True Crime Campfire - Buried: The Chowchilla School Bus Kidnapping

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

If you’re a parent, then you’ve probably spent a lot of time imagining nightmare scenarios for your kids. Y’know, you lose sight of them in Target for a couple of minutes, your mind starts to go in all kinds of awful directions. You’re careful about who they spend time with, you watch what they’re up to online. You make sure they know they can talk to you about anything. But the raw fact is, you can’t keep your kids in a bubble. You can wall off all the obvious angles of attack, but sometimes the danger comes completely out of nowhere. Sometimes, the threat is something nobody could have ever seen coming. Join us for the story of one of California's most startling crimes--the abduction of an entire bus full of children, and their driver. Sources:https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/08/18/frederick-woods-kidnapped-school-bus-children-parole/10356066002/https://www.discoveryplus.com/video/house-of-horrors-kidnapped/buried-alivehttps://www.cbsnews.com/video/48-hours-live-to-tell-the-chowchilla-kidnapping-2020/#xhttps://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/us/ed-ray-bus-driver-who-helped-save-kidnapped-children-dies-at-91.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/23/archives/quarry-owners-son-called-a-loner-fond-of-old-cars.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/1976/08/05/archives/a-puzzling-portrait-of-key-coast-kidnapping-suspect.htmlhttps://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Buried-Memories-Twenty-years-after-three-men-3773683.phphttps://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/30/archives/new-jersey-pages-2-fugitives-seized-in-the-abduction-of-26-children.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/us/chowchilla-kidnapping-parole.htmlhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1982/11/12/healthtalk-children-and-the-aftermath-of-trauma/409ebd0c-10bf-46e7-af42-4a2dff32d3e6/Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. If you're a parent, then you've probably spent a lot of time imagining nightmare scenarios for your kids. You know, you lose sight of them and tar. for a couple of minutes, your mind starts to go in all kinds of awful directions. You're careful about who they spend time with. You watch what they're up to online. You make sure

they know they can talk to you about anything. But the raw fact is, you can't keep your kids in a bubble. You can wall off all the obvious angles of attack, but sometimes the danger comes completely out of nowhere. Sometimes, the threat is something nobody could have ever seen coming. This is buried. The Chowchilla school bus kidnapping. So, campers, for this one, we're in California, all the way back to July 1976, a year before I was born. Gerald Ford was president. The biggest movie in the country was The Omen. Can't believe they didn't wait for a Halloween release on that. And at the top of the charts was Afternoon Delight by the

Starland Vocal Band, a song that had parents all across America pray and their kids wouldn't ask too many questions. And while the streets of San Francisco and L.A. were at various levels of cool and groovy, for this story, we're going inland away to the cute little farming town of Chowchilla.

The afternoon of Thursday, July 15th was pretty typical for California summer, 95 degrees, and clear blue skies as far as the eye could see. At Dairyland Elementary, school, the last bell rang at about 3.30, and 26 summer school kids ran outside to climb on the school bus for home. These were almost all young elementary school kids, with the one exception being Michael Marshall, who was 14. The day before, Michael had gotten in trouble with his mom

for getting drunk on some of her beer. So as punishment, she said she wasn't going to pick him up from summer school the next day. He'd have to hang around for hours after his classes were done and get a ride home on the bus with the little kids. That's a pretty sweet punishment. That'd be super embarrassing. The driver of the bus was 54-year-old Ed Ray, a quiet, gentle guy that these kids had known most of their lives. They all called him Edward. The bus rolled along the dusty roads between the endless fields, stopping to drop a few kids off here and there. The windows were down, and there was a lot of noise and laughter.

The kids were all worked up that day because they'd spent the afternoon on a field trip at the pool, which awesome field trip. Oh, my God. So there was more than the usual amount of hoopla and shenan. And then at a T-junction, the bus suddenly jerked to a stop. There was a white van blocking the road ahead. Somebody must have broken down, Ed thought, right? But then he froze. The kids were oblivious, still joking around until the doors of the bus flew open and two men rushed in.

