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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

The largest mass kidnapping in US history




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.