The smallest children were helped upward.
One at a time.
Hands reached down.
Children climbed onto mattresses.
Onto shoulders.
Toward the opening.
Michael helped pull them out.
Ed Ray helped from below.
No one knew whether the kidnappers might suddenly return.
Escape had to happen quickly.
For roughly sixteen hours, the hostages had been inside that underground vehicle.
Now sunlight was appearing above them.
Some children had spent nearly twenty-eight hours moving through the kidnapping from the original roadblock through the vans and burial.
Outside, the quarry looked strange and unfamiliar.
Heavy machinery.
Conveyor systems.
Excavators.
Industrial equipment.
Nothing told the children where they were.
They knew only that they were above ground.
Workers eventually encountered the escaping group.
Imagine being at a quarry and seeing children suddenly appear from an area where no children should exist.
Not one.
Dozens.
Dirty.
Exhausted.
Frightened.
Then a school bus driver.
The mystery that had consumed Chowchilla was suddenly solving itself one hundred miles away.
The hostages had not been rescued by police discovering their location.
They had rescued themselves.
At approximately 8 p.m. on July 16, the children were free.
Every one of them.
Ed Ray too.
All twenty-seven were alive.
The Kidnappers Wake Up
Somewhere else, the men who had built the underground prison had been waiting to make money.
Their plan depended on leverage.
Twenty-six children were emotionally priceless to their families.
The kidnappers believed that made them financially valuable.
According to later parole-hearing accounts, James Schoenfeld explained that multiple children meant the possibility of demanding millions, and that children were chosen partly because they were seen as precious and easier to control physically than adults.
The men expected the state or authorities to pay.
Their target figure became five million dollars.
In 1976, that represented an enormous ransom.
They had created an elaborate system.
A hidden bus.
Transfer vans.
An underground prison.
Evidence of identities.
A ransom note.
They apparently thought the most difficult part had been completed successfully.
The victims were hidden.
No one knew where.
Then telephone traffic destroyed the timing.
The kidnappers could not get through to deliver the demand.
They slept.
When they woke, the news was no longer about twenty-six missing children.
The children had escaped.
The five-million-dollar hostage operation had produced zero dollars.
And now every law-enforcement agency involved could focus on finding the people responsible.
The kidnappers went from controlling twenty-seven hostages to becoming fugitives.
Before Anyone Could Celebrate
Freedom did not immediately mean home.
Investigators needed information.
The children had just survived an unprecedented crime.
Police needed descriptions.
How many men?
Weapons?
Vehicles?
Voices?
Masks?
Where had they traveled?
What did the underground prison look like?
What had been taken from them?
The hostages also needed medical examination.
Authorities moved them to a nearby facility capable of handling such a large group.
Ironically, the location was associated with a correctional complex.
After being kidnapped, transported in vans and buried underground, some of the children initially wondered why they were being brought somewhere with fences and institutional surroundings.
They were given food and drinks.
They were examined.
Authorities photographed them to document their condition.
Each child was interviewed separately.
That presented another difficulty.
How do children describe masked men whose faces were hidden behind pantyhose?
They could remember voices.
Body shapes.
Clothing.
Weapons.
Behavior.
But conventional facial identification was almost impossible.
Eventually, after hours of examination and questioning, the children were loaded onto another bus.
This time it was taking them home.
Chowchilla at Four in the Morning
Almost thirty-six hours had passed since the ordeal began.
The children finally returned to Chowchilla in the early morning.
The town was waiting.
Parents.
Relatives.
Reporters.
Police.
Cameras.
Lights.
For children who had spent so long in darkness, the scene was overwhelming.
Some simply wanted one thing.
Their mother.
Their father.
Nothing else mattered.
Larry Park later remembered being carried from the bus and placed into his mother's arms.
He said hello.
Then fell asleep against her.
It was perhaps the first moment in more than a day when he truly felt safe.
Other reunions were chaotic.
Parents were searching among children.
Children were searching among adults.
Reporters wanted information.
Cameras wanted photographs.
Everyone wanted to know what had happened.
But the children themselves were only beginning to understand what they had survived.
For the public, the story looked miraculous.
Twenty-six missing schoolchildren had returned alive.
No child had been murdered.
The bus driver had survived.
The nightmare had ended.
For many of the children, however, the kidnapping would continue psychologically for decades.
Who Could Build Something Like That?
Now police had a physical location.
The quarry.
That changed everything.
The underground van was not the kind of prison someone could secretly construct anywhere.
A large hole had been dug.
A moving trailer had been positioned underground.
Ventilation had been arranged.
An access shaft had been built.
Heavy equipment was involved.
Who had access?
Who could dig at a rock quarry without attracting immediate suspicion?
Investigators began examining the site.
One name quickly became important.
Frederick Newhall Woods.
Fred Woods was 24 years old.
His father owned the quarry.
That meant access.
Investigators learned that security personnel had previously seen young men working around a large excavation at the quarry months before the kidnapping.
Woods also had connections to two brothers.
James Schoenfeld.
Richard Schoenfeld.
The three men were not impoverished criminals desperate for food.
They came from wealthy Bay Area families.
That fact fascinated the public.
Why would young men from affluent backgrounds carry out one of the most elaborate kidnappings in American history?
Police searched property associated with the Woods family.
What they found changed suspicion into something far stronger.
Evidence connected to the kidnapping.
A weapon.
Planning material.
And most remarkably, documentation laying out the scheme.
According to prosecutors interviewed decades later, investigators found a document literally functioning as a plan.
It detailed elements of the kidnapping and even considered things that might go wrong.
There was also a draft ransom note.
The crime that had looked bizarre and almost improvised from the perspective of the children had actually been planned in extraordinary detail for well over a year.
Wealthy Young Men Who Wanted More
Money was the motive.
But not poverty.
That distinction became central to how the public viewed the case.
Woods and the Schoenfeld brothers had access to opportunities many people would never have.
Their families had money.
Woods was associated with a wealthy family and property.
The Schoenfeld brothers also came from an affluent background.
James and Fred had been involved in a used-car business and financial ventures.
Later accounts indicated they had suffered losses and accumulated debt.
James Schoenfeld would later explain his thinking in terms that sounded almost unbelievably shallow considering what twenty-seven people had endured.
He had envied wealthy friends.
Friends with expensive lifestyles.