They were a surreal, scary sight. They both had nylon panty hose over their heads, warping their features, and one of them had a shotgun. in his hands. Everybody shut up, the gunman shouted, pointing the barrel of the gun at the kids. I just imagine that for a second. You've been having this great fun summer day with your friends, and then in a split second, everything turns dark. Must have been incredibly scary. Well, for most of the kids anyway, one of them, a little guy named Jeff apparently thought this was some kind of joke, and he stood up in the aisle holding his hands up like, hey, don't shoot. bless his heart

I guess maybe Jeff had been hitting the pixie sticks pretty hard that day but anyway the poor kid figured it out pretty quickly the gunman herded the kids and driver Ed Ray to the back of the bus while his accomplice slid into the driver's seat a third man also with panty hose over his face had stayed with the white van

and as the school bus started driving again he followed by now some of the kids were crying the bus was a sea of little scared faces The gunmen made the kids sit with their hands firmly in their laps, and once he had him settled like that, he sat with the shotgun trained right at 14-year-old Michael Marshall. Maybe he figured Ed Ray would be too sensible to try anything against an armed man, but a teenage boy might just be reckless enough.

He didn't need to worry, though. Michael was terrified. Before long, the bus went off the road, bouncing over the rough terrain until it came to a stop in a dry riverbed. Bamboo grew high on the banks of the river, way taller than the top of the school bus. Nobody would be able to see it from the road. The white van followed the bus down to the riverbed, where another van, a dark green one, already sat. The three kidnappers started transferring their victims from the bus to the vans, half in each one, with Ed Ray in one van and teenage Michael Marshall and the other.

And the kidnappers were meticulous about it, with each van reversing so that its open rear door sat right up against the doors of the doors of the bus. The kids were transferred without ever touching the ground, so they never had a chance to run or even leave footprints in the dirt. Wow. And the vans had been modified for their new purpose as kidnapping vehicles with the windows painted black and wood paneling put in. Oh, of course it was wood paneling. Wood paneling in the back of your van is about the most 70s thing you could possibly do, sort of adding some orange shag carpet too, or like airbrushing some lead zeppelin lyrics on the doors.

You're right, but here's the creepy thing about that. They added the paneling for soundproofing. Oh, my God, that's creepy. Oh, that's awful. Those poor babies. Yeah. When the doors of the vans closed, Ed and the kids were in total darkness. Moments later, the van started moving.

They drove for hours, and while the kids so far had been admirably brave, some of them started to lose it now. The temperature was still in the 90s, and they were crammed together in this black windowless box with no ventilation, with no idea what was happening to them or what was going to happen to them. A lot of them started crying. Some of them peed their pants. The younger kids clung to Ed Ray in one van and Michael Marshall and the other. I mean, when you're in elementary school kid, a 14-year-old seems almost like an adult. Michael wasn't, of course. He was just a kid himself, but having to comfort the younger children helped him keep it together. As you might imagine, time can get pretty weird when you're shut in the back of a dark van

with no idea where you're going. It seemed to some of the kids that they'd be stuck in there forever. Finally, the van stopped. Door slammed shut as the kidnappers got out of the front, and then for a long time, there was silence. Then the rear doors were pulled sharply open. It was dark outside, nighttime. Hands reached in and grabbed the nearest kid and yanked her out. The door slammed shut again. You know, because what this whole experience needed was to make it even more like a horror movie. A few minutes later, the same thing happened again. Doors pulled open, a kid dragged out, the door slammed shut. The ones left inside the van had no idea what was happening to the kids taken outside. The older one started wondering if they were being killed, one by one.

Michael Marshall was the second to last to be taken out. One little girl, Monica, had latched on to him, and Michael thought she'd start screaming if the kidnappers pulled her out of his arms. So he told her he'd go first and that she had to be brave and wait. Oh, man, what a sweet kid, bless him. It makes me emotional, to be honest. Like, humans are cool sometimes. And, God.

Yeah, I remember being an elementary school kid and thinking, like, the high schoolers were just the oldest you would ever be, you know? Yeah. When the kidnappers took him out, Michael saw nothing that might tell him where they were. It was dark all around. There was no lights visible from any towns or buildings. There was nothing but dry, dusty ground and scrubby little plants. It could have been any one of 10,000 places in California.

