Speaker 1: Back in nineteen seventy six, in Chowchilla, a little town
Speaker 1: smack dab in the middle of California, a school bus
Speaker 1: with twenty six children aboard was hijacked and the kids
Speaker 1: were held for ransom by men looking to make easy money.
Speaker 1: But man, was this anything but easy for everyone involved.
Speaker 1: What makes this case so famous, in addition to you
Speaker 1: know the kidnapping of twenty six children on their way
Speaker 1: home from school, is that the kids and the bus
Speaker 1: driver were buried alive while the kidnappers waited for the ransom.
Speaker 1: Why don't you join them by listening to this episode.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
Speaker 1: there's Charles w Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here and this
Speaker 1: is stuff you should know.
Speaker 2: You know what I've been singing for two days?
Speaker 1: Wheels on the bus, go on and around.
Speaker 2: No, that's pretty good, guess though, what donut don't don't
Speaker 2: no out no, no, Chowchilla. I can't get it out
Speaker 2: of my head, thet Godzilla song. Now, all I'm saying
Speaker 2: over and over is Chowchilla.
Speaker 1: That's a great song. Do you remember who played it?
Speaker 2: Was that, like Edgar Winner Johnny Winter.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think it's one of the Winners. Okay, that's my guess.
Speaker 1: Okay the Long Winters.
Speaker 2: Definitely not the Long Winters.
Speaker 1: Okay, So, Chuck, we're talking about a piece of Americana
Speaker 1: true crime history that I had no idea about, actually,
Speaker 1: and I noted though, because of the timing and because
Speaker 1: of the location. I hit up my beloved former hippie
Speaker 1: aunt who lived in San Francisco at the time and
Speaker 1: was raising kids and said, do you remember this? She said, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: I remember this big time that she had kids that
Speaker 1: were about to be bus riding agent. She was not
Speaker 1: very comfortable with this whole jam.
Speaker 2: Yeah it provided discomfort.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's one way to put it.
Speaker 2: So did you even say what the name of it was?
Speaker 1: No, it's the Chillis school bus kidnapping is what people
Speaker 1: usually refer to.
Speaker 2: It as, right, And I think this was a listener
Speaker 2: who sent this in. And I apologize because I'd usually
Speaker 2: make note of that so I can shout them out,
Speaker 2: but I did not do so in this case, so
Speaker 2: I missed. I know, boo hiss, But yeah, this was
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy six and still stands according to the sources,
Speaker 2: I saw as the largest domestic kidnapping in US history.
Speaker 1: So my aunt says, oh yeah.
Speaker 2: She also said she was not very into it.
Speaker 1: I was not very comfortable by that.
Speaker 2: It's very disappointing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the largest mass kidnapping for ransom. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: why that's a quality of fire, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I saw the same thing too that it
Speaker 1: still stands. And it was like the idea that the
Speaker 1: most of anything happened to this little town of Chowchilla
Speaker 1: in the San Joaquin Valley, about one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: miles southeast of San Francisco in and of itself is significant,
Speaker 1: but it was a really terrible like most of event
Speaker 1: that happened to this poor little town, as we'll see.
Speaker 2: All right, So should we just start on July fifteenth,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy six, Yes, all right, we'll paint a picture
Speaker 2: for you. You already mentioned where it was between Fresno
Speaker 2: and San Francisco, out in a part of California that
Speaker 2: had some very very small towns at the time. It's
Speaker 2: hard to imagine anywhere in California having forty six hundred
Speaker 2: people living there. But that was the case in the
Speaker 2: mid seventies in Chowchilla, And it was the next to
Speaker 2: the last day of summer school, and a bus was
Speaker 2: being driven after a because it was summer school, a
Speaker 2: little fun day trip to a swimming pool, driven by
Speaker 2: fifty five year old Ed Ray.
Speaker 1: Yeah, who was a farmer there in chaw Chill himself.
Speaker 1: Apparently he bailed hey like nobody's business. He was married
Speaker 1: to a woman named Odessa who was a bank teller
Speaker 1: at the Bank of America, and he was apparently quite
Speaker 1: happy being a farmer and then driving kids around on
Speaker 1: the school bus, because even after this he continued on
Speaker 1: for another dozen years as the school bus driver.
Speaker 2: That's right, he had only dropped off a few kids
Speaker 2: at this point, and there were nineteen girls and seven
Speaker 2: boys on board from five to fourteen, and notably the
Speaker 2: fourteen year old because he will factor in pretty heavily here.
Speaker 2: His name was Mike Marshall. He wasn't even supposed to
Speaker 2: be on that bus. He usually got picked up by
Speaker 2: his mom, but he got busted the night before with
Speaker 2: some beer and his mom said, your punishment, you got
Speaker 2: to ride that school bus home yep, tomorrow and after
Speaker 2: school or after the trip, he was like, I don't
Speaker 2: even know what bus to take because I don't do this.
Speaker 2: But he knew who Ray was, and so he went
Speaker 2: to ed Ray and said, hey, man, will you I
Speaker 2: don't know if this is my bus or not, Bill
Speaker 2: you take me home? And Edray is ed Ray, so
Speaker 2: he went sure, sureboard, so thank goodness he said that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So after that that third stop, there were twenty
Speaker 1: six kids and ed Ray on board. And ed Ray
Speaker 1: was continuing along his route and he turned on to
Speaker 1: a street called Avenue twenty one, and as he turned
Speaker 1: on to Avenue twenty one, ed Ray found that there
Speaker 1: was a white van blocking the road, and apparently he
Speaker 1: started to go around it, and then I guess thought
Speaker 1: the better of it, and I wanted to stop and
Speaker 1: see if they needed any help instead. And when he did,
Speaker 1: he realized very quickly that he was actually being hijacked,
Speaker 1: because when you see a man with a long gun
Speaker 1: and pantyhose on his head, you're probably being hijacked.
Speaker 2: That's right. The first thing he saw was this one
Speaker 2: guy who said open the door, and then he realized
Speaker 2: there were a couple of other guys, samem I think
Speaker 2: they had shotguns with the pantyhose, and they said, get
Speaker 2: in the back. We'll take over the driving from here.
Speaker 2: If you watched the movie, did you see any of that?
Speaker 1: No? No, I haven't yet.
Speaker 2: We'll get to it. Then there's a Lifetime movie that
Speaker 2: came out in the nineties. I think ninety three looks
Speaker 2: like it was made in eighty three somehow. That is
Speaker 2: on YouTube, and I highly recommend scrubbing through it. I
Speaker 2: wouldn't say watch the whole thing because I don't know
Speaker 2: if you'll be able to. But Carl Malden, yeah, play
Speaker 2: ed ray and I don't know if it's true to
Speaker 2: the story, but he gave them a lot of guff
Speaker 2: about getting out of that driver's seat in the movie.
Speaker 1: Oh really Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if that happened in real life or not.
Speaker 1: It's a Malden improv if I've ever heard one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, And I'm not getting out of my seat right.
Speaker 1: My feet hurt.
