September 26, 2025 • 55 mins
The largest ever kidnapping case in the United States went down in the small town of Chowchilla, CA. Learn all about it today.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Back in nineteen seventy six, in Chowchilla, a little town
smack dab in the middle of California, a school bus
with twenty six 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 twenty six children on their way
(00:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
You know what I've been singing for two days?
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Wheels on the bus, go on and around.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
No, that's pretty good, guess though, what donut don't don't
no out no, no, Chowchilla. I can't get it out
of my head, thet Godzilla song. Now, all I'm saying
over and over is Chowchilla.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
That's a great song. Do you remember who played it?
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Was that, like Edgar Winner Johnny Winter.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I think it's one of the Winners. Okay, that's my guess.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Okay the Long Winters.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Definitely not the Long Winters.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
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 former hippie
aunt who lived in San Francisco at the time and
(01:52):
was raising kids and said, do you remember this? She said, oh, yes,
I remember this big time that she had kids that
were about to be bus riding agent. She was not
very comfortable with this whole jam.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah it provided discomfort.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, yeah, that's one way to put it.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
So did you even say what the name of it was?
Speaker 1 (02:12):
No, it's the Chillis school bus kidnapping is what people
usually refer to.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
It as, right, And I think this was a listener
who sent this in. And I apologize because I'd 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 nineteen seventy six and still stands according to the sources,
(02:39):
I saw as the largest domestic kidnapping in US history.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
So my aunt says, oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
She also said she was not very into it.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
I was not very comfortable by that.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
It's very disappointing.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, the largest mass kidnapping for ransom. I'm not sure
why that's a quality of fire, but I don't know.
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 one hundred and fifty
(03:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
All right, So should we just start on July fifteenth,
nineteen seventy six, 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 forty six hundred
people living there. But that was the case in the
(03:49):
mid seventies in Chowchilla, And it was the next to
the last day of summer school, and a bus was
being driven after a because it was summer school, a
little fun day trip to a swimming pool, driven by
fifty five year old Ed Ray.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Yeah, who was a farmer there in chaw Chill himself.
Apparently he bailed hey like nobody's business. 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.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
That's right, he had only dropped off a few kids
at this point, and there were nineteen girls and seven
boys on board from five to fourteen, and notably the
fourteen 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
(04:47):
his mom, but he got busted the night before with
some beer and his mom said, your punishment, you got
to ride that school bus home yep, tomorrow and after
school or after the trip, 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, will you I
(05:08):
don't know if this is my bus or not, Bill
you take me home? And Edray is ed Ray, so
he went sure, sureboard, so thank goodness he said that.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah. So after that that third stop, there were twenty
six kids and ed Ray on board. And ed Ray
was continuing along his route and he turned on to
a street called Avenue twenty one, and as he turned
on to Avenue twenty one, ed Ray found that there
was a white van blocking the road, and apparently he
(05:37):
started to go around it, and then I guess thought
the better of it, and I 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.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
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, samem 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 watched the movie, did you see any of that?
Speaker 1 (06:17):
No? No, I haven't yet.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
We'll get to it. Then there's a Lifetime movie that
came out in the nineties. I think ninety three looks
like it was made in eighty three somehow. That is
on YouTube, and I highly recommend scrubbing through it. I
wouldn't say watch the whole thing because I don't know
if you'll be able to. But Carl Malden, yeah, play
ed ray and I don't know if it's true to
(06:43):
the story, but he gave them a lot of guff
about getting out of that driver's seat in the movie.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Oh really Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
I'm not sure if that happened in real life or not.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
It's a Malden improv if I've ever heard one.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah, yes, And I'm not getting out of my seat right.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
My feet hurt.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
So he eventually did, though, and they drove. 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 you know, they I think we should
point out a few smart things these guys did along
the way, because they mainly did dumb things. But the
(07:24):
kidnappers did make them jump from the school bus to
the van so they wouldn't leave footprints.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, and these in these vans, they had all the
kids and ed Ray in the vans now two vans,
and they had kind of like deck 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
(07:53):
eleven hours in the backs of those vans, with no
potty breaks, no food, no water, no nothing. They just
drove them around for eleven hours in July, the middle
of July, in the San Joaquin Valley, pretty mercilessly, before
finally arriving at the destination, which ultimately was only one
(08:13):
hundred miles away from where the kids had been kidnapped.
I think they just wanted to disorient the kids.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah. I think that was kind of smart m HM
as well, because they could have been, you know, eleven
hours away if they managed to escape or something. Right,
one of the girls years later did say that she
saw through a crack that they were up there with
the ac go and drinking sodas and have a good
old time, and the kids and ed Rayer back there
just suffering, just terrified obviously of what's going on.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Right. That was Jennifer brown Hyde who said that, and
she's not very happy with this whole thing. It's still
to this day from what I understand.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yeah, as you could imagine.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
So finally, at three thirty am on Friday morning, they
were hijacked around after three point thirty on three PM
on Thursday. They finally stopped driving at three thirty in
the morning Friday morning, and they arrive at a rock quarry.
They're in Livermore, California. Apparently again it's one hundred miles
away from Chowchilla. And this is the what the what
(09:15):
the kidnapper see is the final destination for these kids
until they're ransomed off, until the authorities cough up the money.
And what the 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
twelve feet underground and have covered it with four feet
(09:36):
of dirt, and they've opened a hole, put a ladder
in and told the kids get down there, and ed
ray too.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
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 in contact in parents' names, not on
a clipboard legal pad, but on the back of a
(10:07):
Jack in the box wrapper. 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.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Their way, exactly, and the fact that their kids means
that people do anything to keep them safe. So these
guys figure they've got a pretty good payday with twenty
six 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,
(10:44):
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
a ventilation tubes with some fans to force air into
the into the van. So there was fresh air down there,
but not a lot from what I understand.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
I think we should, because now you've got twenty six
kids buried in a buried trailer right now in Livermore, California,
at three point thirty in the morning. Not a good
thing to happen.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
That's right. So we'll pick up with what's going on
in Chowchilla right after this. All right, So in Chauchilla,
(12:17):
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 like people knew, you know,
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
(12:38):
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, sure,
because where are these kids?
Speaker 1 (12:55):
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 child Chilli sheriff,
a guy named Ed Gates, was going to need some help.
