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The kids heard dirt and quarry rock be pushed over them, and they realized that they were being very alive.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. In nineteen seventy six, twenty six kids were riding on a school bus in Chowchilla, California, when they were kidnapped along with their driver by three men. The men buried them all underground in the middle of nowhere. The kids were terrified as they struggled to stay alive, and then a fourteen year old boy took control. It's
an incredible story of survival. Paul Solid tells me about the story at the center of his film Chowchilla. So this is I think a hell of a film. I really. I was impressed with the way you put it together and what a harrowing story. I was two when this happened, so I don't remember I remember hearing about it. Tell me how this film came to you, because you don't look older than I am. I'm probably older than you are, So how did you get this film?
I come from scripton films, actually, and a long time ago. I was just doing research when I came upon. I was probably looking for, you know, the craziest crimes blah blah blah, and I came upon the Chuchulli kidnapping, and I was just I was first of all shocked, I think that I hadn't heard of it before, and then I realized there were a lot of questions that I had reading about it that that hadn't been the answer.
I wanted to know what happened for the kids, and I wanted to know more specifics on how it resolved on the day, because I mean, the crime itself is completely crazy, but also its resolution is really just, you know, if you wrote it, you know, as a scripted film, you'd say, give me a break, this is no way. I can't I can't believe that I happened.
And you know, importantly, to a documentary like the one you made, you had great archive to work with. You had the original debriefing of the kids, you know, right then in seventy six, you had interviews with a lot of them when they were adults. You had present day news footage. So it sounded like you had a lot to work with. Was there something missing that you would have wanted?
You know, I feel like we got kind of everything that there is. The DA's office worked really closely with us and provided us basically every piece of evidence that existed, so we had the full archive, you know, from Anivesca's story standpoint, and then we also had you know, I became really you make one of these things, you really become close with the subjects. You know, they've become your friends. And I don't know, I don't know how to make
one of these things without doing that. Their stories are so powerful and they've been through so much, and you're sort of in awe of them before you've ever met them, and so you know they they worked very hard to sort of provide every single piece of personal archival that they could. You know, a lot of that stuff I've never been seen before, you know. And so part of that was original audio recordings, you know, one of which was recorded days after the event.
It's pretty incredible and it's amazing to hear sort of one of your heroes, who is Mike Marshall as a
kid and then as an adult and what happens. And I think that's what's powerful about the film is you know, you walk away and there's literally someone of high authority in California years later who says, well, nobody was physically hurt, you know, And then you do a wonderful job of just unfurling all of the emotional trauma and physical heart that people really go through with these sorts of things
in childhood trauma and showing the impact. So I think that this treatment of this story could have gone very differently in somebody else's hands. And I think you did a wonderful job of being empathetic and you know, really paying attention to the survivors.
Yeah, I'm glad that I'm glad that's your sense of it. I mean, I think it is it was a huge story at the time, massive the world was watching. So it's not that it was underreported. It was reported tremendously. And you know, the issue is that what was reported was sort of the intrigue in the event itself, and then that narrative that became the official narrative sort of just ends when everybody comes home. Okay, yeah, and it's that's like really not. That's where a lot of those kids'
stories began. You know. It was like and at the time, our understanding of trauma was a very very different. You know, those kids were told, those kids' parents were told to ignore their nightmares. You know, that's just to not address any of the issues they were having and that it would go away, you know, and that is not our understanding of trauma. Now. In fact, this case shaped, you know,
the way we understand Cheraldo trauma a lot. You know Leonora Terror's book and you know started she interviewed all the victims, you know, in the in the months after the kidnapping, and then kept in touch with them a lot of them for years after. In particular, mic I think that work was really important and is still relevant.
Now, well, let's get going on the story. We are in July of nineteen seventy six in Chowchilla, California, which, to be honest, I mean, I have heard about the bus, chaw Schilla, the bus, the kidnapping, very vaguely. I didn't
know very much about this story. I did not know there was a Chouchilla, California, So you know, this was not even the right state when I started watching this film in my mind, will you tell me a little bit about the political environment we're in the United States, and certainly what Chouchila was like in the seventies.