Speaker 2: So he eventually did, though, and they drove. They drove
Speaker 2: that bus followed by the van for a bit, and
Speaker 2: then eventually transferred those kids to that van and another
Speaker 2: identical van, and you know, they I think we should
Speaker 2: point out a few smart things these guys did along
Speaker 2: the way, because they mainly did dumb things. But the
Speaker 2: kidnappers did make them jump from the school bus to
Speaker 2: the van so they wouldn't leave footprints.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and these in these vans, they had all the
Speaker 1: kids and ed Ray in the vans now two vans,
Speaker 1: and they had kind of like deck these vans out.
Speaker 1: It was kind of a shoddy manner of adding plywood
Speaker 1: partitions to keep the kids from getting out from anybody
Speaker 1: being able to see. And I think they painted over
Speaker 1: the windows. And then they drove those kids around for
Speaker 1: eleven hours in the backs of those vans, with no
Speaker 1: potty breaks, no food, no water, no nothing. They just
Speaker 1: drove them around for eleven hours in July, the middle
Speaker 1: of July, in the San Joaquin Valley, pretty mercilessly, before
Speaker 1: finally arriving at the destination, which ultimately was only one
Speaker 1: hundred miles away from where the kids had been kidnapped.
Speaker 1: I think they just wanted to disorient the kids.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think that was kind of smart m HM
Speaker 2: as well, because they could have been, you know, eleven
Speaker 2: hours away if they managed to escape or something. Right,
Speaker 2: one of the girls years later did say that she
Speaker 2: saw through a crack that they were up there with
Speaker 2: the ac go and drinking sodas and have a good
Speaker 2: old time, and the kids and ed Rayer back there
Speaker 2: just suffering, just terrified obviously of what's going on.
Speaker 1: Right. That was Jennifer brown Hyde who said that, and
Speaker 1: she's not very happy with this whole thing. It's still
Speaker 1: to this day from what I understand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as you could imagine.
Speaker 1: So finally, at three thirty am on Friday morning, they
Speaker 1: were hijacked around after three point thirty on three PM
Speaker 1: on Thursday. They finally stopped driving at three thirty in
Speaker 1: the morning Friday morning, and they arrive at a rock quarry.
Speaker 1: They're in Livermore, California. Apparently again it's one hundred miles
Speaker 1: away from Chowchilla. And this is the what the what
Speaker 1: the kidnapper see is the final destination for these kids
Speaker 1: until they're ransomed off, until the authorities cough up the money.
Speaker 1: And what the what they've done is bury a moving
Speaker 1: van line trailer, so like a huge moving truck, the
Speaker 1: trailer part of it. They buried it a total of
Speaker 1: twelve feet underground and have covered it with four feet
Speaker 1: of dirt, and they've opened a hole, put a ladder
Speaker 1: in and told the kids get down there, and ed
Speaker 1: ray too.
Speaker 2: That's right, And as the kids were going down and
Speaker 2: this kind of points to the direction of how dumb
Speaker 2: these guys were and how unprepared they were, even though
Speaker 2: they it turns out, would have planned this thing for
Speaker 2: well over a year. They wrote down their names and
Speaker 2: their phone numbers in contact in parents' names, not on
Speaker 2: a clipboard legal pad, but on the back of a
Speaker 2: Jack in the box wrapper. So and then they took
Speaker 2: apparently some kind of piece of clothing from each kid,
Speaker 2: because the idea was, once again is that they have many,
Speaker 2: many kids that should bring many many monies and dollar bills.
Speaker 1: Their way, exactly, and the fact that their kids means
Speaker 1: that people do anything to keep them safe. So these
Speaker 1: guys figure they've got a pretty good payday with twenty
Speaker 1: six kids that they're now holding hostage in a buried
Speaker 1: moving van trailer. And in the trailer they had done
Speaker 1: a little more than they had in the van, so
Speaker 1: they had peanut butter cheerios, some bread down there, some water,
Speaker 1: but definitely not enough to keep all those people alive
Speaker 1: for a very long time. They'd also thought of bathrooms.
Speaker 1: They made bathrooms in the wheel wells, and they dropped
Speaker 1: a ventilation tubes with some fans to force air into
Speaker 1: the into the van. So there was fresh air down there,
Speaker 1: but not a lot from what I understand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. And the one faithful mistake they made
Speaker 2: was that for their comfort they included some old box
Speaker 2: springs and mattresses and stuff for them to sit on
Speaker 2: and lay on, which would end up being their undoing.
Speaker 2: Should we take a break.
Speaker 1: I think we should, because now you've got twenty six
Speaker 1: kids buried in a buried trailer right now in Livermore, California,
Speaker 1: at three point thirty in the morning. Not a good
Speaker 1: thing to happen.
Speaker 2: That's right. So we'll pick up with what's going on
Speaker 2: in Chowchilla right after this. All right, So in Chauchilla,
Speaker 2: that bus doesn't come back, so obviously everyone freaks out
Speaker 2: pretty quickly. An entire school bus full of kids and
Speaker 2: a very trusted man about town like people knew, you know,
Speaker 2: it's a small town. People knew ed Ray and he
Speaker 2: was a good guy by all accounts. They were all missing.
Speaker 2: So the very first thing that happens is they locate
Speaker 2: the school bus, which had been hidden with some bamboo
Speaker 2: and camouflage. But they did find the bus right away,
Speaker 2: which you know, on one hand, that's good because they
Speaker 2: have a lead. On the other hand, that just sends
Speaker 2: this thing into the stratosphere as far as panic goes, sure,
Speaker 2: because where are these kids?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I saw also that the bus had basically
Speaker 1: no clues on it whatsoever. So it's like, we found
Speaker 1: the bus, but that doesn't help at all. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure they were panicked by that. So it became
Speaker 1: pretty clear pretty early on that the child Chilli sheriff,
Speaker 1: a guy named Ed Gates, was going to need some help.
Speaker 1: So the FBI came to town. Apparently they booked every
Speaker 1: one of the hotel rooms in the two hotels in town.
Speaker 1: They brought like all the state law enforcement agencies, like
Speaker 1: everybody just converged on this town to help out because
Speaker 1: it made national news. Like almost instantaneously, I saw somewhere
Speaker 1: chuck that like this is during the bi centennial, and
Speaker 1: the bi centennial just been going on and going on
Speaker 1: and going on, and there was still bisentennial stuff going on,
Speaker 1: and this stopped it. Like this kidnapping. News of this
Speaker 1: kidnapping stopped the bisentennial celebration. Deadnis tracks. It was the
Speaker 1: end of it, not just for this town but for
Speaker 1: the whole country.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean this went right up to the
Speaker 2: President Ford at the time, and obviously Governor Jerry Round.