(13:16):
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
(13:36):
chuck that like this is during the bi centennial, and
the bi centennial just been going on and going on
and going on, and there was still bisentennial stuff going on,
and this stopped it. Like this kidnapping. News of this
kidnapping stopped the bisentennial celebration. Deadnis tracks. It was the
end of it, not just for this town but for
the whole country.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Oh yeah, I mean this went right up to the
President Ford at the time, and obviously Governor Jerry Round.
So they threw everything they could at it. The media
descended upon chow Chilla like super fast, and because it's
the media, you start getting these these terrible stories about like,
well maybe because you know, they'd never caught Zodiac and
(14:15):
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 shoe on the
side of the road, so they have to track down
that tip. There was a novel in nineteen fifty eight
(14:36):
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. Yeah,
Ray's wife worked at the bank. Like you said, sod,
They put a bank under surveillance, so there were you know,
it was I don't know if I was described it
as a panic because the FBI was on the scene
(14:57):
in the state californ on your Bureau and Investigation, so
they were doing good work. But there was a frenzy
of activity.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
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. There were there they were just dead
ends left and right, and so like there was, there
was a just an enormous amount of panic and terror
in the town. Families started converging on the firehouse, the
(15:28):
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 was anxious as well,
(15:51):
and so it was really kind of surprising when all
of a sudden, at about I think about eight pm
the next night, Saturday, so the kids have been gone
for almost about Carrie the one about thirty hours, thirty
two hours, something like that at this point, thirty two
(16:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
That's right, amazing, And you would think, well, pretty sensational story,
but it was 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 in who
these people were who kidnapped them. But before we get
to those dumb dumbs, let's talk about the escape. They
(16:55):
were down there about twelve hours and running out of
food and water. 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 seemed like it mike cave in,
and they were worried that they just couldn't stay there basically,
and this is where the story I mean, I guess
(17:16):
we'll cover both points of view, 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 fourteen 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.
(17:39):
Years later, after a while of this story of Ed Ray,
he finally came out and said, oh, you know, Edray's
a good guy. I 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
(18:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Well, his account was corroborated by another guy named Larry
Park who wrote a book called The Chowchilla School Bus
Kidnapping Colon 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
(18:39):
fact that like when Ed Ray like lived the rest
of his life, he stayed in Chowchilla. Most of those
people kids who've been kidnapped with him, stayed in Chowchilla.
When he was dying, Those same kids as adults now
came and visited him his bedside, say goodbye. There's plenty
of opportunity for you know, little town to start talking,
(19:01):
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 a
Chuck is that he may have been a 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
(19:24):
started to try. Ed Ray joined in and started helping,
and that they might not have been able to drink. Yeah,
they might not have been able to get out had
a grown man been helping them, like push against this.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Totally agree. I think we're I think we park our
cars in the same garage here.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, look at them, they're both.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Uh So here's how they got out. They took those
mattresses and stacked them up, and they took apart one
of they kind of smashed one of the box springs,
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 as they put
sort of iron plate I've seen manhole, but it was
(20:02):
some kind of heavy metal plate over the thing, along
with two industrial tractor batteries which are super heavy, and
then dirt, so there's ended up being several hundred pounds
kind of weighing this thing down this escape patch. But
they were able after hours and hours to finally kind
of use that wood to pry open just enough to
(20:22):
where they see starlight and dirt leaking in, and with
the help of ed Ray and his you know, manly
man strength. They were able to climb out of there.
Mike Marshall was.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
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. What was going on, Yeah,
so there was a good chance in their minds that
they were going to poke through and just be shot
(20:55):
on site. Sure, so they were worried about that. And luckily,
when Mike Marshall poked his head up, he's so that
there was no one around. There's nobody guarding it. It
turned out that they had long since left and that
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
(21:15):
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
(21:36):
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 chow Chilla
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.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Carl Maldon was certainly portrayed as the hero in the
Lifetime movie.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
They said, do you have anything you'd like to say,
and he said, just that my feet hurt.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
And you know, we again want to point out this
was thirty six 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 Nice. They were running out of food and water.
(22:27):
So as a five to fourteen year old, I mean,
ed Ray was in hysterics. You're you think you're going
to die down there. So it may not have been,
you know, 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
(22:49):
a sudden that van was going to come speeding down
the road. After like, it took a while until they
felt safe, I think.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
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 in the perpetrator's defense had been reinforced with lumber,
but not very well. That's a lot of weight hanging
(23:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Oh yeah, like the pictures of it afterward, that roof
was in the process of caving in.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Yeah, there was very nerve wracking.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
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 halty.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
I hope, so hopefully that's how.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Who knows, but you know, like I said, they didn't
know what was going on down there, No they didn't.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
So but now they're free, they're they're safe, and the
authorities go get them, the FBI, the sheriff, everybody's interviewing them.
This is ours. It's more hours for the parents back
in chill chill 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
(24:08):
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 will factor in a second. They the
greyhound bus lines donated that bus ride, which is worth mentioning.
I guess the FBI donated their time. Who knows, now they.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
Get bade, But there was a okay, there was a
lot of there's just like.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Well, it did kind of wonder. I was like, maybe
we should send like a few or not even vans.
Send twelve cars, right, no buses, no vans. M that
you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, yeah, I get you're saying. We're just making walk.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
And of course the kids got good to Disneyland.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
That was a big one.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
You got a heroes 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
thirty six hours.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Yeah, they had a huge feast. I saw that Ed
Ray won a vacation, that he appeared on Hollywood Squares,
which is that's peak, that's peak exposure in the mid
seventy six. Sure, and Chuck, there's one other little fact
that we have to say about this, that Robert Goolay
recorded a song called the Ballad of Chow Chill a Ray.
(25:43):
It's so obscure it is not on YouTube. Some either
cursed or Blessed Soul put it on SoundCloud.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, you can find there's a cover version on YouTube.
Oh yeah, from another person I couldn't find. I recommend
the SoundCloud goolay version. It is. It is a product
of the nineteen seventies. In every way.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
It's unlistenable.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
I made it through most of it.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Did you make it through all of it?
Speaker 2 (26:11):
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 seventies
thing when they wrote these story songs like about the
kid jumping off of the tatcha Hatchi bridge or whatever,
not tatcha Hatchi what was it? Billy Joe McAllister, Like
(26:32):
they wrote these songs in the seventies, 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.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I thought a ballad meant it was like told the story.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Maybe, but I think of ballads is love songs.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Surely, but a love story right.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Like the Air Supply wrote ballads, They didn't write songs
about folk heroes jumping off of bridges. You know they
should have.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Sure, well, I don't know. There's really nothing Air Supply
could have done to have improved their game. They were
pretty much still sound great. Yeah. One of the best
concerts I ever saw in my life was Air Supply
in Jacksonville, Florida.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
It was. 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 right there to witness it. It was so cool.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
I didn't know you took ecstasy that show.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
I didn't. That was what's what's so significant about it.