Hell, he didn't even know if they were still in California. The men shoved Michael down. shown flashlights in his face and started barking out questions. What's your name? What are your parents' names? What's their phone number? Then they pulled him up and dragged him, stumbling forward. Through the haze of fear, Michael wondered if they were about to kill him. There was no way he could have expected what he saw a moment later, a wooden ladder, going down into a small, dark hole in the rocky ground. Get down there, one of the men said, and forced him to start climbing down into darkness. A moment later, he heard kids calling his name from below and felt a huge wave of relief. Like, they were all alive.

A little while later, when little Monica came down the ladder, they were all down there in the darkness. 26 children plus driver Ed Ray. God, that poor dude. Can you even imagine being the adult in this situation? Like, it's bad enough for the kids, but Ed had to deal with his own terror, plus that, like, feeling you always get when you're with kids that you're responsible for what happens to them, which in a situation like this has, got to just be a completely helpless feeling. Once the last kid was down in the hole, one of the kidnappers handed a flashlight down to Ed Ray, tossed down one roll of toilet paper and pulled the ladder up.

One of them shouted down, we'll be back for you. And then they all heard a heavy metallic clunk as they put a big steel manhole cover over the hole. The flashlight soon told them where they were, in the back of a cargo truck, buried in the dirt and rock, with crude wooden beams put in to brace the roof up against the weight overhead. There were mattresses on the floor, and at the far end, a few big jugs of water and a pile of food, stuff like bread, cereal peanut butter chips. Round holes had been cut into the tops of the wheel wells to make simple toilets. A humming of fans from a box on the roof suggested that a

ventilator was bringing down fresh air. It was a moving truck, about the size of one of the bigger U-Hauls you can get today, which might seem pretty spacious when you're stacking it with furniture, but imagine putting 27 people in there. It gets real crowded, real fast, and hot. This crude underground prison they'd set up for them seemed to suggest that the kidnappers did want to keep them alive, for a while at least. That pile of food and water didn't seem too big when you considered that it had to feed 27 people.

And thanks for that one roll of toilet paper, guys, that's going to be a big help. Had the kidnappers ended up with a lot more victims than they planned for? Maybe they thought more kids would be off the bus by the time they hijacked it, or maybe they were just really dumb. And instead of actually calculating how many supplies a group of captured children would need, they'd just gone, eh, this will be fine, and just bought a big pile of stuff. One thing was for sure, though,

they were determined for their victims to stay down there. In a little while, everyone in the cargo truck heard the sound of rock and dirt being shoveled onto the manhole cover. The kidnappers were filling in the hole, burying their victims alive, which is my worst nightmare come to life. I literally can't think of almost anything worse than being buried alive. And I think it's everybody's worst nightmare. Like most people, if you ask them, you know, they'll say buried alive. There was no way for the children to know it, but their abduction had already exploded in the media.

When their kids didn't come home from school, parents confused phone calls to the school had quickly edited. escalated to 911 calls, and it didn't take long for everybody to realize the scale of what was happening. An entire school bus, 26 kids and the driver, had apparently just vanished. The local sheriff called the governor's office for extra help, and soon a massive hunt for the missing bus was underway, with 30 FBI agents joining in. Around 8 p.m., a police plane spotted the abandoned school bus in the dry riverbed. They paint those things bright yellow for a reason to make them super visible. searchers converged on the bus, but they didn't find much of anything useful. There was no blood in it or around it, which was reassuring, but the only evidence they found were a few tire

impressions from some other fairly heavy vehicle. Nothing that would help them actually find the kids fast, which was that everybody wanted to do. But the scene was enough to confirm that the children had been abducted, rather than the bus running off the road in a wreck or something. That made this one of the biggest kidnappings in U.S. history. That, plus the young age of the victims, the Chow Chowchilla abduction national news right away. The police set up a command center in downtown Chowchilla and the parents of the missing kids all gathered there, hoping for news, but dreading it too. They didn't know if their kids were alive or dead.

The investigators were worried. No ransom calls had come in. There had been no communication at all from the kidnappers. They were totally in the dark. Back in the buried truck, Ed Ray was doing his best to keep the children calm. He and 14-year-old Michael Marshall took turns trying to move the manhole cover, but no dice. The thing was huge. It weighed a ton. So Ed told the kids it was time to try and get some rest.