Speaker 2: So they threw everything they could at it. The media
Speaker 2: descended upon chow Chilla like super fast, and because it's
Speaker 2: the media, you start getting these these terrible stories about like,
Speaker 2: well maybe because you know, they'd never caught Zodiac and
Speaker 2: this was just six or seven years I think after
Speaker 2: the final what would end up being the final killing,
Speaker 2: so they said maybe it was a Zodiac because they
Speaker 2: made reference to wiping He made reference to wiping out
Speaker 2: a school bus at one point. Any tip that came
Speaker 2: in they had to follow. There's a shoe on the
Speaker 2: side of the road, so they have to track down
Speaker 2: that tip. There was a novel in nineteen fifty eight
Speaker 2: called The Day the Children Vanished, where the gang of
Speaker 2: people abduct a busload of kids just to bring people
Speaker 2: out of town and distract them while they robbed a bank. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Ray's wife worked at the bank. Like you said, sod,
Speaker 2: They put a bank under surveillance, so there were you know,
Speaker 2: it was I don't know if I was described it
Speaker 2: as a panic because the FBI was on the scene
Speaker 2: in the state californ on your Bureau and Investigation, so
Speaker 2: they were doing good work. But there was a frenzy
Speaker 2: of activity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think the sheriff had all the help
Speaker 1: he possibly needed to chase down all these leads and everything.
Speaker 1: But from what I saw, there was just not much
Speaker 1: to go on. There were there they were just dead
Speaker 1: ends left and right, and so like there was, there
Speaker 1: was a just an enormous amount of panic and terror
Speaker 1: in the town. Families started converging on the firehouse, the
Speaker 1: local firehouse for some reason, I'm not sure why, but
Speaker 1: it became like the meeting place for anybody concerned about
Speaker 1: the fate of the kids, and this is where news
Speaker 1: would first be broken. And I think the media probably
Speaker 1: hung around there too, So you can only begin to
Speaker 1: imagine how anxious the parents were, and then the town
Speaker 1: and then apparently the whole country was was anxious as well,
Speaker 1: and so it was really kind of surprising when all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, at about I think about eight pm
Speaker 1: the next night, Saturday, so the kids have been gone
Speaker 1: for almost about Carrie the one about thirty hours, thirty
Speaker 1: two hours, something like that at this point, thirty two
Speaker 1: hours of terror, when all of a sudden at that quarry,
Speaker 1: some people are working and a man and a bunch
Speaker 1: of kids run over and it turns out to be
Speaker 1: the kidnapping victims who just present themselves to a security
Speaker 1: guard at the quarry in Livermore, who gets on the
Speaker 1: phone and says, we found them.
Speaker 2: That's right, amazing, And you would think, well, pretty sensational story,
Speaker 2: but it was very short span of time and all
Speaker 2: the kids were fine, So why is it really a story.
Speaker 2: It's a story because as we'll see, the trauma that
Speaker 2: they suffered emotionally and how it went down in who
Speaker 2: these people were who kidnapped them. But before we get
Speaker 2: to those dumb dumbs, let's talk about the escape. They
Speaker 2: were down there about twelve hours and running out of
Speaker 2: food and water. The roof, you know, they had a
Speaker 2: lot of weight on this moving van roof and those
Speaker 2: things aren't super strong, so this thing was, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of dented in and seemed like it mike cave in,
Speaker 2: and they were worried that they just couldn't stay there basically,
Speaker 2: and this is where the story I mean, I guess
Speaker 2: we'll cover both points of view, the immediate history and aftermath.
Speaker 2: Ed Ray saved the day because he was the only
Speaker 2: adult there, so obviously he was the one that broke
Speaker 2: those kids out of there. Years later, you know, we
Speaker 2: mentioned Mike Marshall, the fourteen year old that wasn't supposed
Speaker 2: to be on that bus, and he was far and
Speaker 2: away the oldest kid there and the most capable to help.
Speaker 2: Years later, after a while of this story of Ed Ray,
Speaker 2: he finally came out and said, oh, you know, Edray's
Speaker 2: a good guy. I want to disparage him, but like
Speaker 2: it was my idea and I was the one that
Speaker 2: really led the charge to escape, and he was a
Speaker 2: big mess, kind of crying in his hands that they
Speaker 2: were doomed and dead, and he got on board and
Speaker 2: helped me. But it was really me. And the reason
Speaker 2: I kind of believe that after reading all the accounts
Speaker 2: is it took many years for him to kind of
Speaker 2: come out with this, and it felt like he even
Speaker 2: felt bad for saying so. So I think that Mike
Speaker 2: Marshall in fact did lead the charge to escape.
Speaker 1: Well, his account was corroborated by another guy named Larry
Speaker 1: Park who wrote a book called The Chowchilla School Bus
Speaker 1: Kidnapping Colon Why Me And I don't know if he
Speaker 1: corroborated in that or in an interview later on, but
Speaker 1: he was there and he said that that's true, that
Speaker 1: that's how it went down. On the other perspective, the
Speaker 1: fact that like when Ed Ray like lived the rest
Speaker 1: of his life, he stayed in Chowchilla. Most of those
Speaker 1: people kids who've been kidnapped with him, stayed in Chowchilla.
Speaker 1: When he was dying, Those same kids as adults now
Speaker 1: came and visited him his bedside, say goodbye. There's plenty
Speaker 1: of opportunity for you know, little town to start talking,
Speaker 1: you know, whispers and that kind of thing, and that
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to have happened. He seems to have died
Speaker 1: considered a hero as well. So my take on a
Speaker 1: Chuck is that he may have been a gloom and
Speaker 1: doom about their prospects to begin with. And maybe it
Speaker 1: really was Mike Marshall who said, no, we need to
Speaker 1: we need to try to get out of here. But
Speaker 1: even Mike Marshall said after a while once Mike Marshall
Speaker 1: started to try. Ed Ray joined in and started helping,
Speaker 1: and that they might not have been able to drink. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they might not have been able to get out had
Speaker 1: a grown man been helping them, like push against this.
Speaker 2: Totally agree. I think we're I think we park our
Speaker 2: cars in the same garage here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, look at them, they're both.
Speaker 2: Uh So here's how they got out. They took those
Speaker 2: mattresses and stacked them up, and they took apart one
Speaker 2: of they kind of smashed one of the box springs,
Speaker 2: which are framed in wood, and they started using that
Speaker 2: wood as like a sort of makeshift crowbar to try
Speaker 2: and what these guys kidnappers had done as they put
Speaker 2: sort of iron plate I've seen manhole, but it was
Speaker 2: some kind of heavy metal plate over the thing, along
Speaker 2: with two industrial tractor batteries which are super heavy, and
Speaker 2: then dirt, so there's ended up being several hundred pounds
Speaker 2: kind of weighing this thing down this escape patch. But
Speaker 2: they were able after hours and hours to finally kind
Speaker 2: of use that wood to pry open just enough to
Speaker 2: where they see starlight and dirt leaking in, and with
Speaker 2: the help of ed Ray and his you know, manly
Speaker 2: man strength. They were able to climb out of there.
Speaker 2: Mike Marshall was.
