SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping

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Back in 1976 in Chow Chilla, a little town smack dab in the middle of California, a school bus with 26 children aboard was hijacked and the kids were held for ransom by men looking to make easy money.

But man, was this anything but easy for everyone involved.

What makes this case so famous, in addition to, you know, the kidnapping of 26 children on their way home from school, is that the kids and the bus driver were buried alive while the kidnappers waited for the ransom.

Why don't you join them by listening to this episode?

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here.

And this is

you should know.

You know what I've been singing for two days?

The wheels on the bus go round and round?

No.

That's a pretty good guess, though.

What?

Dunno, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, no, chow, chilla.

I can't get it out of my head.

The Godzilla song.

Now, all I'm saying over and over is Chow Chilla.

That's a great song.

Do you remember who played it?

Was that like Edgar Winner or Johnny Winner?

I don't know.

I think it was one of the winners.

Okay.

That's my guess.

Okay.

The Long Winters?

Definitely not the Long Winters.

Okay.

So, Chuck, we're talking about a piece of Americana true crime history that I had no idea about, actually.

And I noted, though, because of the timing and because of the location, I hit up my beloved

former hippie aunt who lived in San Francisco at the time and was raising kids and said, do you remember this?

She said, oh, yes, I remember this big time.

She had kids that were about to be bus riding age, and she was not very comfortable with this whole jam.

Yeah.

It provided discomfort.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's one way to put it.

So did you even say what the name of it was?

No.

It's the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping is what people usually refer to it as.

Right.

And I think this was a listener who sent this in.

And I apologize because because I usually make note of that so I can shout them out, but I did not do so in this case.

So I missed, I know, who hiss.

But yeah, this was in 1976 and

still stands, according to the sources I saw, as the largest domestic kidnapping in U.S.

history.

So my aunt says.

Oh, yeah?

She also said she was not very into it.

I was not very comfortable by that.

It was very disappointing.

Yeah, the largest mass kidnapping for ransom.

I'm not sure why that's a qualifier,

but it is.

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 Chow Chilla in the San Joaquin Valley, about 150 miles southeast of San Francisco,

in and of itself is significant.

But it was a really terrible, like, most event that happened to this poor little town, as we'll see.

All right, so should we just start on July 15th, 1976?

Yes.

All right, we'll paint a picture for you.

You already mentioned where it was between Fresno and San Francisco,

out in a part of California that had some very, very small towns at the time.

It's hard to imagine anywhere in California having 4,600 people living there, but that was the case in the mid-70s in Chalchilla, 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 55-year-old Ed Ray.

Yeah, who was a farmer there in Chowchilla himself.

Apparently, he bailed hay like nobody's business.

That's what I mean.

He was married to a woman named Odessa, who was a bank teller at the Bank of America.

And he was apparently quite happy being a farmer and then driving kids around on the school bus.

Because even after this, he continued on for another dozen years as the school bus driver.

That's right.

He had only dropped off a few kids at this point.

And there were 19 girls and seven boys on board from five to 14.

And notably, the 14-year-old, because he will factor in pretty heavily here,

his name was Mike Marshall.

He wasn't even supposed to be on that bus.

He usually got picked up by his mom, but he got busted the night before with some beer.

And his mom said, your punishment, you got to ride that school bus home

tomorrow.

And after school or after the trip, apparently he was like, I don't even know what bus to take

because I don't do this.

But he knew who Ray was.

And so he went to Ed Ray and said, Hey, man, will you, I don't know if this is my bus or not, but will you take me home?

And Ed Ray is Ed Ray.

So he went, sure, sure.

So,

thank goodness he said that.

Yeah.

So after that.

that third stop there were 26 kids and Ed Ray on board and Ed Ray was continuing along his route And he turned on to a street called Avenue 21.

And as he turned on to Avenue 21, Ed Ray found that there is a white van blocking the road.

And apparently, he started to go around it and then, I guess, thought the better of it and wanted to stop and see if they needed any help instead.

And when he did, he realized very quickly that he was actually being hijacked.

Because when you see a man with a long gun and pantyhose on his head,

you're probably being hijacked.

That's right.

The first thing he saw was this one guy who said, Open the door.

And then he realized there were a couple of other guys,

same M.O., I think they had shotguns with the pantyhose.

And they said, get in the back.

We'll take over the driving from here.

If you've watched the movie, did you see any of that?

No, no, I haven't yet.

We'll get to it.

There's a lifetime movie that came out in the 90s.

I think 93 looks like it was made in 83 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

played Ed Ray.

And I don't know if it's true to the story, but he gave them a lot of guff about getting out of that driver's seat in the movie.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I'm not sure if that happened in real life or not.

It's a Malden improv, if I've ever heard one.

Yeah.

Yes, and I'm not getting out of my seat.

