Lawsuits against kidnappers settled for undisclosed amounts
On July 15, 1976, in Chowchilla, California, three armed men hijacked a school bus. They abducted the driver and 26 children, ages 5 to 14, and imprisoned them in a truck trailer buried in a quarry in Livermore, California. The bus driver and children managed to escape before the kidnappers could issue their ransom demands. All of the victims survived but many suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
On Thursday, July 15, 1976, 55-year-old school bus driver Frank Edward "Ed" Ray was transporting 26 Dairyland Elementary School students home. The children had spent the day on a summer class trip to the Chowchilla Fairgrounds swimming pool. At approximately 4p.m., a van drove into the bus's path and blocked the road. Ray stopped, and three men with nylon stockings covering their faces exited the van and hijacked the bus. One of the men pointed a gun at Ray, a second drove the bus, and the third followed in the van.[3]
The kidnappers ordered Ray and the children into the vans at gunpoint, then drove them to the California Rock & Gravel quarry (37°39′47.3″N121°48′32.8″W / 37.663139°N 121.809111°W / 37.663139; -121.809111) in Livermore,[3] roughly 110 miles (180km) from the fairgrounds. In the early morning hours of July 16, the victims were forced, again at gunpoint, to climb down a ladder, through a hatch, and into a buried truck trailer. The kidnappers had made the trailer into an underground bunker, equipped with ventilation and a pit toilet, and stocked with several mattresses and a small amount of food and water.[5] As the victims climbed from the van into the bunker, the kidnappers wrote the name and age of each child on a Jack in the Box hamburger wrapper. Once the victims were all inside, the kidnappers removed the ladder, covered the hatch with a heavy piece of sheet metal, weighted it with two 100-pound (45-kilogram) industrial batteries, and buried the opening.
Victims being escorted by sheriff's deputies after their escape
After several hours, Ray and the older children stacked the mattresses to reach the hatch. As Ray lifted the hatch, 14-year-old Michael Marshall wedged a piece of wood into the opening, moved the sheet metal and batteries, and dug away the remainder of the debris covering the entrance.[5] Sixteen hours after being imprisoned, Ray and the children climbed out of the bunker and walked to the quarry guard's shack, near Shadow Cliffs Regional Park.[6]
Alameda County sheriffs took the victims to Santa Rita Jail, the nearest facility with medical staff. Jail doctors and EMTs examined and treated them and gave them food and water, while the sheriffs took down statements and descriptions of the kidnappers. The victims were then driven back to their families in Chowchilla.
Arrests and convictions
On July 16, telephone lines to the Chowchilla Police Department were jammed with calls from media and frantic families. The kidnappers therefore were unable to issue their $5 million ransom demand (equivalent to $26.8 million in 2023). They decided to call back later and fell asleep. When they awoke later in the evening, they saw television news reports that the victims had freed themselves and were safe.
Meanwhile, the FBI had immediately begun investigating 24-year-old Frederick Newhall Woods IV, the son of Frederick Nickerson Woods III, owner of the California Rock & Gravel quarry. The FBI discovered the younger Woods had keys to the quarry, unlimited access and free use of its facilities. Additionally, Woods and two friends, brothers James and Richard Schoenfeld (aged 24 and 22, respectively), had been previously convicted of motor vehicle theft, for which they were sentenced to probation.
The FBI obtained and executed a search warrant for Hawthorne, the 78-acre Woods estate in Portola Valley. In the younger Woods' room, investigators found journals, a draft of the ransom demand, maps, notes, plans, receipts for the vans and the trailer, false identification, one of the guns used in the kidnapping and the hamburger wrapper on which were written the names and ages of each kidnapped child.[5] The notes outlined plans to have the ransom money dropped from a plane into the Santa Cruz Mountains at night and retrieve it under cover of darkness. Also discovered was a rental contract for a storage facility. There, the FBI found the vans used to transport the victims, as well as a getaway vehicle, a Cadillac spray-painted with flat black night camouflage.
