Nightmare in Chowchilla

Summary

Crime Scene – “Nightmare in Chowchilla” (July 16, 2026)

Podcast by Sony Music Entertainment

Hosts: Jonathan Hirsch & Cooper Mall

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Episode Overview

This episode of Crime Scene delves into the haunting story of the Chowchilla bus kidnapping—America’s largest mass kidnapping. In July 1976, 26 children and their bus driver vanished in rural California, sparking nationwide panic and, ultimately, a miraculous escape. As the 50th anniversary approaches, hosts Jonathan Hirsch and Cooper Mall re-examine the well-known headlines of survival, focusing on the rarely-discussed lifelong trauma endured by the victims, and on the legal and social implications this case continues to raise.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Kidnapping: Shock in Small-Town America

• Setting the Scene:

  • July 15, 1976, Chowchilla, CA, a close-knit farm town. The bus driver, Ed Ray, ferries 19 girls and 7 boys (ages 5–14) home after summer school.
  • The bus is stopped by a white van. Three masked men armed with guns hijack it.
  • Ed Ray, a trusted figure in town, is forced to drive off; eventually, the children and Ed are abducted and loaded into two vans.

• Immediate Aftermath:

  • Parents become frantic as the bus never arrives.
  • Law enforcement finds the abandoned, still-warm bus hidden in a slough; no sign of the children or driver—no clues, ransom, or blood.
  • With no precedent or AMBER Alert system, the case becomes a national story, drawing the FBI and media.

"There was no AMBER Alert. There was no playbook for this, because nothing like it had ever happened."
— Cooper Mall (05:37)

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2. Miraculous Escape: The Forgotten Middle

• Captivity Details:

  • The captors drive the children 100+ miles away, lock them (and Ed) in a buried moving trailer at a rock quarry, and attempt to demand ransom.
  • The conditions in the underground trailer are horrific: minimal food and water, stifling heat, failing ventilation, and fear of death.
  • Mike Marshall, the eldest boy (14), leads a makeshift escape after 16 hours by stacking mattresses and removing the hatch; all 27 emerge alive.

• National Relief & Oversimplified Headlines:

  • The media and nation fixate on the “happy ending,” with Ed Ray celebrated as a hero and the kids portrayed as unharmed survivors.

"The line in virtually every newspaper at the time was something to the effect of they were returned without a scratch. The bus driver, Ed Ray, becomes this national hero overnight."
— Jonathan Hirsch (09:00)

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3. The Trauma: Beyond Physical Survival

• Understanding Trauma (or Not) in 1976:
  • At the time, both public and professionals believed that absent physical injury, little harm was done.
  • The reality: the ordeal left deep psychological and emotional scars on every child, not just “one in twenty-six,” as was initially suggested.

"To not have a scratch is not the same as to be impacted by an event like this, traumatic as it is."
— Cooper Mall (09:27)

• First-Person Accounts:
  • Children recount terrifying sensations of waiting to die in the dark, with some suffering physical symptoms like nosebleeds and fainting.
  • Older kids take charge to care for the young; sibling pairs are separated; the traumatic imprint lingers for decades.

“I thought to myself, if we're gonna die, we're gonna die getting the hell out of here.”
— Mike Marshall, survivor (as recounted by Cooper Mall, 18:13)

• The Role of Dr. Lenore Terr:
  • Psychiatrist Dr. Terr investigates the aftermath, uncovering universal, long-term PTSD among the survivors.
  • Her work redefines understanding of trauma in children—"all of them still carrying this emotional toll" even years later (32:10).

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4. Solving the Case & Who Were the Kidnappers?

• Investigation Breakthroughs:

  • Use of hypnosis on Ed Ray yields a near-complete license plate number.
  • The buried trailer is traced to a quarry owned by Frederick Woods III, whose son (Fred Woods) is revealed as the ringleader.
  • Evidence at the Woods estate: diaries, ransom notes, kid “inventory” on a Jack in the Box wrapper, receipt trails, and false IDs.

• Kidnappers’ Background & Motive:

  • Fred Woods, James, and Richard Schoenfeld—all young, wealthy, and privileged men—perpetrated the crime out of greed and misguided inspiration from the film “Dirty Harry.”
  • Their plan collapses when they fail to make ransom demands due to jammed phone lines and the kids’ escape.