Right.

My feet hurt.

So he eventually did, though, and

they drove that bus followed by the van

for a bit and then eventually transferred those kids to that van and another identical van.

And, you know, I think we should point out a few smart things these guys did along the way because they mainly did dumb things.

But the the kidnappers did make them jump from the school bus to the van so they wouldn't leave footprints.

Yeah.

And in these vans, they had all the kids and Ed Ray in the vans now, two vans.

And they had kind of like decked these vans out

with kind of a shoddy manner of adding plywood partitions.

to keep the kids from getting out from anybody being able to see.

And I think they painted over the windows.

And then they drove those kids around for 11 hours in the backs of those vans with no potty brakes, no food, no water, no nothing.

They just drove them around for 11 hours in July, the middle of July, in the San Joaquin Valley,

pretty mercilessly before finally arriving at the destination, which ultimately was only 100 miles away from where the kids had been kidnapped.

I think they just wanted to disorient the kids.

Yeah, I think that was kind of smart

as well, because they could have been, you know, 11 hours away if they managed to escape or something.

One of the girls years later did say that she saw through a crack that they were up there with the AC going drinking sodas and having a good old time.

And the kids and Ed Ray are back there just suffering,

just terrified, obviously, of what's going on.

Right.

That was Jennifer Brown Hyde who said that.

And she has not, she's not very happy with this whole thing.

It's still to this day, from what I understand.

Yeah, as you could imagine.

So

finally, at 3.30 a.m.

on Friday morning, they were hijacked around after 3:30 on 3.30 p.m.

on Thursday.

They finally stopped driving at 3.30 in the morning, Friday morning, and they arrive at a rock quarry.

They're in Livermore, California.

Apparently, again, it's 100 miles away from Chow Chilla.

And this is

what the kidnappers see as the final destination for these kids until they're ransomed off, until the authorities cough up the money.

And what they've done is bury a moving van line trailer so like a huge moving truck the trailer part of it they buried it a total of 12 feet underground

and have covered it with four feet of dirt and

they've opened a hole put a ladder in and told the kids get down there and Ed Ray too

That's right.

And as the kids were going down, and this kind of points to the direction of how dumb these guys were and how unprepared they were, even though they, it turns out, would have planned this thing for well over a year.

They wrote down their names and their phone numbers and contact and parents' names, not on a clipboard legal pad, but on the back of a jack-in-the-box wrapper.

So, and then they took apparently some kind of piece of clothing from each kid because the idea was, once again, is that they have many, many kids that should bring many, many monies and dollar bills their way.

Exactly.

And the fact that they're kids means that people do anything to to keep them safe so sure these guys figure they've got a pretty good payday with 26 kids that they're now holding hostage in a buried moving van trailer

and in in the trailer they had done a little more than they had in the van so they had peanut butter cheerios some bread down there some water but definitely not enough to keep all those people alive for a very long time.

They'd also thought of bathrooms.

They made bathrooms in the wheel wells.

And they

dropped ventilation tubes with some fans to force air

into the van.

So there was fresh air down there,

but not a lot from what I understand.

Yeah, that's right.

And the one faithful mistake they made was that for their comfort, they included some old box springs and mattresses and stuff

for them to sit on and lay on, which would end up being their undoing.

Should we take a break?

I think we should, because now you've got 26 kids buried in a buried trailer right now in Livermore, California at 3.30 in the morning.

Not a good thing to happen.

That's right.

So we'll pick up with what's going on in Chowchilla right after this.

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All right, so in Chalchilla, that bus doesn't come back.

So obviously everyone freaks out pretty quickly.

Yeah.

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 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?

Yeah, and I saw also that the bus had basically no clues on it whatsoever.

So it's like, we found the bus, but that doesn't help at all.

So yeah, I'm sure they were panicked by that.

So it became pretty clear pretty early on that the Chowchilla sheriff, a guy named Ed Gates, was going to need some help.

So the FBI came to town.

Apparently, they booked every one of the hotel rooms in the two hotels in town.

They brought

like all the state law enforcement agencies, like everybody just converged on this town to help out because it made national news like almost instantaneously.

I saw somewhere Chuck that like this is during the bicentennial and the bicentennial just been going on and going on and going on and there was still bicentennial stuff going on and this stopped it.

Like this kidnapping, news of this kidnapping stopped the bicentennial celebration deadness tracks.

It was the end of it.

Not just for this town, but for the whole country.

Oh yeah.

I mean this went right up to President Ford at the time and obviously Governor Jerry Brown.

So they threw everything they could at it.

The media descended upon Chow Chilla like super fast.

And because it's the media, you start getting these terrible stories about like, well, maybe because, you know, they'd never caught Zodiac and this was just six or seven years, I think, after the final,

what would end up being the final killing.