The FBI issued warrants for the arrests of Woods and the two Schoenfeld brothers. Eight days after the kidnapping, Richard Schoenfeld voluntarily surrendered to authorities.[3] Two weeks later, James Schoenfeld was arrested in Menlo Park. Later the same day, Woods was arrested by the RCMP in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.[7]
The abductors entering the courthouse for a pre-trial hearing
James Schoenfeld later stated that despite coming from wealthy families, both he and Woods were deeply in debt: "We needed multiple victims to get multiple millions and we picked children because children are precious. The state would be willing to pay ransom for them. And they don't fight back. They're vulnerable. They will mind."[5][8]
All three pleaded guilty to kidnapping for ransom and robbery but refused to enter a guilty plea to infliction of bodily harm, as a conviction on that count in conjunction with the kidnapping charge carried a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. They were tried on the bodily harm charge, found guilty and given the mandatory sentence but their convictions were overturned by an appellate court which found that physical injuries sustained by the children (mostly cuts and bruises) did not meet the standard for bodily harm under the law. They were resentenced to life with the possibility of parole.[5] Richard Schoenfeld was released in 2012,[9] and James Schoenfeld was paroled on August 7, 2015.[10][11][12]
In 2016, a worker's compensation lawsuit filed against Woods revealed that he had been running several businesses, including a gold mine and a car dealership, from behind bars without notifying prison authorities. The heir to two wealthy California families, the Newhalls and the Woods, he inherited a trust fund from his parents that was described in one court filing as being worth $100 million (equivalent to $127million in 2023), although Woods' lawyer disputed that amount.[8]
In October 2019, Woods was denied parole for the 19th time.[13][14] Over the years, reasons given for the denials included his continued minimization of the crime as well as disciplinary infractions for possession of contraband pornography and cellphones.[15][16] Woods married three times while in prison, and purchased a mansion about half an hour away.[8]
In March 2022, a panel of two commissioners recommended Woods for parole. The recommendation required the approval of the full parole board, the board's legal division and California's governor.[17][18] Governor Gavin Newsom asked the board to reconsider but the decision was affirmed. On August 17, 2022, it was reported that Woods' parole had been granted and he was to be released from prison.[19]
Aftermath
The victims riding in a parade to celebrate their escape
Ray received a California School Employees Association citation for outstanding community service.[20] Before he died on May 17, 2012,[21] he was visited by many of the schoolchildren he had helped save.[22] In 2015, Chowchilla renamed the Sports & Leisure Park as the Edward Ray Park, and declared every February 26—Ray's birthdate—"Edward Ray Day".[23][24]
A study found that the kidnapped children suffered from panic attacks, nightmares involving kidnappings and death, and personality changes. Many developed fears of such things as "cars, the dark, the wind, the kitchen, mice, dogs and hippies",[25] and one shot a Japanese tourist with a BB gun when the tourist's car broke down in front of his home.[26] Many of the children continued to report symptoms of trauma at least 25 years after the kidnapping, including substance abuse and depression, and a number have been imprisoned for "doing something controlling to somebody else."[27][28] The treatment of young victims of trauma has been guided by what was learned about the effects of the Chowchilla kidnapping on the children who were abducted.[28]
In 2016, the 25 surviving victims settled a lawsuit they had filed against their kidnappers. The money they received was paid out of Frederick Woods' trust fund, and although the exact settlement amount was not disclosed, one survivor stated that they had each received "enough to pay for some serious therapy—but not enough for a house."[8]
Abductors
Frederick Woods, James Schoenfeld and Richard Schoenfeld
Frederick Newhall Woods IV (aged 24 during the kidnapping) was repeatedly denied parole until August 2022 when, at the age of 70, he was granted full parole.[29]
James Schoenfeld (aged 24 during the kidnapping) was paroled in 2015 at age 63.[30]
Richard Schoenfeld (aged 22 during the kidnapping) was paroled in 2012 at age 57.[31]
In popular culture
American crooner Robert Goulet released a ballad about the incident in 1977, entitled "Ballad Of Chowchilla Ray".[32]
A two-hour made-for-television movie about the incident, titled They've Taken Our Children: The Chowchilla Kidnapping, aired on ABC on March 1, 1993. It stars Karl Malden as Ray, and Julie Harris as his wife.[33]
The kidnappings are featured in "Buried Alive", the seventh episode of Season 2 of Investigation Discovery's House of Horrors: Kidnapped.[34] "Buried Alive" first aired on April 21, 2015, and is told from the point of view of Marshall, the oldest of the children, who was instrumental in their escape.
Also in 2015, an episode of Inside Edition reunited some of the women who had been kidnapped as children. They gave their recollections of the abduction. The school bus, which is now stored in a Chowchilla farm warehouse, was shown as well.[35]
48 Hours examines the abduction in the 2019 episode "Live to Tell: The Chowchilla Kidnapping",[17] as well as the March 18, 2023, episode "Remembering the Chowchilla Kidnapping" (Season 36, Episode 20).