“We needed multiple victims to get multiple millions. And we pick children because children are precious. The state would be willing to pay ransom for them. And they don’t fight back.”
— James Schoenfeld (reported by Cooper Mall, 28:58)

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5. Justice & The Limits of the Law

• Prosecution and Sentencing:
  • All three men plead guilty and are initially sentenced to life without parole for kidnapping with “bodily harm.”
  • The key legal debate: Is psychological trauma "bodily harm"? At first, the judge says no, then reverses after testimony of physical symptoms.
  • Later, appeals courts call injuries "minor," leading to eventual parole for all three by 2022.

“The entire legal battle in this case came down to this single question. Did burying those 26 children alive in a box for 16 hours, did that constitute bodily harm?”
— Cooper Mall (33:50)

• Long-Term Impact on Victims:
  • Survivors suffer substance abuse, insomnia, intergenerational anxiety.
  • Legal system lags in recognizing invisible harm; the case becomes a foundational teaching in trauma awareness.

"We can't continue to look at the mental impact of crimes through the same lens that we would for the physical impact of those crimes."
— Cooper Mall (37:16)

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6. Societal Shifts & Lasting Legacy

• From Chowchilla to Today:
  • The case predates modern awareness of "stranger danger,” kid safety, emergency drills in schools, and trauma-informed courts.
  • Ongoing debates on how well we now recognize emotional trauma, with questions left open by the hosts.

"Have we actually gotten better at measuring harm you can't photograph, or have we just gotten better at naming it?"
— Jonathan Hirsch (39:18)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Hundreds of officers, the FBI, the highway patrol, flooded into a town that mostly didn't lock its front doors. And right behind them come the satellite trucks. Chowchilla becomes the only story in America."
  — Cooper Mall (05:30)

• “I was wondering how it was gonna feel to die. I was too scared to move.”
  — Anonymous survivor (18:05)

• “I felt like I was finally safe.”
  — Jennifer Brown Hyde, survivor (32:46)

• "Not all harm is exacted by the physical measurement of harm. There is so much that goes into assault and trauma and violence."
  — Cooper Mall (37:16)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:49] — Chowchilla bus abduction begins
• [04:48] — The bus goes missing; community mobilizes
• [06:04] — Massive search and national attention
• [10:19] — 1976’s limited understanding of trauma
• [13:29] — The children’s experience during kidnapping and captivity
• [18:05] — Survivor voices: Fear in the underground trailer
• [19:12] — Mike Marshall’s escape leadership
• [23:56] — The investigation and tracing evidence to the kidnappers
• [26:07] — Arrests, background, and motive of perpetrators
• [32:09] — Dr. Terr’s findings on child trauma
• [33:50] — Legal debates: psychological vs. bodily harm
• [36:33] — Lessons Chowchilla taught about trauma and the law

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Concluding Reflections

The Chowchilla bus kidnapping—while long known as a story of miraculous survival—remains a powerful lesson on the complexities of trauma, justice, and the ongoing evolution of how we recognize and address psychological harm. The episode challenges listeners to reconsider the way we tell true crime stories and measure the real, lasting effects of crime on its most vulnerable victims.

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Next Week Preview

The hosts tease an upcoming episode featuring Michelle Hadley, subject of a major Netflix documentary ("A Toxic Love Story"), promising listener Q&A and a look into the lasting impacts of another notorious true crime case.

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Transcript

[Narrator/Announcer]

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[Cooper Mall]

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[Cooper Mall]

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[Narrator/Announcer]

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[Cooper Mall]

Imagine your child walking up to the door of a school bus, waving goodbye to them, only to discover a few hours later, it might be the last time you ever see them alive. On a hot afternoon In July of 1976, 26 children and their bus driver vanished off a country road in central California. Fifty years later, this case is as haunting and terrifying as the day that it happened. Welcome to Crime Scene, the show where we tell the stories behind the world's most unforgettable crimes. And this week on the show, the Chowchilla bus kidnapping. A busload of kids disappear without a trace, sending the entire nation into shock. And the strange, fraught journey to bring them justice. From Sony podcasts and the Binge. This is the story we're calling Nightmare in Chowchilla. Hey, y'. All. Welcome to Crime Scene. My name is Jonathan Hirsch, and each week in three acts, we bring you the most shocking and complex true crime stories of our era. And each week I am joined by my friend and fellow documentarian, Cooper Mall. Hi, Cooper.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Hey, Jonathan.

[Cooper Mall]

Don't forget, this show is a part of the Binge, which is our True Crime Limited Series Podcast Network. Go to getthebinge.com to learn more. Okay, Cooper, this story. We are now at the 50th anniversary of this case, so we wanted to bring it to people's attention today. It is the largest mass kidnapping in American history. And the headline that's remembered about this story is that 26 kids and a bus driver survived being left for dead.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Can't believe I've never heard of this.