So they said maybe it was a Zodiac because they made reference to wiping, he made reference to wiping out a school bus at one point.

Any tip that came in, they had to follow.

There's a chew on the side of the road.

So they have to track down that tip.

There was a novel in 1958 called The Day the Children Vanished, where

the gang of people abduct a busload of kids just to bring people out of town and distract them while they robbed a bank.

Ray's wife worked at the bank, like you said, so they put a bank under surveillance.

So there were, you know, it was, I don't know if I would describe it as a panic because the FBI was on the scene in the state

California Bureau investigation.

So they were doing good work, but there was a frenzy of activity.

Yeah, and I think the sheriff had all the help he possibly needed to chase down all these leads and everything.

But from what I saw, there was just not much to go on.

They were just dead ends left and right.

And so, like, there was

just an enormous amount of panic and terror in the town.

Families started converging on the firehouse, the local firehouse, for some reason.

I'm not sure why.

But it became like the meeting place for anybody concerned about the fate of the kids.

And this is where news would first be broken.

And I think the media probably hung around there too.

So you can only begin to imagine how anxious the parents were.

And then the town, and then apparently the whole country was anxious as well.

And so it was really kind of surprising when all of a sudden,

at about, I think about 8 p.m.

the next night, Saturday night, so the kids have been gone for almost

30 hours, 32 hours, something like that at this point.

32 hours of terror.

When all of a sudden, at that quarry, some people are working, and a man and a bunch of kids run over, and it turns out to be the kidnapping victims who just present themselves to a security guard

at the quarry in Livermore, who gets on the phone and says, we found them.

That's right.

Amazing.

And you would think well pretty sensational story but it was very short span of time and all the kids were fine so why is it really a story it's a story because uh as we'll see the trauma that they suffered emotionally and um how it went down and who these people were who kidnapped them but before we get to those dumb-dums um

let's talk about the escape uh they were down there about 12 hours and running out of food and water um the roof you know they had a lot of weight on this moving van roof, and those things aren't super strong.

So this thing was, you know, kind of dented in and it seemed like it might cave in.

And they were worried that they just couldn't stay there, basically.

And this is where the story,

I mean, I guess 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 14-year-old that wasn't supposed supposed to be on that bus.

And he was far and away the oldest kid there and the most capable to help.

Years later, after a while of the story of Ed Ray, he finally came out and said, oh, you know, Ed Ray's a good guy.

I don't want to disparage him, but like, it was my idea.

And I was the one that really led the charge to escape.

And he was a big mess.

kind of crying in his hands that they were doomed and dead.

And he got on board and helped me, but it was really me.

And the reason I kind of believe that after reading all the accounts is it took many years for him to kind of come out with this, and it felt like he even felt bad for saying so.

So I think that Mike Marshall, in fact, did lead the charge to escape.

Well, his account was corroborated by another guy named Larry Park, who wrote a book called The Chow Chilla School Bus Kidnapping, Colon, Why Me?

And I don't know if he corroborated it in that or in an interview later on, but he was there and he said that that's true, that that's how it went down.

On the other perspective, the fact that, like, when Ed Ray

like lived the rest of his life, he stayed in Chow Chilla.

Most of those people, kids who'd been kidnapped with him, stayed in Chow Chilla.

When he was dying, those same kids as adults now came and visited him at his bedside, say goodbye.

There's plenty of opportunity for, you know, little town to start talking, you know, whispers and that kind of thing.

And that doesn't seem to have happened.

He seems to have died, considered a hero as well.

So my take on it, Chuck, is that he may have been

gloom and doom about their prospects to begin with.

And maybe it really was Mike Marshall who said, no, we need to try to get out of here.

But even Mike Marshall said after a while, once Mike Marshall started to try, Ed Ray joined in and started helping, and that they might not have been able to get strengths.

Yeah, they might not have been able to get out had a grown man not been helping them like push against this.

Totally agree.

I think we're, I think we park our cars in the same garage here.

Yeah, look at them.

They're super.

They're both heroes.

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 is they put some sort of iron plate.

I've seen manhole, but it was some kind of heavy metal plate

over the thing, along with two industrial tractor batteries, which are super heavy, and then dirt.

So there's ended up being several hundred pounds kind of weighing this thing down, this escape hatch.

But they were able, after hours and hours, to finally kind of use that wood to pry open just enough to where they see starlight and dirt leaking in.

And with the help of Ed Ray and his, you know, manly man strength, they were able to climb out of there.

Mike Marshall was.

So Mike Marshall climbed out, and then from that moment on, and so apparently also Ed Ray was really worried.

And I guess Mike Marshall was too, but it was not a deterrent for him.

But they were worried that there was at least one or more of the kidnappers hanging around with a gun guarding.

Yeah.