When you look at Chowchila in nineteen seventy six, you know you're seeing a very particular slice in America. You know, it's a small town. It's a small farm town in California Central Valley. It's flat, very flat, dusty, surrounded by orchards and dairies. And you know, even though it's the mid seventies and your post Watergate and your post Vietnam, it's sort of a time capsule of a place. You know, the rhythms of life out there are still closer to kind of an earlier era. A lot of the families
there are descendants of dustbel migration. So culturally it's funny. You know, you go to Central Valley in California, and California is a big place, and so you're so people are sort of surprising when they sort of hear echoes of like there's sort of like a you know, an Oklahoma and even down to the accent, you know, culturally
religious religious views. There are a lot of churches, and so it really is it's like you feel that you know that these are people who left places like Oklahoma and Texas and Missouri during depression and there really is a bedrock of sort of self reliance and church centered community that it really does feel like you know that it does. You can feel that it goes back to that era. As far as what's happening, you know, in the seventies, I mean a lot, you know, a lot
is happening. Economically. The country is in you know, a really bad place, all the oil shocks and stackflation and all that stuff. California is going through all kinds of stuff with agriculture, water issues, you know, all kinds of changing labor conditions. But Churchill as a town, it really is a sort of little time capsule. You know, kids are they're growing up like kids used to grow up. They're riding their bikes, you know, they're catching frogs. You know,
it's sort of idyllic in a way. You know, nobody locked their doors, you know, it really was. It was a very hard working town. Everybody worked their asses off and that they still do. It was not a place where you would have expected this to happen. And it was also it's a working class place. You know, it's not a place that you would expect a ransom quim to happen because these people don't have any money.
There were people who had money in Chowchilla, but even what they were making money off it wasn't finance. It was you know, working class companies, right, I mean, what were Give me some examples of some of the wealthier folks in that area how they got their wealth.
Chechell is really not a wealthy place. People are farmers, you know, people are working farms. You know, that's really what's going on. They're working farms, and they're you know, they work in a restaurant, they work in a bar. It's not a place that has wealthy inhabitants.
Let's see on that day, I mean, set us up, how does this whole thing start to begin with.
So one July day in nineteen seventy six, in this little idyllic central valley town, hard working town. Everyone is working, you know, so the kids need something to do during the day. So there's a summer program and it's like camp the kids life. They love to go there. It's mostly mostly kids under the age of ten, and there's bus takes them to school, takes them from the school to the local pool, takes them back to the school, then takes them home. And so this is their last
day of the summer program for the summer. They were sad that it was ending, and they had even come up with a petition to extend it. It was sort of you know, of course wasn't going to work, but it was a sweet sort of you know, endeavor that these kids had put together. And so on the way home, they were taking the bus a guy named Ed Ray who was a longtime school employee and bus driver there.
Everyone knew him. He was, you know, a strapping you know, I think mid fifties at the time, farmer, tough they kind of got, you know, like a big tough farmer, you know, bucks his own hay, but also and the kids loved him. He was could be stern, but you know he really was just, you know, adored. He was driving these kids home and he dropped one of them off.
And shortly thereafter, almost immediately thereafter, amidst these orchards, these sort of flat orchards where they're growing almond trees, they saw a white van in the middle of the street. And you know, in a place like Chowchilla, if you see a van, you know, a car stop, you assume they're in trouble, and you do what people in small towns do, They try to help. So ed Ray stopped the bus and immediately a man came running out of the orchard with a sawn off shotgun and a pistol
and said open the door. He had a mask, he couldn't see his face, wearing the stocking over his face. And then two other men similarly dressed jumpsuits, stockings over their faces, also carrying a shotgun, one with a pistol. Two So these two more men, they ed, what could he do. He opened the bus doors. They came on the bus, they pointed a gun at the kids. They set everybody to the back of the bus. They told ad to get to the back of the bus and
they took the bus. And so they follow this white van up the road and they drive then the van and the bus both down a little incline into what they call a slough. Now, if you're not from Chuchilla, you know, or a similar place, most people don't know what the hell of slou is, as slugh is like a sort of a high reeded area and this is you know, the sort of like a tall like sort of bamboo like, you know, an area that and this, you know, The point was it couldn't be seen from
the road. And so they come into a little clearing in this slough and they order the kids to at gunpoint to get off the bus and to step directly onto the white van. Half the kids, so the kids on the right side got into the white van. And now there are twenty six kids on this bus, most of them under the age of ten. There was one fourteen year old on the bus. His name is Mike Marshall. He does not ride the bus home usually, and he's only actually riding the bus that day because he is
he's gotten in trouble with his mom. And so she said, you know what, Mike, you're going to ride the bus home with the other kids. He is. He is not in the summer program for the same reason as the other kids. Mike is in the summer program because he and the principal do not get along. Mike is new in town and right away he's gotten into it with the principal and they just they both want to have the it to see the end of each other. And so Mike is in school to accelerate his junior high
experience and get the hell out of there. It's a little tiny school, Dairyland Elementary, tiny tiny school and out in the middle of these orchards, totally secluded. So they offload these kids onto these two vans. These vans have been modified. They have wood paneling that isolates the back from the front, and you know, you can't open the doors from inside. You can't see out. There are no windows,
there's no air circulating. By the way, it's July in Central Valley, California, which is hot as hell, and they slam the doors and these kids are in the dark in the heat, and they start to drive. These kids are in these vans for eleven hours. These are little kids. In one van is the only adult ed ray along with half the kids, and in the other van is Mike. Mike Marshall, the fourteen year old, and he's with the
other half the kids. The kids are terrified, you know, like as you know, any group of adults would be terrified, these are little kids. Driving for eleven hours. You know, there's no way to use the bathroom, so these kids are soiling themselves and it's horrible. You know. At one point they stop for gas and they can smell the gas and they you know, they bang on the on the wall, but no one hears them. And you know, finally,
after eleven hours, they stop. The doors are opened and one kid is dragged out, and then they're they're slam shut and this happens again and again and again until all the kids are dragged off. And what was happening one at a time. The kidnappers were taking the kids out, and they had constructed some sort of a tent which later was discovered to be a military surplus issue tent, you know, and they have work lights glaring at them. These kids don't know what the hell is going on.
