SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Chowchilla Bus Kidnapping

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human 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. What makes this case so famous, in addition to, you know, the kidnapping of 26 children on their way home from school, is that the kids in the bus driver were buried alive while the kidnappers waited for the ransom. Why don't you join them by listening to this episode?

0:40Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:50Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's here. and this is Stuff You Should Know. You know what I've been singing for two days? Wheels on the bus go round and round? No. That's a pretty good guess though. What? Da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. Chowchilla. I can't get it out of my head. The Godzilla song. Now all I'm saying over and over is Chowchilla. That's a great song. Do you remember who played it? Was that like Edgar Winter or Johnny Winter? I don't know. I think it was one of the winters. Okay. That's my guess. Okay. The long winters?

1:33Definitely not the long winters. Okay. So, Chuck, we're talking about a piece of Americana true crime history that I had no idea about, actually. And I noted, though, because of the timing and because of the location, I hit up my beloved former hippie aunt who lived in San Francisco at the time and was raising kids and said, do you remember this? She said, oh, yes, I remember this big time. She had kids that were about to be bus riding age, and she was not very comfortable with this whole jam. Yeah. It provided discomfort? Yeah. Yeah. That's one way to put it. So did you even say what the name of it was?

2:17No. It's the Chowchilla School Bus Kidnapping is what people usually refer to it as. Right. And I think this was a listener who sent this in. And I apologize because I usually make note of that so I can shout them out. But I did not do so in this case. So I missed. I know. Boo hiss. But, yeah, this was in 1976 and still stands, according to the sources I saw, as the largest domestic kidnapping in U.S. history. That's what my aunt says. Oh, yeah? No, she didn't. She also said she was not very into it. Right. I was not very comfortable by that. It's very disappointing. Yeah, the largest mass kidnapping for ransom.

3:02I'm not sure why that's a qualifier. but it is but yeah I saw the same thing too that it still stands and it was like the idea that the most of anything happened to this little town of Chowchilla in the San Joaquin Valley about 150 miles southeast of San Francisco in and of itself is significant but it was a really terrible like most of event that happened to this poor little town as we'll see alright so should we just start on July 15th, 1976? Yes. All right. We'll paint a picture for you. You already mentioned where it was, between Fresno and San Francisco, out in a part of California that had some very, very small towns at the time.

3:48It's hard to imagine anywhere in California having 4 ,600 people living there, but that was the case in the mid-'70s in Chowchilla, and it was the next to the last day of summer school, and a bus was being driven after a, because it was summer school, a little fun day trip to a swimming pool driven by 55-year-old Ed Ray. Yeah, who was a farmer there in Chowchilla himself. Apparently he baled hay like nobody's business. That's what I heard. He was married to a woman named Odessa who was a bank teller at the Bank of America, and he was apparently quite happy being a farmer and then driving kids around on the school bus.

4:25Because even after this, he continued on for another dozen years as the school bus driver. That's right. He had only dropped off a few kids at this point, and there were 19 girls and seven 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 got to ride that school bus home 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.

5:08But 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, on board. 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.

5:47And 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 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, looks like it was made in 83 somehow, that is on YouTube.

6:33And 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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.

7:20And, you know, I think we should point out a few smart things these guys did along the way because they mainly did dumb things. But the kidnappers did make them jump from the school bus to the van so they wouldn't leave footprints. Yeah. Sort of smart. In these vans, they had all the kids and Ed Ray in the vans now, two vans. and they had kind of like decked these vans out. It was kind of a shoddy manner of adding plywood partitions to keep the kids from getting out from anybody being able to see. And I think they painted over the windows. And then they drove those kids around for 11 hours in the backs of those vans with no potty breaks, no food, no water, no nothing.

8:05They just drove them around for 11 hours in July, the middle of July in the San Joaquin Valley, pretty mercilessly before finally arriving at the destination, which ultimately was only 100 miles away from where the kids had been kidnapped. I think they just wanted to disorient the kids. Yeah, I think that was kind of smart as well because they could have been, you know, 11 hours away if they managed to escape or something. One of the girls years later did say that she saw through a crack that they were up there with the AC going drinking sodas and have a good old time. And the kids and Ed Ray are back there just suffering, just terrified, obviously, of what's going on.

8:46Right. That was Jennifer Brown Hyde who said that. And she's not very happy with this whole thing still to this day from what I understand. Yeah, as you could imagine. So finally, at 3.30 a.m. on Friday morning, they were hijacked around after 3.30 p.m. on Thursday. They finally stopped driving at 3.30 in the morning, Friday morning, and they arrive at a rock quarry. They're in Livermore, California. Apparently, again, it's 100 miles away from Chowchilla. And this is what the kidnappers see as the final destination for these kids until they're ransomed off, until the authorities cough up the money.

