The Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, before we get started, you're very happy to
announce that Josh and I are on Jeopardy tonight. That's right,
we get our very own category Stuff you Should Know.
We had a hand in shaping the clues, which are
all from Stuff you Should Know episodes, and that was
super fun to work with them. They were awesome, by
the way, and then we got to present. They brought

(00:23):
a video crew to Atlanta and jumped in the podcast
studio and we, uh, we're on camera presenting our very
own clues in our very own category. This is definitely
a bucket list thing for both of us, and we're
super super excited. So it airs tonight. If you are
listening to this live on Tuesday, February eighth, it is

(00:45):
the prime time collegiate tournament. So check it out tonight
on ABC, our big, big debut on Jeopardy. Uh. Like
I said, it was super fun and we're so proud
of this. After all these years, we finally got the
call we've been waiting for. Check it out tonight, everyone,
All right, on with the show. Welcome to Stuff you

(01:05):
Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here and this is uh stuff.
You should know. You know what I've been singing for

(01:26):
two days. Wheels on the bus, go rounding round. No,
that's pretty good, guests though done. No, No, chow Chilla.
I can't get it out of my head. That got
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 at Your Winner or Johnny Winter?

(01:50):
I don't know. I think it's one of the winners. Okay,
that's my guess. Okay the long Winters. Definitely not the
Long Winters. Okay. Um So, Chuck, we're talking about a
piece of Americana true crime history that I had no
idea about actually, and um I noted though, because of

(02:12):
the timing and because of the location. I hit up
my beloved, uh former hippie aunt who lived in San
Francisco at the time I 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 agents. She was not very u comfortable
with this, this whole jam. Yeah, provided discomfort. Yeah, that's

(02:36):
one way to put it. So did you even say
with the name of it was? No? Um, it's the
chow Chilli school bus kidnapping is what people usually refer
to it as, right, And I think this was a
listener who sent this in. And I apologize because I'd
usually make note of that so I can shout them out,
but I did not do so in this case, so

(02:58):
I missed. I know, boot this, but yeah, this was
in nineteen seventy six and uh still stands according to
the sources, I saw as the largest domestic kidnapping in
US history. So my aunt says, oh yeah, she She
also said she was not very into it. I was

(03:19):
not very comfortable by that. It's very disappointing. Um yeah,
the largest mass kidnapping, four ransom. I'm not sure why
that's a qualifier, but I don't know, but um yeah,
I saw the same thing too that it still stands. Um.
And it was like the idea that the most of
anything happened to this little town of chow Chilla in

(03:41):
the San Joaquin Valley, about a hundred and fifty miles
southeast of San Francisco. Um in and of itself is significant.
But it was a really terrible like most of event
that happened to this poor little town, as we'll see.
All right, So should we just start on July seventy six, Yes,
all right, we'll paint a picture for you. You already

(04:04):
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 forred people living there, but that was
the case in the 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

(04:27):
was summer school, a little fun day trip to a
swimming pool, driven by fifty five year old Ed Ray. Yeah,
it was a farmer there in chow 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

(04:48):
school bus, because even after this he continued on for
another dozen years as the school bus driver. That's right. Uh,
he had only dropped off a few kids at this point,
and the were nineteen girls and seven boys on board
from five to fourteen, and notably, um the fourteen year
old because he will factor in pretty heavily here. His

(05:10):
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 it with some
beer and his mom said, to your punishment, you gotta
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,

(05:32):
but he knew who Ray was, and so he went
to ed Ray and said, hey, man, well you I
don't know if this is my bus or not, but
you take me home. And ed Ray is ed Ray.
So he went short shoreboard. So um, thank goodness, he
said that. 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

(05:53):
on to a street called Avenue, and as he turned
onto Avenue one, Edray on that there was a white
van blocking the road, and apparently he started to go
around it and then I guess thought the better of it,
and I wanted to stop and see if they needed
any help instead, And when he did, he realized very

(06:13):
quickly that he was actually being hijacked. Because when you
see a man with a long gun and panty hose
on his head, um, you're probably being hijacked, that's right.
The first thing he saw was this one guy who said,
opened the door, and then he realized there were a
couple of other guys, same m O. I think they

(06:34):
had shotguns with the panty hose, 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? No? No,
I haven't yet. We'll get to it. Then there's a
there's a Lifetime movie that came out in the nineties.
I think looks like it was made in three somehow.