They march them across this space. They take an item of clothing from each of them and they take their name down, you know, this is sort of proof of life, clothing or possession. And then they mark them further across the space to where a ladder is sticking out of a hole in the ground, and one by one, at gunpoint, they have these kids climb down the ladder. They don't know where the other kids are, they don't know what the hell is going.
On on the bus ride, you know. And when they're getting the kids out, are these three men, the kidnappers who have the pantyhose masks on? Do they say anything at all? Are they reacting to each other or to the kids or to ed.
Yeah, that's an important detail. So in the midst of this kidnappening, you know, just to understand some kind of have some sense of what's happening, you know, would have made all the difference. And as you learn about trauma, like having some sense of what's happening to you is like just absolutely critical thing. These guys did not tell the kids anything. They didn't tell them what they were doing.
They didn't say they were going to be okay, they didn't say this is a you know, kidnapping for ransom. They just took them and you know, for little kids looking at these men, they looked like monsters. I mean, they really did, like their recollections of them were, you know, and you can see that, you know how some of the recollections in the film are affected by their upbringing. You know, one of our subjects, guy Larry Park, you know, his family very involved in the church. He's still very
involved in the church. And it's a little boy. His frame of reference was demons, and these men looked like demons to Larry. Their faces were blurred. They just Another little girl who was very very little asked one of them if if he was the Easter Bunny because he had the end of the panteose hanging off of his head of like years, So you know, it's really it's heartbreaking. So yeah, no, that's an important detail. They did not tell them anything.
Did they talk to each other. Did the kids say that that the were they communicating the kidnappers? No? Wow, this was planned really well. So they're loading these kids down underground, is that right, one at a time down this ladder.
Yeah, So that the kids come down this ladder and they emerge into a narrow chamber that's about twenty eight feet long and about six feet high, six to eight feet high. They don't know what it is. If the walls are lined with like a thick gauge hog wire, like a gritted makes it look a little bit like a cage, like chicken wire, but thicker. The walls are crimson painted, Crimson would be on that. There are no bathrooms. The only bathrooms are holes cut in the floor. There
is hardly any food and water. There's some few jugs of water, a couple five yallon jugs. There's a little bit of there's like, you know, some cheerios, jar peanut butter, some bread like it was not we're talking about twenty six kids and an adult, right, So if they were in a twenty eight foot one chamber, if they were lying side by side, there is no room. So this is a tiny little place. And then the kidnappers came
to the top. They shined a light down, They threw down a flashlight and one set of extra batteries, and then they slammed a very very heavy metal door. And then after that the kids heard a sound, and the sound was dirt and quarry rock being pushed over them, and they realized that they were being buried alive.
And this is six feet down, right? Is that how long the ladder was?
Yeah, they're a little bit more than six feet down. I mean the thing itself is you basically have like six feet to the entrance to the chamber and then you have an additional you know, eight feet down to the floor of the chamber. So they are underground and they're buried alive.
And they couldn't tell where they were. Were they in the desert or the mountains or anything like that.
They had no idea And what is Ed?
I know that he does interviews later on, but do we remember what Ed was sort of thinking or what his thought precess was at this point. He's the only adult with a fourteen year old basically as his sidekick, and that's it.