We were totally sober.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, what was it about the Was it just songs
from your childhood or something?
Speaker 1 (27:42):
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. And but what really kind of made
it unreal was it was it almost had the same
feeling as like a really energetic tent revival, Like people
(28:06):
were wandering down the aisles, like you could tell they
were moving, not necessarily of their own will. They were
being drawn towards 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 we're I
don't think any of them were on next to see either.
(28:27):
I think like everybody was like people were with their
moms or with their kids, or it was just a neat,
neat show. I'll never forget it ever.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Amazing. So go see Air Supply and I'm sure they're
playing a third rate casino near you.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Probably they definitely do the work.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
For sure, they supply you with more than air though.
It sounds like.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Dude, and the guy's voice still is one hundred percent
as good as it was in the seventies, which is pretty.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Muching some 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.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
You won't make it all the way through the Ballad
of Child Chiller Ray. It's so bad. Now I understand
why Elvis would shoot the TV whenever Robert Goulay came on.
It was because of that because of that's Robert Goolay.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Is that why shot the TVs?
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Yeah? For some apparently no one knows why. But whenever
Robert Gouley 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.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
That's pretty good. Yeah, 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 were
didn't have a pinion to their name and were desperate
for cash, right.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
In some ways kind of but if they were also
all three rich kids, if you can put those two
things together.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
They were three which white kids won. Specifically the literal
trust fund kid. Yeah, he was the ringleader. We're talking
about fred Woods, James Schoenfeld, who were twenty four, and
then James's younger brother, Richard, who was twenty two. But
fred Woods, Frederick Newhall Woods, the fourth was the ringleader
(30:21):
and the 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. His one of
his ancestors was Henry Mayo Newall, who came in the
eighteen fifties to California, part of Santa Clarita's new All
California name for him. They made a ton of money
(30:42):
in real estate speculation and railroads and then eventually oil
and ranching and had a several hundred million dollar family fortune.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah. I read that they made seventies about three hundred
and fifty million a year in the seventies a year,
just that family doing nothing. And by the time this guy,
Fred Woods the fourth 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
(31:16):
they remember their roots like their roots were just gobsmackingly
wealth is wealthy, That's what they're 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,
(31:40):
but that his his dad's approval meant a lot to him. Yeah,
that's a terrible position for any any person to be in.
And I feel for him in that respect. And I
also think from from what I saw. There was a
New York Times article about him while I believe he
was still at large where he said, but he's described
(32:01):
as a loser in the headline. Yeah, the New York
Times calls him a loser, at least says other people
call him a loser in their headline. He was that
kind of person, and again it was the seventies, but
he was also that kind of person. He's just he
was the product of wealthy, neglectful parents from what I
can tell, and also an education system that seems to
(32:23):
have failed him, at least in the grammar portion.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
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 eighty acre estate in
(32:47):
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 play because his
dad owned it and he was into cars. He collected
cars with his money. The ringleader did. He had dozens
(33:08):
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 pediatrist, 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
(33:30):
seemed like they weren't super smart.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
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.
He had Fred had designs on being a film producer,
and part of the concept for this kidnapping was the
school bus kidnapping and the movie Dirty Harry. Yeah, and
(34:05):
he said, hey, this would make a great movie too,
which we'll get to sort of the bows eye on
that later on. But he and James ended up losing
some money about thirty grand on a housing deal. And
depending on the report 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
(34:28):
up with the Joneses situation.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, fred was born into it,
and I think took money largely for granted 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,
(34:51):
and his sons kind of suffered for it because they
fell out of place because they just did not have
anywhere near the kind of wealth that their peers had
where they 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.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
I mean, I think part of it had to do
with that thirty 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, I'm dumb.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
I also yeah, and also I have the impression that
James and Rick Schoenfeld were a lot more moral than
fred Wood was.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
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 they It is fair
to say that they kind of fell under the influence
of fred Woods, who had no qualms about this whole thing.
(35:52):
He convinced them to give up their qualms as well.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
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 the news California saved.
California has a five billion dollar budget surplus, and we're
not going to get money kidnapping a kid or even
twenty six kids from their parents for their parents to
(36:20):
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 five million bucks is
chump changed 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.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Yeah, and so the calculation that they made was that
there was nobody was going to get hurt. They knew
that they weren't going to physically hurt those kids. Yeah,
they knew that California had a budget surplus, but even
more than that, that their insurance company, the States whoever
ensured the state would end up actually paying that five
million dollars, and that they were just basically taking five
(36:59):
million dollars 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 did 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.
(37:23):
You know.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah, And I think that's one of the things that
because I think even in the end they saw it
as like not the biggest deal because no one was
hurt and it was really quick. But like when I
saw an eventually spoiler, we'll go ahead and say that
the two brothers were eventually paroled, and we'll get to
all that. But you know, the news teams in twenty
(37:45):
fifteen were like 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 that
trauma these kids have still suffered into adulthood, and he
just went, you know, I've heard, so I heard, and
then just like quickly ran away. So even to this day,
they're trying to get them to realize that there was
(38:07):
a real impact and and the end result was trauma
and PTSD.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah, and the reason it did and it had the
impact and part of the problem for chow Chilla. Apparently
child Chilla was just transformed immediately. Like you know when
when if you're the victim of a crime, you wonder
like why why me? Especially a random crime, and this
is a random crime perpetrated on a whole town. Yeah, Like,
Chowchilla was a possible town among a number of towns
(38:36):
in the area that those three traveled to and staked
out and just kind of tried to figure out what
the best the best victim would be for this crime,
and they just settled on Chowchilla. They had no grudges
against chow Chilla. They had no ties to child Chilla.
But the problem was they didn't care about the people
of Chowdchilla or how they felt about their children or
what they were going to do to them. It was
(38:57):
just a random They chose them basically randomly, and chow
Chilli 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
(39:20):
and that they've tried to forget. And then there's a
lot of problems among the victims who are known in
their like fifties, 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.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Oh yeah, I mean some of them got had very
hard luck stories getting into drugs, eventually getting better and
going through rehabit 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
(40:01):
as a twelve 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. During the investigation, one thing they found,
and we'll put this in the dumb column. On the
(40:23):
property of where Fred lived, they found a plan written
out that said at the top plan I think a
kidnapping plan. 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
(40:44):
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
(41:08):
with parachutes, and it was sort of all over the map.
