said that he showed up at their home while extremely intoxicated and threatened to kill their three-year-old daughter. He fought strangers at bars and crept around graveyards.
He continued using various drugs, including methamphetamine and Benzedrine. During this time, Mathias was in and out of various mental health institutions. He broke out of three of them, once by climbing out of the facility through a drainpipe. At one point, he found his way up to Portland and spent the next five weeks walking more than 500 miles back to Marysville, California.
He survived by stealing cat food and milk off of people's porches along the way. It all came to a head in 1975 when Matthias broke into the home of two strangers by punching through their window and unlocking the front door. The couple asked why he was there. He told them they were in his house and he wanted them to pay rent. He also claimed he was looking for a ring to return to Satan.
The police picked him up again, and for some reason, this episode seems to have marked a turning point for Matthias. He started consistently taking the psychiatric medication he'd been prescribed to manage his schizophrenia. He spent the next two years working for his stepfather's business without any violent incidents or run-ins with the law. It was during this period that he joined the Gateway Project's basketball team.
That's where he met and befriended the other members of the Yuba County Five. But while Mathias stayed on good behavior, some people weren't comfortable with him spending time with the group. The coach of the Gateway basketball team later told investigators he thought Gary Mathias, quote, could possibly flip out at any time. And perhaps the most eerie detail of all,
One of Matthias' old acquaintances told police that he used to talk about a recurring dream. In it, he and a group of people disappeared. Knowing all this, some of the men's families think it's possible that Gary Matthias experienced an episode of psychosis, forced their sons and brothers into the wilderness, and abandoned them there. They don't know where Matthias went after that,
but they think he was responsible for the tragedy playing out the way it did. It's a serious accusation, and without evidence, it's impossible to prove. Gary Mathias has never been seen alive again, and his body was never found. Some people think that reinforces the idea that he could have been behind what happened, but it doesn't really confirm or disprove anything.
Former undersheriff Jack Beauchamp told the Sacramento Bee that he thinks Mathias simply hiked further into the wilderness before succumbing to the elements, and that his remains were lost in the dense manzanita brush. And while those incidents from Gary Mathias' past are extremely troubling, it's worth reiterating that he hadn't had a violent episode in years.
Remember, Ted, at least, had seemingly survived for several weeks, and there was no evidence that anything violent had happened to him. It's possible Gary's psychosis led the men astray, but it's a scenario that doesn't sound like his previous episodes, as described by those who knew him. For context, mental illness was misunderstood and often stigmatized back in the 1970s. Well, it still is today.
Maybe pointing the finger at Gary feels like the easiest answer, but even this theory requires us to fill in a lot of holes with presumptions. Gary could also be a victim of whatever unknown circumstances led the Yuba County Five to their deaths. In fact, that's the official stance of the investigating sheriff's department. Their records on the matter were made public in October 2023.
I said this was a difficult story. That's only partly because of the tragic circumstances, how vulnerable the victims were. The other part is the lack of closure. We may never know what happened on that frigid night in the Plumas National Forest or why the men even went there in the first place. Maybe some cases are destined to stay cold forever. Or maybe the truth is still out in those woods waiting for someone.
to find it. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We'll be back next week with another episode. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod, and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
To learn more about the case of the Yuba County Five, we found Benji Eagle's article "Out in the Cold for the Sacramento Bee" extremely helpful to our research, along with Cynthia Gorney's 1978 Washington Post article "Five Boys Who Never Come Back." Do you have a personal relationship to the stories we tell? Email us at [email protected]. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story.
And the official story isn't always the truth. Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Giles Hoffseth, edited by Karis Allen and Andrew Kelleher, researched and edited by Mickey Taylor, fact-checked by Claire Cronin, sound designed by Russell Nash and Alex Button, and produced by Aaron Larson.
Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy. This episode is brought to you by Hills Pet Nutrition. When you feed your pet Hills, you help feed a shelter pet, providing dogs and cats in need with science-led nutrition that helps make them happy, healthy, and ready to be adopted.
It's an initiative that Hills has supported since 2002. And since then, the Food, Shelter and Love program has helped more than 14 million pets find new homes, changing their life forever so they can change yours. Science did that. Learn more at hillspet.com slash podcast.