So, you know, Ed Ray like, no one would end be this guy this position. This is a terrible position. You know. He loves these kids and all these kids are his charges. They're in his care and Ed is more aware than any of the kids that this is not likely to go well and it is weighing on him tremendously, so he does his best to calm them down. The kids work together with him to distribute some of the rations make sure that people have a little bit
of food, a little bit of water. The older kids, especially the girls, very very helpful and taking care of the younger ones and trying to calm everybody down ed. At a certain point, got everyone to take a nap. But there's nothing they can do. You know, they have one light in this chamber. It's a flashlight, and they're trying to conserve the batteries. They don't they don't know what's going on. They have no idea. Food is rapidly
going away. And the structure itself is very shody. So there's already a support beam holding up the center of it, as if when they were initially burying this thing it started to cave in and they needed to reinforce it. So if someone bumps into that thing, who knows if the roof is going to go. There is very little air coming in. There are two little vents you're talking about, like a dryer tube. Ultimately they found it. It was like it just a little dryer tube that was pushing air
and it wasn't much. And so you know, this is just a nightmare gone to another nightmare.
And this is July. Central California was there an estimate on what the temperatures could get to where they were six feet or more underground during this time.
So when you're underground, it's not as bad as it was when they were in the vans. When they were in the vans, it's likely that those vans are one hundred and fifteen degrees inside, you know, maybe more because there's no ventilation, you know, and you're talking about blistering sun heating these vans for hours and hours and hours,
no air conditioning at all, no ventilation at all. So those that van, those van rids, these kids were dehydrated, they were you know, they had soiled their clothes, they were horrified, and that's before they went in the chamber.
And a lot of that, I know you said before, is a lack of information, the not knowing you're going through something terrible now. But even if it's a false promise, we'll come back, don't worry. Given that hope, that hope is what's important. Do you think that the kidnappers thought that through, like we're just not going to give them any information, the intention is to terrify these kids, or why wouldn't they give them any kind of false hope?
No, They certainly didn't consider that. I mean you just look at the rations they left. Yeah, you look at you know, what was down there for the kids, like there were some mattresses, old mattresses, and some box springs, a couple of blankets. I think they were not thinking about that, I mean their children, Yeah, little children like. No, there was no consideration given. So what would happen to those kids? No, it wasn't part of the equation. It wasn't part of their concern at all.
Anybody have any health issues. I mean, I'm thinking of ed first, if he's in his fifties, but any of the other kids' asthma, anything that was particularly would make them really susceptible to these conditions.
You know, they got lucky, you know that no one had a terrible asthma attack, and definitely kids were having trouble breathing. Some of the kids have held their pee for so long that they ended up having terrible infections and stuff like that, and that stuff was reported ultimately, you know, in the escape attempt which is forthcoming. Ed Ray ended up having some burns from battery acid, but not terrible, and of course Mike Marshall ended up just entirely exhausted.
How many hours is it in this underground compartment before there is a thought of how do we get out of here? Is there a chance we could get out of here?
So the initial thought, you know, is someone is going to help us, and that is what Edray is telling them. Someone's gonna come. They're looking for us, someone is gonna come. He tries to maintain that hope, both for the kids and for himself. But there's a certain point where the hope, you know, starts to fade. They're running out of food, they're running out of water. At a certain point, the batteries that are connected to the air supply that's pushing fresh air in they die, and so the air is
starting to go bad. Your kids, of course, are progressively more exhausted and terrified, and you know, everyone needs to eat, everyone needs to drink. And then, to make matters worse, there's a point at which the ceiling starts to collapse, you know, like suddenly, you know, they hear something buckle and they think that the ceiling is catering in on them.
You know, there's sort of a cascade of dirt and rock, and eventually it doesn't fully fall in it stabilizes, but they're then in a position where they're like, it's only a matter of time, you know, before this thing caves in on our hands. And so at that point what starts to happen is Mike Marshall, who's the older kid, he's fourteen years old, who is the son of Bob Marshall. Bob Marshall is a world champion steer wrestler, which is
like basically the baddest ass of all rodeo sports. I mean, Bob is he's the world champion, and so you know, that doesn't make him rich. That makes him a very hard working rodeo guy. And his son, Mike, you know, who is like an adolescent kid, is an aspiring rodeo kid, you know, and he rides his ass off. It's all he wants to do is be like his dad. And so he has all the qualities of a kid who grew up in the rodeo. He's tough, he's scrappy, he's
incredible hard, incredibly hard worker. He also has all of the sort of spirit of a cowboy. He's been raised as a cowboy, and that means a number of different things. So it means he's brave as hell. It means he's physically courageous. It means he is physically capable. But it also means he has honor and that he respects his elders. And so he has really spent this whole time, you know,
