Kidnapping of Chowchilla
On July 15, 1976 , the driver of a school bus and 26 children between the ages of 5 and 14 were kidnapped in Chowchilla, California . The three kidnappers kept their victims in a truck trailer that they had buried in an open pit near Livermore . The purpose of the kidnapping was to extort ransom money . After 16 hours underground, the victims were able to free themselves. The perpetrators, the son of the owner of the mine and two of his friends, were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Sequence of events
At around 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 15, 1976, school bus driver Frank Edward Ray was driving 26 students from Dairyland Elementary School back home from a trip to the swimming pool when a delivery truck blocked the road in front of the bus. Ray stopped the bus, which was then kidnapped by three armed and masked men. One of the men pointed a gun at Ray while another drove the bus and the third followed them in the van.
The kidnappers hid the bus in the dry bed of the Berenda Slough, a shallow tributary of the Chowchilla River , where a second van had already been parked. In both of the perpetrators' vehicles, the rear windows were painted black and the interiors were reinforced. The victims were herded into the two delivery trucks at gunpoint and then driven around for 11 hours before being taken to a quarry near Livermore. There, the kidnappers forced them to climb down a ladder into a truck trailer that was buried there and that they had equipped with some food, water and mattresses.
The trapped kidnap victims finally piled the mattresses on top of each other so that some of them could reach the hatch in the roof of the vehicle, which had been covered with a heavy sheet of metal and additionally weighted down with two industrial batteries. After several hours, Ray and one of the students managed to wedge the door with a piece of wood and move the batteries. They then dug up the rubble blocking the entrance. Sixteen hours after they were locked in the buried truck, the group managed to break free.
It was not until five months after the abduction that the children were given a psychological examination for their trauma .
Arrests and convictions
Frederick Newhall Woods IV, 24, the son of the owner of the open pit mine in which the hiding place was buried, and two of his friends, brothers James and Richard Schoenfeld, pleaded guilty to the kidnapping after a two-week investigation and manhunt. They were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Richard Schoenfeld was released from prison in 2012, his brother James in 2015. Woods repeatedly requested early release , but these were always denied, most recently in October 2019.
Film adaptations
In 1993 the kidnapping was filmed under the title School Trip Without Return . Karl Malden played his last role in it.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer: Chowchilla nightmares / 25 years later, kidnap victims still struggling to forget past. July 15, 2001, accessed May 14, 2020 .
- ↑ a b Chowchilla bus kidnapping survivor: "I felt like I was an animal going to the slaughterhouse". Retrieved May 14, 2020 (English).
- ↑ Silvia Schneider, Jürgen Margraf: Textbook of behavior therapy: Volume 3: Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence, Springer Science & Business Media, 2009, p. 610 [1]
- ↑ Paroled Chowchilla school bus kidnapper living in Mountain View. In: The Mercury News. June 22, 2012, Retrieved May 14, 2020 (American English).
- ↑ School trip without return
- ↑ Trivia