Speaker 1: You're listening to the mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the
social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway
Murders Facebook page with my partner in crime, Bill Thomas.
Welcome to mind Over Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm
Bill Thomas. Beautiful spring day here in coastal Virginia. We're
happy to be back with a new episode of mind
Over Murder. How are you doing, mister Thomas.
Speaker 2: We're having a beautiful spring day too. Ours is not
as warm as yours, but it is fun. We actually
sat outside on the porch.
Speaker 3: That is fantastic.
Speaker 2: For the second time so far this.
Speaker 3: Season, Here we go It can only go up from.
Speaker 2: Here, right, and the ice floes in our sideyard are
finally gone. There are still snow mounds, but we're getting there.
Speaker 3: I would not want to live where you live.
Speaker 2: Come April fifteenth. It'll be a whole different story.
Speaker 3: You just happen to mention text day too.
Speaker 2: It was interesting, don't get me started.
Speaker 3: Today. We wanted to cover a case that I recently
learned about and found absolutely fascinating. And when something like
that happens to me, usually the first person that I
call is my partner in crime, Bill Thomas, and say, hey,
I heard about this case. Can we cover it on
the pod? And usually he's good enough to say yes.
Speaker 2: You came in with the ooh, I got this great idea,
and it was a case I remembered. I guess I
was about nineteen or twenty when this happened, but I
do remember it was a national story. Amazingly, we're just
talking about this. It doesn't seem to have lasted in
terms of people's memories, partly because I don't think it
got as much coverage as a case like this would today.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, if this were to happen today, it would be
national press for ages and ages. There would be lots
of books about it, definitely movies. We are talking about
the Chelchilla mass kidnapping from nineteen seventy six. This is
something that I only recently learned about, but as soon
as I heard about it, it was like, we're covering
this on the pod. This is the good reason to
have a true crime podcast. You get to talk about
the things you want to talk about. So of interest
today is the Chelchilla mass kidnapping. At four pm on
July fifteenth, nineteen seventy six, in the agricultural town of Childchilla, California,
a school bus carrying twenty six kids ranging in age
from five to fourteen, was hijacked on its way back
to the dairy land score from a summer school field
trip to a local rule. And that is only the
beginning of one of the most chilling and confounding kidnapping
cases in modern history. The ramifications for the child victims
of this kidnapping were long lasting. The trauma of the
event remains just as strong today as it was on
that hot summer day in nineteen seventy six. And we're
going to unpack the case for you over the next
few episodes of Mind Over Murder. Before we get into
a deep dive of the case, Bill start by telling
us about the community of Childchilla, California. I keep on
into calling it Chinchilla, and that's not right.
Speaker 2: And Pamela, my partner, was calling Chowchilla by the wrong
name earlier today as well. So Chowchilla. And don't take
this the wrong way. If you live in the Central
Valley of California, Chowchilla is probably as close to the
middle of nowhere as you're going to find. One of
the questions that you and I have come up with
and we have not found a satisfactory answer so far,
is why this occurred in Chowchilla. Because the offenders, and
we'll get into more details, we're from over one hundred
miles away in a much more affluent part of California.
Chowchilla is a small city in Madera County, California. It's
right smack dab in the middle of the state. It's
inland quite a bit, so it's well away from the coast,
and it's in what they call the Central Valley of California.
I know, when a lot of us think about California,
we think about our big cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento,
which is the state capital, which is in the middle.
Places like Chowchilla are agricultural, very small. It's a city,
but it's only a city of current population of about
nineteen thousand, and the three largest industries in Chowchilla are agriculture.
There's a tremendous amount of farming and ranching there. And
then two other things. They're both prisons, the Central California
Women's Facility, which is also the home for California's female
death row, and the Valley State Prison. So there's not
a lot there. And again I'm not disparaging the place.
Driving through that Central Valley, it's just big and wide
and open. There is a tremendous amount of agriculture there.
It's what they call a Mediterranean climate. It's quite warm
in the summer, as you mentioned, it can go down
to about forty five degrees in the wintertime. They bring
in a lot of water from other parts of the state.