9:27And what they've done is bury a moving van line trailer. So like a huge moving truck, the trailer part of it. They buried it a total of 12 feet underground and have covered it with four feet of dirt. And they've opened a hole, put a ladder in, and told the kids, get down there. And Ed Ray, too. That's right. And as the kids were going down, and this kind of points to the direction of how dumb these guys were and how unprepared they were, even though they, it turns out, would have planned this thing for well over a year. They wrote down their names and their phone numbers and contact and parents' names, not on a clipboard legal pad, but on the back of a jack-in-the-box wrapper.

10:14And then they took apparently some kind of piece of clothing from each kid because the idea was, once again, is that they have many, many kids that should bring many, many monies and dollar bills their way. Exactly. And the fact that they're kids means that people do anything to keep them safe. Sure. So these guys figure they've got a pretty good payday with 26 kids that they're now holding hostage in a buried moving van trailer. And in the trailer, they had done a little more than they had in the van. So they had peanut butter, Cheerios, some bread down there, some water, but definitely not enough to keep all those people alive for a very long time.

10:54They'd also thought of bathrooms. They made bathrooms in the wheel wells. and they dropped ventilation tubes with some fans to force air into the van. So there was fresh air down there, but not a lot from what I understand. Yeah, that's right. And the one faithful mistake they made was that for their comfort, they included some old box springs and mattresses and stuff for them to sit on and lay on, which would end up being their undoing. Should we take a break? I think we should because now you've got 26 kids buried in a buried trailer right now in Livermore, California at 3.30 in the morning.

11:34Not a good thing to happen. That's right. So we'll pick up with what's going on in Chowchilla right after this.

12:19All right. So in Chowchilla, that bus doesn't come back. So obviously everyone freaks out pretty quickly. an entire school bus full of kids and a very trusted man about town like people knew, you know, it was a small town people knew Ed Ray and he was a good guy by all accounts they were all missing so the very first thing that happens is they locate the school bus which had been hidden with some bamboo and camouflage but they did find the bus right away which, you know, on one hand that's good because they have a lead on the other hand, that just sends this thing into the stratosphere as far as panic goes.

12:58Sure. Because where are these kids? Yeah, and I saw also that the bus had basically no clues on it whatsoever. So it's like we found the bus, but that doesn't help at all. So, yeah, I'm sure they were panicked by that. So it became pretty clear pretty early on that the Chowchilla sheriff, a guy named Ed Gates, was going to need some help. So the FBI came to town. Apparently, they booked every one of the hotel rooms in the two hotels in town. They brought, like, all the state law enforcement agencies. Like, everybody just converged on this town to help out because it made national news, like, almost instantaneously.

13:39I saw somewhere, Chuck, that, like, this is during the bicentennial. And the bicentennial had just been going on and going on and going on. And there was still bicentennial stuff going on. And this stopped it. Like this kidnapping, news of this kidnapping stopped the bicentennial celebration, dead in its tracks. It was the end of it, not just for this town, but for the whole country. Oh, yeah. I mean, this went right up to President Ford at the time and obviously Governor Jerry Brown. They threw everything they could at it. The media descended upon Chowchilla like super fast. And because it's the media, you start getting these these terrible stories about like, well, maybe because, you know, they'd never caught Zodiac.

14:19And this was just six or seven years, I think, after the final – what would end up being the final killing. So they said maybe it was the Zodiac because they made reference to wiping – he made reference to wiping out a school bus at one point. Any tip that came in, they had to follow. There's a chew on the side of the road. So they have to track down that tip. There was a novel in 1958 called The Day the Children Banished where the gang of people abduct a busload of kids just to bring people out of town and distract them while they robbed a bank. Ray's wife worked at the bank, like you said, so they put a bank under surveillance.

14:55So there were – it was – I don't know if I would describe it as a panic because the FBI was on the scene in the state California Bureau investigation. So they were doing good work, but there was a frenzy of activity. Yeah, and I think the sheriff had all the help he possibly needed to chase down all these leads and everything. But from what I saw, there was just not much to go on. They were just dead ends left and right. And so, like, there was just an enormous amount of panic and terror in the town. Families started converging on the firehouse, the local firehouse, for some reason. And I'm not sure why, but it became like the meeting place for anybody concerned about the fate of the kids.