[Cooper Mall]

It's a miraculous story of escape and survival, which is what people remember about this case. But there's another piece to the story which I think is particularly interesting to all of us, which is it happened at a time when there was very little known about what the long term impact would be to the children who experienced this horrific event. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Let's get into it.

[Cooper Mall]

Okay, Our story Starts in the middle of the afternoon in 1976, July 15, Chowchilla, California, which is a farm town of about 5,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley. It's the kind of place where the bus driver went to school with some of the kids, grandparents. Bus driver in this story is a guy by the name of Frank Edward Ray. Everybody calls him ed. He's 55 years old. He's a farmer who drives the Dairyland elementary bus route for a little extra money, and he's been doing it for more than 20 years. On this particular afternoon, he's got 19 girls and seven boys aboard, and they're all between the ages of 5 and 14 years old. It's almost the end of summer school on that day, and they're headed home from a swim at the county fairgrounds. They're out on a quiet stretch called Avenue 21. Ed Ray comes upon a white van that stopped in the middle of the road with the hood up. Looks like it's broken down. So he does what any decent person would do in that situation. He slows down to try to help. Three men step out from the van. They have nylon stockings pulled over their faces and they're holding guns. One of them orders Ed to the back of the bus. Another one takes the wheel. From that moment on, the hostages had no idea what was about to happen. The captors began to drive the bus out of the town towards destinations unknown. And back in Chowchilla, summer school is out for the day. But the bus never comes. Parents drift to the ends of their driveways, waiting. Some are waiting for siblings because their brothers and sisters are on that bus. Some are waiting for kids barely out of kindergarten, imagining rows of houses with people just waiting for their kids to come home. As the calls start to fly between the families and the school, it becomes clear that something is terribly wrong.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

Throughout much of this day, parents and other family of the missing children came to the command post set up in downtown Chowchilla to try desperately to fathom some reason out of this madness.

[Cooper Mall]

By the early evening, the Chowchillo police and the sheriff department, the Madera county sheriff's deputies, are out searching the roads for this missing bus. A little after 8 o' clock that night, they find it tucked into a slough, covered over with brush. The engine is still warm and it's empty. No children, no driver, no note. No ransom call, no blood. There's nothing there. 27 people have seemingly vanished into thin air. Remember back then, there was no AMBER Alert. There was no playbook for this, because because nothing like it had ever happened. Hundreds of officers, the FBI, the highway patrol, flooded into a town that mostly didn't lock its front doors. And right behind them come the satellite trucks. Chowchilla becomes the only story in America.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

And it's our job and the job of the entire law enforcement community here in Chowchilla to find these youngsters and the bus driver and to make sure we take the responsible people into custody for this particular crime.

[Cooper Mall]

For 24 hours, the country sits in a horrible kind of suspense. No one knows if the captives are dead or alive. Parents are telling reporters that they're scared to let their kids out of the house. And now all these news crews are showing up.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

Carol Marshall's 14 year old son Mike was another on the bus. Any chance at all this could be some kind of terrible hoax or joke that someone is playing?

[Jonathan Hirsch]

I imagine there's a chance. I hope that's all it is.

[Cooper Mall]

The state mounts one of the largest manhunts ever. The FBI takes it on as a kidnapping for ransom. Agents, sheriff's deputies, the highway patrol work straight through the night. And all of them wait for the one thing a ransom kidnapping is supposed to deliver. A phone call, a voice on the line to negotiate with. It never comes, only deepening the mystery. And then, not even 30 hours after that bus disappeared, there's a break in the case. And not from anyone searching for them. More than 100 miles to the north, in a rock quarry outside of Livermore, California, those 27 missing people are climbing up out of the ground. They're filthy, dehydrated, blinking in the light, they walk to a guard shack near the California Rock and Gravel Company quarry in Livermore, over 100 miles from Chowchilla. And a night watchman calls the police. The kidnappers, whoever they are, have not collected a dime. They didn't even make a ransom demand. Were these men total amateurs or. Or had they not accounted for the bravery of these kids? Maybe the hostages, it seems, had rescued themselves. The headlines the next morning were Pure Relief. All 26 children are safe and the bus driver, Ed, is a hero. He's returned them to their parents. And by every account, there are no serious physical injuries. A bruise here and there. This was a happy ending, right? That's the version of Chowchilla people still carry around. Kids were taken. They were saved. Everybody goes home. And in print In July of 1976, that was true enough. Okay, Cooper, I want to stay on that version of the story that the country settled on that week because it was airtight and it was wonderful. 26 kids were taken, 26 returned. And the line in virtually every newspaper at the time was something to the effect of they were returned without a scratch. The bus driver, Ed Ray, becomes this national hero overnight. And the town even names a day in his honor.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

I mean, honestly, I get why the country and Chowchilla grabbed onto those, you know, miraculous headlines. Right. They had just spent the full day and night imagining the worst possible scenario and outcome for these kids and their bus driver. Right.