This plan over the course of a year and a half.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Yeah, there was this really reveals I think a lot
about them as well that on that plan sheet it
said one of the line items was burned the plan. Yeah,
they just didn't get around to that.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
They left a ransom note.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Yeah, and they had a lot of like scratch outs
and misspellings, and apparently referred to Fred by name in
the ransom note that they were planned to give to
the authorities, like reallys 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.
(41:51):
And they said that their their name was beils a Bub,
but they misspelled beals abub. They spelled b sabub, 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
(42:15):
well for yourself. Most likely.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
That's right in the aftermath of the kidnapping, from when
they buried the kids to when they left, the plan
was called the Chowchilla Police Department, demand your five million
dollar ransom. But the Chowchilla phone system was very small,
and there were obviously when you kidnapped twenty six kids,
(42:38):
and the media is descending. Every phone line was busy.
They literally could not get through with a ransom demand.
The kids escaped before they even got through with a
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.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah, so they never What did these guys do?
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Right afterward? When they couldn't get through.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
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.
(43:26):
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 like a whole movie.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
He said, right, just give me.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Some of the the box office, I guess, but he said,
but be fair, he said, be fair, but he spelled,
he spelled the fai. Yeah, so that's I'm sorry, it's
just annoying me to no end the misspellings. Yeah, but
then he signed the letter sent it Ralph Snyder. He
(44:01):
sent it as his alias, so the cops, the FBI
tracked him like within days to Vancouver and got the
Royal Canadian minded police to arrest him.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
I wonder he knew the guy though in film school.
I wonder if this guy was like, who.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
Is there, who's Ralph Snider?
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Or if he put in parentheses that's my alias, this
is this is Fred.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Don't tell the FBI, but he misspelled FBI.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
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 too sweet, And
so that's why we don't know exactly. That's one reason
(44:52):
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 it did see a new
report that said they took naps. I don't know if
that's true true or not, but I did see that.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
It sounds right. It holds up if you put it
up against everything else.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
And keep in mind once again They took these kids
to a quarry that fred Wood's 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
(45:30):
don't know, like a moving van size hole.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
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, be
way too vague about what he planned to do in Canada,
(45:56):
and see in possession of way too many guns to
be led 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.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:30):
After this, all right, So they were collected.
Speaker 2 (47:12):
Yeah, they were collected and of course had their day
in court. And the big, the big thing that happened
in court was 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,
(47:34):
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
that counted. But in nineteen eighty an appeals court reversed
that ruling said that is not bodily harm and that
made them eligible for parole. And since then, like I
(47:57):
said earlier, the two show Unfeld brothers have been released
in I think twenty twelve and twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
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 twenty two at the time.
He was basically there I saw described as a long
for the ride again, an eagle scout. He probably became
an eagle scout three four years before this happened, and
(48:30):
he he spent thirty nine years in prison.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Yeah, I guess, so twenty fifteen is when he got out.
In twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
Yeah, okay, yeah, so yeah, about thirty seven years in
prison of design from age twenty two. He spent the
next thirty seven 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 gonna let Richard Shownfeld out, you should
(49:02):
really probably take another look at James Schoumfeld 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, probably just he doesn't really
deserve to be parole.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (49:33):
Both did.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, so you know, 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 know, 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
(49:56):
was he was running the Christmas tree farm and Michael Biyanki,
who was managing that business, got injured on the job
and Woods said, I'm not going to help pay for
the surgery. So Biyanki 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 that comes time for parole, that
(50:19):
doesn't look good.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
No, And I guess he's been denied parole seventeen times
so far, yes, and he's up next in twenty twenty
four and a lot of people think he might he
might never be paroled.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
Actually, well, he bought a mansion in Nipomo, California, thirty
miles from the prison that no one lives at. He
did have a civil lawsuit in twenty sixteen where he
had to pay out money to the victims. That was
described as quote enough to pay for some serious therapy,
(50:52):
but not enough to buy a house.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Which is significant too because they did rule. An appeals
court ruled in nineteen eighty that they didn't inflict bodily harm.
But I wonder if that same appeals court would come
to that conclusion in twenty twenty one, based on interviews
with some of the people who were abducted, like Jennifer
Brown High, who I mentioned earlier, who's not I.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
Think emotional harm would play in these days, right.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
If you haven't listened to words said, hey, I could
make you a heck of a deal on a used van.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
Yeah, no, fred Ward took his watch when he shook
his hand.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
Well, I was kidding, but he My final little factoid
is that that used Carlat had those two vans and
he held onto those because he thought they would be
worth a lot of money as the kidnap vans.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
Yeah, which they might be worth an extra few hundred
I could see that, but I don't know if that
If that's the crown jewel of your inventory.
Speaker 2 (52:05):
Owner, Nick cage Bottom, you're right.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
And then you can go watch that movie from Lifetime
in nineteen ninety three called They've Taken Our Children if
you want to see Carl Malden in his underwear apparently.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
Man bad movie, bad song.
Speaker 1 (52:21):
I read also that chow Chiller 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
(52:42):
on Vox very in depth one called the Ballad of
the chow Chiller Bus Kidnapping. It's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (52:48):
Oh that's a good one.
Speaker 1 (52:49):
Yeah, it is all right, all right, the article, not
the song. No, no, oh, okay, it's an article, an article.
I gotcha. Okay, Well, since we had we worked out
them as understanding everybody. That means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
I'm going to call this. Let me see. How about
racist ticketing. In our episode on jaywalking, we talked about
people of the black and Hispanic communities are ticketed more
for jaywalking. And this is from Valerie Mates in an Arbor, Michigan.
Hey guys, you mentioned that black and Hispanic drivers are
(53:29):
issued more traffic tickets and white drivers. His 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,
(53:50):
more sidewalks, more stop signs, more crosswalks, while poorer neighborhoods
had fewer those fewer of those things, and the result
wood cars would be naturally would tend to drive fast
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
(54:10):
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, is actually a difference
in how the neighborhoods are built systematically. Thought it was
really interesting and I agree Injory. Thanks for sending that
in Who was it again? Valerie Mates of ann Arbor?
