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Back in 1976 in Chowchilla, a little town smack dab in the middle of California, a school bus with 26 children aboard was hijacked and the kids were held for ransom by men looking to make easy money.
But man, was this anything but easy for everyone involved.
What makes this case so famous in addition to, you know, the kidnapping of 26 children on their way home from school is that the kids and the bus driver were buried alive while the kidnappers waited for the ransom.
Why don't you join them by listening to this episode?
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's here.
And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Thank you.
You know what I've been singing for two days?
Wheels on the bus go round and round?
No.
That's a pretty good guess though.
What?
Chauchilla.
I can't get it out of my head.
The Godzilla song.
Now all I'm saying over and over is Chauchilla.
That's a great song.
Do you remember who played it?
Was that like Edgar Winner or Johnny Winner?
I don't know.
I think it was one of the Winners.
Okay.
That's my guess.
Okay.
The long winters?
Definitely not the long winters.
Okay.
So Chuck, we're talking about a piece of Americana true crime history that I had no idea about actually.
And I noted, though, because of the timing and because of the location, I hit up my beloved –
A former hippie aunt who lived in San Francisco at the time and was raising kids and said do you remember this?
She said, oh, yes, I remember this big time.
She had kids that were about to be bus riding age and she was not very comfortable with this whole jam.
Yeah.
It provided discomfort.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's one way to put it.
So did you even say what the name of it was?
No.
It's the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping is what people usually refer to it as.
Right.
And I think this was a listener who sent this in.
And I apologize because I usually make note of that so I can shout them out.
But I did not do so in this case.
So I missed, I know, boo hiss.
But yeah, this was in 1976 and still stands, according to the sources I saw, as the largest domestic kidnapping in US history.
So my aunt says.
Oh, yeah?
No, she didn't.
She also said she was not very into it.
I was not very comfortable by that.
It's very disappointing.
Yeah, the largest mass kidnapping for ransom.
I'm not sure why that's a qualifier.
But it is.
But yeah, I saw the same thing too, that it still stands.
And it was like the idea that the most of anything happened to this little town of Chowchilla in the San Joaquin Valley, about 150 miles southeast of San Francisco, in and of itself is significant.
But it was a really terrible, like most of event that happened to this poor little town, as we'll see.
All right, so should we just start on July 15th, 1976?
Yes.
All right, we'll paint a picture for you.
You already mentioned where it was between Fresno and San Francisco out in a part of California that had some very, very small towns at the time.
It's hard to imagine anywhere in California having 4600 people living there, but that was the case in the mid-'70s in Chowchilla and it was the next to the last day of summer school in—.
And a bus was being driven after a because it was summer school.
A little fun day trip to a swimming pool driven by 55-year-old Ed Ray.
Yeah, who was a farmer there in Chowchilla himself.
Apparently, he baled hay like nobody's business.
That's what I heard.
He was married to a woman named Odessa, who was a bank teller at the Bank of America.
And he was apparently quite happy being a farmer and then driving kids around on the school bus.
Because even after this, he continued on for another dozen years as the school bus driver.
That's right.
He had only dropped off a few kids at this point and there were 19 girls and 7 boys on board from 5 to 14.
And notably the 14-year-old, because he will factor in pretty heavily here.
His name was Mike Marshall.
He wasn't even supposed to be on that bus.
He usually got picked up by his mom.
But he got busted the night before with some beer and his mom said to your punishment, you've got to ride that school bus home.
Yep.
Tomorrow.
And after school or after the trip, apparently he was like I don't even know what bus to take, because I don't do this.
But he knew who Ray was.
And so he went to Ed Ray and said hey man, I don't know if this is my bus or not, but will you take me home.
And Ed Ray is Ed Ray.
So he went, sure, hop aboard.
Sure.
Thank goodness he said that.
Yeah.
So after that third stop, there were 26 kids and Ed Ray on board.
And Ed Ray was continuing along his route.
And he turned onto a street called Avenue 21.
And as he turned onto Avenue 21, Ed Ray found that there was a white van blocking the road.
And apparently he started to go around it and then, I guess, thought the better of it and wanted to stop and see if they needed any help instead.
And when he did, he realized very quickly that he was actually being hijacked, because when you see a man with a long gun and pantyhose on his head, you're probably being hijacked.
That's right.
The first thing he saw was this one guy who said, open the door.
And then he realized there were a couple of other guys, same MO.
I think they had shotguns with the pantyhose.
And they said, get in the back.
We'll take over the driving from here.
If you've watched the movie, did you see any of that?
No, no, I haven't yet.
We'll get to it.
There's a Lifetime movie that came out in the 90s.
I think 93.
It looks like it was made in 83 somehow.
That is on YouTube, and I highly recommend scrubbing through it.
Okay.
I wouldn't say watch the whole thing, because I don't know if you'll be able to, but Carl Malden played Ed Ray.
And I don't know if it's true to the story, but he gave them a lot of guff about getting out of that driver's seat in the movie.
Oh, really?
Yeah, I'm not sure if that happened in real life or not.
It's a Malden improv if I've ever heard one.
