California man who helped kidnap busload of kids could get parole
By Curtis Skinner
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - One of three men who kidnapped a busload of school children more than three decades ago and left them in a van hidden in a quarry could soon be paroled if California Governor Jerry Brown takes no action in the case by midnight Thursday.
Although the 26 children and their bus driver all survived the ransom plot, kidnapper James Schoenfeld, now 63, has been in prison for 37 years for the 1976 abduction in the Central California town of Chowchilla.
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials granted an initial parole approval in April.
"If no action is taken, the board's decision would move forward. Or the governor could send the decision back to the panel for further review," said Brown spokesman Gareth Lacy.
The Fresno Bee newspaper said the victims as well as two district attorneys have opposed his release.
"They buried me alive, they stole my childhood and caused me immense emotional pain over the years," victim Jennifer Brown Hyde, who was 9 at the time, told the newspaper in April.
James Schoenfeld, his younger brother Richard and accomplice Frederick Woods all pleaded guilty for their roles in the crime, which was dramatized in a 1993 made-for-TV movie "They've Taken Our Children."
Richard Schoenfeld was released in 2012 after more than 34 years in prison. Woods remains in prison, according to jail records.
The bizarre but carefully planned incident unfolded on a July day in 1976 when the children, 19 girls and seven boys aged 5 to 14, were abducted on a country road on their way back from a swimming trip.
They and their driver were herded off the bus at gunpoint into two vans and driven around for 11 hours to a rock quarry about 100 miles (160 km) away.
There they were entombed in a van that had been placed in a ditch and covered with a metal plate topped with two heavy tractor batteries and dirt.
The bus was later found hidden in a drainage ditch outside Chowchilla.
After 16 hours, bus driver Frank Edward Ray and some of the older children managed to dislodge the roof of their underground prison and dig their way to freedom.
The three kidnappers, who were in their 20s at the time, came from affluent families and hatched the scheme to get $5 million in ransom money to help recoup losses from a failed real estate deal.
(Editing by Sharon Bernstein and Eric Walsh)