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Thanks a lot, Valerie. That's a great one. If you've
got a great one like Valerie does. We love little
brainbusters like that, so you can wrap them up, spank
them on the bottom, and send them off via email
to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:49):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Back in nineteen seventy six, in Chowchilla, a little town
smack dab in the middle of California, a school bus
with twenty six 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 twenty six children on their way
(00:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
You know what I've been singing for two days?
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Wheels on the bus, go on and around.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
No, that's pretty good, guess though, what donut don't don't
no out no, no, Chowchilla. I can't get it out
of my head, thet Godzilla song. Now, all I'm saying
over and over is Chowchilla.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
That's a great song. Do you remember who played it?
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Was that, like Edgar Winner Johnny Winter.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I think it's one of the Winners. Okay, that's my guess.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Okay the Long Winters.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Definitely not the Long Winters.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
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 former hippie
aunt who lived in San Francisco at the time and
(01:52):
was raising kids and said, do you remember this? She said, oh, yes,
I remember this big time that she had kids that
were about to be bus riding agent. She was not
very comfortable with this whole jam.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah it provided discomfort.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, yeah, that's one way to put it.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
So did you even say what the name of it was?
Speaker 1 (02:12):
No, it's the Chillis school bus kidnapping is what people
usually refer to.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
It as, right, And I think this was a listener
who sent this in. And I apologize because I'd 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 nineteen seventy six and still stands according to the sources,
(02:39):
I saw as the largest domestic kidnapping in US history.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
So my aunt says, oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
She also said she was not very into it.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
I was not very comfortable by that.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
It's very disappointing.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, the largest mass kidnapping for ransom. I'm not sure
why that's a quality of fire, but I don't know.
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 one hundred and fifty
(03:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
All right, So should we just start on July fifteenth,
nineteen seventy six, 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 forty six hundred
people living there. But that was the case in the
(03:49):
mid seventies in Chowchilla, And it was the next to
the last day of summer school, and a bus was
being driven after a because it was summer school, a
little fun day trip to a swimming pool, driven by
fifty five year old Ed Ray.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Yeah, who was a farmer there in chaw Chill himself.
Apparently he bailed hey like nobody's business. 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.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
That's right, he had only dropped off a few kids
at this point, and there were nineteen girls and seven
boys on board from five to fourteen, and notably the
fourteen 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
(04:47):
his mom, but he got busted the night before with
some beer and his mom said, your punishment, you got
to ride that school bus home yep, tomorrow and after
school or after the trip, 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, will you I
(05:08):
don't know if this is my bus or not, Bill
you take me home? And Edray is ed Ray, so
he went sure, sureboard, so thank goodness he said that.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah. So after that that third stop, there were twenty
six kids and ed Ray on board. And ed Ray
was continuing along his route and he turned on to
a street called Avenue twenty one, and as he turned
on to Avenue twenty one, ed Ray found that there
was a white van blocking the road, and apparently he
(05:37):
started to go around it, and then I guess thought
the better of it, and I 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.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
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, samem 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 watched the movie, did you see any of that?
Speaker 1 (06:17):
No? No, I haven't yet.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
We'll get to it. Then there's a Lifetime movie that
came out in the nineties. I think ninety three looks
like it was made in eighty three somehow. That is
on YouTube, and I highly recommend scrubbing through it. I
wouldn't say watch the whole thing because I don't know
if you'll be able to. But Carl Malden, yeah, play
ed ray and I don't know if it's true to
(06:43):
the story, but he gave them a lot of guff
about getting out of that driver's seat in the movie.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Oh really Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
I'm not sure if that happened in real life or not.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
It's a Malden improv if I've ever heard one.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah, yes, And I'm not getting out of my seat right.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
My feet hurt.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
So he eventually did, though, and they drove. 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 you know, they I think we should
point out a few smart things these guys did along
the way, because they mainly did dumb things. But the
(07:24):
kidnappers did make them jump from the school bus to
the van so they wouldn't leave footprints.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, and these in these vans, they had all the
kids and ed Ray in the vans now two vans,
and they had kind of like deck 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
(07:53):
eleven hours in the backs of those vans, with no
potty breaks, no food, no water, no nothing. They just
drove them around for eleven hours in July, the middle
of July, in the San Joaquin Valley, pretty mercilessly, before
finally arriving at the destination, which ultimately was only one
(08:13):
hundred miles away from where the kids had been kidnapped.
I think they just wanted to disorient the kids.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah. I think that was kind of smart m HM
as well, because they could have been, you know, eleven
hours away if they managed to escape or something. Right,
one of the girls years later did say that she
saw through a crack that they were up there with
the ac go and drinking sodas and have a good
old time, and the kids and ed Rayer back there
just suffering, just terrified obviously of what's going on.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Right. That was Jennifer brown Hyde who said that, and
she's not very happy with this whole thing. It's still
to this day from what I understand.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yeah, as you could imagine.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
So finally, at three thirty am on Friday morning, they
were hijacked around after three point thirty on three PM
on Thursday. They finally stopped driving at three thirty in
the morning Friday morning, and they arrive at a rock quarry.
They're in Livermore, California. Apparently again it's one hundred miles
away from Chowchilla. And this is the what the what
(09:15):
the kidnapper see is the final destination for these kids
until they're ransomed off, until the authorities cough up the money.
And what the 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
twelve feet underground and have covered it with four feet
(09:36):
of dirt, and they've opened a hole, put a ladder
in and told the kids get down there, and ed
ray too.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
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 in contact in parents' names, not on
a clipboard legal pad, but on the back of a
(10:07):
Jack in the box wrapper. 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.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Their way, exactly, and the fact that their kids means
that people do anything to keep them safe. So these
guys figure they've got a pretty good payday with twenty
six 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,
(10:44):
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
a ventilation tubes with some fans to force air into
the into the van. So there was fresh air down there,
but not a lot from what I understand.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
I think we should, because now you've got twenty six
kids buried in a buried trailer right now in Livermore, California,
at three point thirty in the morning. Not a good
thing to happen.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
That's right. So we'll pick up with what's going on
in Chowchilla right after this. All right, So in Chauchilla,
(12:17):
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 like people knew, you know,
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
(12:38):
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, sure,
because where are these kids?
Speaker 1 (12:55):
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 child Chilli sheriff,
a guy named Ed Gates, was going to need some help.
(13:16):
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
(13:36):
chuck that like this is during the bi centennial, and
the bi centennial just been going on and going on
and going on, and there was still bisentennial stuff going on,
and this stopped it. Like this kidnapping. News of this
kidnapping stopped the bisentennial celebration. Deadnis tracks. It was the
end of it, not just for this town but for
the whole country.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Oh yeah, I mean this went right up to the
President Ford at the time, and obviously Governor Jerry Round.