And there's just a tremendous amount of farming, farming, and ranching.
There are facilities for the slaughter of pigs and cows.
Not a particularly pleasant place. As I said one of
our head scratchers, we still don't have a good answer
yet is how these three offenders chose Chowchilla. But I
think the fact that it's in the middle of nowhere
probably had something to do with that.
Speaker 3: I agree with you, that seems pretty likely. So let's
get into what actually happened in Childchilla. Based on what
Bill just told us, Childchilla is just a quiet rural community,
but it wasn't until nineteen seventy six that it hit
the national news in a very big way. And here
is what happened. On the way home from that field
trip that we mentioned at the top of the pod.
A white van pulled into the middle of the road
and stopped the school bus. Men wearing pantyhose over their
heads and carrying sod off shotguns, boarded and then commandeered
the bus. One man drove the bus, the other held
the driver, fifty five year old Frank Edward ed Ray
at gunpoint, and the third offender drove the white van
behind the bus. Bill, when we were talking a little
bit ago, I think one of the reasons you might
want to pick Childchilla if you're going to orchestrate a
mass kidnapping. Is it does seem like a place where
you can wait and wait until a bus gets to
the middle of the road and you can hijack a bus.
I don't see that happening necessarily in a big city.
It seems like you would have plenty of opportunity to
do so if you're in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 2: I'd love to figure out how they ended up choosing
this place, But that's the only logical reason I can
come up with is yours, which is it's isolated enough
that you could get away with this, and the law
enforcement presence would be very light, so that it would
facilitate something as outrageous as trying to kidnap a bus
full of school kids on the way home from a
field trip.
Speaker 3: A lot of the information for today's episode comes from
the excellent CNN documentary film Sheelchilla, which involves a minute
by minute recounting of the mass kidnapping and also offers
survivor testimony from a number of people who did survive
this attempt. We will offer a link to that in
our show notes, But if you were interested in this case,
after we're done talking about it, I cannot recommend this
documentary enough. It is really excellent and it gives you
a ton of really great information out there. So I
highly recommend CNN Chowchilla and you can find it on
I Believe, HBO, Max or just Max now. In interviews
conducted for the CNN documentary film Cholchilla, survivor Larry Park,
who was six years old at the time of the kidnapping,
stated of the kidnappers where their eyes were it almost
looked hollow. It was like looking at death. The three
kidnappers pulled the bus over into Brenda Slough. It's a
dry river bed which was a branch of the Childchilla
River at that time of year. The sleugh was surrounded
by tall brush and bamboo, and that pretty effectively hid
the bus from view. The kidnappers then forced the twenty
six kids and the bus driver into a second white van.
The vans. This is really creepy. You'd mentioned you found
this creepy too, Bill. The vans were converted prison transport vans,
so they had blacked out windows. The kidnappers had filled
them in with soundproof wood paneling, so that the kids
not only couldn't be seen, but also could not be
heard as they were traveling to their next location. That
creeped me out so badly.
Speaker 2: And this is where you just start to get your
first glimpse of just how uncaring these three offenders are
and how much indifference and even cruelty directed towards these
twenty six kids and their bus driver. And this is
where it starts.
Speaker 3: To disorient and frighten their passengers. The kidnappers drove the
vans around and around for eleven one solid hours before
they eventually stopped at the California Rock and Gravel Quarry
in Livermore, California, which was one hundred and ten miles
from their previous location. Bill, you're telling me off camera
that you were familiar with Livermore as well. What's in
Livermore other than the quarry.
Speaker 2: What's interesting is they drive the one hundred and ten miles,
which should have only taken them two hours. So obviously
they're driving around for eleven hours to terrify and confuse
these kids. Livermore gets you much closer to the coast
and a much more populated and affluent area of California,
so very different. And this is where the three offenders
are from from that area. It occurred to me when
we were going through the details of the plot that
in a way, the three kidnappers there's a major tell
in all of this because they took the kid and
the driver basically to the area of California they were from.
