48 Hours - "48 Hours" Live to Tell: The Chowchilla Kidnapping

Episode Date: October 13, 2019

Twenty-six school children abducted and buried alive in a truck trailer by three young men. An incredible survival story. CBS News' David Begnaud reports.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and even your overall well-being. And you can enjoy Audible anytime, while doing household chores, exercising, commuting, you name it. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca. In 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert

to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park. They have to alert the military. And when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. I'm not sure if I should do this, but I'm never been in darkness like that before. It was just pitch black, like the dark was touching me, engulfing me, like I was actually inhaling the darkness. Chowchilla in 1976 was a cow town. You could drive through the heart of town in about 30 seconds.

Very close-knit community. Everybody looked out for each other. People didn't lock their doors. There was nothing to fear. I didn't know what fear was. I still have a hard time grasping the way that my life changed on July 15th. Just another average summer day, very hot, going to summer school, and that day we got to go to the town swimming pool. Got back on the bus, ready to go home. Our bus driver was Ed Ray. We all called him Edward.

He was just, you know, a really nice man. The buses had the windows down, the hot summer breeze, the kids were laughing and singing. We dropped a few kids off at their normal stops, and then I can remember the bus stopping at a stop sign. Edward went to go around a white van that was parked in the road. parked in the road. We just assumed that that van was broke down until Edward opened the bus door and mass men jumped on with guns. The first man came on the bus and he had a gun. Ed Ray said, what's going on? And he said, shut up and move to the back. I remember telling him that if he didn't get me home on time my dad would be on him like stink on skunk. You know I wasn't afraid of anything I didn't know I needed to be. And then

another man came on the bus and he had a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun. The shotgun filled me with terror. The masked men had pantyhose pulled over their face. It was a very distorted look. I remember scrunching back down in my seat and thinking, I really don't want to see this. Where their eyes were, it almost looked hollow. It was like looking at death. One of the kidnappers got into the driver's seat and the bus started moving again.

I started to think, I wonder where they're taking us. Twenty-six school children and their bus driver have vanished. Anguished parents, President Ford, hundreds of searching police are asking the question, where are the children? Thank you. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was,

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or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. It's just the best idea yet. Just outside Chowchilla on July 15, 1976, the frightening journey began. We started driving down the road. I was wondering how it was going to feel to die. I was too scared to move.

26 terrified children, some as young as five, were staring down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. Three masked men had hijacked the Dairyland Elementary school bus. One had the shotgun, one drove the bus, and one followed behind in the white van they'd used to block the road. Edward kept telling us kids just to be quiet, sit down, do what they say. Edward was speaking in a harsh tone, and that normally was not the Edward that we knew and loved. Eventually, the bus went off the road down into a dry riverbed.

a dry riverbed. And into this big grove of bamboo that were taller, actually, than the bus. And then, as I looked out one of the side windows, I saw that there was another van that was parked there. They parked the bus, and there was another green, there was a green van down there waiting for us. Even at the age of nine, little Jennifer Brown seemed to know the horror of that day should be documented. She later made this recording with her mom. And there was two guys standing from the bus door to the van door with guns, with pantyhose over their heads so we wouldn't run out. And see, they pulled the van right up to the bus door. The kidnappers herded the stunned children from the bus into those two vans.

We had to jump from the bus to the van. So they wouldn't see any feet prints. Jennifer and her 10-year-old brother, Jeff, were immediately separated. And they took off, and I kept telling my friends that I wanted Jeff. Jennifer and Larry Park were forced into the second van, already jam-packed with children, and the bus driver, Ed Ray, threatening them, the kidnapper with that shotgun. Walking toward it, the barrels on that gun seemed like they were getting so big

that they were just going to swallow me up. Inside the vans, the kidnappers had constructed makeshift jail cells. By installing wood paneling and even painting the windows, no one could see in or out. It was pitch dark. As a six-year-old, the only way that I can describe this darkness is that it was trying to get me. The kidnappers sped off with the children, caged in those mobile prisons. And I felt like I was an animal going to the slaughterhouse. Around that time, Jennifer and Jeff's mom, Joan Brown, came home from work to an empty house. The children were not there.