So there was a good chance in their minds that they were going to poke through and just be shot on sight.

Sure.

So they were worried about that.

And luckily, when Mike Marshall poked his head up, he saw that there was no one around.

There was nobody guarding it.

It turned out that they had long since left.

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 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.

Very smart.

But it turned out the kidnappers weren't there.

And somebody, luckily, was still working at the quarry, I believe, including a security guard, when Ed Ray and the kids ran up and presented themselves.

So that's how and then I guess the guy got on the phone and within moments of that happening, the news made it back to 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.

Carl Malden was certainly portrayed as the hero

in the lifetime movie.

They said, do you have anything you'd like to say?

And he said, just that my feet hurt.

And, you know, we, again, want to point out this was 36 hours from beginning to end.

But these kids

didn't know what was going on above ground.

They were hot.

They were, you know, stripping down to their underwear.

Carl Malden was in his underwear even in the movie.

Oh, nice.

They were running out of food and water.

So

as a five to 14 year old, I mean, Ed Ray was in hysterics.

You think you're going to die down there.

So it may not have been, 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 a sudden that van was going to come speeding down the road after.

It took a while until they felt safe, I think.

And then on top of that, Chuck, you'd said it kind of earlier, but I think it really bears repeating.

They were really worried that the roof roof of this thing was going to cave in.

Four feet of dirt on top of a moving van roof that had been

in the perpetrator's defense had been reinforced with lumber, but not very well.

That's a lot of weight pushing down on this.

And if you see pictures of what the thing looked like from inside, I could see how they would have been very nervous that the thing was going to cave in on them and crush them.

Oh, yeah.

Like the pictures of it afterward, that roof was in the process of caving in.

Yeah.

It was very nerve-wracking.

Of course, if that would have happened, the dirt probably would have caved in and gotten some of them dirty, and then they could crawl out.

I hope so.

Hopefully, that's how it would have happened.

Who knows?

But, you know, like I said, they didn't know what was going on down there.

No, they didn't.

So, but now they're free, they're, they're, they're safe.

Um, and the authorities go get them.

The FBI, the sheriff, everybody's interviewing them.

This is hours.

This is more hours for the parents back in Chalchilla having to wait.

And then there was

a Greyhound bus that went and got them and brought them back.

It was pretty sweet.

There was a lot of donations going on.

Like, apparently, Pacific Bell donated not just new phones, but new phone lines because there were so many calls being made by the authorities and by the press, which we'll factor in in a second.

The Greyhound bus lines donated that bus ride, which is worth mentioning.

I guess the FBI donated their time.

Who knows?

Now they get paid.

But there was a lot.

Okay.

there was a lot of um there's just like a lot of banding together to support this town as they were going through this and i just thought it was cool there's a greyhound bus that rolled up with everybody inside and they got off and they're like i'm never getting on one of those again

well i did kind of wonder i was like maybe we should send like a few or not even vans send 12 cars right

no buses no vans

that's a good thing you know what i'm saying yeah yeah i get what you're saying or just make them walk the hundred miles back.

And of course, the kids got to go to Disneyland.

That was a big one.

They got a hero's welcome.

They got a parade.

They got to go to Disneyland.

And it was as soon as the town went from the saddest place on earth to the happiest place on earth in the span of 36 hours.

Yeah, they had a huge feast.

I saw that Ed Ray won a vacation,

that he appeared on Hollywood Squares, which was

peak exposure in the mid-70s.

76?

sure.

And, Chuck, there's one other little fact that we have to say about this: that Robert Goulet recorded a song called The Ballad of Chow Chilla Ray.

It's so obscure, it is not on YouTube.

Some either cursed or blessed soul put it on SoundCloud.

Yeah, you can find there's a cover version on YouTube

from another person.

I couldn't find it.

But I recommend the SoundCloud Goulet version.

It is,

it is a product of the 1970s in every way.

It's unlistenable.

I made it through most of it.

Did you make it through all of it?

I made it through most of it and I skipped to the end.

Okay.

It was something else because it's sort of like disco, but it's also that very 70s thing when they wrote these story songs, like about the kid jumping off of the Tatcher Hatchie Bridge or whatever.

Not Tatchahatchie, what was it?

Billy Joe McAllister.

Like, they wrote these songs in the 70s, these weird sort of folk story songs.

A ballad.

Yeah, but not, I mean, a ballad can be like a love song.

These were like folk stories.

I thought a ballad meant it was, like, told a story.

Maybe, but I think of ballads as love songs, generally.

But a love story.

Right.

Like, Air Supply wrote ballads.

They didn't write songs about folk heroes jumping off of bridges, you know.

They should have.

Sure.

Well, I don't know.

There's really nothing Air Supply could have done to have improved their game.

They were pretty much.

They still sound great.

Yeah.