The thing about Chowchilla is it's not a terribly affluent
area here. The kids are being grabbed up by these
three dirt balls in an effort to receive millions of
dollars in ransom funds. The whole thing just seems so odd,
like why are you going to this teeny tiny agricultural
town one hundred and ten miles away. The whole thing
seems just so lame, And of course you start to
see more and more of that as the story unfolds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, absolutely, it's if you're going to kidnap a
busload of kids, why not do it in your own community.
If it's because they wanted no connection to their own community,
they undermind themselves in that way. When police later revealed
that the father of kidnapper Frederick Newhallwood's the fourth owned
the California Rock and Gravel Quarry where the kidnappers took
their victims. Frederick Newhallwood's the fourth one of three kidnappers,
had unlimited access to this rock quarry. He had keys
to all of the gates, and he had unrestricted use
of all of the facilities, which is largely what allowed
him to conduct to this kidnap for ransom plot. I
don't think that if you don't have access to family
funds and unlimited resources, that you're going to be able
to come up with and then enact a plot of
this intricacy. No.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that's most disturbing to me
about this case is that these three kidnappers, Frederick Newhall
Woods and his two accomplices, Richard and James Schoenfeld, two brothers,
they're all in their early twenties. Woods is twenty four,
Richard and James Schoenfelder twenty two and twenty four. The
weird thing is they all come from serious money. They
don't need to do this. They don't need to kidnap
a busload of kids and demand five million dollars, which
would be about twenty seven million dollars in twenty twenty
four spending. None of this is necessary. As I was
saying to you when we were preparing for this, sometimes
you'll see people that are involved in robberies or kidnappings,
even some pretty Hanna's crimes. They're driven by desperation. I'm
not excusing what they've done in any way, shape or form,
but these are three poor, little rich kids who've watched
a movie and become inspired by it and then are
sick enough and malevolent enough to go out and terrorize
twenty six kids and a school bus driver.
Speaker 3: And we're going to get to that movie connection in
a couple of minutes. That one is a doozy, for sure.
All three kidnappers transferred the children and the driver from
the converted prison vans down a ladder, through a hatch,
and then into a large moving van which had been
buried twelve feet underground and turned into a lated bunker.
The kidnappers had equipped the moving van with fans, mattresses, bread,
peanut butter, and water, and even homemade pit toilets that
were dug into the wheel wells of the van.
Speaker 2: There's something about this that just sent chills down my spine.
They are climbing into something which is roughly twenty six
feet by eight feet. Several of the survivors described it
as feeling like you were climbing down into a grave.
Speaker 3: It's chilling. In the ChIL Chilla documentary, one of the
kids is describing freezing at the top of the ladder
and being too afraid to climb down the hole, and
the bus driver, not wanting anybody to be harmed by
the kidnappers, just put his hand around the little boy's
ankle and said, come on, I've got you. Come on.
It's safer down here with us than it is with
them up there. I can't even imagine what that must
have been like for these kids to be essentially knowing
that they're being lowered into a grave. It's really just
absolutely chilling. As each child descended down into the hole,
the kidnappers printed their name and age on a hamburger
rapper from Jack in the Box in order to demand
ransom for the children by name. That sort of strikes
me as you didn't have anything better than a burger wrapper.
I'm wondering if they hadn't realized that you were probably
going to need to give either proof of life or
something like that. It feels like, what do you have
to write on? Oh, I don't know, there's a burger
rapper over here? Like that? Feels like they hadn't accounted
for that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the level of organization is sometimes pretty appalling. I
think to myself, clipboard, piece of paper, Yeah, no, wasn't
on your list of things to get to plan this kidnapping.
Speaker 3: And if you look at it in some ways, like
they made that little bunker of theirs, that little hell
hole bunker, they did put a lot of thought into that.
They put enough thought into it to put some food down.
They're obviously not enough. They dug a toilet, They were
planning enough to keep them down there to give a
ransom demand. So they're very organized in that way. But
then at the same time, you don't have a piece
of paper, you don't have a ready huge tonsilely it
definitely feels We were mentioning our friend Jim Clemente off
Air a couple of minutes ago. He talks about mixed
organization mixed offenders, where you're organized and disorganized in some extent,
and it feels like that's very much true here.
