He wanted to really control. I said to myself as soon as the bus stopped: 'What have I got myself into?' One of the three drove the bus, another watched Ray and the children, and the third followed behind in their van. In contrast to the comments of others, the mechanic said he found Fred Woods easy enough to get along with.. The three suspects were arrested two weeks after the kidnapping and were initially sentenced to life in prison without parole. Woods appeared via video on Friday before the panel where his attorney, Dominique Banos, said his client has not faced any disciplinary actions since 2019. Ed Ray and 26 children were abducted at gunpoint by Frederick Newhall Woods and his two accomplices from a school bus in rural California. A Portola Valley fireman, who, like others who talked about Mr. Woods to reporters, asked not to be identified. There are snapshots of the young bride with her wedding gifts, listed in red ink on a separate pagetowels, Pyrex bowls, blankets, place mats, kitchen canisters, Tupperware, an electric iron, card and check $25.. Woods' son, Fred Newhall Woods IV, 24, was missing. The portrait that emerges from interviews with Mrs. Padgett and others who knew 24yearold Fred Woods, most of them casually because he had very few friends, is one of a longersome say a loserwho got along poorly with people, and who perhaps as a result, cloaked himself in his possessions, carrying with him as a high school student not pictures of girls but pictures of his automobiles. He dug until he was exhausted, and then he kept on digging. If he did a good job, he'd brag about it to his father, but when he lost his job as a salesman (at a paint store in Palo Alto) he didn't want to tell his father, or me.. A classmate of the younger one, Richard, described him as just real, real normal.. Over the years, there have been other troubling reports about Woods. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. He wasn't interested in anything. On July 15, 1976, Frederick, Richard, and James put their scheme into motion. During that time, the younger Woods, in partnership with 24yearold James Leonard Schoenfeld, the son of Dr. John B. Schoenfeld, a podiatrist of nearby Atherton, restored the vehicles they bought and sold them in a business venture in which they employed parttime mechanics. [Cover Image Courtesy: Alameda County Sheriffs Office], Read More: Best Netflix Kidnapping Movies. Lynda Carrejo Labendeira, who was 10 years old at the time, told the Associated Press in 2015 that the battery-operated blowers that circulated the air in the bunker began to fail. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. A 70-year old California man who has spent four decades in prison for kidnapping a bus full of children and burying them alive could be freed if Gov. Now, after nearly a half-century behind bars, he is on the brink of freedom. Once retired, William Newsom advocated for their release in 2011, noting that no one was seriously physically injured during the kidnapping. ', 'He could have done much more,' she said. The old vehicles, collected originally as a hobby by both the young Mr. Woods and by his father, Frederick Nickerson Woods 3d, were in the last two years a business asset. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. However, 36 years later, in 2012, Richard was the first of the trio to be granted parole. That, plus the fact that Frederick's father owned the rock quarry where the hostages were discovered, placed suspicion on him. He was wealthy and lavished money on the things he wanted, his possessions, but stingy in all else. "I'm overwhelmed to the point that I had to leave work," said Darla Neal, who was a 10-year-old student at the time of the kidnapping. . Mass Abductors According to James, they initially weren't serious about actually committing such a crime, but as time passed by, they began to consider it. I rescued him before he was a year old. So he and 14-year-old Michael Marshall got to work. His father. Over the course of her studies, she noted that numerous traits and facts about the children, including that a majority of the children, upon recollection, did not name the time they spent in the vans or the hours they spent being buried underground as the worst of their experiences; they also remembered that the highest degree of terror occurred at any time whenever their location was changed: from the school bus and into the small vans, from those vans and into the hole at the top of the buried van, and even from their placement onto the buses taking them home after their ordeal ended. A Puzzling Portrait of Key Coast Kidnapping Suspect, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/08/05/archives/a-puzzling-portrait-of-key-coast-kidnapping-suspect.html. He was really adamant that I not see my former boyfriend. PLEASE NOTE ORDERS MAY TAKE LONGER TO SHIP AT THIS TIME. Marshall cautiously stuck his head out of the dirt to make sure their abductors werent nearby, then he and Ray helped the other 25 children out of the truck. Ahead of the 48 Hours episode about this infamous Chowchilla Kidnapping, heres what you need to know about where the kidnappers are today. Though none of the victims of the kidnapping sustained life-threatening physical injuries, the psychological effects of being taken hostage at gunpoint and then kept underground for nearly 20 hours have been harrowing for many. Frederick Newhall Woods and accomplice brothers Richard and James Schoenfeld kidapped the bus full of children from Chowchilla, California in 1976; . It was later observed that elements of the abduction seem similar to a scenario depicted inThe Day the Children Vanished, a story written by Hugh Pentecost that was published in the 1969 fiction anthologyAlfred Hitchcock's Daring Detectives; since there was a copy of the book in the Chowchilla library, it was assumed that the Pentecost story was the inspiration for the mass abduction. 