No peanut butter on the counter, no chairs out there. Well, they just weren't there. As one hour turned to two, worried parents began helping the police retrace the school bus' route, crisscrossing dozens of rural roads. Where were those children? Twenty-six of them and a bus driver. Nowhere. And then, just before sunset,

a police pilot spotted the big bus about seven miles outside Chowchilla, hidden in the dry riverbed. You would only see it from the air. Madera County Sheriff Ed Bates rushed to the scene. His deputies had already found the bus. Empty. The children and the driver, gone.

We found tire impressions in the sand. That led straight to the front door of the bus. Obviously, someone had backed their vehicle up to the doors of the bus. Sheriff Bates was convinced. I called the governor. I said, I need some help down here. The children of Chowchilla had become the victims of a brazen and bizarre mass kidnapping. I had the parents all assembled there in the fire station.

Well, you could just look at their faces, and the anxiety and the fear was there. I told them I called the FBI. All of a sudden, I had 30 FBI agents there. As Sheriff Bates continued to widen the investigation, the children continued to suffer inside the sweltering pitch black vans. Didn't know where we were going. Didn't know what they were going to do with this.

And we drove what seemed like for hours upon hours upon hours. And I remember that I kept falling asleep and coming back awake. I would dream about being... S***. I would dream about being up in the forest where my family would go camping. We all tried to comfort each other. And a few of my little friends that are five and six that came over and started laying on me and crying. And I told them, be brave because everything's going to be all right.

Then the van started to slow down. The kids could feel it, pulling off the road, lurching from side to side on rough terrain before coming to a stop after nearly 12 unbearable hours. They opened up the door and they took Ed Ray out first. They shut the doors back and then there was nothing. There was no sound. And I remember they would just grab the first kid that was inside the door. And they just kept doing that. They opened the door and they grabbed somebody else. Open up the door. Take one of us out and close the door. They'd take a kid, they'd close the door. One by one.

It'd be a couple of minutes and then they would open the door again. They would take one of us out and close the door. And I kept scooting to the back of the van. And I thought, maybe if I just hide in the corner, they won't come for me. But they did. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand lies a tiny volcanic island It's a little known British territory called Pitcairn

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early and ad-free right now. I didn't know if it was in the desert, at the beach, in the side of a mountain. I had no idea where we were. I didn't even know if we were in California. of a mountain. I had no idea where we were. I didn't even know if we were in California. After almost 12 grueling hours in darkness, the kidnappers pulled Jennifer from one of the vans. One guy asked us our name, and we told it to him. One guy asked us our age, and we told him our age. And then I looked. They had a wooden ladder down into a hole in the ground. And then I remember them telling me, you need to climb down there. You need to go down there.

And I thought, oh, they're sending us to hell. I didn't know where we were going. Down underground, Jennifer found herself in an old truck trailer. In fact, the kidnappers had buried it. Ed, Ray, and the rest of the children from her van were there too. I've always referred to it as the hole. 48 hours obtained these rarely seen photos from inside the hole. There was a table set up in the back. It was surrounded with jugs of drinking water.

And then on the table, there were different food items. Boxes of cereal, peanut butter, and loaves of bread. They had made toilets in the wheel wells. They had cut holes in them for toilets. We could hear fans, so we knew that there was some sort of ventilation. 14-year-old Michael Marshall was still in the other van with some of the youngest children. I just remember the kids got a hold of me or holding on to me and just scared out of their, you know, we're all just scared out of our wits. As they did before, the kidnappers removed the children one by one.

Michael and the youngest, five-year-old Monica Artery, were the last ones left in the van. It was just me and her. Not knowing what had happened to the other children, or if they were even alive, Michael says he couldn't bear to hand Monica over to the kidnappers.