So they threw everything they could at it. The media
descended upon chow Chilla like super fast, and because it's
the media, you start getting these these terrible stories about like,
well maybe because you know, they'd never caught Zodiac and
(14:15):
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 shoe on the
side of the road, so they have to track down
that tip. There was a novel in nineteen fifty eight
(14:36):
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. Yeah,
Ray's wife worked at the bank. Like you said, sod,
They put a bank under surveillance, so there were you know,
it was I don't know if I was described it
as a panic because the FBI was on the scene
(14:57):
in the state californ on your Bureau and Investigation, so
they were doing good work. But there was a frenzy
of activity.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
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. There were there they were just dead
ends left and right, and so like there was, there
was a just an enormous amount of panic and terror
in the town. Families started converging on the firehouse, the
(15:28):
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 was anxious as well,
(15:51):
and so it was really kind of surprising when all
of a sudden, at about I think about eight pm
the next night, Saturday, so the kids have been gone
for almost about Carrie the one about thirty hours, thirty
two hours, something like that at this point, thirty two
(16:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
That's right, amazing, And you would think, well, pretty sensational story,
but it was 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 in who
these people were who kidnapped them. But before we get
to those dumb dumbs, let's talk about the escape. They
(16:55):
were down there about twelve hours and running out of
food and water. 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 seemed like it mike cave in,
and they were worried that they just couldn't stay there basically,
and this is where the story I mean, I guess
(17:16):
we'll cover both points of view, 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 fourteen 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.
(17:39):
Years later, after a while of this story of Ed Ray,
he finally came out and said, oh, you know, Edray's
a good guy. I 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
(18:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Well, his account was corroborated by another guy named Larry
Park who wrote a book called The Chowchilla School Bus
Kidnapping Colon 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
(18:39):
fact that like when Ed Ray like lived the rest
of his life, he stayed in Chowchilla. Most of those
people kids who've been kidnapped with him, stayed in Chowchilla.
When he was dying, Those same kids as adults now
came and visited him his bedside, say goodbye. There's plenty
of opportunity for you know, little town to start talking,
(19:01):
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 a
Chuck is that he may have been a 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
(19:24):
started to try. Ed Ray joined in and started helping,
and that they might not have been able to drink. Yeah,
they might not have been able to get out had
a grown man been helping them, like push against this.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Totally agree. I think we're I think we park our
cars in the same garage here.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, look at them, they're both.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Uh So here's how they got out. They took those
mattresses and stacked them up, and they took apart one
of they kind of smashed one of the box springs,
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 as they put
sort of iron plate I've seen manhole, but it was
(20:02):
some kind of heavy metal plate over the thing, along
with two industrial tractor batteries which are super heavy, and
then dirt, so there's ended up being several hundred pounds
kind of weighing this thing down this escape patch. But
they were able after hours and hours to finally kind
of use that wood to pry open just enough to
(20:22):
where they see starlight and dirt leaking in, and with
the help of ed Ray and his you know, manly
man strength. They were able to climb out of there.
Mike Marshall was.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
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. What was going on, Yeah,
so there was a good chance in their minds that
they were going to poke through and just be shot
(20:55):
on site. Sure, so they were worried about that. And luckily,
when Mike Marshall poked his head up, he's so that
there was no one around. There's nobody guarding it. It
turned out that they had long since left and that
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
(21:15):
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
(21:36):
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 chow Chilla
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.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Carl Maldon was certainly portrayed as the hero in the
Lifetime movie.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
They said, do you have anything you'd like to say,
and he said, just that my feet hurt.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
And you know, we again want to point out this
was thirty six 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 Nice. They were running out of food and water.
(22:27):
So as a five to fourteen year old, I mean,
ed Ray was in hysterics. You're you think you're going
to die down there. So it may not have been,
you know, 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
(22:49):
a sudden that van was going to come speeding down
the road. After like, it took a while until they
felt safe, I think.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
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 in the perpetrator's defense had been reinforced with lumber,
but not very well. That's a lot of weight hanging
(23:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Oh yeah, like the pictures of it afterward, that roof
was in the process of caving in.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Yeah, there was very nerve wracking.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
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 halty.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
I hope, so hopefully that's how.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Who knows, but you know, like I said, they didn't
know what was going on down there, No they didn't.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
So but now they're free, they're they're safe, and the
authorities go get them, the FBI, the sheriff, everybody's interviewing them.
This is ours. It's more hours for the parents back
in chill chill 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
(24:08):
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 will factor in a second. They the
greyhound bus lines donated that bus ride, which is worth mentioning.
I guess the FBI donated their time. Who knows, now they.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
Get bade, But there was a okay, there was a
lot of there's just like.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Well, it did kind of wonder. I was like, maybe
we should send like a few or not even vans.
Send twelve cars, right, no buses, no vans. M that
you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah, yeah, I get you're saying. We're just making walk.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
And of course the kids got good to Disneyland.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
That was a big one.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
You got a heroes 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
thirty six hours.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Yeah, they had a huge feast. I saw that Ed
Ray won a vacation, that he appeared on Hollywood Squares,
which is that's peak, that's peak exposure in the mid
seventy six. Sure, and Chuck, there's one other little fact
that we have to say about this, that Robert Goolay
recorded a song called the Ballad of Chow Chill a Ray.
(25:43):
It's so obscure it is not on YouTube. Some either
cursed or Blessed Soul put it on SoundCloud.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, you can find there's a cover version on YouTube.
Oh yeah, from another person I couldn't find. I recommend
the SoundCloud goolay version. It is. It is a product
of the nineteen seventies. In every way.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
It's unlistenable.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
I made it through most of it.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Did you make it through all of it?
Speaker 2 (26:11):
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 seventies
thing when they wrote these story songs like about the
kid jumping off of the tatcha Hatchi bridge or whatever,
not tatcha Hatchi what was it? Billy Joe McAllister, Like
(26:32):
they wrote these songs in the seventies, 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.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I thought a ballad meant it was like told the story.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Maybe, but I think of ballads is love songs.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Surely, but a love story right.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Like the Air Supply wrote ballads, They didn't write songs
about folk heroes jumping off of bridges. You know they
should have.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Sure, well, I don't know. There's really nothing Air Supply
could have done to have improved their game. They were
pretty much still sound great. Yeah. One of the best
concerts I ever saw in my life was Air Supply
in Jacksonville, Florida.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
It was. 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 right there to witness it. It was so cool.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
I didn't know you took ecstasy that show.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
I didn't. That was what's what's so significant about it.