just following dad's lead. But there's a point at which he starts to realize that if they don't do something, they're gonna die, and ed ray, you know, God bless him. He at a certain point quietly sort of falls apart in the darkness and is quietly crying and praying and doing all the things that a normal human being would do in that situation. You know, the man is not a coward, you know, he's a He's a tough, brave
guy in a terrible situation. It just so happens that Mike again, Mike never wrote the bus like, he never rode the bus along. He wrote it to school, he never wrote it home. It just so happens he was
riding that day and he almost missed the bus. He was he was actually in the in the back when the buses were leaving, making out with the teacher's daughter, and she encouraged him, like she was like, you're gonna miss the bus and he and he sort of like, you know, like red faced and blissful and said, oh okay, and brand for the bus and the last guy on. So he'd really like, if you believe in any sort of you know, wow, if you believe in anything, divine intervention,
whatever you want to believe. Yeah, and Mike believes that he was meant to be on that boss. And Mike says, we have to do something. And the other kids, and there are other kids that are saying that too. There's some older kids. One kid, Jeff Brown, he was he was ten, but he was he was he was bigger for his age, and he was a you know, he was another scrappy, intelligent young kid. They determined that they needed to do something, whether whether you know Ed would
help or not. And Ed had tried the hatch earlier and there was a lot of weight on it, so Mike gave it another try. They stacked up some mattresses so he could get a little bit more leverage, and he pushed on this thing and pushed on this thing, on this hatch, and indeed there was a lot of weight on it. But at a certain point he's straining as hard as he can. The kids that are watching, and they're all gathered around cheering him on. The kids say it moved, it moved, and so Mike makes another
appeal to Ad. He says, Ed, we've got to try this. You know, it moved. The thing moved, and d reluctantly agreed to help him. You know, remember Ed is a big, strong adult farmer, and so he and Mike worked together to try to lift this thing up. So Ed got this thing up. It was incredibly heavy, this hatch. He raised it enough for Mike to reach his hand up and to feel around on top of it. He could feel that there was weight on top of it, something
very very heavy up there. And they realized the only way they were going to get this thing open is if Mike reached his arm through and pulled off the weight somehow. Now, if Ed had dropped this thing later, when you do the math, what it was was there were two tractor batteries, and tractor batteries aren't like car batteries, you know, they weighed like one hundred hundred pounds each,
hundred fifty pounds each. And then in addition to the hatch, which was one hundred pounds, you know, you're talking about four hundred pounds of weight. So ed Ray is pushing this this four underd panns up and Mike has this little fourteen year old arm in there trying to get these things off. And they both knew full well that if ed dropped the thing, Mike would lose his arm. Yeah, but they managed to get this thing out. They managed to get the these batteries off. They dropped down and oh,
my god, you know, maybe this is it. But when they looked up there, they realized that the ladder. They had pulled up the ladder when the kidnappers left, but they they realized when they looked up there, the surface was further blocked. They had constructed the kidnappers constructed a like a four x four foot wooden box that went over the hatch and so. And at that point whatever hope he had, I think was gone. He sort of retreated into the shadows again, but Mike worked with the
rest of the kids, got up there. They broke a box spring. Mike got a piece of up box spring, crawled up into the box and started to dig and to smash at the box. They couldn't smash it. It was plywood. If you've ever worked with plywood, it's pretty strong stuff.
It is.
Mike was smashing and smashing and trying to, you know, kick a hole in it. You know, at one point, you know, another kid try to help him, and you know, down below the other kids were holding lights and cheering him on. And finally, what Mike realized was that there was at the base of the hatch, the wall, at the base of this box, where the box met the top of the chamber, there was he could see a
line of dirt. And so he started to dig dirt out of that line, out of that little tiny little crack, and pull it into the box and push it down the box into the rest of the chamber. And his thinking was that if he could pull enough of it out, maybe enough of that dirt would fall, he could create a little hole on the side of the box and eventually me get a little bit of a weight, a little bit of weight off the top of this box. And so he done and doug and dug. No one
knows how long he dug, but it was hours. It was so long that he started to lose equilibrium. He didn't know whether he was digging up or down. He started to hallucinate. At one point he had a really specific hallucination, you know, of a stairway and a hall away and coming up into you know, these kidnappers chamber. That didn't happen. You know. He was just completely exhausted.
But after many, many, many hours of digging, and at one point Mike passed out and was revived by the kids with some of the lasts of their water they poured on him to help wake him up. They give last some of the last their water, and you know, with that same cowboy spirit, he went back up and he kept digging again, and finally he managed to get that weight off the roof, a little bit of weight off the side of the roof of the box, and break a piece of it, and then break another piece
and another piece. And as he broke these pieces off the roof, sand would start to pour through quarry dirt, quarry rocks, and and he broke a bigger piece and a bigger piece, and finally this beam of light came through. And in the film, one of our subjects, one of the survivors, Larry, who was this little boy at the time, described seeing that light, you know, and again his interpretation was as a sort of a divine light, but there was some trepidation.