Speaker 2: If you think about the three offenders, and Woods in particular,
whose father owned the gravel pit, they probably would have
had access to heavy equipment because they literally carried this
moving van under twelve feet of dirt and rock. So
a significant amount of work went into creating this tomb,
if you will, and yet, as we'll see, they failed
on so many other levels.
Speaker 3: Because we're committed to honoring survivors of any crime, will
go ahead and give you the names of all of
the people who ultimately went into the ground, but spoiler alert,
did come back up again, all of them. You'll notice
as we give these names that there are several different
sets of siblings. Remember this was a school field trip
or summer school field trip, and so you have families
that are on the bus. So the people who were
on the bus at the time of the hijacking was
Frank Edward ed Ray, the bus driver, aged fifty five,
The Artery sisters Lisa and Monica, Lisa Barletta, the Brown
siblings Jeff and Jennifer, The Correjos sisters Irene, Julie, Linda
and Stella, Darla Daniels, Johnny Esterbrook, the Gonzales brothers Andras
and Robert, Jody Uffington, Cheryl Hinsley, Mike Marshall, Jody Methini,
the park siblings Andrea and Larry, Barbara Parker, the Reynolds,
sisters Judy and Rebecca, and sisters Angela and Michelle, Cindy
van Hoff, and Laura Yazzi. Once the children and the
driver were all down that hatch, the kidnappers closed it.
They put a heavy piece of sheet metal and then
two one hundred pounds industrial batteries on top of the
sheet metal. They then filled in the rest of the
hole with dirt, and then they left, ostensibly to make
that ransom phone call.
Speaker 2: Just chilling. This whole thing is so creepy and terrifying
and uncaring. To put kids ranging in age from five
to fourteen into a hole and place these heavy objects
on top of them and then rock and dirt and leave.
It makes me insane.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I cannot even imagine the amount of fear that
was going through all of their minds as they are
hearing the clang of the metal, even more from the
batteries and than just all of that dirt. Before we
get to the miraculous escape from the bunker that was
orchestrated chiefly by driver Ed Ray and fourteen year old
Mike Marshall, let's take a minute and turn to the masterminds,
and I guess I should probably say that with quotation
marks around it, because really, ultimately, in the end they
did not get away with this. Let's turn to the
masterminds air quotes behind the largest mass kidnapping and American history.
The three kidnappers were all young, as we've stated, they
ranged in age from twenty two to twenty four, and
they all came from wealthy California families. Frederick Newhallwood's fourth
twenty four and brothers Richard and James Schoenfald two and
twenty four had actually planned this crime out for more
than a year, with the end goal of demanding a
five million dollar ransom from the State Board of Education
for the return of the students and the bus driver.
As Bill has mentioned, if you come from family wealth,
why do you need to orchestrate a kidnapp for ransom scheme?
Sort of courses that had they had a series of
debts that they needed.
Speaker 2: To pay Offish.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Bill, I know you've got a little bit more
information on those three kidnappers. So can you fill us
in a little bit about New Hallwoods and the show
and brothers please, show and fell brothers.
Speaker 2: So, the three friends had planned this for over a year.
As you'd said, they were into a lot of not
very good stuff. Drugs are not mentioned in the articles
that we've read, but I have a feeling that's part
of the mix here. But they were involved in a
number of unsavory activities, including auto theft. The three of
them had been up on charges for auto theft. Interestingly,
as soon as the local law enforcement agencies and the
FBI began looking into the case, they realized that the
owner of the cory was the father of Frederick Newhall Woods.