One of the best concerts I ever saw in my life was Air Supply in Jacksonville, Florida.

It's amazing.

It was amazing.

I said it before, and I'll say it again.

It was like the fabric of reality was coming apart at the seams, and we were

right there to witness it.

It was so cool.

I didn't know you took ecstasy at that show.

I didn't.

That was, that's what's so significant about it.

We were totally sober.

Yeah.

What was it about, was it just songs from your childhood or something?

No, it was, I mean, yes, that was part of it.

It was great to hear all those songs and see them live.

It was the chemistry between the two dudes.

They still got it after all these years.

It was really neat to see.

But what really kind of made it unreal was

it almost had the same feeling as like a really energetic tent revival like people were were wandering down the aisles like like

you could tell they were moving not necessarily of their own will they were being drawn toward the stage it was it was bizarre it was so cool to see people were just out of their minds at this air supply show and and like we're not i don't think any of them were on next to see either i think like everybody was like people were with their moms or with their kids or sure it was just a neat neat show.

I'll never forget it.

Ever.

Amazing.

So go see Air Supply.

I'm sure they're playing a third-rate casino near you.

Probably.

They definitely do the work for sure.

They supply you with more than air, though, it sounds like.

Dude, and

the guy's voice still is 100% as good as it was in the 70s, which is pretty cool.

I was watching some vids the other day, live vids of them recently.

It's a good thing to do.

Sit around.

But definitely check out the song on SoundCloud.

Oh, yeah.

And listen to as much of it as you can.

You won't make it all the way through.

The ballad of Chow Chilleray.

It's so bad.

Now I understand why Elvis would shoot the TV whenever Robert Goulet came on.

It was because of that.

Because of that song.

Robert Goulet.

Is that why he shot the TVs?

Yeah, for some, apparently, no one knows why.

But whenever Robert Goulet would come on, he would shoot his TV.

Sometimes he'd get really mad and shoot his toaster or his oven or whatever.

Wow.

But he would shoot the TV.

That's pretty good.

All right.

So these kidnappers, getting back to the story of the Chow Chilla school bus kidnapping, these guys were

three real low-rent scumbags who didn't have a penny to their name and were desperate for cash, right?

In some ways, kind of, but if they were also all three rich kids, if you can put those two things together.

They were three rich white kids, one specifically,

the literal trust fund kid.

Yeah.

He was the ringleader.

We're talking about Fred Woods, James, Schoenfeld,

who were 24, and then James's younger brother, Richard, who was 22.

But Fred Woods, Frederick Newhall Woods, the fourth,

was the ringleader.

And

I guess you could call it the brains if there was a brain behind this.

But he came from a long line of California money.

One of his ancestors was Henry Mayo Newall, who came in the 1850s to California.

Part of Santa Clarita is Newall, California, named for him.

They made a ton of money in real estate speculation and railroads, and then eventually oil and ranching, and had

several hundred million dollar family fortune.

Yeah, I read that they made

about $350 million a year in the 70s.

A year.

Just that family doing nothing.

And by the time this guy, Fred Woods IV, came along, there were generations of this family that had never worked a day in their life.

So it's not like his parents struck it rich and they remembered their roots.

Like their roots were just gobsmackingly

wealthy.

That's

what they knew.

And apparently, Fred was not particularly paid attention to by his parents, and it had some effects on him.

And I saw also that he had trouble um living up to his father's expectations for him um of a do-nothing blue blood yeah um 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's a New York Times article about him while I believe he was still at large,

where he said that he's described as a loser in the headline.

The New York Times calls him a loser, at least says other people called him a loser in their headline.

He was that kind of person.

And again, it was the 70s, but he was also that kind of person.

He's just,

he was, he was the product of wealthy, neglectful parents, from what I can tell, and also an education system that seems to have failed him, at least in the grammar portion.

Yeah.

We'll get to that.

He didn't have a lot of friends.

He never really had a ton of girlfriends,

which is ironic because he ended up being married four times, which we'll get to.

He lived in a converted apartment in an outbuilding on the nearly 80-acre estate

in Portala Valley where his grandmother lived and his parents lived, even though they were traveling by themselves usually.

He got a job at that rock quarry.

Your first indication that they may not have had the smartest plan

because his dad owned it.

And he was into cars.

He collected cars with his money.

The ringleader did.

He had dozens and dozens of cars.

His buddy James, who helped him, he was rich too, not that kind of rich, but his parent, his dad, was a podiatrist.

So they had doctor money, so they were doing pretty well as well.

And they got into various businesses together.

They had a used car business together.

They never did super well, it seemed like, in any of their business ventures because it seemed like they weren't super smart.

Right.

Another good descriptor is that Fred, in particular, loved his cars and he loved to shoot the windows out of his cars with his guns, which he also loved.