So when they opened the doors again, he went first. I had to take her hands from mine and rip and take them apart so it would be okay and go with them and leave her. That was hard. As soon as I got on that ladder and took a step down, and I heard the rest of the kids say, it's Mike, it's Michael, and I realized that everybody was alive. And to his relief, not long after, Monica came climbing down that ladder.

They were all together again. We're okay. We're okay. We're okay. So right now, so far, we're all right. But the sense of relief was short-lived. Before I knew it, the ladder was gone. They threw a rolled toilet paper down and said, we'll be back for you. And that was it. The kidnappers then covered the opening with a manhole cover. I remember it just went dark.

And you just hear the material getting thrown on us. We would have been buried alive. Buried 12 feet underground. buried alive. Buried 12 feet underground. Ed Ray and Mike Marshall, they looked at every corner, every wall for an escape route, got underneath the manhole cover, pushed up on it. They couldn't move it. So Ed Ray determined that it was time for everyone to get some rest. The minutes and hours ticked by. It would be silent and then somebody would bust out crying and the whole... would just erupt, everybody crying.

The thing that made me cry was not being able to say goodbye to my mom. And I'm remembering the last time that I saw her. And wishing I could have told her goodbye. 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. 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? I imagine there's a chance. I hope that's all it is. This was one of the largest kidnappings in U.S. history. So far, there's been no word from any abductors. Two heavily laden vehicles had taken 26 children and their bus driver. That's not easy to do. How did they control them? And what did they do with them? As investigators intensified their search, Jennifer and Jeff's mom, Joan, waited by the phone, hoping to hear news about her children. I remember later that day praying and saying to God that if you bring them back, I will promise you that I will. And then I stopped because there was nothing I could offer in exchange for my children.

They had been in the hole for almost 12 hours, and the conditions were deteriorating. 12 hours, and the conditions were deteriorating. We had eaten the food. The fans on the ventilator stopped. My little brain started to grasp the concept of, we may really not go home. There was this one boy, and he kept kicking blocks out from underneath the four by four pillars. And so the roof of the van was starting to cave in, the seams were breaking, dust was flowing through. And I remember children just screaming and crying. The sides of the van were bowing in. I knew that I was going to die. I knew it.

We thought and they said, the older kids and Edward, if we're gonna die, we're gonna have a lot of sense of time. There was no sunlight, so you couldn't tell if it was day or night. We were out of food. We were out of water. The roof was caving in. It just was a desperate situation. So Ed Ray and Mike Marshall took a bunch of these mattresses that we were laying on, and they stacked them on top of each other right underneath the manhole cover. They took turns pushing up on it. I'm giving it everything I got, and all the kids are cheering me on, you know. Go on, Mike, you can do it, you can do it.

Then all of a sudden they said, it moved, it moved. But they were far from being free. The children would quickly learn that escaping was not going to be easy. The kidnappers had put truck batteries and dirt on top of the manhole cover and constructed a wooden box around it. Once the manhole cover was moved, that box was just big enough for Michael to stand in. Like Jennifer, Michael Marshall made a recording about his experience. He dug until he was exhausted and then he kept on digging.

There was no quit in him. None of us knew if we got out, they're just going to be standing there with shotguns in our head and stuff. So we were kind of pretty scared. Then suddenly this ray of sunlight, this ray of sunlight came down into the opening. It was catching the dust and the dust particles looked like a bunch of shooting stars. There was this airflow that came out of the van and I knew we were free. I need a minute.

The air and the light, there was beaming coming through. Mike Marshall, actually, brave person that he is, crawled out of the hole first. And I stuck my head out, and I didn't see anybody. And I could see we were in the hills. We were in big trees. It looked totally like a sand dune. There was no way to know that there was anything below. There was no way to know that there was anything below. There was no way to know that we were in there. It was totally camouflaged. It was approximately 8 p.m. on July 16th when Ed, Ray, and the children emerged.