The fort his father, Frederick Nickerson Woods, was a pretty
prominent businessman. Woods and the two brothers, James and Richard Schoenfeld,
had been on probation for the auto theft bust. Once
law enforcement realized who Woods was, they began looking into
his family and their significant properties. They owned a beautiful
seventy eight acre property in Portola Valley, California. Upon executing
a search warrant there, they found journals, a draft of
a ransom demand, maps, notes, plans, receipts for both the
vans and the trailer, false IDs, one of the guns,
the sowt Off shotgun that was using the kidnapping, and
of course, the legendary Hamburger rapper with the names and
ages of each kidnapped child. They began to put this
together pretty quickly that Woods and these two accomplish were
the masterminds that you were calling them. Yeah, so this
kidnapping plot begins to fall apart almost immediately. Warrants are
issued for both Woods and the show Unfeld brothers. The
case comes together fairly quickly. Richard Schoenfeld voluntarily surrendered to
authorities eight days after the kidnapping. Two weeks later, his
brother James was arrested in Menlo Park, California, and then
later that same day, Woods, who's supposed to be overseeing
this whole thing, was arrested in Vancouver, British Columbia by
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the Mounties. So James
Schoenfeld later states that despite coming from a wealthy families,
both he and Woods were deeply in debt, and he said, quote,
we needed multiple victims to get multiple millions, and we
picked children because children are precious. They actually were trying
to get the State of California to give them the money.
The state would be willing to pay ransom for them,
and they don't fight back, meaning the kids, they're vulnerable
and they will mind. That is, they will do what
they're told. As we mentioned, they were seeking five million dollars,
which is about twenty seven million dollars in twenty twenty
five currency. You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be
right back after this word from our sponsors. We're back
here at mindover Murder. These geniuses didn't exactly plan this
thing through. By taking the kids to a facility that
was owned by one of the suspect's fathers, they immediately
cast a gigantic law enforcement spotlight on themselves.
Speaker 3: Interestingly enough, it would come out later that the three
kidnappers were influenced by the nineteen seventy one film Dirty Harry,
directed by Don Siegel and starring the legendary Clint Eastwood
as Harry Callahan, an inspector for the San Francisco Police
Department who's hunting a psychopathic sniper and kidnapper named Scorpio.
Toward the end of the movie, Scorpio hijacks a school
bus full of children and holds them for ransom before
crashing the bus into a mound of dirt and fleeing
into a rock quarry. Now I'm a little ashamed that
I haven't seen Dirty Harry because I am a film teacher,
but I have not. It's not exactly my kind of film.
But you've seen it, have you not?
Speaker 2: I have, and of course several times. I'm sure. Of course.
Scorpio is also a reference to how do I want
to put this? Scorpio is an indirect reference to the
Zodiac murders, yes, which took place in northern California, and
the school bus full of children. This is very similar
to the plan that these three morons attempted to execute.
And I'm sure when they watched the movie, probably over
and over again on VHS tape which is available back then,
it occurred to them that they could use the Father's
Rock quarry as a place to bury a I keep
coming back to the idea of a tomb moving van
that they purchased and then buried, And that's fairly similar
to what happens in the Dirty Harry film.
Speaker 3: As you mentioned, there is this circle of life imitating
art imitating life. The movie Dirty Harrier obviously took some
cues from As you mentioned, the notorious still unsolved. No
matter how many people say it's been solved, it's not solved.
Zodiac Murders which began in nineteen sixty three in Vallejo, California,
and that of course still had a very feverish hold
on the imaginations of San Franciscans. There were still Zodiac
letters being reported up until nineteen seventy four, so the
kidnappers would definitely have been aware of the Zodiac, both
the devious real life killer who deluded police and also
his cinematic counterpart, Scorpio. So, after watching Dirty Harry Woods
and the Schoenfeld Brothers took the idea of hijacking a
bus of school children and used it to plan their
kidnap for ransom scheme that would, they hoped, and with
them five million dollars richer, and and with twenty seven
people buried under a rock quarry and fighting for their lives.
It really is just chilling when you stop to think
about it.
Speaker 2: Some of the things that just seem odd when I
look at how they planned this thing. They were planning
to have the state of California drop the five million
dollars from the air, and then they were planning on
entering this wilderness area where they wanted the money to
be dropped under cover of darkness, and they would acquire
the money and make their escape. The whole thing just
seems so horrifically planned, and of course they weren't counting
on the kids and the bus driver fighting back and
fighting for their lives.