[Cooper Mall]

Yeah. And you want to be able to heal from something like this and to start to rebuild your life and put it to the side as quickly as possible. Awful that it was. But one of the things I think is interesting about this story is how quick we were to determine the impact on these kids. To not have a scratch is not the same as to be impacted by an event like this, traumatic as it is. And so that's sort of the beginning of what ends up going wrong here in totally unexpected ways.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Yeah. And I mean, you're so right. I mean, that they can walk, they're not harmed. Right. And these kids are. Okay. Are objectively two very different things. Right.

[Cooper Mall]

We talk about the impact of trauma on a wide variety of individuals and cases all the time. And our growing understanding of this is so nuanced, you know?

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Yeah. And like you said, it's very contemporaneous. Right. 1976, there weren't, there wasn't as much language for this.

[Cooper Mall]

Yeah. I mean, they literally didn't have the words for this in that era. So they were inclined to believe that without injury, physical injury, there was nothing to see here. They had no idea what was about to go down. Coming up, we climb down the hole with the kids and meet the 14 year old boy who decided they were going to get out of the ground or die trying. If you've tried to quit smoking or vaping and somehow just keep ending up right back where you started, maybe the problem isn't you, maybe it's how you're trying to quit. Because vaping isn't just about the nicotine, it's about the habit. It's reaching for something when you're stressed, bored, driving, taking a break, patches and gum deal with part of that. And quitting cold turkey can leave you relying on your willpower alone. But those hand to mouth routines, those are really hard to shake. That's why Fum is so interesting to me. Fume is a flavored air device designed to help people quit vaping and smoking by giving your hands, mouth and brain something better to reach for when cravings hit no nicotine, no vapor, no batteries. The first thing that surprised me is that it feels like a real object. It's weighted, well made, honestly, kind of satisfying to fidget with. You can draw through it throughout the day and the mint core gives you that fresh breath feeling and a little bit of that throat hit. It's not as intense as vaping. And that's exactly the point. I'm a Chris Mint fan because it's clean and refreshing, but don't sleep on peach blush. It's little unexpected. Over a million people have already used Fume to quit differently. Join them today and grab a Journey Pack. Plus get a free gift purchase by using the Code Crime Scene Addiction is really good at saying later. Don't let it. Head to trif.com that's T R Y F U M dot com and use code Crime Scene for a free gift with your first purchase. Thank you to Fume for sponsoring this episode.

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[Jonathan Hirsch]

okay Jonathan, so where we left it Chowchilla and the country got its happy ending. All the kids were returned home safe without a scratch after, you know, climbing out of a hole a hundred miles away from home. The bus driver's named a hero and we kind of all move on after the tidy headline. But again, I mean, I feel like I only got the beginning and end of the story, not the middle. I feel like I need to know how the kids experienced this ordeal.

[Cooper Mall]