They had been in the hole for nearly 16 hours. We all just scurried like a bunch of little mice. And we heard some noises, machinery and equipment. And then we thought, oh my god, what if it's them? What if we're going right to the men that took us? But they felt they had no choice but to keep going. We started walking towards the equipment that we heard. We saw conveyor belts, excavators. It looked like the Flintstones. And all these men with hard hats came to us and looked at us like,

who are you? And I remember Edward saying, we're from Chotchilla and we're lost. And I remember Edward saying, we're from Chowchilla and we're lost. The kidnappers had buried them in a rock quarry in Livermore, California, 100 miles away from Chowchilla. When police arrived, as evidence, they took photos of every child. Then they transported them to the closest place that could hold them, the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center, a local jail. I remember going in in the bus, and you could see the prison wire. And you thought, well, they're taking us into jail.

They took us into what looked like classrooms. They brought us apples and soda. They had these coveralls and all those little kids got into them and we had to roll the pants of about 10 feet. And then we rolled the arms up and we were all sitting there. Some of them didn't roll their arms up and we sat there flapping our arms. We said, hey, we can fly. Over the next few hours, Ed Ray and the children were examined by doctors. They were also questioned by police. But they could tell them very little about the kidnappers. How do you describe somebody that has pantyhose over their face?

After four hours of questioning, they were finally allowed to go home. They put us on a Greyhound, escorted us back to Chowchilla. It was time for mom and dad. I just wanted my mom and dad. It was 4 a.m. when the bus arrived at last. It had been almost 36 hours since their traumatic ordeal began. The scene was like a mob scene. News cameras and TV lights. Everybody started saying, are you all right, Jennifer, and all this stuff.

And I said, yeah, I'm fine. Then whenever we got into this room, I found my mom and my dad. We pulled up to Chow Chow and I was asleep. So when I got off the bus, everybody started taking pictures of me and said, I'm like, how are you doing? What was it like? This man carried me off the bus, and he put me in my mom's arms. the bus and he put me in my mom's arms. And I said, hi mom, and fell asleep on her shoulder. I felt, I felt like I was finally safe.

Ever since the kidnapping a little more than a week ago, the parents and relatives of the 26 children have been spending a lot of restless nights waiting for each new development and hopeful that authorities will soon apprehend. We had no idea what our kids had been through. None whatsoever. How does it feel to be a big movie star? I don't know. 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? I don't know. They didn't have enough love. She had horrible nightmares. She would run screaming into our bedroom and she wasn't even awake and she would tell us later that she dreamt that they were lined up and shot. One night I was dreaming that I was falling down this hole, and I was trying to get out.

I started screaming for my mom. Mom came in, and all I could do was cry. And all she could do was hold me. There was nothing more that could be dead. Today, in this rock quarry, they unearthed the truck that was prison and very nearly a tomb for 26 children and their school bus driver. Unearthing the who and why of all this is much harder. In the days following the kids' escape, investigators searched the rock quarry and the van that had been their underground tomb,

hoping they would find clues that would lead them to the kidnappers. They looked to see who would have keys to the quarry. In order to have access to bury this moving container undetected, you would have to have access. Assistant District Attorney Jill Klinge. Fred Woods had keys to that quarry. 24-year-old Frederick Newhall Woods, the son of the owner of the quarry, immediately became a person of interest. They looked at the ledger, surveillance tapes,

and started to put it all together at that point. Security guards told investigators they had seen three young men digging a large hole in the quarry months before the kidnapping. One of them, they said, was Fred Woods. And Woods had a record.

Two years earlier, he had been charged with grand theft auto. Arrested with him were two of his friends, James Schoenfeld, Fred's partner in a used car business, and James's younger brother, Richard. All three were from wealthy families who lived in San Francisco's nicest suburbs. They escaped with a fine and probation. They're young, they're white, they're wealthy.