Speaker 3: It's interesting, Bill, something that you just said about having
the ransom money dropped out of an airplane into a
wilderness area that has some real similarities to another sort
of hard hitting true crime event from that time period,
and that's the dB Cooper skyjacking, in which a man
calling himself Dan Cooper skyjacked to the Northwest Orient Airlines
flight three h five on November twenty fourth, nineteen seventy one.
He then parachuted out of the plane over the Cascades
with a quite a large amount of cash. So that
whole thing about let's have a ransom drop essentially, that
reminded me a lot of D. B. Cooper. It feels
like these guys would have been true crime fans in
their day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they seemed very influenced by things that had happened
in the previous years. They clearly followed the headlines and
followed these stories. The dB Hooper story, by the way,
which is an interesting case in and of itself. Perhaps
we should discuss it sometime of mind over murder. Yeah,
they found some of the money in the dB Hooper case,
but I don't think they've ever found him.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No. Interestingly enough, recently in a farm family farm
here in nearby North Carolina, someone came across a parachute
that they think very closely matches the rig that D. B.
Cooper used to parachute out of the plane. So there's
some indicators, some suspicions that maybe one of the maybe
one of the potential suspects for D. B. Cooper actually
lived in northeast or North Carolina.
Speaker 2: Why would he bring the parachute all the way back
across the country.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I have no idea. That's actually I
think it would be fun for us to do D B. Cooper. Honestly,
there's a lot of good stuff there. Honestly, there's been
some great stuff written about it and shot about it.
I think that might be fun. We'll think about doing
dB Cooper. You guys would like us to cover dB Cooper?
Sound off in the comments please, So what didn't the
kidnappers actually count on? It was the sheer tenacity of
a fourteen year old named Michael Marshall. While the media
of the day largely credited bus driver Ed Ray with
rescuing the students, he was not the only person who
worked to rescue the trapped children, According to that CNN
documentary simply called Sheldchilla, when the ceiling of the moving
van began to cave in, Mike Marshall insisted to Ed
Ray that if they were going to die, they would
do it trying to get out of the van, So
Ray and Marshall and the older children stacked up all
the mattresses underneath the hatch. Ray then raised the hatch
as high as he could until Marshall could wedge a
piece of wood underneath the opening. The two then heaved
the batteries and the sheet metal off and began the
arduous task of digging the dirt and debris out of
the way. After sixteen hours of digging, Ed Ray, Mike
Marshall and the other children were out of their would
be mass grave and walking to a very startled guard
at the Rock Quarry security shack and letting them know
where they had been.
Speaker 2: The Rock Quarry not far from our house here, just
a few miles away. We pass it on the way
to the grocery store. That's a place where they've carved
a massive opening into the side of a hill, and
it's a granite quarry. It has a very similar feel.
I would imagine it's a great open sandy area and
trucks go in and out of there during the day.
We'll drive by there sometimes in the evening and there's
this one solitary little guard shack with a guy in there,
and you can see the light on. He's obviously providing
security to make sure that nobody goes in there gets hurt.
I imagine this poor guy who was acting as security
at the California Rock Quarry. All of a sudden, he's
got twenty six kids and a school bus driver appearing
in his little guard shack letting him know this incredible story.
Speaker 3: All told, they ended up being missing for about thirty
six hours. The only location nearby with medical facilities was
the Santa Rated Jail. Children and ed Ray were taken
there to be treated by EMT's and by the jail's
medical staff. They were given a meal, they were given water.
They were even giving prison jumpsuits to wear because their
own clothing was stained with dirt and sweat and all
sorts of other yuckiness, and soon the victims were reunited
with their families back in Choldchilla.
Speaker 2: One of the things I love about this story is
these three morons fell asleep somehow. I picture them lighting
up too many bones to count, getting completely stoned, and
then falling asleep. So while mister Ray and the kids,
particularly Mike Marshall, the oldest boy at age fourteen, were
working so hard to survive, these three idiots are off
falling asleep, taking a nap. The whole thing. I just
have to laugh at their expense.
