'Nightmare in Chowchilla': Notorious 1976 school bus kidnapping revisited

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Looking back at a 'Nightmare'

Fox News Investigative Unit revisits kidnapping of 26 children and bus driver in new podcast 'Nightmare in Chowchilla.'

Whenever a tornado warning forces Jennifer Brown Hyde to seek shelter in a crawl space underneath her family's Tennessee home, the event triggers a traumatic memory from her past.

Hyde was one of several school children buried alive for 16 hours in 1976 during the largest kidnapping for ransom scheme in U.S. history – a crime that still torments Hyde and other survivors more than 45 years later.

"We joke and say that's actually my wine cellar – that's how my husband gets me to go in it," Hyde said of the underground shelter at her home, noting she cannot be in a confined space for more than an hour without suffering from debilitating anxiety.

On July 15, 1976, three masked gunmen stormed a school bus in the small farming town of Chowchilla, Calif., kidnapping 26 children and their bus driver. The men drove them to a dry river bed where they hid the bus and forced their hostages into two windowless vans. The children, ages 5 to 14, were then driven 100 miles away to a rock quarry in Livermore, where they were buried alive in a truck trailer 12 feet underground for some 16 hours.  

"I remember thinking, ‘I'm gonna die in here,’" Hyde told the Fox News Investigative Unit in its new podcast, "Nightmare in Chowchilla: The School Bus Kidnapping," available now on Foxnewspodcasts.com and your favorite podcast player.

The 54-year-old Hyde, who was 9 years old at the time, said she experienced nightmares about her captors for years.

"The earliest recollection I have of them just soon after the kidnapping was that the kidnappers would line us all up, put an apple on our head and shoot and miss the apple and shoot me in the head," said Hyde. "I would see my own funeral."

The children and their bus driver managed to dig themselves out and escape. But the terror of the kidnapping – which lasted nearly 30 hours – changed their lives forever.

"The screaming to this day is burned into the audio files of my memory," said survivor Larry Park, who was just 6 years old in 1976. "The screaming and the crying. I've told people before, I can't wait until I get Alzheimer's so that some of this stuff goes away."

At 14 years old at the time, Mike Marshall was the oldest child kidnapped.

"I was just trying to figure out what the heck was going on, because if I could figure out what was going on, then I could maybe figure out a way to get around it," said Marshall.

"And then you hear the dirt and rock and the shovel hitting the top of the trailer and—we're being buried alive," Marshall told Fox News. "My thought process was if we're gonna stay down here and kick the bucket, we might as well kick it trying to get out."

The unlikely captors, brothers James and Richard Schoenfeld and Fred Woods, were directionless young men from affluent families in the Bay Area of San Francisco. They planned the kidnappings for more than 18 months in the hopes of getting easy money. But the trio never had their $5 million ransom demand met because all phone lines to the sheriff’s department were busy with frantic calls from parents and the media.

Richard Schoenfeld turned himself in eight days after the children escaped, while his brother James and Fred Woods fled the area before they were eventually arrested. The men were sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1978, but that sentence was overturned a few years later. Richard Schoenfeld was granted parole and released from prison in 2012. His brother’s release followed in 2015. Ringleader Fred Woods remains behind bars and is eligible for parole in 2024.

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In "Nightmare in Chowchilla," hosted by senior correspondent Claudia Cowan, find out who the real hero is from the kidnapping, hear an exclusive statement from one of the captors and listen in on the conversation between two survivors who were reunited for the first time in 45 years.

Cowan travels throughout California to get firsthand accounts from the people who lived through the ordeal, including several of the survivors and their parents, the sheriff who feverishly looked for the abductors, a TV news producer who covered the story, and a prosecutor who worked on the case. 

"Nightmare in Chowchilla: The School Bus Kidnapping" is available on Foxnewspodcasts.com and can be downloaded here.