Right, people are still thinking the kidnappers are up there. There was one thing I'd love for you to describe. You have a psychologist talking about the hallucinations and delusions that especially with kids, can go through when they're deprived of everything and they're frightened about I think it was the girl who was one of them could clearly see the kidnappers sleeping and sleeping bags on top of this chamber.
Can you talk just a little bit about that before they're released and why they would be scared to get out of that chamber to begin with?
Yeah, yeah, any thanks for bringing that up. That's important stuff too. So you've got to remember, these kids are down there for sixteen hours. You know, what are they doing down there and in the dark, and what you hear from them in their recollections are various copa mechanisms that they're so. In the one case, one of our subjects, Larry, who was five years old at the time, he was
sort of transporting himself to safer places. He was imagining being camping with his family and those the two spaces sort of merged for him in a way. That's like almost sort of hallucinatory, you know, and he could almost you know, smell you know, the campground, the fire burning, and because that's that was Larry's happy, safe place with his family. And you know, by the way, Larry's family was also camping at the time. The rest of his
family was camping when this happened. Another little girl, who was even younger than Larry, imagined that she could see through what was the ceiling for her, you know, and then sort of up through the floor and could see kidnappers lying in what she imagined in her four year old mind kidnappers hideout would look like, which is three kidnappers weren't pajamas lying in bed with their guns, like lying in three beds above them. This, of course wasn't true.
They appers were nowhere near there at the time. You know, they had they had left. What the mind does, and particularly the mind of a child does to try to sort of make sense of this stuff. You don't really understood any of that at the time. The part I left out was this ed Ray was really concerned that those kidnappers were still up there, and he had no reason not to be, you know. That was the conservative
adult choice. They had guns. They pointed them at us, you know, they had They had made Ed Ray take off his h his clothes, and they left him in his box or shorts, you know, whether to humiliate him or or what. You know. But Ed's concern was that they weren't there and he didn't want them to get killed. And everyone respected that and understood that, and Mike understood that. But there was a point at which Mike knew, look,
we're gonna die. We have to do something. So that's when Mike sort of began to step in and take over in that regard. So but even when when they had gotten through, there is still this trepidation, a renewed trepidation about who's up there. Are they going to poke their head up and get shot. There's no reason to think that that's not going to happen, you know. They
just know they have no other choice. And so Mike, when he gets this thing open, he pokes his head up through this hole into what is at that point fading daylight, but still much brighter than anything he'd seen for a long time. So his eyes are adjusting and they're no kidnappers. He sees no kidnappers. He sees, in fact, nothing except dirt and you know, cory, sand and trees.
He doesn't know where the hell he is. And so one by one Ed hands up the kids to Mike, you know that they're all on the surface, and Ed, you know, takes over once again and shepherds them through this space to who knows where. They don't know where they are, they don't know where the kidnappers are. There. They're being super quiet. Mike is actually is not in the movie, but he can't put everything in the movie.
But Mike was actually laying back and trying to keep an eye out and going from sort of scrub to scrub, you know, in cover, to try it see if you could see anybody. But what happened was they crested a little hill and they saw a quarry, like an active working quarry, and then they saw a worker like at first they see this figure and they say, oh my god, it's one of them, and then they realize it's a quarry worker. And he says, the whole world has been
looking for you, because it's been everywhere. You know. What we don't know is what's going above ground this whole time.
This is a total what sixteen hours. Is that right?
Well, you've got eleven hours in the vans and then you've got sixteen underground. And so by this point, one of the many things that kidnappers didn't consider was that if you kidnap twenty six children, there will be a massive, massive outrage and huge news story. And that's exactly what happened. It was all over the wires. It was, you know,
chac Chila was flooded with press from everywhere. You know, there's one story of a reporter getting out of a cab from Los Angeles, you know, paying in canrash like you know, that's a long cab ride, and you know, it was covered, it was covered internationally. It was a massive, massive story. And so on the kidnappers side, they went to call on this ransom and they couldn't get through.
And you would have thought that they would have been industrious enough to find another way to make a ransom request, but they either were not or chose not to. And you know, the kidnapping side is a whole nother story.
Yeah, the kids and Ed get to safety and I'm sure you know, the authorities debrief them and the first questions are where besides are you okay, and how are you? It's you know, how do we figure out who these people are?
Right?
Who kidnapped you? Because they're out there.