(06:56):
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 that ed Ray and uh, 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. Yeah, I don't. I'm not sure if

(07:18):
it happened in real life or not. It's a Malden
improv if I've ever heard one. Yes, And I'm not
getting out of my seat right my feet hurt. So
he eventually did though, and they drove Um. They drove
that bus followed by the van uh for a bit,
and then eventually transferred those kids to that van and

(07:41):
another identical van UM. 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 kidnappers did make them jump from the school
bus to the van so they wouldn't leave footprints. And
in these vans, they had all the kids and ed

(08:01):
Ray in the vans now two vans, UM, and they
had kind of like deck these vans out. Um. 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 eleven hours

(08:23):
in the backs of those vans with no potty breaks,
no food, no water, no nothing. They just drove him
around for eleven hours in July, the middle of July
in the San Joaquin Valley, UM, pretty mercilessly before finally
arriving at the destination, which ultimately was only a hundred
miles away from where the kids had been kidnapped. I

(08:45):
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, eleven 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 a c go and drinking
sodas and have a good old time, and the kids
and ed Ray are back there just suffering. Um, just

(09:08):
terrified obviously if 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 can imagine. So, Um, finally,
at three thirty am on Friday morning, they were hijacked
around after three thirty one thirty pm on Thursday. They

(09:30):
finally stopped driving at three thirty in the morning Friday morning, UM,
and they arrived at a rock quarry. They're in Livermoore, California.
Apparently again it's a hundred miles away from chow Chilla,
and um, this is the what the what the kidnapper
see as the final destination for these kids until they're
ransomed off, until the authorities cough up the money. And

(09:52):
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, um, 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
Rey too, that's right. And as the kids were going

(10:15):
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 uh, and their phone numbers in contact and parents names,
not on a clipboard legal pad, but on the back

(10:35):
of a Jack in the box wrapper, right so uh.
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
a many many moneys and dollar bills their way exactly,
and the fact that their kids means that people do
anything to to keep them safe. So these guys figure

(10:56):
they've got a pretty good pay day with twenty six
kids that they're now holding hostage and a buried moving
van trailer um. 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 also thought

(11:19):
of bathrooms. They made bathrooms in the wheel wells, and
they they dropped ventilation tubes with some fans to force
air in into the into the van, so there was
fresh air down there, um, 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

(11:40):
some old box springs and mattresses and stuff with them
for them to sit on and lay on, which would
end up being they're undoing. Should we take a break?
I think we should, because now you've got twenty six
kids buried in a buried trailer right now in Livermore California,
three thirty in the morning. Not a good thing to happen,

(12:00):
that's right. So we'll pick up with what's going on
in chow Chilla right after this. Alright, So in chow Chilla,

(12:46):
that bus doesn't come back, so obviously everyone freaks out
pretty quickly. An entire school bus full of kids and
a very trusted h man about town like people. You know,
it's a small town. People knew ed Ray and he
was a good guy by all accounts. Um, they were
all missing. So uh. The very first thing that happens
is they locate the school bus, which have been hidden

(13:08):
um and some with some bamboo and camouflage. But they
did find the bus right away, which, you know, on
one hand, that's good because they have a lead. On
the other hand, that just sends this thing into the
stratosphere as far as panic goes, because where are these kids? Yeah,
and I saw also that the bus had basically no
clues on it whatsoever. So it's like, we found the bus,

(13:29):
but that doesn't help at all. Um, So yeah, I'm
sure they were panicked by that. So um. It became
pretty clear pretty early on that the child Chilla 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. Um,

(13:52):
they brought uh, 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. Um. I
saw somewhere Chuck that like this is during the bi centennial,
and the bi centennial has just been going on and
going on and going on, and there was still by
centennial stuff going on, and this stopped it, like this kidnapping,

(14:15):
news of kidnapping stopped the bi centennial celebration. Dennis Check.
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. Um. The media descended upon chow Chilla like
super fast, and because it's the media, you start getting

(14:38):
these these terrible stories about like well maybe because you know,
they've never called Zodiac and this was just six or
seven years I think after the final uh 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. Um, any tip that came in they had
to follow. There's a chew on the side of the road,

(15:00):
so they have to track down that tip. Um. There
was a novel in ninety eight called The Day the
Children Vanished where the gang of people abductive bus load
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. Uh, so there were you know, it