Okay, so it's the second to last day of summer school and these kids are sunburned, worn out, riding home after an afternoon at the pool and the bus slows down and stops. The next thing you know, three men with stockings pulled over their face climb aboard. They've got guns and Ed, the bus driver they trust, is marched to the back of the bus at gunpoint. This is where our story picks up from where we started. They must have been stunned into silence because no one was there to explain to them that the unthinkable was happening. Mike Marshall was the oldest of them. He was 14. He knew that they were being kidnapped, but the little ones must have just seemed confused and terrified. Then after a drive, they were taken off the bus, got split up into two vans. The bus drove off into a dry riverbed called Berenda Slow, about nine miles outside of town. And the captors hit it down in the brush. Then they move Ed and every child into the backs of two windowless vans. Jeff Brown was all of 10 years old. He was separated from his younger sister, Jennifer, and he didn't know if she would live or die. And these vans were scary. Windows were painted black, walls lined with soundproofing. The kids climb in, the doors shut, and daylight just stops. Then they drive for 11 hours in the dark, in July heat, in the back of a sealed van with almost nothing to eat or drink, and dug holes for makeshift toilets. Some of these children are five years old. They don't know where their parents are. They don't know if they are being driven somewhere to be killed. A few of the older kids, like 10 year old Jody Heffington, start working the van, you know, the way a big sister would, Keeping the little ones talking, trying to keep them calm. The van finally stops in the middle of the night at a gravel quarry outside of Livermore. And then it gets worse. One at a time, at gunpoint, they're walked into a hole in the ground and made to climb down a ladder. Ed and all 26 children into a moving truck trailer that had been buried in the earth. Picture the size of this thing, right? About 26 by 8ft. The footprint of like a couple of parked cars, 27 people inside of it. A few filthy mattresses, some peanut butter and water, pair of fans that barely move the air around. And there's this one detail that tells you a lot about how these kidnappers saw the children before they were sealed in. They took an inventory, right? They wrote down each kid's name and age on the back of a jack in the box hamburger wrapper, like a packing list. Then they pulled that ladder out. They dragged a sheet of metal over the one way out, and they weighed it down with two industrial batteries, like a hundred pounds apiece. Then they buried it. They shoveled dirt over the top of it in places. The roof of that trailer sat more than four feet underground. Then they drove to make their ransom call. But the problem was, is that the phone lines in the Chowchilla Police department, they were all jammed, clogged by the very parents and reporters that the Crime had thrown into a panic, so they couldn't get through to the police department. Below ground, the air is starting to go stale, and the fans can't keep up. So the ceiling starts to sag under the weight of all that dirt. And the kids can see it bowing, they said, toward them in the dark. Children are wetting themselves because there's nowhere else to go. And some of them will come up with bladder infections from holding it for 16 hours. There are nosebleeds. Kids faint, they cry, and then they go quiet. Imagine all of them lying there, certain that this dirty hole was where they were gonna die.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

I was wondering how it was gonna feel to die. I was too scared to move.

[Cooper Mall]

At first, Ed won't let anyone near the hatch because he's sure that those men are still up top waiting. But it's the oldest kid, a teenager named Mike Marshall, who says he's gonna try to dig them out anyway. He said, quote, I thought to myself, if we're gonna die, we're gonna die getting the hell out of here. Mike gets the kids stacking these filthy mattresses into a tower high enough to reach the hatch. He climbs up and wedges a piece of wood into the gap to hold it open. He shoves at the metal lid, and the hundred pound batteries sitting on top of it start to move. Then he claws through the dirt and the wooden barrier above until he breaks through into the surface. I heard the rest of the kids say, mike, it's Mikey, Michael.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

And I realized that everybody was alive.

[Cooper Mall]

He said it was the most glorious ray of sunlight he'd ever seen. All 27 of them come up from out of the ground. And they survived because a teenager would not go quietly. And their kidnappers weren't even aware of what had happened until they saw it on the news. And to the world, that was the story. Roll the credits, you know, that's it. But for those 26 kids, the day they came up out of the ground is when their real ordeal started. And what happens next is really almost impossible to believe. In 1976, the prevailing wisdom was that children were resilient, that they'd bounce back. One mental health professional looked at these kids and predicted that maybe 1 in 26 might be left with some lasting problems. And at first, no parent wanted to admit that any of their children were struggling. And it would actually take someone looking into this to find the truth that it wasn't just one of them who was having a hard time. It was all of them. Oh, my God, Cooper. This would have gone so differently today. I'm sure you're thinking this as you're hearing this story in 1976, like nobody knew what stranger danger was, let alone how to deal with a situation like this.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Yeah. That was definitely something I don't think people were saying yet. I mean, these kids got on a bus that they got on every single day with a driver. They knew that some of their grandparents knew. Right. I mean, I don't think anyone was thinking at the time that a mass stranger could even be approaching this bus they had so much familiarity with. Right.

[Cooper Mall]

Yeah. And knowing a little bit of the history, too. Some of the cases that became sort of iconic in our understanding of the danger that our children might face out in the world hadn't really been publicized by the seventies, you know?

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Right. It makes me think of the Jacob Wetterling case.

[Cooper Mall]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Which the first season of in the Dark dug into the boy who was abducted in Minnesota.

[Cooper Mall]

Right.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

But that didn't happen until 1989, which is over a decade after Chowchilla. Right.