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the striking things is that these kids who were kidnapped, you know, their bus was kidnapped or then loaded onto a bus and driven to the only place nearby where they can question them, and it's a jail. These kids are driven to a jail and they are you know, everyone is very kind to them. You know, these were you know, hardworking police and detective and investigators and you know, you know they're doing their jobs, but it's it's a sort of a
crazy irony. You know that they're loaded back onto a bus and driven in this place, and you know, they're clothes are soiled, and so they're given adult prison jumpsuits. So there are these images in the film of these little kids wearing these white prison jumpsuits that are rolled up, you know, in their little legs and arms. It's like it's just heartbreaking, but they were happy to be alive, and I think the trauma that was to come, it
really was. They didn't they were really quite understood at the time, and so they were questioned and then it became about who did this. They were questioned by the police and the FBI, and then they were put on another bus and driven back to jud Chua, where they were reunited with their parents. Wow, so there's a you know,
nationwide manhunt. They're trying to figure out who the hell did this, and eventually they put the pieces together and discover that the people who are responsible are not you know, there were all kinds of theories about who this could have been. You know, it's nineteen seventy six, right, so you had skyjackings at the time, you had you know, judges getting kidnapped. It was crazy. Nineteen seventy six was a crazy time, and so a lot of motives respect
and people thought it might be the Moonies. There was you know, really no one knew what the hell was going on. Some people thought they just were abducted, like by aliens. So it's really every every conceivable because they really ditches of ash and so what was what they discovered was the wasn't any set of mass or criminals. It was three young men in their twenties, and they were not the young man that anyone would have supposed that they would be. They were in fact, wealthy kids
from the Portola Valley. It was a very nice area of California, very nice. Two of them were brothers who were the sons of a local doctor, and the other one was a guy named Fred Woods. And Fred Woods was from a family that was incredibly wealthy. They were an old money family. They had one hundred and fifty thousand acres of rancho. They basically built the San Francisco Railroad. Okay, so that's it's like as old as old money can be.
And in fact, Fred had you know, many, many, many, many, many tens of millions of dollar inheritance that he would have gotten had he just waited. But he had a strange relationship with his father about money, and he wanted to do his own thing, and he was you know, the film gets into all this stuff, you know, much much more deeply. But I think these were not people who needed the money. They were people who wanted the
money and who wanted an adventure. They wanted a caper, they wanted to do something in the case of the brothers that was sort of bold and adventurous and challenging, which sort of that component of it is almost relatable. But then you go but didn't you think about the kids that we were going to get nap? Like, yeah, that didn't occur to you in your you know, in your adventure, in your venture narrative you concocted.
But you know, the way they constructed that chamber, which was a ended up being a moving truck, is that right?
Yeah? They eventually discovered that the chamber that had been constructed was in fact built from the back of an old style moving van.
Wow.
And like the toilets were in the wheel wells, they drilled out the wheel wells.
To me, the way they constructed this and you know, they've got the cage on top, and they've got these truck batteries and they pulled up the ladder, it doesn't seem to me like these three guys intended to come back. I mean, it just seemed like they were trying to make this permanent and this is you know, they're going to ask for a ransom. I don't know, it just seemed odd like they weren't going to give provisions anymore. What do you think they were thinking?
I mean, I do think they were going to come back. I think that there was you know, a ransom crime. In fact, they had. It was just a sort of half baked, insane, bizarrely complicated. You know. The film goes into some details of what their intended plan was. That you know, involved like a fully blacked out Cadillac, you know, throwing dummies out of airplanes. Like it's a crazy, crazy, wackadoo plan, and that didn't actually ultimately make a lick
of sense or have any chance of working. You know, as complicated as it was, it was ultimately like relatively idiotic. One of the sort of starting points for that plan was one of them had read an article that said that California had a five million dollar budgets or plus that year. They had decided like, well, you know what if we take a city vehicle like a school bus, we can then leverage state of California.
You know.
It's just insane, yeah, and ridiculous, you know, like they're like they're just gonna get a bag of five million bucks and drop it somewhere. But w was the idea. They claimed to have been intending to return with more provisions. I don't think they thought it was gonna last quite
so long. The brothers were impressionable early twenties guys that were I think largely under the influence of fred Woods, who was I think in many ways the ringleader for the operation, even though one of the brothers was really more logistically inclined. But fred Woods. I think it's pretty clear fred Wood's you know, as a sociopath, you know, based on how he was over the years in prison.
I mean, the movie goes into it more, you know, his behavior after the fact, but yeah, he really sort of really eliminates any question about you know, his character.
And this where they buried these kids and ed was on fred Woods's father's property. It was a quarry, right.
That's right. Yeah, So ultimately what they discovered is that the property that they have buried these kids in is owned by fred Wood's father. He owns the quarry, among you know, a whole lot of other things.
So we get enough to charge them, Police charge them, and then they go on trial. Is there any doubt that they're going to be convicted? And I have to assume that the kid's families are all there waiting to see what happens.