Yes, and I'm not getting out of my seat.
Right.
My feet hurt.
So he eventually did though, and they drove that bus, followed by the van, for a bit, and then eventually transferred those kids to that van and another identical van.
And I think we should point out a few smart things these guys did along the way, because they mainly did dumb things.
But the kidnappers did make them jump from the school bus to the van so they wouldn't leave footprints.
Yeah.
And in these vans, they had all the kids and Ed Ray in the vans now, two vans.
And they had kind of like decked these vans out.
It was kind of a shoddy manner of adding plywood partitions to keep the kids from getting out from anybody being able to see.
And I think they painted over the windows.
And then they drove those kids around for 11 hours in the backs of those vans, with no potty breaks, no food, no water, no nothing.
They just drove them around for 11 hours in July, the middle of July, in the San Joaquin Valley, pretty mercilessly before finally arriving at the destination, which ultimately was only 100 miles away from where the kids had been kidnapped.
I think they just wanted to disorient the kids.
Yeah, I think that was kind of smart as well, because they could have been, you know, 11 hours away if they managed to escape or something.
One of the girls years later did say that she saw through a crack, that they were up there with the AC going drinking sodas and have a good old time.
And the kids and Ed Ray are back there just suffering, just terrified obviously, of what's going on.
Right.
That was Jennifer Brown Hyde who said that.
And she's not very happy with this whole thing still to this day from what I understand.
Yeah, as you could imagine.
So finally, at 3.30 a.m. on Friday morning, they were hijacked around after 3.30 p.m. on Thursday.
They finally stopped driving at 330 in the morning, Friday morning, and they arrive at a rock quarry.
They're in Livermore, California.
Apparently, again, it's 100 miles away from Chowchilla.
And this is what the kidnappers see as the final destination for these kids, until they're ransomed off, until the authorities cough up the money.
And what they've done is bury a moving van line trailer so, like a huge moving truck, the trailer, part of it.
They buried it a total of 12 feet underground and have covered it with four feet of dirt.
And they've opened a hole, put a ladder in, and told the kids, get down there.
And Ed Ray, too.
That's right.
And as the kids were going down, and this kind of points to the direction of how dumb these guys were and how unprepared they were, even though they, it turns out, would have planned this thing for well over a year.
They wrote down their names and their phone numbers and contact and parents' names not on a clipboard legal pad but on the back of a Jack in the Box wrapper.
Yeah.
So, and then they took apparently some kind of piece of clothing from each kid, because the idea was once again, is that they have many, many kids that should bring many, many monies and dollar bills their way.
Exactly.
And the fact that they're kids means that people do anything to keep them safe.
So these guys figure they've got a pretty good payday with 26 kids that they're now holding hostage in a buried moving van trailer.
And in the trailer, they had done a little more than they had in the van.
So they had peanut butter Cheerios, some bread down there, some water, but definitely not enough to keep all those people alive for a very long time.
They'd also thought of bathrooms.
They made bathrooms in the wheel wells.
And they dropped ventilation tubes with some fans to force air into the van.
So there was fresh air down there, but not a lot from what I understand.
Yeah, that's right.
And the one faithful mistake they made was that, for their comfort, they included some old box springs and mattresses and stuff for them to sit on and lay on, which would end up being their undoing.
Should we take a break?
I think we should, because now you've got 26 kids buried in a buried trailer right now in Livermore California, at 330 in the morning.
Not a good thing to happen.
That's right.
So we'll pick up with what's going on in Chowchilla right after this.
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All right, so in Chowchilla that bus doesn't come back, so obviously everyone freaks out pretty quickly.
An entire school bus full of kids and a very trusted man about town.
It's a small town.
People knew Ed Ray, and he was a good guy by all accounts.
They were all missing.
So the very first thing that happens is they locate the school bus, which had been hidden with some bamboo and camouflage.
But they did find the bus right away.
Which, you know, on one hand, that's good because they have a lead.
On the other hand, that just sends this thing into the stratosphere as far as panic goes.
Because where are these kids?
Yeah, and I saw also that the bus had basically no clues on it whatsoever.
So it's like we found the bus, but that doesn't help at all.
So, yeah, I'm sure they were panicked by that.
So it became pretty clear pretty early on that the Chowchilla sheriff, a guy named Ed Gates, was going to need some help.
So the FBI came to town.
Apparently they booked every one of the hotel rooms in the two hotels in town.
They brought like all the state law enforcement agencies.
Like everybody just converged on this town to help out because it made national news like almost instantaneously.
I saw somewhere Chuck, that like this is during the Bicentennial, and the Bicentennial just been going on, and going on, and going on.
And there was still Bicentennial stuff going on.
And this stopped it.
Like this kidnapping.
News of this kidnapping stopped the Bicentennial celebration dead in its tracks.
It was the end of it, not just for this town, but for the whole country.
Oh, yeah.
I mean this went right up to President Ford at the time and obviously Governor Jerry Brown.
So they threw everything they could at it.
The media descended upon Chowchilla like super fast.