Speaker 3: One of the questions that we had were not entirely
clear on, like where the three kidnappers were during this
time period. We know that they left the quarry. Were
they in some sort of evil mastermind layer like where
we weren't hanging out at a local diner or anything.
I don't think I am very curious where exactly these
guys were. Certainly, at some point or another, as you said, Bill,
they ended up falling asleep, and that was largely because
they couldn't get their ransom call through. They were trying
to reach the Chelchilla Police Department to make the ransom call,
and the phone lines at the police department were so
jammed because the victims' families were calling, the media was calling.
Nobody could get through to actually make that ransom demand.
You know, they're figuring they're not going to escape from that.
We put sheet metal and batteries and all sorts of stuff.
It's fine, We'll go take a nap. So they decided
that they were going to call later. They fell asleep,
and then they woke up a couple hours later to
all of these news reports that their victims had freed
themselves and gotten out of the rock quarry.
Speaker 2: Nice planning. They can't even get their ransom call through,
and they don't have a backup plan. There's no note,
there's nothing. They just thought they were going to call
the police and say we've got these kids and we
want five million dollars or you'll never see them alive again.
There's something about the sheer incompetence of these kidnappers that
I find incredibly amusing.
Speaker 3: As you mentioned earlier, it did not take long for
this plan to start to fall apart, and before long
the investigation was on, which led them to Fred Woods
and then to James and Robert Schoenfeld. You had mentioned earlier,
the vast array of crime related material that was found
at the Woods family property, journals, the draft of the
ransom note, maps, notes, plans, receipts, fake id's guns, like
you name it. They found storage facilities, he had so
many things like These guys left a trail that was
a mile wide, and so they really at that point
had no choice, and the youngest of the kidnappers, Richard Schoenfeld,
voluntarily turned himself in, as you said. Two weeks later
his brother was arrested, and then fred Woods was arrested
as well. I'm curious whether they split up by choice
or by chance. Fred Woods made it all the way
to Vancouver. I'm curious if he was like, you guys,
take care of it, see you later, or if the
other two were going to join him. I'm curious about
the sequence of events that led them to split up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am too, and some of the reporting. We're
going to have to keep digging on this case because
we both ended up with a lot of questions about
their level of preparedness, which I don't think was high.
And something tells me they were half asking this entire thing,
thinking they were so much smarter than authorities. When the
truth is law enforcement put this thing together pretty quickly.
As you mentioned, the school bus driver and the kids
actually rescued themselves.
Speaker 3: So when the kidnappers ultimately did go to trial, they
all decided to plead guilty. They pled guilty to kidnap
for ransom, they pled guilty to robbery. The one count
they refused to plead guilty on was infliction of bodily injury.
They claimed that the cuts and bruises that the kids
endured did not meet the standard for bodily injury under
the law, or rather, I'm sure their lawyers said that.
I don't think they would have been able to figure.
Speaker 2: That out rocket scientists, they're not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were really insistent on that point, in particular
because a conviction on the bodily injury charge means a
sentence of life without the possibility of parole. If you're
found not guilty on the bodily injury charge, then you
have life with the possibility of parole. So for them
that one point, the bodily injury charge was the difference
between can I get paroled at some point or can
I not. The legal drama continued. The kidnappers were convicted
on the bodily injury charge. They were given life sentences
without the possibility of parole. Because all three of these kidnappers, remember,
came from a rich family. They all three appealed their
sentences in the early eighties, and eventually an appellate court
overturned the convictions on the bodily injury charge, which blew
my mind because obviously they're not taken into account psychological trauma.
And we're going to talk about in a separate episode
the impact that this kidnapping had on all of these victims,
and it was staggering. They clearly did not think that trauma,
PTSD or anything else factored into the idea of bodily
injury and I hate that infuriates me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, me too. And when we got into the details
of the impact that the horrific crime had on these
young kids, just the amount of terror that was inflicted
upon them. In many examples, they suffered from this trauma
for the rest of their lives. To this day. These
people are still struggling with PTSD nightmares, many of them
have had difficulty with drugs, alcohol, relationships, fear of the dark,
which is not a joke. If you're struggling to sleep
every single night for the rest of your lives. And
they talked about, even as adults, them refusing to go
down into the basement or any kind of confined space.