I think it added a component of fascination to the story because it was so unlikely that three men such as these would commit such an atrocious crime. Investigators executed a warrant to search Fred Woods' father's estate. For the last two days, the Woods estate has looked like an armed camp, dozens of officers looking for anything. What they found there was a treasure trove of evidence. We were able to recover one of the guns that was used during this kidnapping.

Now, 43 years later, the Alameda County District Attorney's Office has opened the evidence vault to 48 hours. This crime was planned out for a year and a half in intricate detail. You actually have a document labeled plan, and it sets out the way they were going to commit the kidnapping, labeled plan. And it sets out the way they were going to commit the kidnapping, and then they, on the right-hand side, put how they would compensate or deal with what could go wrong. They also recovered the draft of a ransom note.

The draft of the ransom note says $2.5 million, but in actuality, they were going to ask for $5 million from the state of California. But the kidnappers were never able to deliver their demand. When they tried to call the Chowchilla Police Department, because of the number of calls that were coming in worldwide, the phone lines were jammed. They couldn't get through, so they took a nap. And by the time they woke up, they saw on the news

that the kids had been found. So they were never able to request their ransom. And so the search is on nationwide for these three men and their... Arrest warrants were issued. Richard Schoenfeld turned himself in. Fred Woods and James Schoenfeld fled California, but not for long.

James Schoenfeld was captured at dawn today. Police say he ran hard all over the western United States, but he did not run well. Frederick Woods was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police this afternoon just across the Washington state border in Vancouver. I remember watching on TV thinking, they're so young. Hoping that the children could identify the kidnappers by their voices, the suspects were put in video lineups and asked to repeat phrases the kidnappers used. So what drove these young men, seemingly well-off, to kidnap young children for money?

James Schoenfeld eventually said despite their parents' wealth, he and Fred Woods were in serious debt. He explained it this way. We needed multiple victims to get multiple millions, and we picked children because children are precious. The state would be willing to pay ransom for them, and they don't fight back. I think that the two Schoenfelds did it just on pure persuasion by Fred Woods. Fred Woods, in my own personal opinion,

and I have a master's degree, I think he was a sociopath. Some might call him a psychopath. With the overwhelming evidence against them, Woods and the Schoenfels pleaded guilty to 27 counts of kidnapping for ransom and robbery. But they refused to plead guilty to eight counts of bodily harm. Those charges would send them to prison for life without the possibility of parole. life without the possibility of parole. So 16 months after their abduction, Jennifer, Michael,

and some of the other children faced the kidnappers in court. They testified that in addition to the emotional trauma, they had suffered physical wounds like cuts, bruises, and burns. The kidnappers were sitting to my left at a table. I didn't want to look at them. I remember giving my dad my gum because I told him I was going to spit my gum at him. You say they would give you this funny look. What did that make you feel? Scared. I did my testimony, I answered my questions,

and I left that courtroom with my head held high, and there was no way that I was going to let them see me cry. A California judge today imposed mandatory life prison sentences without parole on those three young men who kidnapped 26 children. Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. That was all we needed. That's what we needed. I remember thinking, they're going to go to jail. They're not going to do this to anybody else.

That's all that I need to know. Life in Chowchilla had returned to normal. The survivors thought their nightmare was finally over. But it was just beginning. Bye, Jennifer! Bye! Just five weeks after being buried alive, the gutsy children of Chowchilla and their bus driver, Ed Ray, were hailed as heroes. There was even a trip to Disneyland. Everyone thought that was great because the good memories of Disneyland would overshadow the bad memories of the kidnapping. And when the kidnappers were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole,

the legal ordeal seemed to be over, finally. In a way, you try to be normal, but when you've gone through something that's so traumatic, it's hard to go back and be a normal kid again. The survivors struggled to move forward. But just four years after the kidnappings, a critical turning point that meant even more trauma. Prosecutor Jill Klinge. The kidnappers' lawyers appealed the finding of bodily harm. And the appellate court overturned it.