On December 3, 2023, CNN aired a documentary on the kidnapping, simply titled Chowchilla.[36]
Patricia Campbell Hearst is the granddaughter of American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. She first became known for the events following her 1974 kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was found and arrested 19 months after being abducted, by which time she was a fugitive wanted for serious crimes committed with members of the group. She was held in custody, and there was speculation before trial that her family's resources would enable her to avoid time in prison.
Chowchilla is a city in Madera County, California, United States. The city's population was 19,039 at the 2020 census. Chowchilla is located 16 miles (26 km) northwest of Madera, at an elevation of 240 feet (73 m).
In criminal law, kidnapping is the unlawful abduction and confinement of a person against their will. Kidnapping is typically but not necessarily accomplished by use of force or fear; i.e., it also usually involves menace/assault or/and battery; but it is still kidnapping without those additional elements, or if a person is enticed to enter the vehicle or dwelling willingly.
Dirty Harry is a 1971 American neo-noir action thriller film produced and directed by Don Siegel, the first in the Dirty Harry series. Clint Eastwood plays the title role, in his first appearance as San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan. The film drew upon the real-life case of the Zodiac Killer as the Callahan character seeks out a similar vicious psychopath.
Susan Denise Atkins was an American convicted murderer who was a member of Charles Manson's "Family". Manson's followers committed a series of nine murders at four locations in California over a period of five weeks in the summer of 1969. Known within the Manson family as Sadie Mae Glutz or Sexy Sadie, Atkins was convicted for her participation in eight of these killings, including the most notorious, the Tate murders in 1969. She was sentenced to death, which was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment when the California Supreme Court invalidated all death sentences issued prior to 1972. Atkins was incarcerated until her death in 2009. At the time of her death, she was California's longest-serving female inmate, long since surpassed by fellow Manson family members Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel.
The Onion Field is a 1973 nonfiction book by Joseph Wambaugh, a sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department, chronicling the kidnapping of two plainclothes LAPD officers by a pair of criminals during a traffic stop and the subsequent murder of one of the officers.
Following the historic Lindbergh kidnapping, the United States Congress passed a federal kidnapping statute—known as the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) —which was intended to let federal authorities step in and pursue kidnappers once they had crossed state lines with their victim. The act was first proposed in December 1931 by Missouri Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, who pointed to several recent kidnappings in the Missouri area in calling for a federal solution. Initial resistance to Patterson's proposal was based on concerns over funding and state's rights. Consideration of the law was revived following the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton in late January 1932. Woolverton's kidnapping featured prominently in several newspaper series researched and prepared in the weeks following his abduction, and were quite possibly inspired by it. Two such projects, by Bruce Catton of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and Fred Pasley of the Daily News of New York City, were ready for publication within a day or two of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Both series, which ran in papers across North America, described kidnapping as an existential threat to American life, a singular, growing crime wave in which no one was safe.
The Rengstorff House was one of the first houses to be built in Mountain View, California. It was built c. 1867 by Henry Rengstorff, a prominent local businessman who operated a ferry between San Francisco and Mountain View. It is built in the Italianate Victorian architecture style. The house's three-bay front facade features an entrance pavilion topped by a balustrade and a pediment on the middle bay.
Chowchilla may refer to:
Central California Women's Facility (CCWF) is a female-only California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison located in Chowchilla, California. It is across the road from Valley State Prison. CCWF is the second largest female correctional facility in the United States, and houses the only State of California death row for women.
Robert Christian Boes Hansen, popularly known as the Butcher Baker, was an American serial killer active in Anchorage, Alaska, between 1972 and 1983. Hansen abducted, raped and murdered at least seventeen women, many of whom he may have attacked in the wilderness with a Ruger Mini-14 and hunting knives. Hansen was captured in 1983 and sentenced to 461 years' imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He died in 2014 of natural causes at age 75.
On 6 October 1972, at a one-teacher school in the rural town of Faraday in Victoria, Australia, two plasterers, Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, kidnapped six female pupils and their teacher for a $1,000,000 ransom. The Victorian government claimed it would pay the ransom. The victims escaped and the criminals were captured, tried and convicted. Eastwood escaped and later kidnapped a teacher and nine pupils. He was again captured, convicted and sentenced. While in prison, Eastwood strangled convicted rapist Glen Davies in what was ruled self-defence. He was eventually released, having served his sentence.