[Cooper Mall]

That case and a number of cases. Right. Where we began to understand that there's so much danger in the world that we need to prepare our children for.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Yeah. And today, I mean, kids are taught this preparedness in school. Right. I mean, everything from emergency drills for school shootings to, you know, just lockdown preparedness. And in the same way like you and I used to do fire drills. Right?

[Cooper Mall]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

And kids are actually taught how to handle crisis before it happens now.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

Yeah.

[Cooper Mall]

I still remember the day Columbine happened when they brought us all out into the yard and it was so clear that the teachers didn't have the faculty then to handle that situation. Ultimately, this would become a daily part of American life.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Yeah. By the time I got to college, I knew exactly what to do if that were to happen. Right, Exactly.

[Cooper Mall]

Yes.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Back then, I don't think any of this had been contemplated yet. Right.

[Cooper Mall]

It hadn't been. And that's one of the things that sort of drives a wedge between the experiences of these kids and what the public and experts and the media think is happening. And then ultimately how it's adjudicated. Coming up, three men who buried a busload of children learn what a courtroom will and won't call harm.

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[Jonathan Hirsch]

All right, to catch everyone up as we move into our third act of this episode. So 26 kids and their bus driver were taken off the road in Chowchilla, buried in this underground trailer. And they were scared to death, but survived. But Jonathan, I'm wondering, like, what kind of person does this, right? And how did these kidnappers ultimately get caught?

[Cooper Mall]

That's the big question at this point in our story, right? So the first real break in the case happened in an unlikely place. That bus driver went under hypnosis. Talk about things that don't happen anymore. A medical hypnotist named William Kroger sat with Ed Ray at a Fresno motel room and walked him back into the afternoon of the kidnapping. In that trance, he pulled almost the entire license plate number of one of the vans. Every digit but one. That's incredible. But the thing that really cracked it was the ground itself. So that trailer hadn't been buried just anywhere. It sat inside this rock quarry owned by California Rock and Gravel Company, which is a company owned by Frederick Woods III. His son, 24 year old Fred woods, had keys to the place and the run of it. And quarry workers even remembered the young men out there digging months before. The hole those children climbed out of led almost straight back to the family's front door. So investigators get a warrant for the woods family estate, 78 acres in Portola Valley.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

All last night and all today. Law enforcement authorities have been combing the Portola Valley estate of Fred woods iii, looking for ev in the very strange and very well covered case of the kidnapped Chowchilla school bus.

[Cooper Mall]

And inside the mastermind's own room, they found the whole crime written down. A draft of the $5 million ransom note, journals, maps, a step by step plan, receipts for the vans and the trailer, false IDs, one of the guns, and the single most damning piece of evidence in the entire house. That Jack in the Box receipt with the name and age of every child on it, a storage unit that they rented held those two blacked out vans and a Cadillac they'd spray painted flat black for a getaway car. And here's where this case stops making any sense. The men who buried those children in the dirt were not poor. They were not hardened criminals. They were rich kids. The ringleader was Frederick Newell woods iv. Fred, an heir to serious California money. His family is like one of these big land and farming dynasties in the state. The other two were brothers, James and Richard Schoenfeld, 24 and 22 years old. And they were sons of a well off Bay Area doctor. All three had grown up comfortably in the town of Woodside, California, and they'd gone to the same high school together. So why did they do wasn't survival. It was greed and a spectacularly stupid version of it. The trio had gone into debt on a failed real estate scheme. By several accounts, they wanted ransom money, partly to fix up a rundown Victorian mansion. They had money and wanted more of it. And so they convinced themselves that the state of California would hand over this 5 million dollar ransom for the safety of these children. Years later, at a parole hearing, Fred woods put it this way. He said, quote, I didn't need the money. I wanted the money. You know, there is this one detail that sticks out to me. It shows you how detached from reality they really were. The whole thing was modeled on a movie. The plan was lifted in large part from the 1971 Clint Eastwood film Dirty Harry, in which the villain hijacks a school bus full of kids. So three of the most privileged young men in California planned a mass kidnapping the way you would plan a heist for fun in a screenplay. And the punchline to all of that planning, nobody actually ever asked for the ransom. The plan was to demand $5 million and have it dropped from a small plane into the Santa Cruz Mountains before dawn. But when the men finally went to phone it in, the lines into Chowchilla were jam solid. Like we said, they were clogged by the parents and reporters who were thrown into a panic by this event and they couldn't get through. So they decided they'd grab a few hours of sleep and try again in the morning. And while they slept, those kids dug themselves out. The men woke up, turned on the news and found out their hostages had escaped. Their leverage was completely shot. And then there's the single coldest thing anyone said in this entire case. It came from James Schoenfeld later explaining how they chose their victims. He said, quote, we needed multiple Victims to get multiple millions. And we pick children because children are precious. The state would be willing to pay ransom for them. And they don't fight back. They're vulnerable. They pick children up because children obey. The case unraveled almost as fast as it had baffled everyone. So eight days after the kidnapping, the youngest brother, Richard, walked into custody in Oakland with his father and a lawyer beside him. And about two weeks after that, James was arrested near the family's home.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