And because it's the media you start getting these terrible stories about like – well, maybe because they never caught Zodiac, and this was just six or seven years, I think, after the final – what would end up being the final killing.
So they said maybe it was a Zodiac, because they made reference to wiping – he made reference to wiping out a school bus at one point.
Any tip that came in, they had to follow.
There's a chew on the side of the road.
So they have to track down that tip.
There was a novel in 1958 called The Day the Children Vanished, where the gang of people abduct a busload of kids just to bring people out of town and distract them while they robbed a bank.
Ray's wife worked at the bank, like you said, so they put a bank under surveillance.
So there were.
You know it was I don't know if I would describe it as a panic because the FBI was on the scene in the state California Bureau investigation.
So they were doing good work, but there was a frenzy of activity.
Yeah, and I think the sheriff had all the help he possibly needed to chase down all these leads and everything.
But from what I saw, there was just not much to go on.
They were just dead ends left and right.
And so, like, there was just an enormous amount of panic and terror in the town.
Families started converging on the firehouse, the local firehouse, for some reason.
I'm not sure why.
But it became like the meeting place for anybody concerned about the fate of the kids.
And this is where news would first be broken.
And I think the media probably hung around there, too.
So you can only begin to imagine how anxious the parents were.
And then the town and then apparently the whole country was anxious as well.
So the kids had been gone for almost about 30 hours, 32 hours, something like that at this point.
Uh-huh.
32 hours of terror when all of a sudden at that quarry some people are working and a man and a bunch of kids run over and it turns out to be the kidnapping victims, who just present themselves to a security guard at the quarry in Livermore who gets on the phone and says we found them.
That's right.
Amazing.
And you would think well, pretty sensational story.
But it was a very short span of time and all the kids were fine, so why is it really a story?
It's a story because, as we'll see, the trauma that they suffered emotionally and how it went down, and who these people were, who kidnapped them.
But before we get to those dum-dums, let's talk about the escape.
They were down there about 12 hours and running out of food and water.
Um the roof.
You know they had a lot of weight on this moving van roof and those things aren't super strong.
So this thing was, you know, kind of dented in and it seemed like it might cave in, and they were worried that they just couldn't stay there.
And this is where the story, I mean, I guess we'll cover both points of view.
Um, The immediate history and aftermath, Ed Ray saved the day because he was the only adult there.
So obviously he was the one that broke those kids out of there.
Years later.
You know we mentioned Mike Marshall, the 14-year-old that wasn't supposed to be on that bus.
And he was far and away the oldest kid there and the most capable to help.
Years later, after a while of the story of Ed Ray, he finally came out and said oh, you know, Ed Ray's a good guy.
I don't want to disparage him.
But like, it was my idea.
And I was the one that really led the charge to escape.
And he was a big mess, kind of crying in his hands that they were doomed and dead.
And he got on board and helped me.
But it was really me.
And the reason I kind of believe that after reading all the accounts, is it took many years for him to kind of come out with this.
And it felt like he even felt bad for saying so.
So I think that Mike Marshall, in fact, did lead the charge to escape.
Well, his account was corroborated by another guy named Larry Park, who wrote a book called The Chowchilla School Bus Kidnapping why me?
And I don't know if he corroborated in that or in an interview later on, but he was there and he said that that's true, that that's how it went down.
On the other perspective, the fact that when Ed Ray lived the rest of his life, he stayed in Chowchilla.
Most of those kids who'd been kidnapped with him stayed in Chowchilla when he was dying.
Those same kids, as adults, now came and visited him at his bedside to say goodbye.
There's plenty of opportunity for you know a little town to start talking.
You know whispers and that kind of thing.
And that doesn't seem to have happened.
He seems to have died, considered a hero as well.
So my take on it Chuck, is that he may have been gloom and doom about their prospects to begin with, and maybe it really was Mike Marshall who said no, we need to, we need to try to get out of here.
But even Mike Marshall said after a while once Mike Marshall started to try, Ed Ray joined in and started helping and that they might not have been able to get out had a grown man not been helping them.
Like, push against this, Totally agree.
I think we park our cars in the same garage here.
Yeah, look at them.
They're both shining, which are framed in wood, and they started using that wood as like a sort of makeshift crowbar to try.
And what these guys kidnappers, had done is they put some sort of iron plate.
I've seen manhole, but it was some kind of heavy metal plate over the thing, along with two industrial tractor batteries which are super heavy and then dirt.
So there ended up being several hundred pounds kind of weighing this thing down This escape hatch.
But they were able, after hours and hours, to finally kind of use that wood to pry open just enough to where they see starlight and dirt leaking in.
And with the help of Ed Ray and his manly man strength, they were able to climb out of there.
Mike Marshall was.
So Mike Marshall climbed out and then from that moment on, and so apparently also Ed Ray was really worried, and I guess Mike Marshall was too, but it was not a deterrent for him.
But they were worried that there was at least one or more of the kidnappers hanging around with a gun guarding them.
Oh, they didn't know what was going on there.
Yeah, so there was a good chance in their minds that they were going to poke through and just be shot on sight.
So they were worried about that.