Speaker 1: So Mike Marshall climbed out and then from that moment
Speaker 1: on and so apparently also ed Ray was really worried,
Speaker 1: and I guess Mike Marshall was too, but it was
Speaker 1: not a deterrent for him. But they were worried that
Speaker 1: there was at least one or more of the kidnappers
Speaker 1: hanging around with a gun. What was going on, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there was a good chance in their minds that
Speaker 1: they were going to poke through and just be shot
Speaker 1: on site. Sure, so they were worried about that. And luckily,
Speaker 1: when Mike Marshall poked his head up, he's so that
Speaker 1: there was no one around. There's nobody guarding it. It
Speaker 1: turned out that they had long since left and that
Speaker 1: so Mike Marshall had ed Ray start handing kids up
Speaker 1: to him, and they got all the kids out and
Speaker 1: then ed Ray out and Mike Marshall ran into the
Speaker 1: woods to hide. So in case the kidnappers were still around,
Speaker 1: they just hadn't seen them yet, and those kids were
Speaker 1: intercepted by him. At least Mike Marshall would be able
Speaker 1: to run away through the woods and get help. But
Speaker 1: it turned out the kidnappers weren't there, and somebody, luckily
Speaker 1: was still working at the quarry I believe, including a
Speaker 1: security guard when ed Ray and the kids ran up
Speaker 1: and presented themselves, So that's how and then I guess
Speaker 1: the guy got on the phone, and within moments of
Speaker 1: that happening, the news made it back to chow Chilla
Speaker 1: that they'd all been found safe and they were all
Speaker 1: alive and generally unharmed, and ed Ray was basically automatically
Speaker 1: hailed as a hero.
Speaker 2: Carl Maldon was certainly portrayed as the hero in the
Speaker 2: Lifetime movie.
Speaker 1: They said, do you have anything you'd like to say,
Speaker 1: and he said, just that my feet hurt.
Speaker 2: And you know, we again want to point out this
Speaker 2: was thirty six hours from beginning to end. But these
Speaker 2: kids were didn't know what was going on above ground.
Speaker 2: They were hot, they were, you know, stripping down to
Speaker 2: their underwear. Carl Malden was in his underwear even in
Speaker 2: the movie Nice. They were running out of food and water.
Speaker 2: So as a five to fourteen year old, I mean,
Speaker 2: ed Ray was in hysterics. You're you think you're going
Speaker 2: to die down there. So it may not have been,
Speaker 2: you know, a kidnapping that lasted days and weeks, but
Speaker 2: that doesn't minimize the trauma that these kids suffered down there,
Speaker 2: completely not knowing what was going on above ground, and
Speaker 2: daring to escape, not knowing if they were all of
Speaker 2: a sudden that van was going to come speeding down
Speaker 2: the road. After like, it took a while until they
Speaker 2: felt safe, I think.
Speaker 1: And then on top of that, Chuck, You'd said it
Speaker 1: kind of earlier, but I think it really bears repeating.
Speaker 1: They were really worried that the roof of this thing
Speaker 1: was going to cave in. Four feet of dirt on
Speaker 1: top of a moving van, roof that had been in
Speaker 1: the in the perpetrator's defense had been reinforced with lumber,
Speaker 1: but not very well. That's a lot of weight hanging
Speaker 1: pushing down on this And if you see pictures of
Speaker 1: what the thing looked like from inside, I could see
Speaker 1: how they would have been very nervous that the thing
Speaker 1: was going to cave in on them and crush them.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, like the pictures of it afterward, that roof
Speaker 2: was in the process of caving in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was very nerve wracking.
Speaker 2: Of course, if that would have happened, the dirt probably
Speaker 2: would have caved in and gotten some of them dirty
Speaker 2: and then they could crawl halty.
Speaker 1: I hope, so hopefully that's how.
Speaker 2: Who knows, but you know, like I said, they didn't
Speaker 2: know what was going on down there, No they didn't.
Speaker 1: So but now they're free, they're they're safe, and the
Speaker 1: authorities go get them, the FBI, the sheriff, everybody's interviewing them.
Speaker 1: This is ours. It's more hours for the parents back
Speaker 1: in chill chill having to wait. And then there was
Speaker 1: a greyhound bus that went and got them and brought
Speaker 1: them back. It was pretty sweet. There was a lot
Speaker 1: of donations going on, like apparently Pacific Bell donated not
Speaker 1: just new phones, but new phone lines because there were
Speaker 1: so many calls being made by the authorities and by
Speaker 1: the press, which will factor in a second. They the
Speaker 1: greyhound bus lines donated that bus ride, which is worth mentioning.
Speaker 1: I guess the FBI donated their time. Who knows, now they.
Speaker 3: Get bade, But there was a okay, there was a
Speaker 3: lot of there's just like.
Speaker 1: A lot of banding together to support this town as
Speaker 1: they were going through this, And I just thought it
Speaker 1: was cool. There was a Greyhound bus that rolled up
Speaker 1: with everybody inside and they got off and they're like,
Speaker 1: I'm never getting on one of those again.
Speaker 2: Well, it did kind of wonder. I was like, maybe
Speaker 2: we should send like a few or not even vans.
Speaker 2: Send twelve cars, right, no buses, no vans. M that
Speaker 2: you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I get you're saying. We're just making walk.
Speaker 2: And of course the kids got good to Disneyland.
Speaker 1: That was a big one.
Speaker 2: You got a heroes welcome, they got a parade, they
Speaker 2: got to go to Disneyland, and it was as soon
Speaker 2: as the town went from the saddest place on Earth
Speaker 2: to the happiest place on Earth in the span of
Speaker 2: thirty six hours.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they had a huge feast. I saw that Ed
Speaker 1: Ray won a vacation, that he appeared on Hollywood Squares,
Speaker 1: which is that's peak, that's peak exposure in the mid
Speaker 1: seventy six. Sure, and Chuck, there's one other little fact
Speaker 1: that we have to say about this, that Robert Goolay
Speaker 1: recorded a song called the Ballad of Chow Chill a Ray.
Speaker 1: It's so obscure it is not on YouTube. Some either
Speaker 1: cursed or Blessed Soul put it on SoundCloud.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can find there's a cover version on YouTube.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, from another person I couldn't find. I recommend
Speaker 2: the SoundCloud goolay version. It is. It is a product
Speaker 2: of the nineteen seventies. In every way.
Speaker 1: It's unlistenable.
Speaker 2: I made it through most of it.
Speaker 1: Did you make it through all of it?
Speaker 2: I made it through most of it. Then I skipped
Speaker 2: to the end. Okay, it was something else because it's
Speaker 2: sort of like disco, But it's also that very seventies
Speaker 2: thing when they wrote these story songs like about the
Speaker 2: kid jumping off of the tatcha Hatchi bridge or whatever,
Speaker 2: not tatcha Hatchi what was it? Billy Joe McAllister, Like
Speaker 2: they wrote these songs in the seventies, these weird sort
Speaker 2: of folk story songs. A ballad, yeah, but not. I
Speaker 2: mean a ballad can be like a love song. These
Speaker 2: were like folk stories.
Speaker 1: I thought a ballad meant it was like told the story.