We were totally sober.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, what was it about the Was it just songs
from your childhood or something?
Speaker 1 (27:42):
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. And but what really kind of made
it unreal was it was it almost had the same
feeling as like a really energetic tent revival, Like people
(28:06):
were wandering down the aisles, like you could tell they
were moving, not necessarily of their own will. They were
being drawn towards 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 we're I
don't think any of them were on next to see either.
(28:27):
I think like everybody was like people were with their
moms or with their kids, or it was just a neat,
neat show. I'll never forget it ever.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Amazing. So go see Air Supply and I'm sure they're
playing a third rate casino near you.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Probably they definitely do the work.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
For sure, they supply you with more than air though.
It sounds like.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Dude, and the guy's voice still is one hundred percent
as good as it was in the seventies, which is pretty.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Muching some 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.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
You won't make it all the way through the Ballad
of Child Chiller Ray. It's so bad. Now I understand
why Elvis would shoot the TV whenever Robert Goulay came on.
It was because of that because of that's Robert Goolay.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Is that why shot the TVs?
Speaker 1 (29:20):
Yeah? For some apparently no one knows why. But whenever
Robert Gouley 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.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
That's pretty good. Yeah, 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 were
didn't have a pinion to their name and were desperate
for cash, right.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
In some ways kind of but if they were also
all three rich kids, if you can put those two
things together.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
They were three which white kids won. Specifically the literal
trust fund kid. Yeah, he was the ringleader. We're talking
about fred Woods, James Schoenfeld, who were twenty four, and
then James's younger brother, Richard, who was twenty two. But
fred Woods, Frederick Newhall Woods, the fourth was the ringleader
(30:21):
and the 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. His one of
his ancestors was Henry Mayo Newall, who came in the
eighteen fifties to California, part of Santa Clarita's new All
California name for him. They made a ton of money
(30:42):
in real estate speculation and railroads and then eventually oil
and ranching and had a several hundred million dollar family fortune.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah. I read that they made seventies about three hundred
and fifty million a year in the seventies a year,
just that family doing nothing. And by the time this guy,
Fred Woods the fourth 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
(31:16):
they remember their roots like their roots were just gobsmackingly
wealth is wealthy, That's what they're 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,
(31:40):
but that his his dad's approval meant a lot to him. Yeah,
that's a terrible position for any any person to be in.
And I feel for him in that respect. And I
also think from from what I saw. There was a
New York Times article about him while I believe he
was still at large where he said, but he's described
(32:01):
as a loser in the headline. Yeah, the New York
Times calls him a loser, at least says other people
call him a loser in their headline. He was that
kind of person, and again it was the seventies, but
he was also that kind of person. He's just he
was the product of wealthy, neglectful parents from what I
can tell, and also an education system that seems to
(32:23):
have failed him, at least in the grammar portion.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
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 eighty acre estate in
(32:47):
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 play because his
dad owned it and he was into cars. He collected
cars with his money. The ringleader did. He had dozens
(33:08):
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 pediatrist, 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
(33:30):
seemed like they weren't super smart.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
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.
He had Fred had designs on being a film producer,
and part of the concept for this kidnapping was the
school bus kidnapping and the movie Dirty Harry. Yeah, and
(34:05):
he said, hey, this would make a great movie too,
which we'll get to sort of the bows eye on
that later on. But he and James ended up losing
some money about thirty grand on a housing deal. And
depending on the report 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
(34:28):
up with the Joneses situation.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, fred was born into it,
and I think took money largely for granted 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,
(34:51):
and his sons kind of suffered for it because they
fell out of place because they just did not have
anywhere near the kind of wealth that their peers had
where they 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.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
I mean, I think part of it had to do
with that thirty 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, I'm dumb.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
I also yeah, and also I have the impression that
James and Rick Schoenfeld were a lot more moral than
fred Wood was.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
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 they It is fair
to say that they kind of fell under the influence
of fred Woods, who had no qualms about this whole thing.
(35:52):
He convinced them to give up their qualms as well.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
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 the news California saved.
California has a five billion dollar budget surplus, and we're
not going to get money kidnapping a kid or even
twenty six kids from their parents for their parents to
(36:20):
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 five million bucks is
chump changed 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.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Yeah, and so the calculation that they made was that
there was nobody was going to get hurt. They knew
that they weren't going to physically hurt those kids. Yeah,
they knew that California had a budget surplus, but even
more than that, that their insurance company, the States whoever
ensured the state would end up actually paying that five
million dollars, and that they were just basically taking five
(36:59):
million dollars 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 did 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.
(37:23):
You know.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah, And I think that's one of the things that
because I think even in the end they saw it
as like not the biggest deal because no one was
hurt and it was really quick. But like when I
saw an eventually spoiler, we'll go ahead and say that
the two brothers were eventually paroled, and we'll get to
all that. But you know, the news teams in twenty
(37:45):
fifteen were like 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 that
trauma these kids have still suffered into adulthood, and he
just went, you know, I've heard, so I heard, and
then just like quickly ran away. So even to this day,
they're trying to get them to realize that there was
(38:07):
a real impact and and the end result was trauma
and PTSD.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah, and the reason it did and it had the
impact and part of the problem for chow Chilla. Apparently
child Chilla was just transformed immediately. Like you know when
when if you're the victim of a crime, you wonder
like why why me? Especially a random crime, and this
is a random crime perpetrated on a whole town. Yeah, Like,
Chowchilla was a possible town among a number of towns
(38:36):
in the area that those three traveled to and staked
out and just kind of tried to figure out what
the best the best victim would be for this crime,
and they just settled on Chowchilla. They had no grudges
against chow Chilla. They had no ties to child Chilla.
But the problem was they didn't care about the people
of Chowdchilla or how they felt about their children or
what they were going to do to them. It was
(38:57):
just a random They chose them basically randomly, and chow
Chilli 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
(39:20):
and that they've tried to forget. And then there's a
lot of problems among the victims who are known in
their like fifties, 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.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Oh yeah, I mean some of them got had very
hard luck stories getting into drugs, eventually getting better and
going through rehabit 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
(40:01):
as a twelve 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. During the investigation, one thing they found,
and we'll put this in the dumb column. On the
(40:23):
property of where Fred lived, they found a plan written
out that said at the top plan I think a
kidnapping plan. 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
(40:44):
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
(41:08):
with parachutes, and it was sort of all over the map.