Yeah, they had a lot of guns between them as well.

I mean, it's sort of what you think.

There were these rich kids who weren't paid attention to, that could do whatever they wanted, and ended up getting into trouble.

Fred had designs on being a film producer, and part of the concept for this kidnapping was the school bus kidnapping and the movie Dirty Harry.

Yeah.

And he said, hey, this would make a great movie too, which we'll get to sort of the bow tie on that later on.

But he and James ended up losing some money, about 30 grand on a housing deal.

And

depending on the reports you read, some people say they were desperate for money.

But if you talk to James, he said, I wanted to buy a Ferrari with it because my neighbors had Ferraris and it was to keep up with the Joneses situation.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

You know, Fred was born into it and I think took money largely for granted, but James and Richard, but James in particular, really kind of felt new to the area and didn't fit in because they didn't have as much money.

I think their dad was

punching above his weight class socioeconomically in the area that they moved to.

And his sons kind of suffered for it because they felt out of place because

they just did not have anywhere near the kind of wealth that their peers had

where they now lived.

And that seems to have gotten to James, and and that was his big motivation.

I never saw Fred Wood's motivation, did you?

I mean, I think part of it had to do with that 30 grand in debt, but I think part of it, dude, is he was a bored rich kid in some ways.

Right.

Like that may have been the reason.

So, yeah.

And dumb.

I also, yeah, and dumb.

Also, I have the impression that

James and Rick Schoenfeld were

a lot more moral than Fred Wood was.

Oh, yeah.

Apparently in his journal, James wrote at the time that he was worried he was becoming immoral as they were like really planning this.

And he and his brother were both Eagle scouts.

So I guess it is fair to say that they kind of fell under the influence of Fred Woods,

who had no qualms about this whole thing.

He convinced them to give up their qualms as well.

Yeah, I think the last time I'll say the word smart thing that they did was when they were initially hatching the idea.

they said, we saw in the news, California, the state of California has a $5 billion budget surplus, and we're not going to get money kidnapping a kid or even 26 kids

from their parents for their parents to pay ransom.

But if they were on a school bus, then it's the responsibility of the state of California.

And they've got all this dough, so $5 million is chump change to them.

So if we get them on a school bus, then they're liable and that's how we're going to get the most money.

Yeah.

And so the calculation that they made was that nobody was going to get hurt.

They knew that they weren't going to physically hurt those kids.

Yeah.

They knew that California had a budget surplus, but even more than that,

that their insurance company, the state's, whoever insured the state, would end up actually paying that $5 million.

And that they were just basically taking $5 million from the state that the state didn't really need.

and that nobody was going to get hurt.

And then that calculation, it really kind of reveals like how much they did

lose any kind of morality, which is they 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.

You know?

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,

and eventually, spoiler, we'll go ahead and say that the two brothers were eventually paroled and we'll get to all that.

But

the news teams in 2015 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 the trauma these kids have still suffered into adulthood.

And he just went, you know, I've heard, so I've heard.

And then just like quickly ran away.

So even to this day, they're trying to get them to realize that there was a real impact, and

the end result was trauma and PTSD.

Yeah, and the reason it did, and it had the impact.

And part of the problem for Chow Chilla, apparently, Chow 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, Chow Chilla was a possible town among a number of towns in the area that those three traveled to and staked out and just kind of tried to figure out what the best, the best victim would be for this crime.

And they just settled on Chow Chilla.

They had no grudges against Chow Chilla.

They had no ties to Chow Chilla.

But the problem was they didn't care about the people of Chow Chilla or how they felt about their children or what they were going to do to them.

It was just a random,

they chose them basically randomly.

And Chow Chilla is the kind of

rural farming town where people don't talk about their feelings.

I think I get the impression that they still think that that's weak.

It shows a sign of weakness.

And so I don't really have the impression that the town has ever really processed this and that they've tried to forget.

And then there's a lot of problems among the victims who are now in their like 50s

that have never really been resolved or worked out because the town just tried to carry on as if it never happened basically from the get-go.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, some of them had very hard luck stories getting into drugs, eventually getting better and going through rehab and treatment and writing books about it.

Others say they don't trust people.

They suffered nightmares for years.

Some continue to.

Others have said that they don't even really remember much of what happened.

I imagine if you're five years old,

you're not going to remember as much as a 12-year-old, obviously.

So, depending on your age group, you may have suffered some more obvious lasting damage, but they were all damaged.

The way these guys

got caught is,

well, I guess let's tell a little bit of that story.

During the investigation, one thing they found in his, and we'll put this in the dumb column, on the property of where Fred lived, they found a plan written out that said at the top, plan.

Yep.

I think in London.

They say kidnapping plan.

They didn't even capitalize the P.

Yeah, they wrote it out in pen, and they had a lot of ideas.