They had no way of knowing it, but it was about 3 a.m. at this point, and the kids were exhausted. Most of them managed to fall asleep, but every now and then, one of them would start crying, and that would set off the other kids, too. It was a rough night. It's just heartbreaking. Yeah. 12 hours into this nightmare, things were looking grim. They'd already finished all the food, and the ventilator system had stopped working.

The place was hot and sweaty, and it smelled god-awful. Some of the poor kids had thrown up from the stress, and obviously there weren't any flushes on those makeshift toilets. Oh, Lord. And then, things got suddenly, dramatically worse. The roof and walls of the truck started to buckle under the weight of all that dirt and rock, with a noise that made the hairs on the back of their neck stand up. And as the walls buckled, the roof started bowing down.

If it wasn't real to them before now, it was real now. They all knew there was a good chance they wouldn't make it out alive. This lit a fire under Ed and Michael. Working as fast as they could, they piled out the mattresses under the sealed entrance in the roof and took turns trying to move the steel manhole cover. This was tough. The kidnappers had placed two industrial batteries. each weighing around 100 pounds on top of the manhole cover,

then added a bunch of rocks on top of that. Jeez, Louise. But Ed and Michael kept at it until eventually Michael was able to move the manhole cover just enough for Ed to wedge it open with a piece of wood. Through this opening, they were eventually able to shove the batteries off the manhole cover and push it aside. Rebel fell through, but not as much as they'd expected. Michael was smaller and more flexible, so he was the wall.

one to climb up and take a careful look around. But he wasn't climbing up the ladder to freedom, not yet. Apparently, the kidnappers had put a big wooden frame, like a box with no bottom, on top of the entrance, and then shoveled several feet of dirt on top of it. I guess they figured it would make it easier for them to uncover the entrance when they came back. So Michael had more work to do. He hammered at the wood overhead until he was able to break off enough that he could start

clawing up through the dirt. And that's what he did. This 14-year-old kid scratching and clawing his way upward in the dark, barely able to breathe. His arms felt like they were on fire, and he was covered in dirt and sweat. It must have felt like he was clawing his way out of a grave. And Michael had no idea what was waiting for him at the top. He figured there was a good chance the kidnappers would be right there, that they'd shoot him the second he broke the surface.

But he couldn't leave those kids down there in the dark. He had to keep going. there was nothing else to do because Michael is a goddamn hero. Absolutely. And then his hand broke through to open air and a moment later bright sunlight and fresh air hit his face.

He crawled up onto the surface and lay on the ground as the children below saw sunlight for the first time since this nightmare started. The kidnappers, thank God, weren't around. Nobody was. Michael still had no idea where they were. Seen in daylight, the place looked even more desolate. There were noises from one direction, though.

Rattlings and thuds that sounded like they came from big machines. But for now, that could wait. Michael went back to the hole. One by one, Ed Ray passed up the kids, and Michael helped them into the open air. Then, last, Ed came up himself. Except for the hole they'd just crawled out of, the ground around them was flat and looked perfectly undisturbed. If they hadn't escaped, nobody would have ever. known they were down there.

It was now 8 p.m. on the day after they'd all been kidnapped, just a little before sunset. They'd been underground for 16 hours. Ed gathered the kids into a tight little group and said, okay, now we're going to go toward those noises, just follow me. And he led them in the direction of the machinery sounds.

Some of the kids worried that they were heading straight to the men who'd taken them, but I mean, what else could they do? Soon, though, they realized what the noises were. A rock quarry. A bunch of massive conveyor belts and heavy machines that look like they could have been dropped right out of a gritty sci-fi movie. And as they approached, some men in hard hats noticed them and ran over, totally stunned to see one man leading 26 kids across the desolate ground. We're from Chowchilla and were lost, Ed said. And finally, they knew they were safe.

The quarry was in Livermore, California, about 100 miles away from Chowchilla. It was a major operation, covering miles of land, and not somewhere people just wandered around on four. there was almost zero chance that the buried truck would have ever been found. Police were quickly on the scene and after photographing each one of the victims as evidence, they had everybody transported to the nearest place that had the resources to hold that many people while they got them fed and cleaned up and examined by doctors and interviewed. This just happened to be the local jail and some of the kids, still on edge for obvious reasons, were kind of freaked out about it.