15:40And this is where news would first be broken. And I think the media probably hung around there, too. So you can only begin to imagine how anxious the parents were and then the town. And then apparently the whole country was anxious as well. And so it was really kind of surprising when all of a sudden at about, I think about 8 p.m. the next night, Saturday night. So the kids had been gone for almost about 30 hours, 32 hours, something like that at this point. 32 hours of terror. when all of a sudden at that quarry, some people are working and a man and a bunch of kids run over. And it turns out to be the kidnapping victims who just present themselves to a security guard at the quarry in Livermore who gets on the phone and says, we found them.

16:35That's right. Amazing. And you would think, well, pretty sensational story, but it was a very short span of time and all the kids were fine. So why is it really a story? It's a story because, as we'll see, the trauma that they suffered emotionally and how it went down and who these people were who kidnapped them. But before we get to those dum-dums, let's talk about the escape. They were down there about 12 hours and running out of food and water. The roof, you know, they had a lot of weight on this moving van roof, and those things aren't super strong. So this thing was, you know, kind of dented in and seemed like it might cave in.

17:14And they were worried that they just couldn't stay there, basically. And this is where the story – I mean, I guess we'll cover both points of view. The immediate history and aftermath, Ed Ray saved the day because he was the only adult there. So obviously he was the one that broke those kids out of there. Years later, you know, we mentioned Mike Marshall, the 14-year-old that wasn't supposed to be on that bus. And he was far and away the oldest kid there and the most capable to help. Years later, after a while of the story of Ed Ray, he finally came out and said, oh, you know, Ed Ray's a good guy.

17:50I don't want to disparage him. But, like, it was my idea, and I was the one that really led the charge to escape. And he was a big mess, kind of crying in his hands that they were doomed and dead. And he got on board and helped me, but it was really me. And the reason I kind of believe that after reading all the accounts is it took many years for him to kind of come out with this. And it felt like he even felt bad for saying so. So I think that Mike Marshall, in fact, did lead the charge to escape. Well, his account was corroborated by another guy named Larry Park, who wrote a book called The Chowchilla School Bus Kidnapping, colon, Why Me?

18:33And I don't know if he corroborated in that or in an interview later on, but he was there and he said that that's true, that that's how it went down. And on the other perspective, the fact that, like, when Ed Ray, like, lived the rest of his life, he stayed in Chowchilla. Most of those people, kids who've been kidnapped with him, stayed in Chowchilla. When he was dying, those same kids as adults now came and visited him at his bedside to say goodbye. There's plenty of opportunity for, you know, a little town to start talking, you know, whispers and that kind of thing. And that doesn't seem to have happened.

19:09And he seems to have died considered a hero as well. So my take on it, Chuck, is that he may have been gloom and doom about their prospects to begin with. And maybe it really was Mike Marshall who said, no, we need to try to get out of here. But even Mike Marshall said after a while, once Mike Marshall started to try, Ed Ray joined in and started helping. And he needed his strength. Yeah, they might not have been able to get out had a grown man not been helping them, like, push against this. Totally agree. I think we park our cars in the same garage here. Yeah, look at them. They're both heroes.

19:45So here's how they got out. They took those mattresses and stacked them up, and they took apart one of the – they kind of smashed one of the box springs, which are framed in wood, and they started using that wood as like a sort of makeshift crowbar to try and – what these guys' kidnappers had done is they put some sort of iron plate. I've seen manhole, but it was some kind of heavy metal plate over the thing, along with two industrial tractor batteries, which are super heavy, and then dirt. So there's ended up being several hundred pounds kind of weighing this thing down, this escape hatch. But they were able, after hours and hours, to finally kind of use that wood to pry open just enough to where they see starlight and dirt leaking in.

20:29and with the help of Ed Ray and his, you know, manly man strength, they were able to climb out of there. Mike Marshall was. So Mike Marshall climbed out, and then from that moment on, and so apparently also Ed Ray was really worried, and I guess Mike Marshall was too, but it was not a deterrent for him. But they were worried that there was at least one or more of the kidnappers hanging around with a gun guarding them. Oh, they didn't know what was going on there. Yeah, so there was a good chance in their minds that they were going to poke through and just be shot on sight. So they were worried about that.

21:02And luckily, when Mike Marshall poked his head up, he saw that there was no one around. There was nobody guarding it. It turned out that they had long since left. And that, so Mike Marshall had Ed Ray start handing kids up to him. And they got all the kids out and then Ed Ray out. And Mike Marshall ran into the woods to hide. So in case the kidnappers were still around, they just hadn't seen them yet. And those kids were intercepted by him. at least Mike Marshall would be able to run away through the woods and get help. Very smart. But it turned out the kidnappers weren't there, and somebody luckily was still working at the quarry, I believe including a security guard, when Ed Ray and the kids ran up and presented themselves.