Investigators here are reportedly looking for a man named Fred, who is indirectly linked to the California rock and Gravel company quarry where the children were kept underground.

[Cooper Mall]

And Fred woods, the only one who really ran, was caught in Vancouver, Canada, Inside roughly two weeks of burying those children, all three of them were behind bars. All three pled guilty to kidnapping for ransom. But while the three of them sat in jail waiting to be tried, the children they had buried were supposed to slip back into their ordinary life. And they were not slipping back into their ordinary life. That fall, parents started to report that they could hear their own children screaming in their sleep. And that is when a San Francisco psychiatrist named Lenore Terre started to get involved. Dr. Terror came to Chowchill and started to interview 23 of those survivors. And she did it for years. What she documented changed the way that we look at these kinds of scenarios. She found that every single child was struggling nightmares, kids who would scream and run at nothing. Kids replaying the kidnapping over and over, joylessly acting it out. Their childhood had been stolen from them. Post traumatic stress disorder was not a formal diagnosis even for combat veterans at this time. And Tara's work on these kids became some of the first hard, systematic proof that acute trauma leaves lasting, measurable wounds in children. Her four year follow up found the same thing that the early study did. All of them still carrying this emotional toll. And the wounds did not close up when the kids got older. Michael Marshall, the boy who dug them out, was drinking heavily by the time he was 19, and he went to rehab seven times. Larry park, who was nine, fought a 20 year addiction before he got sober.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

This man carried me off the bus and he put me in my mom's arms and I said, hi, mom, and fell asleep on her shoulder.

[Cooper Mall]

I felt.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

I felt like I was finally safe.

[Cooper Mall]

And Jennifer Brown Hyde, who was also nine, says that for decades she couldn't sleep without a light on. And she can't easily climb down into a storm shelter because the ladder is the ladder.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

It feels to be a big movie star. I don't know.

[Cooper Mall]

I've never been a Movie star before. For nine year old Jennifer Brown, the experience has allowed her to still see the world with compassion. Why do you suppose that they would do something like that?

[Jonathan Hirsch]

I don't know. They didn't have enough love.

[Cooper Mall]

Survivors who became parents couldn't let their kids ride a bus or go on a field trip or have a sleepover. The fear became intergenerational at that point. For their survivors, the damage would never really be undone. But for the men who caused it, the law was about to do something almost as hard to believe as the crime itself. So under California law at this time, kidnapping was one thing, but kidnapping with bodily harm was another. And the entire legal battle in this case came down to this single question. Did burying those 26 children alive in a box for 16 hours, did that constitute bodily harm? And early on, the judge in this case made a ruling that sort of set the table here. He decided that psychological and psychiatric damage, the screaming nightmares, the terrors, everything that terror had been documenting, would not count as bodily harm. Talk about a dated analysis. The mental wounds were ruled out still after hearing testimony about kids suffering from nosebleeds and fainting and stomach pains. And he changed his mind and reversed that.

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

Are you afraid? Afraid that some of those kids who are witnesses and victims could forget everything that they, they went through? I don't think there's any chance in the world they'll ever forget.

[Cooper Mall]

On December 15, 1977, he convicted all three of kidnapping with bodily harm. The men were resentenced to life without the possibility of parole in this case. But then three years later, this case was overturned by the court of Appeals. That called the injuries minor cuts and bruises. Even though Dr. Terr had shown what had happened to these kids was total and lasting, it mostly worked for a long time. But one by one, the system let these men out. So Schoenfeld was paroled in 2012, the brother in 2015. Fred woods, the ringleader, was denied parole 17 times before. In 2022, he was let out. Governor Gavin Newsom, to his credit, asked the full board to review it. But because this wasn't a murder case, he didn't have the power to block it. When In August of 2022, Fred woods got out. So, Cooper, this is the part of the story I wanted to get to, because Chowchilla really is a case about a definition. In 1976, the law had basically one tool for measuring how badly hurt a victim was, and that was a physical measurement.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Yeah, there's like no framework for assigning weight or severity to what gets done to a person's mind, or at least that's what I've gathered.