Colleen J. Stan is an American woman who was kidnapped and held as a sex slave by Cameron and Janice Hooker in their Red Bluff, California home for over seven years, between 1977 and 1984. At Cameron Hooker's trial, Stan's experience was described as unparalleled in FBI history. Janice Hooker was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for testimony, while Cameron Hooker was found guilty on multiple charges and sentenced to 104 years in prison.
Lenore C. Terr is a psychiatrist and author known for her research into childhood trauma. Terr graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School with an MD. She is the winner of the Blanche Ittleson Award for her research on childhood trauma. Terr is noted for her work studying the after-effects of the 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping on the 26 children who were buried alive for 16 hours after being kidnapped from a bus.
On June 10, 1991, Jaycee Lee Dugard, an eleven-year-old girl, was abducted from a street while walking to a school bus stop in Meyers, California, United States. Searches began immediately after Dugard's disappearance, but no reliable leads were generated, even though several people witnessed the kidnapping. Dugard remained missing for over 18 years until 2009, when a convicted sex offender, Phillip Garrido, visited the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, accompanied by two adolescent girls, who were discovered to be the biological daughters of Garrido and Dugard, on August 24 and 25 of that year. The unusual behavior of the trio sparked an investigation that led Garrido's parole officer, Edward Santos Jr. to order Garrido to take the two girls to a parole office in Concord, California, on August 26. Garrido was accompanied by a woman who was eventually identified as Dugard.
The Speed Freak Killers is the name given to serial killer duo Loren Herzog and Wesley Shermantine, together initially convicted of four murders — three jointly — and suspected in the deaths of as many as 72 people in and around San Joaquin County, California based on a letter Shermantine wrote to a reporter in 2012. They received the "speed freak" moniker due to their habitual methamphetamine abuse. Herzog committed suicide in 2012. Shermantine remains on death row in San Quentin State Prison, in San Quentin, California.
The Puccio family was an Argentine criminal family. Three of the Puccios were convicted of four kidnappings and three murders in the early 1980s.
The murder of Mackenzie Lueck occurred on June 17, 2019. Lueck, a 23-year-old student at the University of Utah, was reported missing and her bound, burned, and buried remains were later discovered. Ayoola Ajayi, 31, was arrested and charged with Lueck's kidnapping and murder. In October 2020, Ajayi pleaded guilty to Lueck's murder and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Gonzalo Artemio Lopez was an American fugitive, mass murderer, and prison escapee who killed a total of six people in separate murders in 2005 and 2022. In 2005, Lopez kidnapped and murdered a man in Weslaco, Texas. He was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison. In May 2022, Lopez received international attention when he escaped from prison custody by assaulting a corrections officer and fleeing from a prison bus. He became a wanted fugitive and evaded authorities for three weeks. On June 2, Lopez broke into a ranch and murdered five people from the same family, including three children, before stealing weapons and a pickup truck. Later that same day, police spotted Lopez and engaged in a shootout with him after a high-speed chase, where he was fatally shot during the exchange of gunfire.
Vincent Lee Chuan Leong is a Singaporean ex-convict who, together with two illegal immigrants from China, kidnapped a 14-year-old female student in 1999. The trio abducted the teenager into their rented car, and then demanded S$500,000 ransom from the girl's father, a wealthy second-hand car dealer. Eventually, through negotiations, the ransom was lowered to S$330,000, and upon the agreement to the amount, the ransom was paid and the girl was subsequently released without harm.
↑ Lindsey, Robert (July 17, 1976). "26 Children Found Safe After Being Kidnapped From Bus In California". The New York Times. p.1. Retrieved May 12, 2017. Instead of turning right at an intersection leading to the fourth stop, it apparently continued west toward what is called the Berenda Slough. It was in the slough that the bus was found...
↑ Miller, Thaddeus (February 26, 2015). "Chowchilla bus driver remembered, honored as humble hero". Merced Sun-Star. Retrieved February 26, 2016. Chowchilla Mayor John Chavez read a proclamation during the park dedication, which included making every Feb. 26 Edward Ray Day in Chowchilla.
↑ "Study Finds Trauma in Kidnap Victims". Merced Sun-Star. Associated Press. January 20, 1981.
↑ Osgood, Charles; Blackstone, John (July 29, 2001). "Innocence lost; the Chowchilla kidnap victims 25 years later, and what they taught us about childhood trauma". CBS Sunday Morning– via CBS News Transcripts.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