'I believe you have served enough time for the crime you committed,' Park said Friday, before adding: 'I'm concerned about the addiction you may have about money.'. In July 1976, dozens of parents in rural Chowchilla, California, faced their worst nightmare when their children went missing. Multiple survivors support Woods parole, while others oppose it. His parole stirred great controversy from the hostages. There were two bright spotstwo trips to Baja California, she said, one with her husbanil's parents. But he was lonely, and it was lonely living with him.. 'This is an individual who's demonstrated how dangerous he is,' she said after Friday's decision. Marshall also struggled with addiction for a while as a young adult, but he too is sober now and has a therapy dog named Blue. Once all 27 members of the group were inside, the kidnappers put a heavy piece of metal and two 100-pound industrial batteries on top of the entry theyd cut into the roof of the truck, filled in the rest of the hole with dirt, and left the scene. CBS reported that in previous parole hearings he was evasive, unable or unwilling to follow prison rules and fail[ed] to acknowledge the severity of his crime. Alive (all released). You can check out his prison record here. "Now I fully understand the terror and trauma I caused. Natasha Anderson For Dailymail.Com Although the children and Ray were safe, the perpetrators were still out there. When the last of the children was inside, Woods and the Schoenfelds began shoveling dirt over the roof, weighing down the hatch-door by placing two 100-pound industrial batteries on top of it. Under hypnosis, Ray was also able to remember one of the license plates of the vans that had taken them to the quarry, which was tied to Woods and both of his accomplices. While Woods has lived a relatively cushy life in prison, his victims continue to suffer from the trauma he inflicted upon them more than 40 years ago. He'd buy a shirt he didn't need.. It was back in July 1976, when three young men from. Thanks for contacting us. Twenty-six children and their bus. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Once it did, they boarded the bus, wearing masks and armed with shotguns. They all walked to the security shack at the quarry and told employees what had happened. Prosecutors said Woods and his accomplices planned the kidnapping as if it was the crime of the century, and demanded $5 million in ransom from the state Board of Education. Then they were taken to the quarry in Livermore, California. The bravura performance was another illfitting piece in the puzzling portrait of a wealthy, privileged young man who, evidence indicates, is the central figure in a crime that is bizarre even by Catifornia standards. CBS And just scared out of their you know, we were all just scared out of our wits, Marshall told CBS News, adding, It would be silent and then somebody would bust out crying and the hole would just erupt. At a parole hearing held online last week due to Covid-19 safety precautions that featured testimony from multiple survivors, Woods said that he is a changed man. It was at the gravel quarry owned by Mr. Woods's father, Frederick Nickerson Woods 3d, that the children were held in a buried moving van for 18 sweltering hours before they managed to dig their way out. A copper penny is taped to a page, date 1971, and the inscription reads our lucky penny., On a final page is a snapshot of a puppy. 13:36 GMT 30 Mar 2022. The three men were arrested in the weeks following the kidnapping and were initially sentenced to life in prison without parole, but an appeals court later changed the sentences to make the trio eligible for parole. Frederick "Fred" Newhall Woods IV, Richard "Rick" Schoenfeld, and James "Jim" Schoenfeld were a trio of abductors infamous for hijacking a school bus full of children and holding them for ransom. They pleaded guilty, were fined $125 each and placed on a year's probation. In 1976, Frederick Newhall Woods IV and brothers James and Richard Schoenfeld kidnapped a school bus driver and 26 children, then buried them alive in a moving van trailer in a quarry. I was 24 years old. Richard was 22 at the time of the kidnapping. Part of the reason for that, she said, was that Fred Woods had a vascular blockage that prevented the couple from having children, although she said they had normal marital relations. The panel's proposed parole decision will become final within 