Like, they're putting us in jail now? Like, what the hell is happening? But that didn't last long. The police got them all together in a classroom at the jail and brought them apples and soda. and that cheered everybody up. They'd all been given white prison overalls, about ten sizes too big. One kid started flapping the long arms of the overalls going, I can fly! I'm guessing it was Jeff, probably.

Good old Jeff, class clown of the century. And the next day, Saturday, they were all bused home to Chow Chila and back into the arms of their parents, alive and at least physically unhurt. But the hunt for the kidnappers was still on. And until they were caught, a lot of the kids were scared they'd come back and take them again. The weird thing was nobody'd ever heard word one from the kidnappers. No ransom demands, nothing. And there's a reason for that, which I think really encapsulates the kind of steel trap criminal masterminds we're dealing with here. They had tried calling in a ransom demand for $5 million to the Chow Chila police station the day after the kidnapping.

But the story had blown up so much so fast that the phone lines were all jammed and they couldn't get through. So all three of them had just decided to have a little nappy do. You know, they'd been up late the night before terrorizing children, which is exhausting. So you can see why they'd be tired. Yeah, I think that's something too many kidnappers forget is like you always need your beauty rest. So like don't forget that. Absolutely. So you can look good in your mugshot. Yes. So they just had a little nappy nap and then they slept later than they intended, and when they woke up and turned on the TV, the news was wall-to-wall about the heroic escape of Ed Ray and the Chow Shilla Kids.

Which, man, I'd love to be a fly on the wall right at that moment when it's like, goodbye, $5 million, hello, desperate flight from justice. So who the hell were these chuckleheads? Well, investigators now had some leads to chase. For one thing, Ed Ray, under hypnosis, interestingly enough, which is something they just could not get enough of in the 70s and 80s. was able to recall the license plate of one of the vans. Police were quickly able to track this because both vans

were recently purchased Navy surplus vehicles. Now, you know, when I'm buying vehicles to use in my various nefarious criminal schemes, I always like to make sure to get them straight from parts of the federal government that are absolutely guaranteed to keep meticulous records. Because I just wouldn't want the police to have to work too hard, right? I'm just, I'm like, I'm nice like that.

It's just considerate is what it is. Okay? Exactly. You know, just get the government involved from the beginning, and that way it's just smooth sailing. Absolutely. The vans were bought with cash under a name that came back as fake, but the investigators did get a description of the man who bought them. Youngish guy, thin face, little mustache, big sideburns. I don't know.

The little mustache big sideburns thing gets me every time. It makes me laugh. I don't know why. That's also very 70s. It's very 70s, just big old Cyburns. The big lead was the quarry itself. This was both a dangerous place and contained lots of valuable machinery. The whole area was fenced off.

You couldn't just drive in there out of nowhere and start burying a cargo truck, which of course would take a hell of a long time. You need to have access to the quarry. Probably needed keys for the gates. These were the days before there were security cameras everywhere, but there were security guards with logbooks and, I don't know, memories. And these both quickly pointed the finger at a guy named Frederick Newhall Woods the fourth.

Or Fred Woods, if you want to be a dashed commoner about bloody thing. You know I do. I love disrespecting, disgusting rich boys. Fred's dad was the owner of the quarry and a very wealthy man. Security log showed Fred making a lot of trips to the area around where the cargo van had been buried. and guards remembered seeing him and two other guys digging a big hole in the quarry a couple months before. If it had been anybody else, I'm sure questions would have been asked. But hey, the boss's loser son wants to dig a big old hole.

What are you going to do? It's sure his shit better than him getting underfoot of all that dangerous and expensive machinery, right? Fred lived on his family's palatial 100-acre estate, the hawthorns, just south of San Francisco. No, not somewhere you'd usually expect a search warrant to be served, but there's a first time for everything. Yeah, if you ask me, we ought to be serving a lot more search warrants in places like that and perhaps less in other places. Stop letting these rich assholes get away with murder all the time. Also, the Hawthorne sounds like the setting for an 80s soap opera about vampires, just saying. Or like a VC Andrews book about horrifying incest.