(15:20):
was I don't know if I was to describe it
as a panic because the FBI was on the scene
in the state, uh, California Bureau and 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

(15:42):
to go on. There were there They were just dead
ends left and right. Um, 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 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 um, this is

(16:05):
where news would first be broken. And I think the
media probably hung around there too, so um, 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. Um. And so it was really
kind of surprising when all of a sudden, um, at
about uh, I think about eight pm the next night,

(16:27):
Saturday night, so the kids have been gone for almost
uh thet about thirty hours, thirty two hours something like
that at this point, thirty two 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

(16:50):
who just present themselves to a security guard at the
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 fined,
so why is it really a story. It's a story
because as we'll see, the trauma that they suffered emotionally,

(17:13):
and um, how it went down in who these people were,
who kidnapped them. But before we get to those dumb dumbs, Um,
let's talk about the escape. Uh, they were down there
about twelve 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,

(17:33):
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, Um, the immediate history and aftermath. Uh,
ed Ray saved the day because he was the only
adult there, so obviously he was the one that broke

(17:55):
those kids out of there. Um. Years later, you know,
we mentioned Mike Marshall, the fourth teen year old that
wasn't supposed to be on that bus, and he was
far and away the oldest kid there and the most
capable to help. Years later, after a while of this
story of ed Ray, he finally came out and said, oh,
you know, Ed Ray is a good guy. I want
to disparage him, but like it was my idea and

(18:18):
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

(18:39):
like he even felt bad for saying so. So I
think that Mike Marshall in fact did lead the charge
to escape. Well. His his account was corroborated by another
guy named Larry Park who wrote a book called The
chow Chillas School Bus Kidnapping Cole and Why Me. And
I don't know if he corroborated in that or in

(18:59):
an interview you later on, but um, 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 live the rest of his life,
he stayed in chow Chilla. Most of those people kids
who've been kidnapped with them stayed in Chowchilla. When he
was dying, those same kids as adults now came and

(19:21):
visited him at his his bedside and say goodbye. Um,
there's plenty of opportunity for you know, a little town
to start talking, you know, whispers and that kind of thing,
and that doesn't seem to have happened. He seems to
have died considered a hero as well. So my take
on a Chuck is that he may have been a
gloom and doom about their prospects to begin with. And

(19:44):
maybe it really was um Mike Marshall who said, no,
we need to we need to try to get out
of here. But even Mike Marshall said after a while,
once Mike Marshall started to try, Ed Ray joined in
and started helping, and that they might not have been
able to Yeah, they might not have been able to
get out had a grown man not in helping them.
Like push against this, totally agree. I think we're I
think we park our cars in the same garage here. Yeah,

(20:06):
look at them. Uh so here's how they got out.
They took those mattresses and stacked them up, and they
took apart one of the 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 have done

(20:26):
as they put um sort of 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, uh, this escape hatch. But they were able
after hours and hours to finally kind of use that

(20:48):
wood to pry open just enough to where they see
starlight and dirt leaking in, and with the help of
Ed Ray and 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 Edray was really worried.

(21:08):
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, so there was a good chance
in their minds that they were going to poke through
and just be shot on site, so they were worried
about that, and luckily, when Mike Marshall poked his head up,
he saw that there was no one around. There's nobody

(21:29):
guarding it. They it turned out that they had long
since left UM and that so Mike Marshall had Edray
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

(21:50):
Marshall would be able to run away through the woods
and get help UM. But it turned out the kidnappers
weren't there and 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

(22:12):
made it back to chow Chilla that they had all
been found safe and they were all alive and generally unharmed,
and UM ed Ray was basically automatically hailed as a hero. Uh.
Carl Marl Karl Maldon 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

(22:35):
out this was uh, thirty six hours from beginning to end.
But these kids were I didn't know what was going
on above ground. They were hot, they were you know,
stripping down to their underwear. Carl Maldon was in his
underwear even in the movie. Uh. They were running out
of food and water. So as a five to fourteen

(22:58):
year old, I mean, Ed Ray was in hysterics. You're
you think you're gonna die down there. So it may
not have been you know, 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 and daring to escape, not knowing if they were
all of a sudden that van was going to come

(23:19):
speeding down the road. After like, it took a while
until they felt safe, I think, and then on top
of that, Chuck you'd said it kind of earlier, but
I think it really bears repeating. They were really worried
that the roof of this thing was going to cave in.
Four ft of dirt on top of a moving van
roof that had been in the in the perpetrator's defense