[Cooper Mall]

Yeah. None. And once you see the case that way, you start seeing those blind spots everywhere. I. I've gotta say, I'm sure many of y' all have seen this already. There was a Netflix special on the murder of Rachel Nichol that just came out about a young woman who was murdered in a park area in England. Her son witnessed that murder, and the story is told in harrowing detail.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Such a tough watch.

[Cooper Mall]

Barely get through it myself as the father of two boys, trying to imagine what this kid went through. Psychologists are brought into that case, if I remember correctly, and they're trying to extract information from the child who was the only one to directly witness the murder. But imagine walking up to the precipice of that traumatic experience with a small child trying to get them to relive and relay what was a violent assault and murder. It is just really hard to imagine anybody in their right minds doing that today.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

And it's clear to me this is a. This is a topic you are just so passionate about. I mean, it makes me think of watching you in the case of domestic violence. Right?

[Cooper Mall]

Yes. Yeah. Not all harm is exacted by the physical measurement of harm. There is so much that goes into assault and trauma and violence. As a cult survivor, I, in particular, feel sensitive to the experiences of people where their physical damage is not measured in the same way as their emotional trauma and the impact of traumatic events. And watching you is a great example of a family operating inside the boundaries of a high control environment, the way cult leaders operate their groups in high control situations. So we can't continue to look at the mental impact of crimes through the same lens that we would for the physical impact of those crimes.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Yeah. And I feel like we're still in a kind of flux, right, with how we think about coercive control. I mean, only some places have criminalized it in the last couple of years. And I do think we're in the middle of a shift. Right. We have things like victim impact statements, trauma, informed courts, and things like coercive control statutes.

[Cooper Mall]

But it's complicated, Right. Because if you create laws for the unseen impact of a person's behavior, we're operating in a highly subjective territory that can get a little bit dangerous.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Yeah. It's a tricky one for sure.

[Cooper Mall]

Right. Like, what's to define something you can't see? But you have to take that into account when you're looking at a situation like what happened in Chowchilla when you're looking at a situation like what happened to Dominique Liley and to her family, these are more nuanced than we sometimes give them credit for.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

And I'm curious for those of you tuning in, I mean, have we actually gotten better at measuring harm you can't photograph, or have we just gotten better at naming it?

[Reporter/News Correspondent]

Right.

[Cooper Mall]

It's a, it's a good question. Would this look any different today? I want to believe that it would, but I'm not sure.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

All right, Jonathan, We've had something kind of happenstance.

[Cooper Mall]

Yes.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

Occur.

[Cooper Mall]

Yeah. So we're very excited to bring you a very special episode of Crime Scene next week. Some of you may remember our episode, the Fake Stalker on the Michelle Hadley case. I mentioned very briefly in that episode that I'd been in touch with Michelle and that she has a much longer tale to her story than maybe meets the eye or that the public knows. It turns out she is the subject of a major documentary on Netflix that is about to drop. And we are bringing her into the crime scene office to talk about that case to talk about the aftermath of everything that had happened to her. So we are going to link to that fake stalker episode here so you can get caught up to date on that case before we bring Michelle Hadley into the crime scene office to talk about the new series based on her experience. It's called A Toxic Love Story. It's going to be on Netflix and you're going to hear from her the day after that series drops.

[Jonathan Hirsch]

And if you have any questions for her, drop them below.

[Cooper Mall]

We will try to get as many of them answered by her. So please, in the comments or wherever you find us, send us your questions. And we'll be asking Michelle all manner of questions on that day. Hey y', all, thank you so much for joining us on Crime Scene. Just a reminder here, you can watch or listen to us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is a production of Sony Podcasts and the binge. Thank you to everybody who makes this happen week in and week out. Also, we we're journalists. We love journalism. These stories have been deeply reported, the ones that you hear on this show. And you can find an extensive bibliography by going to the show notes of this episode and to every episode to learn more about the reporting that informed all of the great stories you hear on Crime Scene. And just one last note, you can get exclusive content from us and the binge over 60 jaw dropped dropping true Crime stories bingeable and ad free right now by signing up for our [e-mail] so go to getthebinge.com to get access to our entire catalog of stories, but also to get behind the scenes access to all of the stories that Cooper and I are working on. To join us in the conversation about these cases, go to getthebinge.com to learn more.

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