Entführung von Chowchilla

The 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping occurred in Chowchilla, California, on July 15, 1976, when kidnappers abducted 26 children and their adult driver from their school bus and imprisoned them in a buried truck. The driver, Frank Edward "Ed" Ray, was able to free the children, and the kidnappers were caught and convicted.

Kidnapping and escape

Chowchilla was launched into national headlines on July 15, 1976, when 26 children and an adult bus driver were kidnapped from their bus. The kidnappers hid the bus in a drainage slough, and drove the children and bus driver around in two vans for 11 hours before forcing them to climb into a hole in the ground. After passing through the hole, the children and their driver found themselves trapped in the interior of a buried moving van. Although they did not know it, their place of confinement was in a quarry located in Livermore, California.

Local farmer and part-time bus driver Ed Ray, with help from some of the boys, stacked the 14 mattresses that were in the van. This enabled some of the older children to reach the opening at the top of the truck, which had been covered with a metal lid and weighed down with two 100-pound industrial batteries. They wedged the lid open with a stick, Ray moved the batteries, and then they removed the remainder of the debris blocking the entrance. After 16 hours underground, they emerged and walked to the guard shack at the entrance to the quarry. The guard alerted the authorities, all the victims were pronounced in good condition, and they returned home to find that the mass media had descended on the town.

Investigation and arrests

Ray was able to remember the license plate number of one vehicle under hypnosis, which led to the capture of the kidnappers as they attempted to flee to Canada. A rough draft of a ransom note was found at the house of the owner of the quarry. The owner's son, Frederick Newhall Woods, IV, and two friends, Richard and James Schoenfeld, were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

After the children were recovered, it was observed that some circumstances of the abduction corresponded to details in "The Day the Children Vanished", a story written by Hugh Pentecost that had been published in the 1969 fiction anthology Alfred Hitchcock's Daring Detectives. A copy of this book was in the Chowchilla public library; police theorized that this was the real-life kidnappers' inspiration.

Incarceration

After being denied parole 20 times, one of the three kidnappers, Richard Schoenfeld, was deemed suitable for parole by the California Board on Parole Hearings on October 30, 2008. Richard Shoenfeld was released on June 20, 2012 and is living with his mother in a condominium complex in Mountain View, California.

James Schoenfeld has been denied parole 16 times. Frederick Woods was denied parole for the 12th time on January 5, 2009, and will be eligible again in 2012.

Bus driver

Frank Edward "Ed" Ray (February 26, 1921 – May 17, 2012) graduated from Chowchilla High School in 1940. After working on a small farm, Ray began driving a bus in the early 1950s. After the kidnapping, the town celebrated Ed Ray and Children’s Day with a parade, and governor Jerry Brown awarded Ray a 1976 California School Employees Association citation for outstanding community service. Ray died at a Chowchilla nursing home of cirrhosis of the liver, at the age of 91. In the days before he died, he was visited by many of the schoolchildren whom he helped save.

After Effects

Three years after the kidnapping, a study of 23 of the children by Dr. Lenore C. Terr of UC San Francisco concluded that they had been traumatized by the ordeal, resulting in panic attacks, nightmares of kidnappings leading to their deaths, and personality changes. Twenty of the children were afraid of being kidnapped again, and 21 were afraid of such things as "cars, the dark, the wind, the kitchen, mice, dogs and hippies." Eighteen months after the kidnapping, one of the older male victims shot a Japanese tourist with a BB gun when the tourists car broke down in front of his home in what Dr. Terr described as "a dangerously inappropriate episode of (his need for) heroism."

Media adaptations

The ordeal was dramatized in the 1993 ABC-TV movie They've Taken Our Children: The Chowchilla Kidnapping (shown in the UK as Vanished Without a Trace) starring Karl Malden as Ray. Woods subsequently sued the network, alleging their portrayal of him was false and misleading, but the case was dismissed.

Interviews with many of the children, now adults, as well as the bus driver, have been broadcast on MSNBC.

The TV series Without a Trace ran an episode called "The Bus" in which a bus full of children is hijacked for ransom in a manner similar to the Chowchilla incident.

External links

• The Chowchilla kidnapping via Tru TV
• Chowchilla's History: 1976 Bus Kidnapping via City of Chowchilla website