The largest mass kidnapping in US
history is also one of the most bizarre kidnapping in US history. It
was Thursday, July 15, 1976 at around 4 p.m., part time school bus driver and
full time farmer Frank Edward "Ed" Ray was driving 26 students,
ranging in age from 5 to 14, from the Dairyland Elementary School home from a
summer class trip to the Chowchilla fairgrounds swimming pool.
A white van stopped in the road. Ray slowed down to
see if it was someone with engine trouble. When he came to a complete stop, three
young men with guns jumped out of the van and commandeered the bus and drove it
into a dry canal bottom, where another van was waiting.
“Edward (Ray)” recalled Jennifer Brown Hyde “kept
telling his kids just be quiet, sit down, do what they say. … Edward was
speaking in a harsh tone, and that normally was not the Edward that we knew and
loved.”
Years later Ed Ray recalled that the youngest child on the bus, Monica Ardery,
asked one of the gunmen who had covered his face in pantyhose that left the legs
hanging alongside his head like ears, if he was the Easter Bunny.
The children
and the driver were hurried into the back of the two vans whose windows had
been painted black, and driven for 11 hours, without food, water or a rest
stop. Most of the young children vomited from the ride. The older children tried
to muster the younger ones by leading sing-alongs.
At 3:30 in the morning, the vans arrived at a rock
quarry in Livermore California about 100 from Chowchilla were they were forced
to jump from the bus to the vans so that they would not leave behind any
footprints. With guns drawn the kidnappers made each child give their names and
a piece of clothing to them and were then and herded down a ladder into a buried,
dark moving van. One guy asked us our
name. We told it to him.” Jennifer Brown Hyde said years later “One guy asked
us our age. And we told him our age. And then I looked. They had a wooden
ladder down into a hole in the ground. … And then I remember them telling me
you need to climb down there. You need to go down there. And I thought,
"Oh, they're sending us to hell.” I
didn't know where we were going.”
The walls of the van were covered with filthy ty mattresses
and a single containers of water. The air inside the van was smelled of putrid
white dirt and rocks and it was hot made even hotter when all of the children
and the driver were inside. Two small air tubes allowed in a small amount of
fresh air.
In the meantime, parents were worried when their
children didn’t arrive home. After two hours, they were terrified. Parents
began helping the police retrace the school buses route, crisscrossing dozens
of rural roads. Just before sunset, a police pilot spotted the empty bus about
seven miles outside Chowchilla, hidden in the dry riverbed. The tire
impressions found in the sand led straight to the front door of the bus.
The local Sheriff, Ed Bates knew immediately that the children had become the victims of a
brazen and bizarre, mass kidnapping. “I called the governor.” Bates said “I
said, "I need some help down here. I had the parents all assembled there
in the fire station. … Well, you could just look at their faces, and the
anxiety and the fear was there. I called the FBI. … And all of a sudden, I have
30 FBI agents there.”
Two hours away, when all of the children were down inside
the moving van, the three gunmen started shoveling dirt over the roof. Children
screamed in terror and Ed Ray was certain the thin tin roof would cave in under
the weight of the dirt.
Larry Park, one of the older kidnapped children said “Ed
Ray and Mike Marshall they looked at every corner, every wall … for an escape
route. They got underneath the manhole cover and pushed up on it. And they
couldn't move it. So, Ed Ray determined that it was time for everyone to get
some rest. The minutes and hours ticked by. It would be silent and then
somebody would bust out crying and the hole would just erupt. Everybody's
crying.
There was this one boy. … And he kept kicking blocks
out from underneath the 4x4 pillars. And so, the roof of the van was starting
to cave in. The seams were breaking. Dust was flowing through. And I remember
children just screaming and crying. … The sides of the van were bowing in. … I
knew that I was going to die. I knew it. So, Ed Ray and Mike Marshall … took a
bunch of these mattresses that we were laying on and they stacked them on top
of each other right underneath the manhole cover. And I'm giving it everything
I got, and all the kids are cheering me on. You know, "Come on Mike, you
can do it. You can do it." And then all of a sudden, they said, "It
moved, it moved."
Two heavy iron and steel tractor batteries were
holding down the plate. After a few hours, they ere able to move the batteries.