Speaker 2: Maybe, but I think of ballads is love songs.
Speaker 1: Surely, but a love story right.
Speaker 2: Like the Air Supply wrote ballads, They didn't write songs
Speaker 2: about folk heroes jumping off of bridges. You know they
Speaker 2: should have.
Speaker 1: Sure, well, I don't know. There's really nothing Air Supply
Speaker 1: could have done to have improved their game. They were
Speaker 1: pretty much still sound great. Yeah. One of the best
Speaker 1: concerts I ever saw in my life was Air Supply
Speaker 1: in Jacksonville, Florida.
Speaker 2: It's amazing.
Speaker 1: It was. It was amazing. I said it before and
Speaker 1: I'll say it again. It was like the fabric of
Speaker 1: reality was coming apart at the seams and we were
Speaker 1: right right there to witness it. It was so cool.
Speaker 2: I didn't know you took ecstasy that show.
Speaker 1: I didn't. That was what's what's so significant about it.
Speaker 1: We were totally sober.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what was it about the Was it just songs
Speaker 2: from your childhood or something?
Speaker 1: No, it was, I mean, yes, that was part of
Speaker 1: it. It was great to hear all those songs and see
Speaker 1: them live. It was the chemistry between the two dudes
Speaker 1: they still got it after all these years is really
Speaker 1: neat to see. And but what really kind of made
Speaker 1: it unreal was it was it almost had the same
Speaker 1: feeling as like a really energetic tent revival, Like people
Speaker 1: were wandering down the aisles, like you could tell they
Speaker 1: were moving, not necessarily of their own will. They were
Speaker 1: being drawn towards the stage. It was bizarre. It was
Speaker 1: so cool to see people were just out of their
Speaker 1: minds at this air Supply show and like we're I
Speaker 1: don't think any of them were on next to see either.
Speaker 1: I think like everybody was like people were with their
Speaker 1: moms or with their kids, or it was just a neat,
Speaker 1: neat show. I'll never forget it ever.
Speaker 2: Amazing. So go see Air Supply and I'm sure they're
Speaker 2: playing a third rate casino near you.
Speaker 1: Probably they definitely do the work.
Speaker 2: For sure, they supply you with more than air though.
Speaker 2: It sounds like.
Speaker 1: Dude, and the guy's voice still is one hundred percent
Speaker 1: as good as it was in the seventies, which is pretty.
Speaker 2: Muching some I was watching some VIDs the other day,
Speaker 2: live VIDs of them recently. It's a good thing to do.
Speaker 2: Sit around, but definitely check out the song on SoundCloud.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and listen to as much of it as
Speaker 2: you can.
Speaker 1: You won't make it all the way through the Ballad
Speaker 1: of Child Chiller Ray. It's so bad. Now I understand
Speaker 1: why Elvis would shoot the TV whenever Robert Goulay came on.
Speaker 1: It was because of that because of that's Robert Goolay.
Speaker 2: Is that why shot the TVs?
Speaker 1: Yeah? For some apparently no one knows why. But whenever
Speaker 1: Robert Gouley would come on, he would shoot his TV.
Speaker 1: Sometimes he'd get really mad and shoot his toaster or
Speaker 1: his oven or whatever. Wow, but he would shoot the TV.
Speaker 2: That's pretty good. Yeah, all right, So these kidnappers, getting
Speaker 2: back to the story of the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping,
Speaker 2: these guys were three real low rent scumbags who were
Speaker 2: didn't have a pinion to their name and were desperate
Speaker 2: for cash, right.
Speaker 1: In some ways kind of but if they were also
Speaker 1: all three rich kids, if you can put those two
Speaker 1: things together.
Speaker 2: They were three which white kids won. Specifically the literal
Speaker 2: trust fund kid. Yeah, he was the ringleader. We're talking
Speaker 2: about fred Woods, James Schoenfeld, who were twenty four, and
Speaker 2: then James's younger brother, Richard, who was twenty two. But
Speaker 2: fred Woods, Frederick Newhall Woods, the fourth was the ringleader
Speaker 2: and the I guess you could call it the brains
Speaker 2: if there was a brain behind this. But he came
Speaker 2: from a long line of California money. His one of
Speaker 2: his ancestors was Henry Mayo Newall, who came in the
Speaker 2: eighteen fifties to California, part of Santa Clarita's new All
Speaker 2: California name for him. They made a ton of money
Speaker 2: in real estate speculation and railroads and then eventually oil
Speaker 2: and ranching and had a several hundred million dollar family fortune.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I read that they made seventies about three hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty million a year in the seventies a year,
Speaker 1: just that family doing nothing. And by the time this guy,
Speaker 1: Fred Woods the fourth came along, there were generations of
Speaker 1: this family that had never worked a day in their life.
Speaker 1: So it's not like his parents struck it rich. And
Speaker 1: they remember their roots like their roots were just gobsmackingly
Speaker 1: wealth is wealthy, That's what they're That's what they knew.
Speaker 1: And apparently Fred was not particularly paid attention to by
Speaker 1: his parents and it had some effects on him. And
Speaker 1: I saw also that he had trouble living up to
Speaker 1: his father's expectations for him. But do nothing blue blood, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that his his dad's approval meant a lot to him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a terrible position for any any person to be in.
Speaker 1: And I feel for him in that respect. And I
Speaker 1: also think from from what I saw. There was a
Speaker 1: New York Times article about him while I believe he
Speaker 1: was still at large where he said, but he's described
Speaker 1: as a loser in the headline. Yeah, the New York
Speaker 1: Times calls him a loser, at least says other people
Speaker 1: call him a loser in their headline. He was that
Speaker 1: kind of person, and again it was the seventies, but
Speaker 1: he was also that kind of person. He's just he
Speaker 1: was the product of wealthy, neglectful parents from what I
Speaker 1: can tell, and also an education system that seems to
Speaker 1: have failed him, at least in the grammar portion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll get to that. He didn't have a lot
Speaker 2: of friends. He never really had a ton of girlfriends,
Speaker 2: which is ironic because he ended up being married four times,
Speaker 2: which we'll get to. He lived in a converted apartment
Speaker 2: in an outbuilding on the nearly eighty acre estate in
Speaker 2: Portala Valley where his grandmother lived and his parents lived.
Speaker 2: Even though they were traveling by themselves usually. He got
Speaker 2: a job at that rock quarry. Your first indication that
Speaker 2: they may not have had the smartest play because his
Speaker 2: dad owned it and he was into cars. He collected
Speaker 2: cars with his money. The ringleader did. He had dozens
Speaker 2: and dozens of cars. His buddy James, who helped him,
Speaker 2: he was rich too, not that kind of rich, but
Speaker 2: his parent his dad was a pediatrist, so they had
Speaker 2: doctor money. So they were doing pretty well as well,
Speaker 2: and they got into various businesses together. They had a
Speaker 2: used car business together. They never did super well, it
Speaker 2: seemed like, in any of their business ventures, because it
Speaker 2: seemed like they weren't super smart.