They wanted to buy an x-ray machine.

I think they did.

To x-ray in case the ransom money was bugged.

They had a larger plan.

They had one plan about them, the state dropping the money from a plane in the Santa Cruz Mountains

at a specific drop site indicated by a series of lights.

But they also had this larger plan of putting dummies in a plane with parachutes.

And it was sort of all over the map, this plan over the course of a year and a half.

Yeah,

this really reveals, I think, a lot about them as well.

That on that plan sheet, it said one of the line items was burn the plan.

Yeah.

They just didn't get around to that.

They left it.

There was a ransom note.

Yeah, there was.

I think too.

Yeah.

And it had a lot of scratch outs and misspellings.

And apparently it meant it referred to Fred by name in the ransom note that they were planning to give to the authorities.

Like really dumb

stuff.

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.

And they said that their name was Beelzebub, but they misspelled Beelzebub.

Yeah.

They spelled it B-E-A-L-S-A-B-U-B,

which is just offensive to anybody who knows how to spell that word.

It's just like, if you misspell things in your ransom note, like you're not going to do very well for yourself, most likely.

That's right.

In the aftermath of the kidnapping from when they buried the kids to when they left, the plan was call the Chow Chilla Police Department, demand your $5 million ransom.

But the Chow Chilla phone system was very small and there were obviously when you kidnap 26 kids and the media is descending every phone line was busy they literally could not get through with their ransom demand the kids escaped 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

yeah so they never what did these guys do right afterward when they couldn't get through?

They decided they needed to scram, that the jig was up and they needed to part ways and they did.

Fred

Woods was

wily enough to have come up with a passport with the name Ralph Snyder.

And he traveled successfully to British Columbia, I think Vancouver, under that fake passport.

But then when he was there, he started writing to people.

He had a friend who was,

I think, in film school and and said, hey, you should turn this into a whole,

like a whole, a whole movie.

He said,

kidnapping that I did.

Right.

Just give me some of the

box office, I guess.

But he said, but be fair.

He wanted a piece.

He said, be fair, but

he spelled it F-A-R-E.

Yeah.

So that's it.

I'm sorry.

It's just annoying me to no end.

The misspellings.

Yeah.

But then he signed the letter, sent it as Ralph Snyder.

He sent it as his alias.

So the cops, the FBI tracked him like within days to Vancouver and got the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to arrest him.

I wonder he knew the guy, though, in film school.

I wonder if this guy was like, who is this?

Who's Ralph Snyder?

Or if he put in parentheses, that's my alias.

This is

Fred.

Don't tell the FBI.

But he misspelled FBI.

So Rick, the younger Schoenfeld,

for his part, almost immediately confessed.

He got home after the three of them met up and then split up, went home and told his dad what he did.

His dad, because they had money, again, as a podiatrist, got him a lawyer, Tootsweet.

And so that's why we don't know exactly.

That's one reason we don't know exactly what happened in those first like.

you know, hours afterward is because the lawyer kind of kept that all quiet.

Although I did see a news report that said they took naps.

I don't know if that's true or not, but I did see that.

It sounds right.

It holds up if you put it up against everything else.

And keep in mind, once again, they took these kids to a quarry that Fred Woods' dad owned and where Fred Woods worked.

And the quarry security guard said, when they were interviewed, said, well, yeah, last week, Fred and two other guys dug a big hole out there,

you know, a few months before this happened,

like a, oh, I don't know, like a moving van size hole.

But the hole's gone now, so who cares?

Right, exactly.

So Rick turned himself in.

Fred got caught.

James made attempts to cross the border into Canada himself, but apparently the Canadian authorities considered him A, way too nervous, B, way too vague about what he planned to do in Canada, and C, in possession of way too many guns to be let in the country.

And apparently tried two two or three times using his own name to get in and finally gave up and turned around.

And I guess he had decided he was going to turn himself into authorities, but because of an all-points bulletin on his license plate, he was picked up before he could turn himself in.

Right.

So they were all

collected less than two weeks after it happened.

Yes.

All right.

Well, let's take our last break and then we will kind of quickly go over the sentencing and what happened afterward, right after this.

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All right.

So they were collected.

Yeah, they were collected and, of course, had their day in court.

And

the big thing that happened in court was

whether or not these guys committed bodily harm on these children.

Because if you committed bodily harm, then you have a sentence of life without a possible sentence of life without parole.

If there was no bodily harm, then you could have life with parole.

They ruled that they did suffer bodily harm.

So they had stomach trouble, they had nosebleeds, some of the kids fainted, and that that counted.

But in 1980, an appeals court reversed that ruling, said that is not bodily harm, and that made them eligible for parole.

And since then, like I said earlier, the two Schoenfeld brothers have been released in, I think, 2012 and 2015.