(23:39):
had been reinforced with lumber, but not very well. Um,
that's a lot of weight hanging 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 afterwards, that roof was in the process
of caving in. Yeah, there was very nerve wracking. Of course,

(24:04):
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
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 the FBI, the
sheriff everybody's um interviewing them this is ours is more

(24:26):
hours for the parents back in child Chilla having to wait. Uh.
And then there was a 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 will factor in

(24:47):
a second. Um, they the greyhound bus lines donated that
bus ride, which is worth mentioning. Um, I guess the
FBI donated their time. Who knows now they get bad.
But there was a 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

(25:08):
I just thought it was cool. There was a greyhound
bus that rolled up with everybody inside and they got
off and they're like, I'm never getting on one of
those again. Well they did kind of wonder. I was like,
maybe we should send like a few are not even Vans'
send twelve cars, no buses, no vans. Mm hmm, that's
what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, I get what you're saying.

(25:29):
We're just and of course the kids got good at Disneyland.
That was a big one. You gonna 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. Yeah, they had
a huge feast. I saw that um ed ray one

(25:51):
of vacation. Uh, that he appeared on Hollywood Squares, which
is that's peaks, that's peak exposure in the mid and Chuck.
There's one other little fact that we have to say
about this that Robert Goulay recorded a song called the
Ballad of Chow Chill Ray. It's so obscure it is

(26:13):
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, but I recommend the
SoundCloud Gooley version. It is uh. It is a product
of the nineteen seventies in every way. It's unlistenable. I

(26:36):
made it through most of it. Did you make it
through all of it? I made it through most of it,
then skipped to the end. 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 kids jumping off of the to touch a Hatchie
bridge or whatever. Not touch ATCHI what was it? Billy

(26:58):
Joe McAllister like they wrote these songs in the seventies,
he is weird sort of folk story song. Yeah, but not.
I mean a ballad can be like a love song,
and these were like folk stories. I thought a ballad
went it was like told the story. Maybe, but I
think the ballads as love songs, sure, but a love

(27:19):
story like the Air Supply wrote ballads, they didn't write
songs about folky rose jumping off of bridges. You know
they should have Well, I don't know. There's really nothing
Air Supply could have done to have improved their game.
They were pretty much sound great. Yeah. One of the
best concerts I ever saw in my life was Air

(27:39):
Supply in Jacksonville, Florida. It's amazing. It was um, it
was amazing. I said it before I'll say again. It
was like the fabric of reality was coming apart at
the themes and we were right right there to witness it.
It was so cool. I didn't know you took ecstasy
at that. I didn't. That was what's what's so significant

(28:02):
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.
Was great to hear all those songs and see them live.
It was the chemistry between the two dudes. Um, they
still got it after all these years. Is really neat
to see. Um. And but what really kind of made

(28:26):
it unreal was it was almost had the same feeling
as like a really energetic tent revival. Like people were
wandering down the aisles, like like you could tell they
were moving not necessarily of their own will, they were
being drawn towards the stage. It was. It was bizarre.

(28:46):
It was so cool to see people were just out
of their minds at this Air Supply show. And and
like we're 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
or it was just a neat, neat show. I'll never
forget it ever. Amazing. So go see Air Supply and

(29:06):
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 the guy's voice still is a d as
good as it was in the seventies, which is probably.
I was watching some bids the other day, live VIDs
of them recently. It's a good thing to do. Sit around,

(29:28):
but definitely check out the song on SoundCloud and listen
to as much of it as you can. You won't
make it all the way through the Ballad of chowd
Chiller Ray. It's so bad. Now I understand why Elvis
would shoot the TV whenever Robert Goolay came on. It
was because of that, because that's is that why I
shot the TVs? Yeah, for some apparently no one knows why.

(29:51):
But whenever Robert Boley would come on, he would shoot
his TV. Sometimes he gets really mad and shoot his
toaster or his oven or whatever, but he would shoot
the TV. That's pretty good, alright. So these kidnappers, getting
back to the story of the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping,
these guys were three real low rent scumbags who were

(30:14):
didn't have opinion to their name, and we're 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, there were three rich white kids. One
specifically literal trust fund kid. Uh, he was the ringleader.