Speaker 1: Right. Another good descriptor is that Fred in particular loved
Speaker 1: his cars, and he loved to shoot the windows out
Speaker 1: of his cars with his guns, which he also loved.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they had a lot of guns between them as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's sort of what you think. There were
Speaker 2: these rich kids who weren't paid attention to that could
Speaker 2: do whatever they wanted and ended up getting into trouble.
Speaker 2: He had Fred had designs on being a film producer,
Speaker 2: and part of the concept for this kidnapping was the
Speaker 2: school bus kidnapping and the movie Dirty Harry. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: he said, hey, this would make a great movie too,
Speaker 2: which we'll get to sort of the bows eye on
Speaker 2: that later on. But he and James ended up losing
Speaker 2: some money about thirty grand on a housing deal. And
Speaker 2: depending on the report you read, some people say they
Speaker 2: were desperate for money, but if you talk to James,
Speaker 2: he said, I wanted to buy a Ferrari with it
Speaker 2: because my neighbors had Ferraris and it was to keep
Speaker 2: up with the Joneses situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, fred was born into it,
Speaker 1: and I think took money largely for granted James and Richard,
Speaker 1: but James in particular really kind of felt new to
Speaker 1: the area and didn't fit in because they didn't have
Speaker 1: as much money. I think their dad was punching above
Speaker 1: his weight class socioeconomically in the area that they moved to,
Speaker 1: and his sons kind of suffered for it because they
Speaker 1: fell out of place because they just did not have
Speaker 1: anywhere near the kind of wealth that their peers had
Speaker 1: where they where they now lived. And that seems to
Speaker 1: have gotten to James, and that was his big motivation.
Speaker 1: I never saw fred Wood's motivation, did you.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think part of it had to do
Speaker 2: with that thirty grand in debt, but I think part
Speaker 2: of it, dude, is he was a bored rich kid
Speaker 2: in some ways, right, Like that may have been the reason,
Speaker 2: So yeah, I'm dumb.
Speaker 1: I also yeah, and also I have the impression that
Speaker 1: James and Rick Schoenfeld were a lot more moral than
Speaker 1: fred Wood was.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Apparently in his journal James wrote at the time that
Speaker 1: he was worried he was becoming immoral as they were
Speaker 1: like really planning this, and he and his brother were
Speaker 1: both Eagle Scouts, so I guess they It is fair
Speaker 1: to say that they kind of fell under the influence
Speaker 1: of fred Woods, who had no qualms about this whole thing.
Speaker 1: He convinced them to give up their qualms as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think the last time I'll say the word
Speaker 2: smart thing that they did was when they were initially
Speaker 2: hatching the idea. They said, we saw the news California saved.
Speaker 2: California has a five billion dollar budget surplus, and we're
Speaker 2: not going to get money kidnapping a kid or even
Speaker 2: twenty six kids from their parents for their parents to
Speaker 2: pay ransom. But if they were on a school bus,
Speaker 2: then it's the responsibility of the state of California. And
Speaker 2: they've got all this dough so five million bucks is
Speaker 2: chump changed to them. So if we get them on
Speaker 2: a school bus, then they're liable and that's how we're
Speaker 2: going to get the most money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so the calculation that they made was that
Speaker 1: there was nobody was going to get hurt. They knew
Speaker 1: that they weren't going to physically hurt those kids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they knew that California had a budget surplus, but even
Speaker 1: more than that, that their insurance company, the States whoever
Speaker 1: ensured the state would end up actually paying that five
Speaker 1: million dollars, and that they were just basically taking five
Speaker 1: million dollars from the state that the state didn't really
Speaker 1: need and that nobody was going to get hurt. And
Speaker 1: then that calculation it really kind of reveals like how
Speaker 1: much they did lose any kind of morality, which is
Speaker 1: they did they utterly failed to take into account, like
Speaker 1: the psychological and emotional damage they were going to inflict
Speaker 1: on these kids and their parents and the town in general.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that's one of the things that
Speaker 2: because I think even in the end they saw it
Speaker 2: as like not the biggest deal because no one was
Speaker 2: hurt and it was really quick. But like when I
Speaker 2: saw an eventually spoiler, we'll go ahead and say that
Speaker 2: the two brothers were eventually paroled, and we'll get to
Speaker 2: all that. But you know, the news teams in twenty
Speaker 2: fifteen were like following this guy around in a parking lot,
Speaker 2: asking him questions and he's just trying to avoid it.
Speaker 2: And one of them was like, you do realize that
Speaker 2: trauma these kids have still suffered into adulthood, and he
Speaker 2: just went, you know, I've heard, so I heard, and
Speaker 2: then just like quickly ran away. So even to this day,
Speaker 2: they're trying to get them to realize that there was
Speaker 2: a real impact and and the end result was trauma
Speaker 2: and PTSD.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the reason it did and it had the
Speaker 1: impact and part of the problem for chow Chilla. Apparently
Speaker 1: child Chilla was just transformed immediately. Like you know when
Speaker 1: when if you're the victim of a crime, you wonder
Speaker 1: like why why me? Especially a random crime, and this
Speaker 1: is a random crime perpetrated on a whole town. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: Chowchilla was a possible town among a number of towns
Speaker 1: in the area that those three traveled to and staked
Speaker 1: out and just kind of tried to figure out what
Speaker 1: the best the best victim would be for this crime,
Speaker 1: and they just settled on Chowchilla. They had no grudges
Speaker 1: against chow Chilla. They had no ties to child Chilla.
Speaker 1: But the problem was they didn't care about the people
Speaker 1: of Chowdchilla or how they felt about their children or
Speaker 1: what they were going to do to them. It was
Speaker 1: just a random They chose them basically randomly, and chow
Speaker 1: Chilli is the kind of rural farming town where people
Speaker 1: don't talk about their feelings. I think I get the
Speaker 1: impression that they still think that that's weak. It shows
Speaker 1: a sign of weakness. And so I don't really have
Speaker 1: the impression that the town has ever really processed this
Speaker 1: and that they've tried to forget. And then there's a
Speaker 1: lot of problems among the victims who are known in
Speaker 1: their like fifties, that have never really been resolved or
Speaker 1: worked out because the town just tried to carry on
Speaker 1: as if it never happened basically from the get go.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean some of them got had very
Speaker 2: hard luck stories getting into drugs, eventually getting better and
Speaker 2: going through rehabit treatment and writing books about it. Others
Speaker 2: say they don't trust people. They suffered nightmares for years,
Speaker 2: some continue to Others have said that they don't even
Speaker 2: really remember much of what happened. I imagine if you're
Speaker 2: five years old, you're not going to remember as much
Speaker 2: as a twelve year old obviously, so depending on your
Speaker 2: age group, you may have suffered some more obvious lasting damage.