And luckily, when Mike Marshall poked his head up, he saw that there was no one around.
There was nobody guarding it.
It turned out that they had long since left.
So Mike Marshall had Ed Ray start handing kids up to him.
And they got all the kids out and then Ed Ray out.
And Mike Marshall ran into the woods to hide.
So in case the kidnappers were still around, they just hadn't seen them yet.
And those kids were intercepted by him.
At least Mike Marshall would be able to run away through the woods and get help.
But it turned out the kidnappers weren't there, and somebody luckily was still working at the quarry, I believe including a security guard, when Ed Ray and the kids ran up and presented themselves.
So that's how – and then, I guess, the guy got on the phone and within moments of that happening, the news made it back to Chowchilla that they'd all been found safe and they were all alive and generally unharmed.
And Ed Ray was basically automatically hailed as a hero.
Carl Malden was certainly portrayed as the hero in the Lifetime movie.
They said, do you have anything you'd like to say?
And he said, just that my feet hurt.
And, you know, we again want to point out this was 36 hours from beginning to end.
But these kids were – didn't know what was going on above ground.
They were hot.
They were, you know, stripping down to their underwear.
Carl Malden was in his underwear even in the movie.
Oh, nice.
They were running out of food and water.
So as a 5 to 14-year-old, I mean, Ed Ray was in hysterics.
You think you're going to die down there.
So it may not have been a kidnapping that lasted days and weeks, but that doesn't minimize the trauma that these kids suffered down there, completely not knowing what was going on above ground.
And daring to escape, not knowing if they were all of a sudden that van was going to come speeding down the road after like it took a while until they felt safe, I think.
And then on top of that Chuck, you'd said it kind of earlier, but I think it really bears repeating.
They were really worried that the roof of this thing was going to cave in.
Four feet of dirt on top of a moving van roof that had been in the perpetrator's defense had been reinforced with lumber, but not very well.
That's a lot of weight pushing down on this.
And if you see pictures of what the thing looked like from inside, I could see how they would have been very nervous that the thing was going to cave in on them and crush them.
Oh, yeah.
Like the pictures of it afterward, that roof was in the process of caving in.
Yeah.
It was very nerve-wracking.
Of course, if that would have happened, the dirt probably would have caved in and gotten some of them dirty, and then they could crawl out.
I hope so.
Hopefully that's how it would have happened.
Who knows?
But, you know, like I said, they didn't know what was going on down there.
No, they didn't.
But now they're free.
They're safe.
And the authorities go get them.
The FBI, the sheriff, everybody's interviewing them.
This is hours.
This is more hours for the parents back in Chowchilla having to wait.
And then there was a Greyhound bus that went and got them and brought them back.
It was pretty sweet.
There was a lot of donations going on.
Like apparently, Pacific Bell donated not just new phones but new phone lines, because there were so many calls being made by the authorities and by the press, which we'll factor in in a second.
The Greyhound bus lines donated that bus ride, which is worth mentioning.
I guess the FBI donated their time.
Who knows?
Yeah.
Now they get paid.
But there was a lot of banding together to support this town as they were going through this.
And I just thought it was cool.
There was a Greyhound bus that rolled up with everybody inside.
And they got off and they're like, I'm never getting on one of those again.
Well, I did kind of wonder.
I was like, maybe we should send like a few, or not even vans, send 12 cars.
Great.
No buses, no vans.
That's a good one.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, yeah, I get what you're saying.
Or just make them walk 100 miles.
And, of course, the kids got to go to Disneyland.
That was a big one.
They got a hero's welcome.
They got a parade.
They got to go to Disneyland.
And it was as soon as the town went from the saddest place on earth to the happiest place on earth in the span of 36 hours.
Yeah, they had a huge feast.
I saw that Ed Ray won a vacation event, that he appeared on Hollywood Squares, which is – that's peak exposure in the mid-'70s.
Sure.
And Chuck.
There's one other little fact that we have to say about this that Robert Goulet recorded – a song called The Ballad of Chowchilla Ray.
It's so obscure, it is not on YouTube.
Some either cursed or blessed soul put it on SoundCloud.
Yeah, you can find, there's a cover version on YouTube from another person.
I couldn't find it.
But I recommend the SoundCloud Goulet version.
It is a product of the 1970s in every way.
It's unlistenable.
I made it through most of it.
Did you make it through all of it?
I made it through most of it, then I skipped to the end.
Okay.
It was something else, because it's sort of like disco, but it's also that very 70s thing when they wrote these story songs, like about the kid jumping off of the Tatchahatchee Bridge or whatever.
Not Tatchahatchee.
What was it?
Billy Joe McAllister.
Like, they wrote these songs in the 70s, these weird sort of folk story songs.
A ballad.
Yeah, but not...
I mean, a ballad can be like a love song.
These were like folk stories.
I thought a ballad meant it was like told a story.
Maybe, but I think of ballads as love songs generally.
But a love story.
Right.
Like the Air Supply wrote ballads.
They didn't write songs about folk heroes jumping off of bridges, you know.
They should have.
Sure.
Well, I don't know.
There's really nothing Air Supply could have done to have improved their game.