It sounds like a VC Andrews, it totally does. It's a creepy. It sounds like the setting for an incredibly creepy book, which is nevertheless bizarrely popular about siblings who are like boyfriend and girlfriend or whatever the hell that book was. That book made it clear that they were in love. Anyway, I don't know why those books were available to 12-year-olds. I don't get it, but whatever. I don't know, but I will tell you I was obsessed with them. I know you were. And it makes sense. When I was in middle school, I love those books. Yeah, it's very, it makes me feel weird now. Yeah, of course. But I mean, whatever, you were, You were 12.

Also, second, about the Hawthorns, I don't know why rich people got to name their houses or why they pick names that make them sound like douchebags. They should start naming them like people name their boats. You know what I mean? Like, tax write off. That's the one that makes me laugh every time about boats. This is the SS tax write off. Oh, gross.

Investigators learned that Fred had remodeled an old school house on his parents' property and lived there by himself, and he and his dad liked collecting old cars. They found over 50 cars, vans, fire engines, and things all lined up in a wooded part of the estate that looked like it hadn't been used in years. What they didn't find was Fred, who was mysteriously absent for some reason, but they did find a shotgun that matched the description of the weapon used in the kidnapping. And they also found the kind of evidence every detective dreams about. A series of handwritten pages titled wait for it plan describing the kidnapping in detail oh i almost forgot and a draft of a ransom note plan oh my sweet summer child yeah like plan he should have just

committed and labeled it like nefarious plan like go full supervillain my dude like oh god oh my so yeah. This was all shaping up nicely. All they needed was to lay hands on Freddie Boy and a conviction should be in the back. And not just Freddie, of course. The notes helped investigators identify the other two kidnappers, too. Friends old high school buddy James Schoenfield and James Kid Brother Richard, who were also from a wealthy family, the sons of a successful podiatrist. Good God, shame on you. Your daddy did not bust his ass for six years studying feet in medical school so you can do this boneheaded shit. Just, it's like, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves, for God's sakes.

I would pay to see a study on what happens in the brains of the children of rich people because if I had a dollar for every single one that was just kind of wacky and also a little bit evil, I would be the rich person with the wacky children. So the chase was on. and the photos of the three musketeers flashed across TV screens all across the country. Richard, who was 22, had kind of a baby face, but Fred and James, a couple years older, had that thing that seems to have been more of a thing back then than it is now where they looked like 24 going on 44, especially Fred, who at 24 already had a pretty spectacular

comb over. Police went public with the kidnappers' names a week after the abductions. and the next day, Richard Schoenfeld turned himself in, but his older brother James and Fred Woods were still on the lamp. Their discoveries at the Hawthorns, plus what Richard told them, led the detectives to believe that Fred Woods was the driving force behind the kidnapping. Well, yeah, he was the one who wrote out the plan. But it was so weird.

Like, why would a trust-fund kid like Fred try to pull off a kidnapping for ransom? His classmates at Woodside High School remembered Fred as a shy, awkward, sometimes weird kid, who showed occasional big flashes of temper, if you felt like you'd wronged him. Despite how rich his daddy was, he was also pretty stingy. I mean, not as far as his own spending went. If he wanted something, especially a new old car to add to his creepy little automotive graveyard out in the woods, he got it. He'd even buy stuff he had no use whatsoever for, like flashlights or shirts he'd never wear,

just because they were on sale. But as far as spreading the wealth a little and spending any on anybody else, good luck with that. nobody was going to squeeze a sweet red penny out of Fred. He was an average student, and after school he was pretty much a slacker, despite his businessman dad's efforts to make him a little mini version of himself. Fred worked for a little while as an ambulance driver, paint salesman, and a moving van driver, never stick him with one job for long. Then his dad had him work at the quarry, hoping Fred would learn the business from the ground up.

But he didn't stick with that either. He was just kind of faffing around. He got married at one point, but it only lasted a year. The next girl he dated, he met under pressure from his mom, who thought they'd be just perfect for each other. So, you can imagine how that one went. This girlfriend later told the New York Times, it was not that he couldn't keep a job as much as he didn't want to work.

What, a spoiled rich kid, not wanting to work? Get out. But despite his allergy to an honest day's work, according to his ex-wife, Fred cared a lot about impressing his daddy. Which, for God's sakes, man, do we have to hit every single rich kid stereotype? Can we maybe get some new material? Rich boy with daddy issues again? But yeah, Fred was in constant search of validation from his businessman father. Like, if he'd had a great day selling paint, Fred would brag about it to his dad.