This plan over the course of a year and a half.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Yeah, there was this really reveals I think a lot
about them as well that on that plan sheet it
said one of the line items was burned the plan. Yeah,
they just didn't get around to that.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
They left a ransom note.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Yeah, and they had a lot of like scratch outs
and misspellings, and apparently referred to Fred by name in
the ransom note that they were planned to give to
the authorities, like reallys 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.
(41:51):
And they said that their their name was beils a Bub,
but they misspelled beals abub. They spelled b sabub, 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
(42:15):
well for yourself. Most likely.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
That's right in the aftermath of the kidnapping, from when
they buried the kids to when they left, the plan
was called the Chowchilla Police Department, demand your five million
dollar ransom. But the Chowchilla phone system was very small,
and there were obviously when you kidnapped twenty six kids,
(42:38):
and the media is descending. Every phone line was busy.
They literally could not get through with a ransom demand.
The kids escaped before they even got through with a
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.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah, so they never What did these guys do?
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Right afterward? When they couldn't get through.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
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.
(43:26):
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 like a whole movie.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
He said, right, just give me.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Some of the the box office, I guess, but he said,
but be fair, he said, be fair, but he spelled,
he spelled the fai. Yeah, so that's I'm sorry, it's
just annoying me to no end the misspellings. Yeah, but
then he signed the letter sent it Ralph Snyder. He
(44:01):
sent it as his alias, so the cops, the FBI
tracked him like within days to Vancouver and got the
Royal Canadian minded police to arrest him.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
I wonder he knew the guy though in film school.
I wonder if this guy was like, who.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
Is there, who's Ralph Snider?
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Or if he put in parentheses that's my alias, this
is this is Fred.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Don't tell the FBI, but he misspelled FBI.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
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 too sweet, And
so that's why we don't know exactly. That's one reason
(44:52):
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 it did see a new
report that said they took naps. I don't know if
that's true true or not, but I did see that.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
It sounds right. It holds up if you put it
up against everything else.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
And keep in mind once again They took these kids
to a quarry that fred Wood's 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
(45:30):
don't know, like a moving van size hole.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
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, be
way too vague about what he planned to do in Canada,
(45:56):
and see in possession of way too many guns to
be led 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.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:30):
After this, all right, So they were collected.
Speaker 2 (47:12):
Yeah, they were collected and of course had their day
in court. And the big, the big thing that happened
in court was 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,
(47:34):
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
that counted. But in nineteen eighty an appeals court reversed
that ruling said that is not bodily harm and that
made them eligible for parole. And since then, like I
(47:57):
said earlier, the two show Unfeld brothers have been released
in I think twenty twelve and twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
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 twenty two at the time.
He was basically there I saw described as a long
for the ride again, an eagle scout. He probably became
an eagle scout three four years before this happened, and
(48:30):
he he spent thirty nine years in prison.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Yeah, I guess, so twenty fifteen is when he got out.
In twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
Yeah, okay, yeah, so yeah, about thirty seven years in
prison of design from age twenty two. He spent the
next thirty seven 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 gonna let Richard Shownfeld out, you should
(49:02):
really probably take another look at James Schoumfeld 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, probably just he doesn't really
deserve to be parole.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (49:33):
Both did.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, so you know, 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 know, 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
(49:56):
was he was running the Christmas tree farm and Michael Biyanki,
who was managing that business, got injured on the job
and Woods said, I'm not going to help pay for
the surgery. So Biyanki 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 that comes time for parole, that
(50:19):
doesn't look good.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
No, And I guess he's been denied parole seventeen times
so far, yes, and he's up next in twenty twenty
four and a lot of people think he might he
might never be paroled.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
Actually, well, he bought a mansion in Nipomo, California, thirty
miles from the prison that no one lives at. He
did have a civil lawsuit in twenty sixteen where he
had to pay out money to the victims. That was
described as quote enough to pay for some serious therapy,
(50:52):
but not enough to buy a house.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Which is significant too because they did rule. An appeals
court ruled in nineteen eighty that they didn't inflict bodily harm.
But I wonder if that same appeals court would come
to that conclusion in twenty twenty one, based on interviews
with some of the people who were abducted, like Jennifer
Brown High, who I mentioned earlier, who's not I.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
Think emotional harm would play in these days, right.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
If you haven't listened to words said, hey, I could
make you a heck of a deal on a used van.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
Yeah, no, fred Ward took his watch when he shook
his hand.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
Well, I was kidding, but he My final little factoid
is that that used Carlat had those two vans and
he held onto those because he thought they would be
worth a lot of money as the kidnap vans.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
Yeah, which they might be worth an extra few hundred
I could see that, but I don't know if that
If that's the crown jewel of your inventory.
Speaker 2 (52:05):
Owner, Nick cage Bottom, you're right.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
And then you can go watch that movie from Lifetime
in nineteen ninety three called They've Taken Our Children if
you want to see Carl Malden in his underwear apparently.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
Man bad movie, bad song.
Speaker 1 (52:21):
I read also that chow Chiller 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
(52:42):
on Vox very in depth one called the Ballad of
the chow Chiller Bus Kidnapping. It's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (52:48):
Oh that's a good one.
Speaker 1 (52:49):
Yeah, it is all right, all right, the article, not
the song. No, no, oh, okay, it's an article, an article.
I gotcha. Okay, Well, since we had we worked out
them as understanding everybody. That means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
I'm going to call this. Let me see. How about
racist ticketing. In our episode on jaywalking, we talked about
people of the black and Hispanic communities are ticketed more
for jaywalking. And this is from Valerie Mates in an Arbor, Michigan.
Hey guys, you mentioned that black and Hispanic drivers are
(53:29):
issued more traffic tickets and white drivers. His 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,
(53:50):
more sidewalks, more stop signs, more crosswalks, while poorer neighborhoods
had fewer those fewer of those things, and the result
wood cars would be naturally would tend to drive fast
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
(54:10):
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, is actually a difference
in how the neighborhoods are built systematically. Thought it was
really interesting and I agree Injory. Thanks for sending that
in Who was it again? Valerie Mates of ann Arbor?
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Thanks a lot, Valerie. That's a great one. If you've
got a great one like Valerie does. We love little
brainbusters like that, so you can wrap them up, spank
them on the bottom, and send them off via email
to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:49):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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