They were pretty much perfect.
They still sound great.
One of the best concerts I ever saw in my life was Air Supply in Jacksonville, Florida.
It's amazing.
It was amazing.
I said it before, and I'll say it again.
It was like the fabric of reality was coming apart at the seams, and we were right there to witness it.
It was so cool.
I didn't know you took ecstasy at that show.
That's amazing.
I didn't.
That's what's so significant about it.
We were totally sober.
Yeah.
What was it about the, was it just songs from your childhood or something?
No, it was, I mean, yes, that was part of it.
It was great to hear all those songs and see them live.
It was the chemistry between the two dudes.
They still got it after all these years is really neat to see.
Yeah.
But what really kind of made it unreal was it almost had the same feeling as like a really energetic tent revival.
Like people were wandering down the aisles.
Wow.
You could tell they were moving not necessarily of their own will.
They were being drawn toward the stage.
It was bizarre.
It was so cool to see.
People were just out of their minds at this air supply show.
And, like, I don't think any of them were on Next to See either.
I think, like, everybody was, like, people were with their moms or with their kids.
It was just a neat, neat show.
I'll never forget it ever.
Sure.
Amazing.
So go see Air Supply.
I'm sure they're playing a third-rate casino near you.
Probably.
They definitely do the work for sure.
They supply you with more than air, though, it sounds like.
Dude, and the guy's voice still is 100% as good as it was in the 70s, which is pretty significant.
I was watching some vids the other day, live vids of them recently.
It's a good thing to do, sit around.
But definitely check out the song on SoundCloud.
Oh, yeah.
And listen to as much of it as you can.
You won't make it all the way through.
The Ballad of Chow Chow Luray.
It's so bad.
Now I understand why Elvis would shoot the TV whenever Robert Goulet came on.
It was because of that song.
Robert Goulet.
Is that why he shot the TVs?
Yeah, apparently no one knows why, but whenever Robert Goulet would come on, he would shoot his TV.
Sometimes he'd get really mad and shoot his toaster or his oven or whatever.
Wow.
But he would shoot the TV.
That's pretty good.
All right.
So these kidnappers getting back to the story of the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping these guys were three real low-rent scumbags who who didn't have a penny to their name and were desperate for cash right.
In some ways kind of, but they were also all three rich kids, if you can put those two things together.
They were three rich white kids, one specifically, a literal trust fund kid.
Yeah.
He was the ringleader.
We're talking about Fred Woods, James Schoenfeld, who were 24, and then James' younger brother Richard, who was 22.
But Fred Woods, Frederick Newhall Woods IV, was the ringleader.
And I guess you could call it the brains if there was a brain behind this.
But he came from a long line of California money.
One of his ancestors was Henry Mayo Newhall Jr, who came in the 1850s to California.
Part of Santa Clarita is New All-California, named for him.
They made a ton of money in real estate speculation and railroads and then eventually oil and ranching, and had a several hundred million dollar family fortune.
Yeah, I read that they made about $350 million a year in the 70s.
A year, just that family doing nothing.
And by the time this guy, Fred Woods IV, came along, there were generations of this family that had never worked a day in their life.
So it's not like his parents struck it rich and they remember their roots.
Like their roots were just gobsmackingly wealthy.
That's what they knew.
And apparently Fred was not particularly paid attention to by his parents and it had some effects on him.
And I saw also that he had trouble living up to his father's expectations for him.
But do nothing blue blood?
Yeah.
But that his dad's approval meant a lot to him.
That's a terrible position for any person to be in.
And I feel for him in that respect.
And I also think, from what I saw, there's a New York Times article about him while, I believe, he was still at large.
Mm-hmm.
Where he said that he's described as a loser in the headline.
Yeah.
The New York Times calls him a loser.
At least says other people call them a loser in their headline.
He was that kind of person.
And again, it was the 70s, but he was also that kind of person.
He was the product of wealthy, neglectful parents, from what I can tell, and also an education system that seems to have failed him, at least in the grammar portion.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll get to that.
He didn't have a lot of friends.
He never really had a ton of girlfriends, which is ironic because he ended up being married four times, which we'll get to.
He lived in a converted apartment in an outbuilding on the nearly 80-acre estate in Portala Valley where his grandmother lived and his parents lived, even though they were traveling by themselves usually.
He got a job at that rock quarry.
Your first indication that they may not have had the smartest plan.
Sure.
Because his dad owned it.
And he was into cars.
He collected cars with his money.
The ringleader did.
He had dozens and dozens of cars.
His buddy James who helped him – he was rich too.
Not that kind of rich.
But his parent – his dad was a podiatrist.
So –
They had doctor money, so they were doing pretty well as well.
And they got into various businesses together.
They had a used car business together.
They never did super well, it seemed like, in any of their business ventures, because it seemed like they weren't super smart.
Right.
Another good descriptor is that Fred, in particular, loved his cars and he loved to shoot the windows out of his cars with his guns, which he also loved.
Yeah.
Yeah, they had a lot of guns between them as well.
I mean, it's sort of what you think.
