The Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping

On July 15, 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children and their driver, Ed Ray, was traveling through Chowchilla, California when it was ambushed by three masked men driving a white van. The kidnappers forced the children — ranging in age from 5 to 14 — and Ray at gunpoint into a pair of modified vans and drove for eleven hours before transferring everyone into a buried moving van hidden on a private quarry property in Livermore, California. The van had been outfitted with food, water, and mattresses, but the ventilation was woefully inadequate. After sixteen hours of confinement in increasingly desperate conditions, bus driver Ed Ray and the older children began stacking mattresses and boxes to reach the van's roof hatch. They dug through dirt and debris until they created an opening large enough to escape. Ray led all 26 children out of the buried van safely. Remarkably, not a single child was physically harmed during the ordeal. Investigators identified the three kidnappers as Frederick Newhall Woods IV and brothers Richard and James Schoenfeld — all sons of wealthy California families. They had demanded a $5 million ransom but never actually made contact after the kidnapping. All three were arrested within days after the van was traced back to the Schoenfeld family. They pleaded guilty to 27 counts of kidnapping. All three kidnappers received life sentences. After decades of parole hearings, the Schoenfeld brothers were eventually paroled — Richard in 2012 and James in 2015. Frederick Woods was paroled in 2024. The Chowchilla kidnapping remains the largest mass kidnapping in American history, and Ed Ray, who drove the bus that day and helped free the children, was widely celebrated as a hero until his death in 2012.