(30:35):
We're talking about fred Woods James Schoenfeld, who were twenty four,
and then james younger brother, Richard, who was twenty two.
But fred Woods, Frederick new Hollwoods the fourth was the ringleader.
And uh, the I guess you could call it the
brains if there was a brain behind us. But he
came from a long line of California money. His Uh.

(31:00):
One of his ancestors was Henry Mayo knew All, who
came in the eighteen fifties to California, part of Santa
Clarita's New All, California named for him. They made a
ton of money in real estate speculation and railroads and
then eventually oil and ranching and had a uh several
hundred million dollar family fortune. Yeah. I read that they

(31:24):
made about three d 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 they remember their roots like

(31:45):
their roots were just gob smacking lee. 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
he had trouble um living up to his father's expectations
for him. Um but do nothing blue blood yea Um,

(32:08):
but that his his dad's approval meant a lot to him.
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 that he's described

(32:29):
as a loser in the headline. 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 a he was.
He was the product of wealthy, neglectful parents from what
I can tell, and also an education system that seems

(32:51):
to have failed him at least in the grammar portion. Yeah,
we'll get to that. Uh. He was didn't have a
lot of friends. He never really had a ton of girlfriends.
Um he which is ironic because he ended up being
married four times, which we'll get to. Uh. He lived
in a converted apartment in an outbuilding on the nearly

(33:12):
eighty acre estate uh in uh Portla Valley, where his
grandmother lived and his parents lived. Even though they were
traveling by themselves usually. Uh. 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. Uh.
And he was into cars. He collected cars with his

(33:33):
money the um the ringleader did. He had dozens and
dozens of cars. His buddy James, who helped him. He
was rich to not that kind of rich, but his parents.
His dad was a pediatrist, so they had doctor money.
So they were doing pretty well as well. Uh. And
they got into various businesses together. They had a used
car business together. They never did super well, it seemed like,

(33:56):
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 are these rich kids who weren't

(34:16):
paid attention to that could do whatever they wanted and
ended up getting into trouble. He he had. Fred had
designs on being a film producer, and part of the
concept for this kidnapping was the school bus kidnapping in
the movie Dirty Harry, and he said, hey, this would
make a great movie too, which we'll get to sort

(34:37):
of the bow tie on that later on. But he
and James ended up losing some money, about thirty 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 Jones just situation. Yeah,

(34:58):
that's exactly right. You know, Fred was born into it,
and I think took money largely for granted, but um
James and 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 there
their dad was punching above his weight class socioeconomically in
the area that they moved to, and his son's kind

(35:20):
of suffered for it because they fell out of place
because they just they just did not have anywhere near
the kind of wealth that their 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. I mean, I
think part of it had to do with that thirty
grand in debt, but I think part of it, dude,

(35:41):
as he was a board rich kid in some ways
like that may have been the reason. So yeah, I
also yeah, and UM also I have the impression that UM,
that that James and Rick Shonfeld were um a lot
more moral than fred Wood was. Apparently in his journal,

(36:01):
James wrote at the time that he was worried he
was becoming immoral as they were like really planning this um,
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, UM,
who had no qualms about this whole thing. He convinced
them to give up their qualms as well. Yeah. I

(36:24):
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 State of
California has a five billion dollar budget surplus, and we're
not gonna get money kidnapping a kid or even twenty
six kids um from their parents for their parents to

(36:48):
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 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 there was nobody was going

(37:08):
to get hurt. They knew that they weren't going to
physically hurt those kids. They knew that California had a
budget surplus. But even more than that, um 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 million dollars from the
state that the state didn't really need uh, and that

(37:31):
nobody was going to get hurt, and then that calculation
it really kind of reveals like how much they did
um 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,

(37:53):
And I think that's one of the things that because
that they 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 the news teams
in were like following this guy around in a parking

(38:16):
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, uh, 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 and and the end

(38:39):
result was trauma and PTSD. Yeah, and the reason it
did and it had the impact him part of the
problem for child Chill apparently, chaud Chill. It was just
transformed immediately. Like you know when when if you're the
victim of a crime, you you wonder like why why me?
Especially a random crime. And this is a random crime
perpetrated on a whole town like chad Chill. It was

(39:00):
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 with chow Chilla. What
the problem was. They didn't care about the people of

(39:21):
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 um 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

(39:44):
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
and they're like fifties, um, that that have never really
been resolved or worked out because the town just tried
to carry on as if it never happened basically from

(40:04):
the get go. Oh yeah, I mean some of them
got had very hard luck stories getting into drugs, eventually
getting better, uh 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.