There were these rich kids who weren't paid attention to, that could do whatever they wanted and ended up getting into trouble.
Fred had designs on being a film producer and part of the concept for this kidnapping was the school bus kidnapping in the movie Dirty Harry.
Yeah.
And he said hey, this would make a great movie too, which we'll get to sort of the bow tie on that later on.
But he and James ended up losing some money, about 30 grand on a housing deal.
And depending on the reports you read, some people say they were desperate for money.
But if you talk to James, he said I wanted to buy a Ferrari with it because my neighbors had Ferraris and it was to keep up with the Joneses situations.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Fred was born into it and I think took money largely for granted.
But James and Richard but James in particular really kind of felt new to the area and didn't fit in because they didn't have as much money.
I think their dad was punching above his weight class socioeconomically in the area that they moved to.
And his sons kind of suffered for it, because they felt out of place, because they just did not have anywhere near the kind of wealth that their peers had where they now lived.
And that seems to have gotten to James, and that was his big motivation.
I never saw Fred Wood's motivation.
Did you?
I mean, I think part of it had to do with that 30 grand in debt.
But I think part of it, dude, is he was a bored rich kid in some ways.
Right.
Like that may have been the reason.
So, yeah.
And dumb.
I also – yeah, and dumb.
Also, I have the impression that James and Rick Schoenfeld were – a lot more moral than Fred Wood was.
Apparently in his journal, James wrote at the time that he was worried he was becoming immoral, as they were like really planning this.
And he and his brother were both Eagle Scouts.
So I guess it is fair to say that they kind of fell under the influence of Fred Woods, who had no qualms about this whole thing.
He convinced them to give up their qualms as well.
Yeah, I think the last time I'll say the word smart thing that they did was when they were initially hatching the idea.
They said, we saw on the news California, the state of California has a $5 billion budget surplus.
And we're not going to get money kidnapping a kid, or even 26 kids from their parents for their parents to pay ransom.
But if they were on a school bus, then it's the responsibility of the state of California.
And they've got all this dough, so $5 million is chump change to them.
So if we get them on a school bus, then they're liable, and that's how we're going to get the most money.
Yeah, and so the calculation that they made was that nobody was going to get hurt.
They knew that they weren't going to physically hurt those kids.
They knew that California had a budget surplus, but even more than that, that their insurance company whoever insured the state would end up actually paying that 5 million and that they were just basically taking 5 million from the state that the state didn't really need.
And that nobody was going to get hurt.
And then that calculation it really kind of reveals like how much they did lose any kind of morality, which is they utterly failed to take into account, like the psychological and emotional damage they were going to inflict on these kids and their parents and the town in general.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that, Because I think even in the end they saw it as not the biggest deal.
Yeah.
Because no one was hurt, and it was really quick.
But when I saw And eventually spoiler, we'll go ahead and say that the two brothers were eventually paroled and we'll get to all that.
The news teams in 2015 were following this guy around in a parking lot asking him questions, and he's just trying to avoid it.
And one of them was like, you do realize the trauma these kids have still suffered into adulthood?
And he just went, I've heard, so I've heard, and then just quickly ran away.
So, even to this day, they're trying to get them to realize that there was a real – impact and and, and the end result was trauma and ptsd.
Yeah, and the reason it did and it had the impact and part of the problem for chowchilla.
Apparently, chowchilla was just transformed immediately, like you know when when, if you're the victim of a crime you, you wonder like why, why me especially?
A random crime, and this is a random crime, perpetrated on a whole town Like Chowchilla, was a possible town among a number of towns in the area that those three traveled to and staked out and just kind of tried to figure out what the best victim would be for this crime, and they just settled on Chowchilla.
They had no grudges against Chowchilla.
They had no ties to Chowchilla.
But the problem was they didn't care about the people of Chowchilla, or how they felt about their children or what they were going to do to them.
It was just a random...
They chose them basically randomly.
And Chowchilla is the kind of... rural farming town where people don't talk about their feelings.
I think I get the impression that they still think that that's weak.
It shows a sign of weakness.
And so I don't really have the impression that the town has ever really processed this and that they've tried to forget.
And then there's a lot of problems among the victims who are now in their like 50s that have never really been resolved or worked out, because the town just tried to carry on as if it never happened, basically from the get go.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, some of them got, had very hard luck stories getting into drugs, eventually getting better and going through rehab and treatment and writing books about it.
Others say they Don't trust people.
They suffered nightmares for years.
Some continue to.
Others have said that they don't even really remember much of what happened.
I imagine if you're five years old, you're not going to remember as much as a 12-year-old, obviously.
So depending on your age group, you may have suffered some more obvious lasting damage.
But they were all damaged.
The way these guys got caught is –
Well, I guess let's tell a little bit of that story.
I think in all lowercase.
It didn't say kidnapping plan.
It didn't even capitalize the P.
Yeah, they wrote it out in pen, and they had a lot of ideas.
They wanted to buy an x-ray machine.
I think they did.
To x-ray in case the ransom money was bugged.
They had a larger plan.