And while acknowledging the horrific nature of the crime, stated that the injuries suffered did not rise to the level of bodily harm under the law. So their sentence was thrown out. Fred Woods and the Schoenfeld brothers were resentenced to life with the possibility of parole. They would get a parole hearing every one or two years depending on the decision of the parole board.

I felt like I had been betrayed by the justice system. Larry and the other survivors faced a frightening new reality. The prospect of dozens of parole hearings for years to come. And someday, freedom for the kidnappers. It was extremely difficult for the survivors. Just six years after the kidnappings, the parade of parole hearings began. Every time one of the kidnappers came up for parole,

it triggered all their fears and trauma from being kidnapped. Prosecutor Klinge has handled the hearings since 2007. They sit in the same room and it's not a large room with the kidnapper. For all three kidnappers, Klinge says there have been about 60 parole hearings to date. It takes the victims back to the day this happened, back to when they were five or ten or six. The one thing that always sticks with me is they will never know who they would have been or what their life would have been like if they hadn't been kidnapped. would have been like if they hadn't been kidnapped. By the time I turned 10 years old, I was just an angry child.

Growing up, Larry's anger often turned to rage. His parents, fearing he was capable of violence, placed him in a facility for youth offenders when he was 15. By the time I was 21, I was using meth, I was smoking crack, I was doing acid, and I was just angry. I could see years ahead of me and then after the kidnapping I could not see tomorrow. Michael Marshall, the hero who never quit digging in the underground prison, left Chowchilla to become a rodeo cowboy and lost his way. I went to bed at 18, drunk and hungover and blacked out and woke up about 48, you know, with a hangover. Blurry.

The victims are the ones that are being punished and always will be. And they watched helplessly as Richard Schoenfeld was the first to be granted parole in June 2012, 36 years after the kidnappings. Three years later, James Schoenfeld was paroled. As far as I know, they have not been in any kind of trouble and I know they have not returned to prison.

The same cannot be said for Fred Woods. Fred Woods' behavior in prison is what keeps him in prison. Long considered to be the ringleader behind the kidnappings, Woods, now 67, has repeatedly been caught with pornography and cell phones in prison. And that's not allowed. pornography, and cell phones in prison. And that's not allowed. And one of the best indicators of an inability to obey the laws in society is that you can't obey the rules in prison.

It was 28 hours of terror that will always be with the children, now middle-aged adults. Today, Michael, Jennifer, and Larry have managed to find ways to get on with living. Healing continues, if you allow it. Larry Park, 49, owns a handyman business and volunteers as a pastor at a local church. His nightmares have finally stopped, and he's sober. I have nine years sober. His sobriety was motivated by an epiphany about the kidnappers. My resentment for them was killing me. One night I was laying in

bed and I said, God, help me to forgive them. Larry met the men, shook their hands, and did forgive them. Here he is with Richard Schoenfeld. It changed my life. Something washed over me. And there was peace like I had never known. And I knew that day that I would be okay. Until just recently, Jennifer Brown Hyde, a wife, mother, and executive assistant, says she couldn't sleep without a nightlight. And I've had family and church family and coworkers that have piece by piece helped put me back together. And I want people to know that that little girl that was kidnapped and buried alive has managed to live a wonderful life. Michael Marshall, 57, husband, father, and now a long-distance trucker,

tries not to think about the kidnappers. a long-distance trucker, tries not to think about the kidnappers. What they put my mom and dad through is something I can't, I cannot forgive. He's been sober for eight years, with help from his family and his therapy dog Dog Blue. I rescued him before he was a year old, and now he rescues me every day. On Tuesday, kidnapper Fred Woods was denied parole. He is eligible for parole again in five years. Woods was denied parole. He is eligible for parole again in five years. See more of the rare evidence photos on Facebook at 48 Hours. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free

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