But when he lost that job a little while later, he didn't even mention it. We've seen this before, Camper's, the Golden Boy Syndrome. People so terrified of losing face that they can resort. to some truly messed up stuff. Fred did eventually try his hand at something that fit his interests, a used car business with his buddy James Schoenfeld. But a lifetime habit of fuck-upperie is pretty hard to break. Fred and James turned out to be terrible businessman,

and soon they were in a metric shit ton of debt. But hey, they were both from wealthy families. Time to gurg your loins and go crawl into mommy and daddy and beg them to bail you out, right? Sure, it'd be difficult and awkward, maybe even kind of humiliating, but what choice? did they have? Well, I guess they could kidnap a bunch of school kids instead and hold them for millions of dollars in ransom. That was definitely a better option than making

Papa angry, right? God forbid that dad should work a nerve. The idea didn't come out of nowhere, which shouldn't surprise you if you've been paying attention. These chuckle fucks never had an original thought in their lives. If you've ever seen the movie Dirty Harry, you'll remember that creepy scene where the villain, Scorpio, who was based on the Zodiac Killer, by the way, takes a school bus hostage and forces the kids to sing nursery rhymes. That apparently struck a chord with our boy Fred. You know, dude, it's a big enough red flag to identify with Clint Eastwood's character in that movie. Never mind the psychopath he's tracking down.

Just yikes, Fred. Yikes. Yeah, it takes a scumbag to find a scumbag. That doesn't mean either of them are admirable, you weirdo. Fred's buddy slash business partner James recruited his younger brother into the scheme, and the three dipshit amigos spent 18 months, 18 months, planning and preparing for the kidnapping. A year and a half, during which not one of them realized what a weapons-grade stupid idea it was.

18 months and they still sucked at it. And they could have been like getting proper jobs or like doing anything else in the world but this. It just blows my mind. Learning a trade, getting a hobby, going to therapy. absolutely all options my dudes sitting with your thumb up your butt literally anything else but kidnapping 26 children and an adult and like the thing i keep thinking about is like they they obviously like meticulously planned like burying the fucking truck or whatever oh god can you imagine the effort absolutely they did and they sweated they worked hard at it and absolutely imagine imagine if that truck had collapsed like it was absolutely going to And what would have happened? I can't even verbalize it because it makes me nauseous. Like those dumb motherfuckers worked so hard and just failed.

You know what? Maybe they're right. Maybe they shouldn't try it anything. I changed my mind. Jesus. That's true. James would later say that they ultimately decided on children as their targets. Because children are precious.

The state would be willing to pay ransom for them. which is an incredibly cold and creepy thing to say. They're not things, Jimmy. They're people. And also just dumb. Yeah, maybe the state would have been willing to pay the ransom if the kids hadn't escaped on their own, but they also would have hunted you down for the rest of your life. There was a less than zero chance of them getting away with this.

It's like he thought the state would be just like, well, you got us. Here's your cash. Good game. Thanks for not hurting the precious objects. I mean, kids, don't spend it all in one place. It's baffling. I don't know what the hell they were thinking. It's the, it is the worst kidnapping plot. It is the most plan nine from outer space, wily coyote bullshit kidnapping plot. I've literally had heard of. Battlefield Earth. It's Battlefield Earth. Yeah, it is a flippant disaster. From start to finish. God, they were just dumb as bald. I can't take it. James Schoenfield was arrested on July 29th, two weeks after the kidnapping. He ditched to the kidnapping. He ditched to the own car and bought a beat-up old Chevy van for $235, and he'd been camping out in the woods.