They had one plan about them the state dropping the money from a plane in the Santa Cruz Mountains at a specific drop site indicated by a series of lights.
But they also had this larger plan of putting dummies in a plane with parachutes.
And it was sort of all over the map, this plan, over the course of a year and a half.
Yeah.
Yeah, this really reveals I think, a lot about them as well that on that plan sheet it said one of the line items was burn the plan.
Yeah.
They just didn't get around to that.
Yeah, there's a ransom note, I think, too.
Yeah, and it had a lot of, like, scratch-outs and misspellings.
And apparently it referred to Fred by name in the ransom note that they were planning to give to the authorities.
Like really dumb stuff.
Reason code names.
They were trying to throw the authorities – they were trying to sniff the authorities off the case, I guess by posing or presenting themselves as a satanic group.
Yeah.
And they said that their name was Beelzebub, but they misspelled Beelzebub.
Yeah.
They spelled it B-E-E-L-S-A-B-U-B, which is just offensive to anybody who knows how to spell that word.
It's just like if you misspell things in your ransom note like you're not going to do very well for yourself, most likely.
Yeah.
That's right.
In the aftermath of the kidnapping, from when they buried the kids to when they left.
The plan was call the Chowchilla Police Department.
Demand your 5 million ransom.
But the Chowchilla phone system was very small.
And there were – obviously, when you kidnap 26 kids and the media is descending, every phone line was busy.
They literally could not get through with their ransom demand.
The kids escaped immediately.
Before they even got through with the ransom demand.
Yeah.
I think you said the donation from the phone company.
They literally had to go in and install like dozens of phone lines just so the FBI could operate effectively.
Yeah.
So they never –
They decided they needed to scram, that the jig was up and they needed to part ways, and they did.
Fred Woods was wily enough to have come up with a passport with the name Ralph Snyder.
And he traveled successfully to British Columbia, I think Vancouver, under that fake passport.
But then when he was there, he started writing to people.
He had a friend who was, I think, in film school and said hey, you should turn this into a whole movie.
Just kidnapping that I did.
Right.
Just give me some of the box office, I guess.
But he said, but be fair.
He wanted a piece.
He said, be fair.
But he spelled it F-A-R-E.
Yeah.
So, I'm sorry.
This is just annoying me to no end.
The misspellings.
Yeah.
But then he signed the letter or sent it as Ralph Snyder.
He sent it as his alias.
So the cops, the FBI, tracked him like within days to Vancouver and got the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to arrest him.
I wonder, he knew the guy, though, in film school.
I wonder if this guy was like, who is this?
It was Ralph Snyder.
Or if he put in parentheses, that's my alias.
This is Fred.
Don't tell the FBI.
But he misspelled FBI.
So Rick, the younger Schoenfeld, for his part, almost immediately confessed.
He got home after the three of them met up and then split up went home and told his dad what he did.
His dad, because they had money, again, as a podiatrist, got him a lawyer, toot sweet.
And so that's why we don't know exactly.
That's one reason we don't know exactly what happened in those first, like you know, hours afterward is because the lawyer kind of kept that all quiet.
Although I did see a news report that said they took naps.
I don't know if that's true or not, but I did see that.
It sounds right.
It holds up if you put it up against everything else.
And keep in mind once again.
They took these kids to a quarry that Fred Woods' dad owned and where Fred Woods worked.
And the quarry security guard said when they were interviewed, said well yeah, last week Fred and two other guys dug a big hole out there, you know, a few months before this happened.
Like a – oh, I don't know, like a moving van size hole.
Yeah.
But the hole's gone now, so who cares?
Right, exactly.
So Rick turned himself in.
Fred got caught.
James made attempts to cross the border into Canada himself, but apparently the Canadian authorities considered him A way too nervous, B B way too vague about what he planned to do in Canada.
And C, in possession of way too many guns to be let in the country.
And apparently he tried two or three times using his own name to get in and finally gave up and turned around.
And I guess he had decided he was going to turn himself into authorities.
But because of an all-points bulletin on his license plate he was picked up before he could turn himself in.
Right.
So they were all... collected less than two weeks after it happened.
Yes.
All right.
Well, let's take our last break, and then we will kind of quickly go over the sentencing and what happened afterward, right after this.
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All right.
So – They were collected.
Yeah, they were collected and, of course, had their day in court.
And the big thing that happened in court was whether or not these guys committed bodily harm on these children, because –.
If you committed bodily harm, then you have a sentence of life without – a possible sentence of life without parole.
If there was no bodily harm, then you could have life with parole.
They ruled that they did suffer bodily harm.
So they had stomach trouble.
They had nosebleeds.
Some of the kids fainted.
And that counted.
But in 1980 an appeals court reversed that ruling, said that is not bodily harm and that made them eligible for parole.
And since then, like I said earlier, the two Schoenfeld brothers have been released in, I think, 2012 and 2015.
Right.
Like long after some observers who were involved in the case think that they should have been paroled like especially, Richard Schoenfeld.
He was 22 at the time.
He was basically there I saw described as along for the ride.
Again, an Eagle Scout.
He probably became an Eagle Scout three, four years before this happened.