Yeah, I think a little bit slow, but this obviously was a big case on big trial, and so it moved relative quickly through court system and what their defense was was that there was no bodily harm. Every kid in there was severely traumatized, every single one of them. Their lives were really really fucked up by what happened to them. But the defense attorney made this argument, and ultimately they ended up doing quite a bit of time,
but they did all eventually get parole. The last one, Fred Woods, was in there a good deal longer other than the brothers, and he is now free.
So you know, and there were some powerful people who were advocating for these three guys thirty forty years later to get out. But also I was surprised that there was at least one of the survivors who thought they should be out too. But I think the insinuation was maybe that was a payoff or no.
There are allegations that seem at the very least very likely. What we know is that one of the key investigators on the case from almost years ago, a guy named Dale four, was years later hired by Fred Woods, who remember, has a tremendous amount of money. He eventually gets that inheritance when he's in prison.
It's like one hundred million, right, Yeah, he.
Got a lot of money, and so you know, he can kind of do what he wants with that money. He hires Dale four, who was an investigator on the case, so the kids remember fondly and Dale four allegedly started to approach survivors to try to influence the way that the parole hearings would go, and eventually Fred Woods has a relationship with one of the survivors. You know, it
seems like their likely was money exchanged. It's all pretty horrible and sortid, and I think pretty on brand for a guy who would come up with this crime in the first place.
Yeah, and you do go into detail about Fred in prison versus the other two brothers. You know that Fred was very manipulative and use the system. And I have not how was he able to access that money while he was in prison? Is there not a law that precludes that from happening.
I mean, I can't speak to I can't speak to the lawn. What I can tell you is, you know, you can get a cell phone in prison pretty easily. And yeah, you know Fred had cell phones. Again and again he had cell phones, and he was running businesses, a lot of businesses. He was trying to you know, he had a gold mine that he was getting going. He was buying and selling a lot of cars. In fact, at one point he bought back the kidnapping bands because
he thought they would be valuable. Yeah, it's just so dark.
So where are the three kidnappers now? Do we have any idea? Did they just vanish?
They're free, living their lives. I don't think that the survivors are scared that they're gonna that these guys are going to get them again. But I do think that many of them fell very strongly that they shouldn't and released. That was that's my own impression. Those guys are pretty old now, It wasn't my impression of the survivors actually
felt like they were going to get them. But I mean, in particular Fred Woods, the way he behaved in prison, Like you know, it's just just no indication of this guy's character has changed at all.
Right, I guess if we endier on sort of the long lasting ramifications of what happened with them. I remember the story of the woman who said she lives in a tornado ridden state and she has to you know, they needed a tornado shelter, but they couldn't put an underground, which is understandable because of everything she went through and how difficult things like that are. And there was another person who talked about being triggered by men just in
general in some ways. You know. So while they might not be scared that, you know, these guys are going to come after them, necessarily that specter's there and it doesn't go away, and so there are all of these you know, shades coming at them. So can you talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, I mean, I think the point is not that they're afraid that these guys are going to come after and the point is that these guys never left them. Everyone I talked to described in one way or another sort of leaving part of themselves down there and spending the rest of their lives fighting trying to find some way to make it to get it back. And they tried all different things, you know, all these different all
these kids went through all kinds of different shit. You know, like there was a there was you know, a lot of there was alcoholism, there was substance abuse. You know, some people were committing crimes themselves. Mike Marshall tells very candidly in the movie what he went through, and it's
a lot. Thank god, you know, some of them have been able to build lives for themselves, you know, And I think that's one of the most one of the most powerful things to me about about what happened is that in a way, it's sort of simultaneously a story about the fragility of the human spirit and how vulnerable
we are, especially as children. And then on the other hand, there's still this sort of incredible resilience, you know, and this this will to push forward, you know, to see how the survivors of this thing, despite everything they've been through, and it is a lot, have managed to make lives for themselves, and also to understand that they are that they really are still affected by the kid appen of
this day. That is just hugely powerful, you know, And I think ultimately it's a story about how how precious childhood is, you know, and how we should do everything we possibly can to protect it.
You know.
When I came to this, it was a lot you know, many years ago. When I first came to the story, it drew me in from this sort of spectacle of the true crime itself, and the deeper I got into it and older I got, you know, I got married, I had a kid, you know like and I made this movie as a new father, you know, and so it had a very different resonance, you know, for me than it did when it started. The absurdity and craziness, you know, of the crime itself, it's not lost on me,
you know. It's it's like out of a Coen Brothers movie. It's nuts. It's just completely nuts, and so are the characters. You can never understand it. But when you've done everything you can to try to try to put yourself in this position and to live in there with them and Toga, I don't understand how they're living now, you know, you realize that, you know, this movie is about a lot more than just a crime.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Sinners, All About the Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already. This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more and if you know of a historical crime that could use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words