Speaker 2: But they were all damaged. The way these guys got
Speaker 2: caught is well, I guess let's tell a little bit
Speaker 2: of that story. During the investigation, one thing they found,
Speaker 2: and we'll put this in the dumb column. On the
Speaker 2: property of where Fred lived, they found a plan written
Speaker 2: out that said at the top plan I think a
Speaker 2: kidnapping plan. Didn't even capitalize the p Yeah, they wrote
Speaker 2: it out in pen and they had a lot of ideas.
Speaker 2: They wanted to buy an X ray machine. I think
Speaker 2: they did to X ray in case the ransom money
Speaker 2: was bugged. They had a larger plan. They had one
Speaker 2: plan about them the state dropping the money from a
Speaker 2: plane in the Santa Cruz Mountains at a specific drop
Speaker 2: site indicated by a series of lights. But they also
Speaker 2: had this larger plan of putting dummies in a plane
Speaker 2: with parachutes, and it was sort of all over the map.
Speaker 2: This plan over the course of a year and a half.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was this really reveals I think a lot
Speaker 1: about them as well that on that plan sheet it
Speaker 1: said one of the line items was burned the plan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they just didn't get around to that.
Speaker 2: They left a ransom note.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they had a lot of like scratch outs
Speaker 1: and misspellings, and apparently referred to Fred by name in
Speaker 1: the ransom note that they were planned to give to
Speaker 1: the authorities, like reallys they were trying to throw the authorities.
Speaker 1: They were trying to sniff the authorities off the case,
Speaker 1: I guess, by posing or presenting themselves as a Satanic group.
Speaker 1: And they said that their their name was beils a Bub,
Speaker 1: but they misspelled beals abub. They spelled b sabub, which
Speaker 1: is just offensive to anybody who knows how to spell
Speaker 1: that word. It's just like if you misspell things in
Speaker 1: your ransom note, like you're not going to do very
Speaker 1: well for yourself. Most likely.
Speaker 2: That's right in the aftermath of the kidnapping, from when
Speaker 2: they buried the kids to when they left, the plan
Speaker 2: was called the Chowchilla Police Department, demand your five million
Speaker 2: dollar ransom. But the Chowchilla phone system was very small,
Speaker 2: and there were obviously when you kidnapped twenty six kids,
Speaker 2: and the media is descending. Every phone line was busy.
Speaker 2: They literally could not get through with a ransom demand.
Speaker 2: The kids escaped before they even got through with a
Speaker 2: ransom demand. Yeah, I think you said. The donation from
Speaker 2: the phone company. They literally had to go in and
Speaker 2: install like dozens of phone lines just so the FBI
Speaker 2: could operate effectively.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they never What did these guys do?
Speaker 2: Right afterward? When they couldn't get through.
Speaker 1: They decided they needed to scram that the jig was
Speaker 1: up and they needed to part ways, and they did.
Speaker 1: Fred Woods was wily enough to have come up with
Speaker 1: a passport with the name Ralph Snyder, and he traveled
Speaker 1: successfully to British Columbia, I think Vancouver under that fake passport.
Speaker 1: But then when he was there he started writing to people.
Speaker 1: He had a friend who was i think in film
Speaker 1: school and said, hey, you should turn this into a
Speaker 1: whole like a whole movie.
Speaker 2: He said, right, just give me.
Speaker 1: Some of the the box office, I guess, but he said,
Speaker 1: but be fair, he said, be fair, but he spelled,
Speaker 1: he spelled the fai. Yeah, so that's I'm sorry, it's
Speaker 1: just annoying me to no end the misspellings. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: then he signed the letter sent it Ralph Snyder. He
Speaker 1: sent it as his alias, so the cops, the FBI
Speaker 1: tracked him like within days to Vancouver and got the
Speaker 1: Royal Canadian minded police to arrest him.
Speaker 2: I wonder he knew the guy though in film school.
Speaker 2: I wonder if this guy was like, who.
Speaker 1: Is there, who's Ralph Snider?
Speaker 2: Or if he put in parentheses that's my alias, this
Speaker 2: is this is Fred.
Speaker 1: Don't tell the FBI, but he misspelled FBI.
Speaker 2: So Rick, the younger Schoenfeld, for his part, almost immediately confessed.
Speaker 2: He got home after the three of them met up
Speaker 2: and then split up, went home and told his dad
Speaker 2: what he did. His dad because they had money again
Speaker 2: as a podiatrist, got him a lawyer too sweet, And
Speaker 2: so that's why we don't know exactly. That's one reason
Speaker 2: we don't know exactly what happened in those first like
Speaker 2: you know, hours afterward, is because the lawyer kind of
Speaker 2: kept that all quiet. Although it did see a new
Speaker 2: report that said they took naps. I don't know if
Speaker 2: that's true true or not, but I did see that.
Speaker 1: It sounds right. It holds up if you put it
Speaker 1: up against everything else.
Speaker 2: And keep in mind once again They took these kids
Speaker 2: to a quarry that fred Wood's dad owned and where
Speaker 2: fred Woods worked, and the quarry security guard said when
Speaker 2: they were interviewed, said, well, yeah, last week, Fred and
Speaker 2: two other guys dug a big hole out there, you know,
Speaker 2: a few months before this happened, like a oh, I
Speaker 2: don't know, like a moving van size hole.
Speaker 1: But the hole's gone now, so who cares, right, exactly?
Speaker 1: So Rick turned himself in. Fred got caught. James made
Speaker 1: attempts to cross the border into Canada himself, but apparently
Speaker 1: the Canadian authorities considered him a way too nervous, be
Speaker 1: way too vague about what he planned to do in Canada,
Speaker 1: and see in possession of way too many guns to
Speaker 1: be led in the country. And apparently he tried two
Speaker 1: or three times using his own name to get in
Speaker 1: and finally gave up and turned around. And I guess
Speaker 1: he had decided he was going to turn himself into authorities,
Speaker 1: but because of an all points bulletin on his license plate,
Speaker 1: he was picked up before he could turn himself in.
Speaker 2: Right, So they were all collected less than two weeks
Speaker 2: after it happened. Yes, all right, well, let's take our
Speaker 2: last break and then we will kind of quickly go
Speaker 2: over the sentencing and what happened afterward, right.
Speaker 3: After this, all right, So they were collected.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were collected and of course had their day
Speaker 2: in court. And the big, the big thing that happened
Speaker 2: in court was was whether or not these guys committed
Speaker 2: bodily harm on these children, because if you committed bodily harm,
Speaker 2: then you have a sentence of life without a possible
Speaker 2: sentence of life without parole. If there was no bodily harm,
Speaker 2: then you could have life with parole. They ruled that
Speaker 2: they did suffer bodily harm, so they had stomach trouble,
Speaker 2: they had nosebleeds, some of the kids fainted, and that
Speaker 2: that counted. But in nineteen eighty an appeals court reversed
Speaker 2: that ruling said that is not bodily harm and that
Speaker 2: made them eligible for parole. And since then, like I
Speaker 2: said earlier, the two show Unfeld brothers have been released
Speaker 2: in I think twenty twelve and twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: Right like long after. Some observers who were involved in
Speaker 1: the case think that they should have been paroled, like
Speaker 1: especially Richard Schoenfeld. He was twenty two at the time.