And he spent –
39 years in prison?
Yeah.
I guess so.
2015 is when – or he got out in 2012, yeah.
Okay, yeah.
So, yeah, about 37 years in prison.
Of his life.
From age 22, he spent the next 37 years in prison for basically hanging out with his brother and his brother's goofy friend doing something really stupid.
And a lot of other people said yeah, and if you're going to let Richard Schoenfeld out, you should really probably take another look at James Schoenfeld too because yeah, he was more involved than his brother, but he was still no Fred Woods.
And then you get to Fred Woods and people say yeah, he probably just he doesn't really deserve to be paroled.
Yeah.
I mean, the other two were model prisoners and they also had, I mean, people that were active.
I don't know if it was a prosecutor or investigator.
I think the investigator for the case eventually advocated for parole.
Both did.
Yeah, so some of the townspeople felt betrayed by that, but they did get out.
Fred Woods was not a model prisoner.
He was still as shady as ever.
You're not supposed to run businesses from prison, but he ran a gold mine.
He ran a used car business.
He ran a Christmas tree farm.
He got married a few times.
The reason he was finally outed was he was – running the Christmas tree farm.
And Michael Bianchi, who was managing that business, got injured on the job.
And Woods said, I'm not going to help pay for the surgery.
So Bianchi said, all right.
And he filed a state workers' comp claim.
And they got on the investigation and found out that Woods was behind the operation.
So he's not – when it comes time for parole, that doesn't look good.
Yeah.
No, and I guess he's been denied parole 17 times so far.
Yes.
And he's up next in 2024.
And a lot of people think he might never be paroled, actually.
Well, he bought a mansion in Nipomo, California, 30 miles from the prison that no one lives at.
He did have a civil lawsuit in 2016 where he had to pay out money to the victims that was described as quote enough to pay for some serious therapy, but not enough to buy a house.
Which is significant too, because they did rule.
An appeals court ruled in 1980 that they didn't inflict bodily harm.
But I wonder if that same appeals court would come to that conclusion in 2021, based on interviews with some of the people who were abducted.
Oh, no way.
Like Jennifer Brown Hyde, who I mentioned earlier who's not— I think emotional harm would play in these days.
Right.
Right.
And there was definitely emotional harm inflicted.
You talked about Larry Park, who was addicted to meth and crack before he finally found forgiveness and actually went and met with all three of the perpetrators and shook their hands and told them he forgave them and apparently changed his own life like that.
Fred Ward said, hey, I could make you a heck of a deal on a used van.
Yeah, no, Fred Ward took his watch when he shook his hand.
Well, I was kidding, but my final little factoid is that that used car lat had those two vans and he held on to those because he thought they would be worth a lot of money as the kidnap vans.
Yeah, which they might be worth an extra few hundred bucks.
I could see that, but I don't know if that's the crown jewel of your inventory.
I don't know.
Nick Cage bought them.
Right.
And then you can go watch that movie from Lifetime in 1993, called They've Taken Our Children, if you want to see Carl Malden in his underwear apparently.
Man.
Bad movie, bad song.
I read also that Chowchilla residents do not care for that movie Chuck, because it was shot in Kansas.
And anyone who knows anything about the San Joaquin Valley knows that Kansas is a poor stand-in for that.
So they're a little turned off by that movie from what I understand.
That's right.
And then last thing I want to shout out Caleb Horton, who wrote an article on Vox, a very in-depth one, called The Ballad of the Chowchilla Bus Kidnappings.
It's pretty good.
Oh, that's a good one?
Yeah, it is.
All right.
All right.
The article, not the song.
No, no.
Oh, okay.
It's an article.
An article.
I got you.
Okay.
Well, since we worked out the misunderstanding, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail.
I'm going to call this, let me see.
How about racist ticketing?
In our episode on jaywalking we talked about.
People in the black and Hispanic communities are ticketed more for jaywalking.
And this is from Valerie Mates in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Hey guys, you mentioned that black and Hispanic drivers are issued more traffic tickets than white drivers.
This interesting issue.
In Chicago, when they installed traffic cameras, they found that the cameras, despite being race neutral, still gave more tickets to black and Hispanic drivers.
So, of course, they wanted to study that.
The experts found that more affluent neighborhoods are built with more features.
That would naturally slow down traffic.
More sidewalks, more stop signs, more crosswalks, while poorer neighborhoods had fewer of those things, and the result would be cars would tend to drive faster in poorer neighborhoods.
Since black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to live and be driving in less wealthy neighborhoods in Chicago, they were more likely to be speeding and caught by traffic cameras.
Or so says the evidence, at least.
Crazy.
It's not just prejudice on the part of police officers that causes this discrepancy.
It's actually a difference in how the neighborhoods are built systematically.
I thought it was really interesting.
And I agree.
Indeed.
Thanks for sending that in.
Who was it again?
Valerie Mates of Ann Arbor.
Thanks a lot, Valerie.
That's a great one.
If you got a great one like Valerie does, we love little brain busters like that.
So you can wrap them up, spank them on the bottom and send them off via email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradiocom.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.
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