120 days. On Friday, March 25, 2022, Woods read aloud an apology at his parole hearing. Escape was further cut off by a metal lid that covered the top of the truck and was weighed down with two 100-pound industrial batteries. He really didn't want people around here. He attended public school at Portola Valley's Woodside High School, the kind of school that people lie, cheat and steal to get into, said a neighbor, and it was there that he met James Schoenfeld, also charged with the kidnapping. No. The company reported gross sales of $1.5 million last year, and the young Mr. Woods is reported to hold stock in the company. The possibility of parole for Frederick, Richard, and James stirred controversy, with Ray and some of the hostages stating that they should be kept in prison, while other hostages, sheriff's officers, and the judge that presided over the case and passed down the sentence stated that they should be released from jail. Darla Neal, who was 10 at the time of the hijacking, told CNN in 2015 her 'extreme anxiety' made it impossible to live normally. We were friends, but we didn't hang around together. To his young bride, Mr. Woods seemed inordinantly possessive, a collector, he hoarded things. Scattered across the aging estate were scores of automobiles, fire engines, buses, vans, a hundred or more. A school bus carrying 26 students mysteriously vanished on the way back from a summer field trip, and three wealthy young men were the top suspects. of 1. But there were no children, and that set the stage in part for the young couple's breakup. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. He was denied parole numerous times for his minimization of the crime, his behavior in prison, and his possession of contraband like pornography and cell phones. "48 Hours: Live to Tell": Twenty-six school children abducted and buried alive in a truck trailer by three young men. Frederick Newhall Woods, now a bit frail, had been incarcerated 43 years for helping commit one of California's most shocking crimes. I think I only saw a few pictures of him and his parents together in the family pictures. It was at the Woods estate, called The Hawthorries, in wealthy Portola Valley, that the authorities found a draft of the kidnapping ransom note demanding $5 million from an undesignated source. He did not, in thcse days, hunt, camp, fish, watch or participate in sports, although he enjoyed watching automobile races on television. Fearing of embarrassment from asking their parents for financial support, they agreed to get themselves some money. An appellate panel, which included the governor's late father, state Judge William Newsom, reduced the kidnappers' sentencesin 1980, giving them the chance at parole. Fred (Frederick)Rick (Richard)Jim (James) Woods has spent the vast majority of his life in prison, where his disciplinary record reportedly includes citations for running an unauthorised gold mine, a car dealership, and a Christmas tree farm. It is possible that the money has helped finance some of Woods prison activities. 01:30 GMT 30 Mar 2022 Fighting heat exhaustion, they poured water over their heads and kept pushing until they were able to knock the batteries off of the top of the hatch. He came home and told me about it and was all excited. But eight days later, Richard Schoenfeld turned himself in to the authorities, according to the San Francisco Gate. I think he was not hostileyou really couldn't put it as hostile, the youth said. We enjoyed ourselves, she said. I was 24 years old, he said. Frederick Newhall Woods was 24 years old at the time of the 1976 Chowchilla school bus kidnapping. While underground, Ray and one of the elder students were able to dig their way out of the truck. The young mechanic who worked at the Woods estate described James as a pretty decent person. He was intelligent, quick with the math needed in the automobile trans actions, but usually quiet, the mechanic said. Three years later, his brother followed suit. The shotgun thing concerns accounts that Mr. Woods on one or two occasions fired over the heads of teenagers who attempted to enter the long drive up the hill at 800 Los Tancos Road where the Woods estate is situated. All three were from wealthy San Francisco Bay Area families when they kidnapped 26 children and their bus driver near Chowchilla. Miraculously, the driver and children managed to dig themselves out and escape relatively unharmed and the kidnappers were eventually caught. The Schoenfeld brothers surrendered to authorities in California after several days in hiding. Park remembered Marshalls determination at that moment. At this point, Frederick and James, having passed through the Bay Area, decided to split up and head into Canada separately. I just remember the kids got a hold of me and were holding onto me. Madera County prosecutors said Woods' disciplinary infractions in prison showed he had not yet learned to follow the rules. Frederick, Richard Schoenfeld turned himself in to the quarry in Livermore, California in 1976 ; originally,. Families when they kidnapped 26 children were abducted at gunpoint by Frederick Woods... 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