The guy he'd bought the van from gave the license plate to the FBI, and the cops nabbed him on the freeway close to his parents' house. He claimed he'd been driving home so his folks could go with him to turn himself in, and maybe that was true, although the first the police heard of it was when they pulled him over. And only a few hours later, Fred Woods also experienced the old habeas-Grabis, Canadian style. He'd gotten his hands on a passport and driver's license using the identity of dead man, Ralph Snyder, and he'd use them to flee to Vancouver when the ransom scheme fell apart. There, I guess, as a disguise, he dressed like what one Canadian official called, quote,

an amateur cowboy, high-heeled boots, a brown denim suit, and a big old 10-gallon hat. Way to fly under the radar, man. Good call. Yeah, I guess he figured he'd just blend right in with all those Vancouver cowboys. What the hell? He was posing as an oil baron in Vancouver. When five Mounties, acting on a tip from the FBI, arrested him outside a post office, Fred said, I'm really sorry I'm going to miss this on the news tonight. Oh, fuck.

My heart rate just spiked. My watch just asked if I needed to meditate. This is the second dip shit we've covered in a month that has some weird rehearsed one-liner that they throw out there to seem cool. And I just want Fred and Tracy Wiginton to know that it makes me want to suplex you into dust. That is all. On the main kidnapping charges, their gooses were cooked like Christmas dinner and they knew it. Fred Woods and the Schoenfield brothers all pled guilty to kidnapping and robbery, but they refused to plead. guilty to the charges of inflicting bodily harm. That, in conjunction with the kidnapping charge,

would mean a mandatory sentence of life without parole. So on that one charge, they went to trial and lost, receiving the mandatory sentence. An appellate court overturned the convictions on that charge, though, on the grounds that the cuts and bruises suffered by some of the kids during their escape didn't meet the standard for bodily harm. Which is just absolute horseshit. There should have been charges for psychological harm anyway. Because, you know, I mean, people act like bodily harm is the worst thing. Broken bones will heal, but the brain, that can take a lot longer. Yep, but the law didn't seem to recognize that. All three were resentenced, still life, but with a chance for parole. Like you said, there's a big difference between no bodily harm and no harm. A psychiatrist who examined

the children soon after the kidnapping, then again four years later, found that they all exhibited signs of severe psychological trauma, including fearfulness, especially fear of strangers, nightmares, and depression. One nine-year-old girl started having night terrors. One night she ran still fully asleep into her parents' bedroom. She was screaming bloody murder. When she woke up, she told her mom she'd had a nightmare that she and all the other kids were being lined up and shot. Over half the kids, in fact, had recurring dreams of their own deaths. One girl said she didn't expect to live past twelve. In the later interviews, some kids were still playing games like Burying Barbie, or the slightly happier traveling Barbie, where she goes on a long bus trip and

gets back safely. She's just the saddest thing I've ever heard in my life. Bless her sweethearts. So, none of those kids got out unscathed. I mean, of course they didn't. It could have been worse, obviously, and it almost was. We don't know how long these three dip shits were willing to wait for a ransom, but for their buried victims, as soon as they were, they were that half-ass ventilation system failed, a clock started ticking. There was every chance in the world that the end result would have been 27 bodies dead from carbon dioxide poisoning. That would have been a hell of a grim thing to open up that manhole cover and find, if investigators even managed to find them. But despite what they went through, as they grew up, many of the survivors

of the kidnapping were able to forgive their kidnappers. Back in 1996, they were split about 50-50 on whether Woods and the Schoenfelds should receive parole. Ed Ray, who was 75 by then, was definitely in the no camp, saying parole, nope, they ought to stay there. They did a damn dirty trick. I agree with Ed, for what it's worth. I feel like you bury 27 people alive. You have given up your right to mingle. Shout out to Ed for coming in with a killer quip there.

Like, he's allowed. Fred is not. Amen. But unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. Richard Schoenfeld, the younger brother, was released in 2012. James was paroled in 2015. Fred Woods was granted paroled just this past summer, but we don't know if he's actually out yet.

Actual release dates and details are kept secret, for security reasons. His lawyer swears up and down that Fred's a changed man, that he's been riddled with guilt ever since his arrest and he's done everything he could do to better himself in prison, which, you know, good for him. That doesn't do a lot to help the victim sleep without the lights on at night. Ed Ray died in Chowchilla in 2012, at the age of 91.

There's a park there named after him now. Edward Ray Park, which I think is lovely. I think what I like to take from this story is how important it is to keep on fighting against the darkness that you should try never to give in to despair. Even if you have to crawl through dirt and rocks to get there, the light and the fresh air are still there. So that was a wild one, right, campers?

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