(40:25):
I imagine if you're five years old, um, you're not
going to remember as much 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. Um.
The way these guys got caught is well, I guess
let's tell a little bit of that story. During the investigation,

(40:47):
one thing they found in him and we'll put this
in the dumb column on the property of where where
Fred lived. They found a plan written out that said
at the top in ye, I think it kidnapping. Plan
didn't even capitalize the peak. Yeah, they wrote it out

(41:08):
in pin and they had a lot of ideas. They
wanted to buy an X ray machine. I think they
did to to uh two 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

(41:31):
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, 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

(41:54):
to that. They left a ransom note. Yeah, and they
had a lot of like scratch out and misspellings, and
apparently it referred to Fred by name in the ransom
notes that they were planned to give to the authorities.
Like really they were trying to throw the authorities. They
were trying to sniff the authorities off the case, I

(42:14):
guess by posing or presenting themselves as a Satanic group.
And they said that their their name was Beal's abub
but they misspelled beals abub um. They spelled b E
A L s A b u b um, which is
just offensive to anybody who knows how to spell that word. Um.

(42:36):
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. Uh. In the aftermath of the kidnapping,
from when they buried the kids too, when they left,
the plan was called the Chowchilla Police Department, demand your

(42:56):
five million dollar ransom. But the child Chilla phone system
was very small, and there were obviously when he kidnapped
twenty six 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. I think you said. The

(43:19):
donation from the phone company. They literally had to go
in and install like dozens of phone lines just so
that FBI could operate effectively. Yeah, so they never what
did these guys do. Right afterwards, when they couldn't get through,
they decided they needed to scram that the jig was
up and they needed part ways, and they did. Fred

(43:40):
um Woods was wildey enough to have come up with
a passport um with the name Ralph Snyder, and he
traveled successfully to British Columbia, I think Vancouver under that
fake passport. But then when he was there, he started
writing to people. He had a friend who was I
think in film school and said, hey, you should turn

(44:02):
this into a whole um, like a whole whole movie.
He said, he just k right, just give me some
of them the box office, I guess. But he said,
but be fair, he said, be fair, but he spelled
he spelled the F A R E. Yeah, So, um,
that's that's I'm sorry, it's just annoying me to no ends. Yeah,

(44:25):
but um. But then he signed the letter or sent
it as Ralph Snyder. He sent it as his his alias.
So the cops, the FBI tracked him like within days
to um Vancouver and got the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
to arrest him. I wonder he knew the guy though
in film school. I wonder if this guy was like,
who is this, It's Ralph Snyder or if he put

(44:48):
in parentheses, that's my alias. This is friend. Don't tell
the FBI, but he misspelled FBI. So Rick, the younger Schoenfeld,
for his part, almost immediately confessed. Uh, he got home
after the three of them met up and then split up.

(45:10):
I went home and told his dad what he did.
His dad because they had money again as a pediatrists
got him a lawyer too sweet. And so that's why
we don't know exactly. That's one reason we don't know
exactly what happened in those first like, you know, hours afterwards,
because the lawyer kind of kept that all quiet. Although
it did see a news report that said they took naps.

(45:31):
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 Wood's dad owned and where Fred Woods worked,
and the quarry security guards said when they were interviewed, said, well, yeah,
last week Fred and two other guys dug a big

(45:54):
hole out there. Uh you know a few months before
this happened. Um, like h I don't know, like a
a moving van size hole, right, but the hole's gone now,
so who cares exactly? Um? So Rick turned himself in. Uh,
Fred got caught. James made attempts to cross the border
into Canada himself, but apparently the Canadian authorities considered him

(46:19):
a way too nervous, be way too vague about what
he planned to do in Canada, and see in possession
of way too many guns to be led in the country,
and apparently 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

(46:40):
bulletin on his license plate, he was picked up before
he could turn himself in. Right, So they're 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, all right, So they were collected. Yeah,

(47:41):
they were collected, and of course had their day in
court and the big um, the big thing that happened
in court was was whether or not these guys um
committed bodily harm on these children, because if you committed
bodily harm, then you have a sentence of life without
a possible sentence a life without parole. If there was

(48:01):
no bodily harm, then you could have life with parole. Uh.
They ruled that they did suffer bodily harm. So Uh,
they had stomach trouble, they had nosebleeds, some of the
kids fainted, Uh, and that that counted. But in and
appeals court reverse that ruling said that is not bodily harm,