Once the manhole cover was moved, that box was just big enough for Michael Marshall
to stand in. “Edward (Rau) squeezes me through this half-foot hole. I get on
top of it and I start pounding on this box. Start hitting and pounding, hitting
and pounding. None of us knew if when we got out, they were just going to be
standing there with shotguns at our head and stuff, so we were kind of … pretty
scared."
Rock quarry in Livermore, Calif., where kidnapped children and their bus driver were held prisoner. The circle in upper left locates the area where the captives were buried in a trailer.
Larry Park another ten boy said “Then suddenly this
ray of sunlight [cries]. This ray of sunlight came down into the opening. And it
was catching the dust. And the dust particles looked like a bunch of shooting
stars. … There was this airflow that came out of the van and I knew we were
free.”
Michael Marshall continued “And I stuck my head out
and … I didn't see anybody. … I could see we were in the hills we were in big
trees.”
It was approximately 8 p.m
Jennifer Brown Hyde recalled “It looked totally like
a sand dune. There was no way to know that there was anything below. There was
no way to know that we were in there. … It was totally camouflaged. We all just scurried like a bunch of little mice.
And we heard some noises, machinery and equipment. And then we thought,
"Oh my God. What if it's them? What if we're going right to the men that
took us? We started walking toward the equipment that we heard. … We saw
conveyor belts and excavators and large machinery … It looked like "The
Flintstones." … And all these men with hard hats came to us and looked at
us like, "Who are you?" … And I remember Edward saying, "We're
from Chowchilla. And we're lost."
They had been underground for 16 hours.
When police arrived they transported the kids to the
closest place that could hold them — the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center, a
local jail. Jennifer Brown Hyde said “I remember going in in the bus and you
could see the prison wire. … And you thought well, "they're taking us into
jail. They took us into what looked like classrooms. … They brought us apples
and soda. They had these coveralls. … And all these little kids go into 'em and
we had to roll the pants about 10 feet. And we rolled the arms up and we were
all sitting there — some of 'em didn't roll our arms up and we sitting there
flapping our arms. We said, "Hey we can fly!?"
The kidnappers tried to call in their demands for the
children’s safe release, they wanted $5,000,000 in cash in small bills, but the
phone lines to the Chowchilla Police Department were jammed by calls from the children’s
families the media and gawkers. Exhausted, the gunmen fell asleep. When they
awoke later that night, the news was reporting that the children had escaped and
were safe.
The police reasoned that who ever owned the quarry would have some
answers and they were right. The quarry owner's son, 24-year-old Frederick
Newhall Woods IV, came under suspicion as one of the people who had keys to the
quarry and enough access to have buried the moving truck there. A warrant was
executed on the estate of Woods' father, and there police recovered one of the
guns used in the kidnapping as well as a draft of a ransom note.
Police also learned that two of Woods friends,
brothers James and Richard Schoenfeld (aged 24 and 22 respectively) sons of a
wealthy Menlo Park podiatrist, had
previous conviction for grand theft auto and were on probation. When the cops
went to round them up, they learned that the brothers and Woods had fled.
Richard Schoenfeld voluntarily turned himself in eight
days after the kidnapping. His brother James was captured in Menlo Park,
California, and Woods was picked up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada a
few hours later.
Woods and the Schoenfeld’s were tried and convicted and
sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, which meant nothing. Richard
Schoenfeld was released in 2012 and James Schoenfeld was paroled on August 7,
2015. Woods, a chronic problem in prison, was denied parole for the 19th time
in 2019.
In 2016 it was learned that Woods, the ring leader in
the kidnapping, had been running several
businesses, including a gold mine and a car dealership, from behind bars, from
inherited family money left in a trust fund which came to about $100 million.
Not only had earned a fortune behind bars, he had also married three times and bought
a mansion about 30 minutes away from the prison.
His next parole hearing is in 2024. Prosecutor Jill
Klinge said “Fred Woods' behavior in prison is what keeps him in prison. He has
repeatedly been caught with pornography and cell phones in prison. And that's
not allowed. … And one of the best indicators of an inability to obey the laws
in society is that you can't obey the rules in prison”
Later that year, the twenty-five surviving kidnapped
children 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." It was a light joke at best. All of the kidnapped children spent
their lives suffering from panic attacks and nightmares. Most of them continue
to report trauma symptoms.