Speaker 1: He was basically there I saw described as a long
Speaker 1: for the ride again, an eagle scout. He probably became
Speaker 1: an eagle scout three four years before this happened, and
Speaker 1: he he spent thirty nine years in prison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess, so twenty fifteen is when he got out.
Speaker 2: In twenty twelve.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, yeah, so yeah, about thirty seven years in
Speaker 1: prison of design from age twenty two. He spent the
Speaker 1: next thirty seven years in prison for basically hanging out
Speaker 1: with his brother and his brother's goofy friend doing something
Speaker 1: really stupid. And a lot of other people said, yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you're gonna let Richard Shownfeld out, you should
Speaker 1: really probably take another look at James Schoumfeld too, because yeah,
Speaker 1: he was more involved than his brother, but he was
Speaker 1: still no Fred Woods. And then you get to fred
Speaker 1: Woods and people say, yeah, probably just he doesn't really
Speaker 1: deserve to be parole.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the other two were model prisoners, and
Speaker 2: they also had, I mean people that were active. I
Speaker 2: don't know if it was a prosecutor or investigator. I
Speaker 2: think the investigator for the case eventually advocated for parole.
Speaker 1: Both did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you know, some of the townspeople felt betrayed
Speaker 2: by that, but they did get out. Fred Woods was
Speaker 2: not a model prisoner. He was still as shady as ever.
Speaker 2: You know, you're not supposed to run businesses from prison.
Speaker 2: But he ran a gold mine. He ran a used
Speaker 2: car business, he ran a Christmas tree farm, he got
Speaker 2: married a few times. The reason he was finally outed
Speaker 2: was he was running the Christmas tree farm and Michael Biyanki,
Speaker 2: who was managing that business, got injured on the job
Speaker 2: and Woods said, I'm not going to help pay for
Speaker 2: the surgery. So Biyanki said all right, and he filed
Speaker 2: a state workers comp claim and they got on the
Speaker 2: investigation and found out that Woods was behind the operation.
Speaker 2: So he's not When that comes time for parole, that
Speaker 2: doesn't look good.
Speaker 1: No, And I guess he's been denied parole seventeen times
Speaker 1: so far, yes, and he's up next in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: four and a lot of people think he might he
Speaker 1: might never be paroled.
Speaker 2: Actually, well, he bought a mansion in Nipomo, California, thirty
Speaker 2: miles from the prison that no one lives at. He
Speaker 2: did have a civil lawsuit in twenty sixteen where he
Speaker 2: had to pay out money to the victims. That was
Speaker 2: described as quote enough to pay for some serious therapy,
Speaker 2: but not enough to buy a house.
Speaker 1: Which is significant too because they did rule. An appeals
Speaker 1: court ruled in nineteen eighty that they didn't inflict bodily harm.
Speaker 1: But I wonder if that same appeals court would come
Speaker 1: to that conclusion in twenty twenty one, based on interviews
Speaker 1: with some of the people who were abducted, like Jennifer
Speaker 1: Brown High, who I mentioned earlier, who's not I.
Speaker 2: Think emotional harm would play in these days, right.
Speaker 1: And there was definitely emotional harm inflicted. You talked about
Speaker 1: Larry Park who was addicted to meth and crack before
Speaker 1: he finally found forgiveness and actually went and met with
Speaker 1: all three of the perpetrators and shook their hands and
Speaker 1: told them he forgave them and apparently changed his own
Speaker 1: life like that.
Speaker 2: If you haven't listened to words said, hey, I could
Speaker 2: make you a heck of a deal on a used van.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, fred Ward took his watch when he shook
Speaker 1: his hand.
Speaker 2: Well, I was kidding, but he My final little factoid
Speaker 2: is that that used Carlat had those two vans and
Speaker 2: he held onto those because he thought they would be
Speaker 2: worth a lot of money as the kidnap vans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which they might be worth an extra few hundred
Speaker 1: I could see that, but I don't know if that
Speaker 1: If that's the crown jewel of your inventory.
Speaker 2: Owner, Nick cage Bottom, you're right.
Speaker 1: And then you can go watch that movie from Lifetime
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety three called They've Taken Our Children if
Speaker 1: you want to see Carl Malden in his underwear apparently.
Speaker 2: Man bad movie, bad song.
Speaker 1: I read also that chow Chiller residents do not care
Speaker 1: for that movie Chuck because it was shot in Kansas,
Speaker 1: and anyone who knows anything about the San Joaquin Valley
Speaker 1: knows that Kansas is a poor stand in for that.
Speaker 1: So they're a little turned off by that movie from
Speaker 1: what I understand, that's right. And then last thing I
Speaker 1: want to shout out Caleb Horton, who wrote an article
Speaker 1: on Vox very in depth one called the Ballad of
Speaker 1: the chow Chiller Bus Kidnapping. It's pretty good.
Speaker 2: Oh that's a good one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is all right, all right, the article, not
Speaker 1: the song. No, no, oh, okay, it's an article, an article.
Speaker 1: I gotcha. Okay, Well, since we had we worked out
Speaker 1: them as understanding everybody. That means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2: I'm going to call this. Let me see. How about
Speaker 2: racist ticketing. In our episode on jaywalking, we talked about
Speaker 2: people of the black and Hispanic communities are ticketed more
Speaker 2: for jaywalking. And this is from Valerie Mates in an Arbor, Michigan.
Speaker 2: Hey guys, you mentioned that black and Hispanic drivers are
Speaker 2: issued more traffic tickets and white drivers. His interesting issue
Speaker 2: in Chicago, when they installed traffic cameras, they found that
Speaker 2: the cameras, despite being race neutral, still gave more tickets
Speaker 2: to black and Hispanic drivers, so of course they wanted
Speaker 2: to study that. The experts found that more affluent neighborhoods
Speaker 2: are built with more features that would naturally slow down traffic,
Speaker 2: more sidewalks, more stop signs, more crosswalks, while poorer neighborhoods
Speaker 2: had fewer those fewer of those things, and the result
Speaker 2: wood cars would be naturally would tend to drive fast
Speaker 2: in poorer neighborhoods. Since black and Hispanic drivers are more
Speaker 2: likely to live and be driving in less wealthy neighborhoods
Speaker 2: in Chicago, they were more likely to be speeding and
Speaker 2: caught by traffic cameras, or so says the evidence at
Speaker 2: least crazy. It's not just prejudice on the part of
Speaker 2: police officers that causes this discrepancy, is actually a difference
Speaker 2: in how the neighborhoods are built systematically. Thought it was
Speaker 2: really interesting and I agree Injory. Thanks for sending that
Speaker 2: in Who was it again? Valerie Mates of ann Arbor?
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, Valerie. That's a great one. If you've
Speaker 1: got a great one like Valerie does. We love little
Speaker 1: brainbusters like that, so you can wrap them up, spank
Speaker 1: them on the bottom, and send them off via email
Speaker 1: to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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