Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Back in 1976 in Chowchilla, a little town smack dab in the middle of California, a school bus with 26 children aboard was hijacked and the kids were held for ransom by men looking to make easy money. But man, was this anything but easy for everyone involved.
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Chapter 2: What happened during the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping?
He had only dropped off a few kids at this point, and there were 19 girls and 7 boys on board from 5 to 14. And notably, the 14-year-old, because he will factor in pretty heavily here, his name was Mike Marshall. He wasn't even supposed to be on that bus.
He usually got picked up by his mom, but he got busted the night before with some beer, and his mom said to your punishment, you've got to ride that school bus home. Yep. Tomorrow. And after school or after the trip, apparently he was like, I don't even know what bus to take because I don't do this. But he knew who Ray was.
And so he went to Ed Ray and said, hey, man, I don't know if this is my bus or not, but will you take me home? And Ed Ray is Ed Ray. So he went, sure. Off the board.
Sure.
Thank goodness he said that. Yeah. So after that third stop, there were 26 kids and Ed Ray on board. And Ed Ray was continuing along his route. And he turned onto a street called Avenue 21. And as he turned onto Avenue 21, Ed Ray found that there was a white van blocking the road.
And apparently he started to go around it and then I guess thought the better of it and wanted to stop and see if they needed any help instead. And when he did, he realized very quickly that he was actually being hijacked because when you see a man with a long gun and pantyhose on his head, you're probably being hijacked. That's right.
The first thing he saw was this one guy who said, open the door. And then he realized there were a couple of other guys, same MO. I think they had shotguns with the pantyhose. And they said, get in the back. We'll take over the driving from here. If you've watched the movie, did you see any of that? No, no, I haven't yet. We'll get to it. There's a Lifetime movie that came out in the 90s.
I think 93. It looks like it was made in 83 somehow. That is on YouTube, and I highly recommend scrubbing through it. Okay. I wouldn't say watch the whole thing because I don't know if you'll be able to, but Carl Malden played Ed Ray. And I don't know if it's true to the story, but he gave them a lot of guff about getting out of that driver's seat in the movie. Oh, really?
Yeah, I'm not sure if that happened in real life or not. It's a Malden improv if I've ever heard one. Yes, and I'm not getting out of my seat. Right. My feet hurt. So he eventually did, though, and they drove that bus followed by the van. for a bit and then eventually transferred those kids to that van and another identical van.
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Chapter 3: How did the kidnappers execute their plan?
That's a terrible position for any person to be in. And I feel for him in that respect. And I also think from what I saw, there's a New York Times article about him while I believe he was still at large.
Mm-hmm.
Where he said that he's described as a loser in the headline. Yeah. The New York Times calls him a loser, at least says other people call them a loser in their headline. He was that kind of person. And again, it was the 70s, but he was also that kind of person.
He was the product of wealthy, neglectful parents, from what I can tell, and also an education system that seems to have failed him, at least in the grammar portion. Yeah. We'll get to that. He didn't have a lot of friends. He never really had a ton of girlfriends, which is ironic because he ended up being married four times, which we'll get to.
He lived in a converted apartment in an outbuilding on the nearly 80-acre estate in Portala Valley where his grandmother lived and his parents lived, even though they were traveling by themselves usually. He got a job at that rock quarry. Your first indication that they may not have had the smartest plan. Sure. Because his dad owned it. And he was into cars. He collected cars with his money.
The ringleader did. He had dozens and dozens of cars. His buddy James who helped him – he was rich too. Not that kind of rich. But his parent – his dad was a podiatrist. So – They had doctor money, so they were doing pretty well as well. And they got into various businesses together. They had a used car business together.
They never did super well, it seemed like, in any of their business ventures because it seemed like they weren't super smart. Right. Another good descriptor is that Fred in particular loved his cars and he loved to shoot the windows out of his cars with his guns, which he also loved. Yeah, they had a lot of guns between them as well. I mean, it's sort of what you think.
There are these rich kids who weren't paid attention to that could do whatever they wanted.
and ended up getting into trouble uh he he had fred had designs on being a film producer and part of the concept for this kidnapping was the school bus kidnapping in the movie dirty harry yeah and he said hey this would make a great movie too which we'll get to sort of the bow tie on that later on but he and james ended up losing some money about 30 grand on a housing deal and
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Chapter 4: What conditions did the children face while being held captive?
I never saw Fred Wood's motivation. Did you? I mean, I think part of it had to do with that 30 grand in debt. But I think part of it, dude, is he was a bored rich kid in some ways. Right. Like that may have been the reason. So, yeah. And dumb. I also, yeah, and dumb. Also, I have the impression that James and Rick Schoenfeld were a lot more moral than Fred Wood was. Oh, yeah.
Apparently in his journal, James wrote at the time that he was worried he was becoming immoral as they were like really planning this. Mm-hmm. And he and his brother were both Eagle scouts. So I guess it is fair to say that they kind of fell under the influence of Fred Woods, who had no qualms about this whole thing. He convinced them to give up their qualms as well.
Yeah, I think the last time I'll say the word smart thing that they did was when they were initially hatching the idea for They said, we saw on the news California – the state of California has a $5 billion budget surplus. And we're not going to get money kidnapping a kid or even 26 kids from their parents – for their parents to pay ransom.
But if they were on a school bus, then it's the responsibility of the state of California – And they've got all this dough, so $5 million is chump change to them. So if we get them on a school bus, then they're liable, and that's how we're going to get the most money. Yeah, and so the calculation that they made was that nobody was going to get hurt.
They knew that they weren't going to physically hurt those kids. They knew that California had a budget surplus, but even more than that, that their insurance company, whoever insured the state, would end up actually paying that $5 million and that they were just basically taking $5 million from the state that the state didn't really need. And that nobody was going to get hurt.
And then that calculation, it really kind of reveals like how much they did lose any kind of morality, which is they utterly failed to take into account like the psychological and emotional damage they were going to inflict on these kids and their parents and the town in general. You know? Yeah.
Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that – because I think even in the end they saw it as like not the biggest deal. Yeah. Because no one was hurt and it was really quick. But like when I saw – and eventually, spoiler, we'll go ahead and say that the two brothers were eventually paroled and we'll get to all that. Yeah.
The news teams in 2015 were following this guy around in a parking lot asking him questions, and he's just trying to avoid it. And one of them was like, you do realize the trauma these kids have still suffered into adulthood? And he just went, I've heard, so I've heard, and then just quickly ran away. So even to this day, they're trying to get them to realize that there was a real –
impact and and and the end result was trauma and ptsd yeah and the reason it did and it had the impact and part of the problem for chow chilla apparently chow chilla was just transformed immediately like you know when when if you're the victim of a crime you you wonder like why why me especially a random crime and this is a random crime perpetrated on a whole town Yeah.
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