And you can see if you were six years old,
you're old enough to remember what it was like being
kidnapped at gunpoint and forced to go into a hole
in the ground and then dig your way out. You
can see how this would have lasting gative impact.
Speaker 3: And this is very much occurring during a time when
there was no standard of treatment for child psychology. There
just wasn't anything the closest to psychological treatment that any
of these kids got. The survivors and the documentary were
talking about a trip to Disneyland that like a local
Lions club managed to pay for. Sure, you dug your
way out of a potential mass grave, you're scared of
the dark, you're traumatized, but Disneyland is somehow going to
make it all better. That's the way that people thought
back then. We didn't have an idea about how to
treat these sort of disorders with children, and so one
thing we want to get into is the fact that
the justice system did not have a good understanding of
how to deal with child victims. That is reflected in
the fact that by August of twenty twenty two, all
three kidnappers were out on parole, which should never ever
have happened. I do not believe there are any circumstances
under which they should be allowed out. By August of
twenty twenty two, all three of the kidnappers were out
on parole. Richard Schoenfeld was released first in twenty twelve.
He was then followed by his brother James, who was
paroled in twenty fifteen. Frederick new Hollwoods, the fourth, was
denied parole seventeen times before he was finally released in
twenty twenty two. But the release was against the wishes
of California Governor Gavin Newsom, who strongly urged the Parole
Board to reconsider letting him leave jail on this heinous crime.
Speaker 2: Now, remember, Governor Newsom would have had no ability to
keep Woods or any of the offenders in jail. All
he could do was urge the Parole Board to do
the right thing. Ultimately, they decided to let all three
of them out. They were fifty seven, sixty three, and
seventy at the time they got out of jail, so
they served long sentences, but I was still shocked that
they were ultimately allowed to go free.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Woods stated to the parole board, this is only
a partial statement. And forgive me while I roll my
eyes while I say it. Woods said, I have empathy
for the victims, which I didn't have then. I've had
a character change since then I was twenty four years old.
Now I fully understand the terror and trauma that I caused.
I fully take responsibility for this heinous act.
Speaker 2: I'll share you in the eye roll and then let
me just add something too. Woods wasn't exactly a model prisoner.
He was charged with running several businesses illegally from prison yep,
including a gold mine and a car dealership see what
money will buy? Yeah, And amazingly, although there was a
settlement with the victims, he still ultimately received a fortune
worth at least one hundred million dollars from his two families,
the new Halls and the Woods.
Speaker 3: And that's after still continuing to make money inside of prison.
The man married three times during his incarceration. He even
bought a mansion while he was behind bars. I find
that just beyond the pale. How could they have let
that happen.
Speaker 2: And another conversation for another day is at some point
I'd love to talk to an expert as to who
are these women that want to marry dirt balls who
are in prison?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I think I think that is a whole
separate episode. I that's a great idea. If you'd like
to see us do that, sound off in the comments.
Speaker 2: Please, Why do women want to marry? The Menendez brothers
are another great example, multiple marriages while they were in prison.
What for?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have so much more to talk about in
this case. We will be hosting our favorite prosecutor, Matt Murphy,
who is going to talk to us about the parole system,
the restorative justice system, answer some of our questions about
why the sentences that the kidnappers were given were given
the way that it was. We're going to talk about
the bodily injury charge and everything else. So Matt is
going to join us next week, and we have a
lot more to talk about in this case. We hope
that you've enjoyed this first deep dive into the child
Chilla mass kidnapping, and we do highly encourage you to
watch the excellent CNN documentary film Cholchilla you should be
able to find that on Max. That is going to
wrap it up for this episode of mind Over Murder.
Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral Space Media.
Speaker 2: You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Speaker 1: You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
Murders on Facebook.
Speaker 2: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas five six.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.