(48:21):
and that made them eligible for parole. Uh. And since then,
like I said earlier, the two showing Fell brothers have
been released in I think like long after. Some observers
who were involved in the case, I can think that
they should have been paroled, like especially Richard shown felt

(48:44):
he was twenty two at the time. He was basically there.
I saw it described as along for the ride. Um again,
an eagle scout. He probably became an eagle scout three
or four years before this happened. Um. And he uh
he spent um thirty nine years in prison. Yeah, I

(49:07):
guess so when or he got out in twelve Yeah, okay, Yeah,
So Uh yeah, about thirty seven years in prison of
his life 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. Um.
And a lot of other people said, yeah, and if

(49:28):
you're gonna let Richard schoon Felt out, you should really
probably take another look at James Schoenfeldt too, because yeah,
he was more involved than his brother, Um, 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 paroles. Yeah, I mean the
other two were model prisoners. Uh. And they also had uh,

(49:51):
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 he advocated for parole. Uh. 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,

(50:12):
you're not supposed to to run businesses from prison, but
he ran a gold mine. He ran a used car business,
he ran a Christmas tree farm. Uh. He got married
a few times. The reason he was finally outed was
he was running the Christmas Tree Farm and Michael Bianci,
he was managing that business, got injured on the job

(50:32):
and Wood said, I'm not gonna help pay for the surgery.
So bank he 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
seventeen times so far, and he's up next in and

(50:56):
a lot of people think he might not, he might
never be ruled. Actually, well, he bought a mansion in Nipomo, California,
thirty miles from the prison that no one lives at.
Uh He did have a civil lawsuit in twenty sixteen
where he had to pay out money to the victims
that was described as uh quote enough to pay for

(51:19):
some serious therapy, but not enough to buy a house.
Which is significant too, because they did rule. An appeals
court ruled the night that they didn't inflict bodily harm.
But I wonder if that same appeals court would come
to the to that conclusion. In one based on interviews
with some of the people who were abducted, like like

(51:41):
Jennifer Brown High who I mentioned earlier, who's not I
think emotional harm would play in these days, and there
was definitely emotional harm inflicted. You talked about Larry Park
who was addicted to methane crack before he finally found
forgiveness and actually went and met all with all three
of the perpetrators and shook their hands and told him

(52:01):
he forgave him and apparently changed his own life like that,
If you haven't listened to and said, hey, I can
make you a heck of a deal on a used van. Yeah, no,
Fred Woard took his watch when he shook his hand.
Well I was, I was kidding, but he Uh. My
final little factoid is that that used Carlat had those
two vans and he held onto those because he thought

(52:22):
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 that if that's the crown jewel of
your inventory on Nick Cage bought him right, uh, And
then you can go watch that movie from lifetime. UH

(52:42):
called They've taken our children if you want to see
Karl Malden in his underwear. Apparently, bad movie, bad song.
I read also that Chowchilla residents do not care for
that movie Chuck because it was shot in Kansas, and
anyone who knows anything about the San Joaquin Valley knows
that Kansas is a poor stand in for the at
So they're a little turned off by that movie from
what I understand. And then last thing I want to

(53:05):
shout out um Caleb Horton, who wrote an article on
Vox very in depth one called the Ballad of the
chow chillip Bus Kidnapping is pretty good. Oh that's a
good one. Yeah, it is all right, all right, the article,
not the song. No, no, okay, it's an article, an

(53:26):
article I got. Okay, Well, since we had we worked
out them misunderstanding everybody. That means it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this. Uh, let me see. How about
racist ticketing. In our episode on jaywalking, we talked about
people of uh and the black and Hispanic communities are

(53:48):
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 and white
drivers his entry issue In Chicago when they installed traffic cameras,
they found that the cameras, despite being raced neutral, still
gave more tickets to black and Hispanic drivers, so of

(54:09):
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 few of those fewer of those things,
and the result would cars would be naturally would tend
to drive faster in poorer neighborhoods. Since black and Hispanic

(54:31):
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, 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. I

(54:52):
thought it was really interesting, uh and I agree. Thanks
for sending that In who was it again? Valerie, Mates
of an Ar 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. Um so you can
wrap them up, spank them on the bottom, and send
them off via email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio

(55:14):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
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