Local News

Linda Yee, Reporting
CHOWCHILLA (CBS 5) ― It was a story that stunned the world. In 1976, a bus full of school children disappeared in broad daylight--kidnapped from their small Central California town. What ever happened to them and their captors?

November 23, 1975. It was the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Three young men showed up at the Cal-Rock gravel quarry in Livermore and began digging. A guard noted in his logbook: "men still working."

In another eight months, the world would know why.

Dave Rezendes, who was security chief at the time, made a call to the plant manager, who "informed me that one of the young men was Mr. Woods," he recalled.

Frederick Woods was the son of the quarry's owner, and had come to the remote property with friends James and Richard Schoenfeld.

"He (has) full rein of the property," the plant manager told Rezendes, "and can drive the tractors and the equipment, and that they're not to be bothered."

July 16, 1976. It was late afternoon in Chowchilla, just north of Fresno. The Dairyland District school bus was bringing 26 children home from a summer school outing. 19 girls, seven boys, ages five to fourteen. Suddenly a white van pulled onto the country road and blocked the bus. When driver Ed Ray tried to go around, the kidnappers pulled their guns.

"They got on the bus, with masks on their head, or nylons, and guns. And got us, and told us to get in the back of the bus," Michelle Robison Bishop remembered. She was 11-years-old at the time.

The kidnappers drove the bus off-road to hide it in the tall reeds next to an irrigation canal. The bus driver and children were loaded into two vans, with soundproofing and blacked-out windows. The kidnappers then drove them around for the next 11 hours.

"Everybody was crying," Bishop said. "Screaming, wanted to go home, wanted their moms and dads."

"And I remember riding for hours in that van," said Jodi Heffington. She was ten at the time. "The smell of it being horrible because being sick in there and they, you know, they have to go to the bathroom."

Finally the vans stopped. They were at the Livermore quarry. The kids were ordered out one at a time, at gunpoint.

"I remember Richard Schoenfeld putting a gun to my stomach," Heffington said.

"There was a big bright light," Bishop said, "a white sheet and a man with a gun pointed at your head, and said, 'How old are you, tell me your name and something your parents would know about you.' And after they got their information, they threw us down in a hole."

The hole was cut into the roof of a small moving van buried eight months earlier by Frederick Woods and the Schoenfeld brothers. 26 school children and their bus driver were buried alive. To the world, they had simply vanished.

Frantic parents rushed to Dairyland elementary school, while police swarmed the area for clues.

"Everybody's spending their time together," said one parent in a TV interview, "talking about why, and how come."

The sheriff's phone lines were jammed. When the kidnappers tried to call in their ransom demands they couldn't get through. Meanwhile, 22 hours into the kidnapping, air was running out inside the children's tomb -- and it was caving in.

"One of the beams collapsed," Heffington recalled.

"The dirt started falling," Bishop said. "We're gone. We're dead."

The bus driver and children began piling mattresses to the ceiling. It took 8 hours to dig out. It was late evening. They had been missing for 30 hours. A quarry worker was shocked to see 26 dirty children knocking at the door of his Quonset hut. They were saved.

The next day, police began digging out the moving van, with the name "Palo Alto Storage" on the side. But they still didn't know who did it until security chief Dave Resendez gave them his log book.

"We were able to connect the dots from the log," he said, flipping to the notation that reads: "Palo Alto Storage" -- written by a guard who had seen the van drive in eight months earlier.

"When we saw these," said Rezendes, "especially when it mentioned the van, that was the aha moment when we said 'Whoa! We've got some information, that I think definitely would help the sheriff's department.'"

Frederick woods and the Schoenfeld brothers were arrested within two weeks after the kidnapping. They are now serving life terms. In some ways, so are the children.

"I always locked the doors," Heffington said. "I always used to turn on every single light in the house. I made sure all the car doors were always locked." Even today she said.

Like many of the kids, Heffington fought off depression. She got married and had children. She now runs her own beauty salon.

Not everyone was so lucky.

"That's why I turned to drugs," Bishop said, "just to numb everything."

Michelle Bishop spent two years in prison for drug dealing -- one of several children who had trouble with the law. She still has nightmares, and was afraid to go near our CBS 5 news van because it has blocked-out windows.

CBS 5: "So you basically lived in fear?"

"Um-hmm," Bishop nodded.

CBS 5: "For the rest of your childhood?"

"Yep," she said.

CBS 5: "And even into adulthood?"

"Yep," she said.

And Heffington said, "They take from these victims things they can never get back."

Heffington said the kidnappers need to stay in prison. And to make sure, she goes to their parole hearings. She believes there should be no second chance when you hurt a child.

"When I go to these parole hearings, they look at me as a 43 year old woman and they say, 'Well you're a grown woman.' No, I was a 10-year-old child. And in that hole with me there was five year olds."

The prisoners have been denied parole more than a dozen times. They remain at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo.

When asked, "What did the kidnappers take from you?" Jodi responded, "They took my trust. And they took my ability to fully believe, to trust somebody. There is evil out there. And I do know it exists -- because it did happen to me."

Jodi is the only one of the victims who testifies at the parole hearings. And though she said she's tired of going, she expects to be there again next month when Richard Schoenfeld comes up for parole.

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