21:42So that's how, and then I guess the guy got on the phone, and within moments of that happening, the news made it back to Chowchilla that they'd all been found safe and they were all alive and generally unharmed. and Ed Ray was basically automatically hailed as a hero. Carl Malden was certainly portrayed as the hero. Yeah. In the Lifetime movie. They said, do you have anything you'd like to say? And he said, just that my feet hurt. And, you know, we again want to point out this was 36 hours from beginning to end, but these kids didn't know what was going on above ground. They were hot. They were stripping down to their underwear.

22:26Carl Malden was in his underwear even in the movie. They were running out of food and water. So as a 5 to 14-year-old, I mean, Ed Ray was in hysterics. You think you're going to die down there. So it may not have been a kidnapping that lasted days and weeks, but that doesn't minimize the trauma that these kids suffered down there, completely not knowing what was going on above ground and daring to escape, not knowing if they were, all of a sudden that van was going to come speeding down the road after. It took a while until they felt safe, I think. And then on top of that, Chuck, you'd said it kind of earlier, but I think it really bears repeating.

23:05They were really worried that the roof of this thing was going to cave in. Four feet of dirt on top of a moving van roof that had been in the perpetrator's defense had been reinforced with lumber, but not very well. That's a lot of weight pushing down on this. And if you see pictures of what the thing looked like from inside, I could see how they would have been very nervous that the thing was going to cave in on them and crush them. Oh, yeah. Like the pictures of it afterward, that roof was in the process of caving in. Yeah. It was very nerve-wracking. Of course, if that would have happened, the dirt probably would have caved in and gotten some of them dirty, and then they could crawl out.

23:46I hope so. Hopefully that's how it would have happened. Who knows? But, you know, like I said, they didn't know what was going on down there. No, they didn't. So, but now they're free. They're safe. And the authorities go get them. The FBI, the sheriff, everybody's interviewing them. This is hours. This is more hours for the parents back in Chalchilla having to wait. And then there was a Greyhound bus that went and got them and brought them back. It was pretty sweet. There was a lot of donations going on. Like, apparently Pacific Bell donated not just new phones, but new phone lines because there were so many calls being made by the authorities and by the press, which we'll factor in in a second.

24:25The Greyhound bus lines donated that bus ride, which is worth mentioning. I guess the FBI donated their time. Who knows? Now they get paid. But there was a lot of banding together to support this town as they were going through this. And I just thought it was cool. There was a Greyhound bus that rolled up with everybody inside. And they got off and they're like, I'm never getting on one of those again. Well, I did kind of wonder. I was like, maybe we should send like a few, or not even vans. Send 12 cars. No buses, no vans. That's a good point. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, I get what you're saying.

25:05Or just make them walk. It's 100 miles. And, of course, the kids got to go to Disneyland. That was a big one. They got a hero's welcome. They got a parade. They got to go to Disneyland. And it was as soon as the town went from the saddest place on earth to the happiest place on earth in the span of 36 hours. Yeah, they had a huge feast. I saw that Ed Ray won a vacation, that he appeared on Hollywood Squares, which is—that's peak exposure in the mid-'70s. 76? Sure. And, Chuck, there's one other little fact that we have to say about this, that Robert Goulet recorded a song called The Ballad of Chowchilla Ray.

25:47It's so obscure, it is not on YouTube. Some either cursed or blessed soul put it on SoundCloud. Yeah, you can find – there's a cover version on YouTube from another person. I couldn't find it. But I recommend the SoundCloud Goulet version. It is a product of the 1970s in every way. It's unlistenable. I made it through most of it. Did you make it through all of it? I made it through most of it, then I skipped to the end. Okay. It was something else because it's sort of like disco, but it's also that very 70s thing when they wrote these story songs, like about the kid jumping off of the Tachahatchee Bridge or whatever.

26:32Not Tachahatchee. What was it? Billy Joe McAllister. Like they wrote these songs in the 70s, these weird sort of folk story songs. A ballad. Yeah, but not – I mean, a ballad can be like a love song. These were like folk stories. I thought a ballad meant it was like told a story. Maybe, but I think of ballads as love songs generally. But a love story. Right. Like Air Supply wrote ballads. They didn't write songs about folk heroes jumping off of bridges, you know. They should have. Sure. Well, I don't know. There's really nothing Air Supply could have done to have improved their game. They were pretty much perfect.