Right.

Like long after some observers who were involved in the case think that they should have been paroled, like especially Richard Schoenfeld.

He was 22 at the time.

He was basically there, I saw it described as a long for the ride.

Again, an Eagle Scout.

He probably became an Eagle Scout three, four years before this happened.

And

he spent

39 years in prison?

Yeah.

I guess so.

2015 is when, or he got out in 2012, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So,

yeah, about 37 years in prison of his life from age 22.

He spent the next 37 years in prison for basically hanging out with his brother and his brother's goofy friend doing something really stupid.

And a lot of other people said, yeah, and if you're going to let Richard Schoenfeld out, you should really probably take another look at James Schoenfeld, too, because, yeah, he was more involved than his brother,

but he was still no Fred Woods.

And then you get to Fred Woods and people say, yeah, he probably just, he doesn't really deserve to be paroled.

Yeah, I mean, the other two were model prisoners, and they also had,

I mean, people that were active.

I don't know if it was the prosecutor or investigator.

I think the investigator for the case eventually advocated for parole.

Both did.

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 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 was he was...

running a Christmas tree farm, and Michael Bianchi, who was managing that business, got injured on the job.

And Woods said, I'm not going to help pay for the surgery.

So Bianchi said, all right.

And he filed a state workers' comp claim.

And they got on the investigation and found out that Woods was behind the operation.

So he's not,

when it comes time for parole, that doesn't look good.

No, and I guess he's been denied parole 17 times so far.

Yes.

And he's up next in 2024.

And a lot of people think

he might never be paroled, actually.

Well, he bought a mansion.

In Nipomo, California, 30 miles from the prison that no one lives at.

He did have a civil lawsuit in 2016 where he had to pay out money to the victims that was described as,

quote, enough to pay for some serious therapy, but not enough to buy a house.

Which is significant, too, because they did rule, an appeals court ruled in 1980 that they didn't inflict bodily harm.

But I wonder if that same appeals court would come to that conclusion in 2021 based on interviews with some of the people who were abducted, like

Jennifer Brown Hyde, who I mentioned earlier, who's not.

I think emotional harm would play in these days.

Right.

And there was definitely emotional harm inflicted.

You talked about Larry Park, who was addicted to meth and crack before he finally found forgiveness and actually went and met with all three of the perpetrators and shook their hands and told them he forgave them and apparently changed his own life like that.

If you haven't listened to that.

Fred Ward said, hey, I could make you a heck of a deal on a used van.

Yeah, no, Fred Ward took his watch when he shook his hand.

Well, I was kidding, but

my final little factoid is that that used car lat had those two vans, and he held on to those because he thought they would be worth a lot of money as the kidnap vans.

Yeah.

Which they might be worth an extra few hundred bucks.

I could see that.

But I don't know if

that's the crown jewel of your inventory.

I don't know.

Nick Cage bought them.

Right.

And then you can go watch that movie from Lifetime in 1993 called They've Taken Our Children if you want to see Carl Malden in his underwear, apparently.

Man.

Bad movie, bad song.

I read also that Chow Chilla 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 article on Vox, a very in-depth one, called The Ballad of the Chow Chilla Bus Kidnapping.

It's pretty good.

Oh, that's a good one.

Yeah, it is.

All right.

All right.

The article, not the song.

No, no.

Oh, okay.

It's an article.

An article.

I gotcha.

Okay.

Well, since we worked out the misunderstanding, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this,

let me see.

How about racist ticketing?

In our episode on jaywalking, we talked about people

in the black and Hispanic communities are ticketed more for jaywalking.

And this is from Valerie Mates in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Hey guys, you mentioned that black and Hispanic drivers are issued more traffic tickets than white drivers.

This is an interesting issue.

In Chicago, when they installed traffic cameras, they found that the cameras, despite being race neutral, still gave more tickets to black and Hispanic drivers.

So, of course, they wanted to study that.

The experts found that more affluent neighborhoods are built with more features that would naturally slow down traffic.

More sidewalks, more stop signs, more crosswalks, while poorer neighborhoods had

fewer of those things.

And the result would cars would be naturally, would tend to drive faster in poorer neighborhoods.

Since black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to live and be driving in less wealthy neighborhoods in Chicago, they were more likely to be speeding and caught by traffic cameras.

Or so says the evidence, at least.

Crazy.

It's not just prejudice on the part of police officers that causes this discrepancy.

It's actually a difference in how the neighborhoods are built systematically.

Thought it was really interesting.

And I agree.

Valerie, thanks for sending that in.

Who was it again?

Valerie Mates of Ann Arbor.

Thanks a lot, Valerie.

That's a great one.

If you got a great one like Valerie does, we love little brain busters like that.

So you can wrap them up, spank them on the bottom, and send them off via email to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

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