Chowchilla kidnapping

The 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping was big news at the time. I think of it when I see the end of Dirty Harry which may have been what inspired it.

Three rich boys in their 20's kidnapped a busload of 26 children aged 5 to 14 and their school bus driver. They loaded them in the back of two vans, drove them around for hours and finally buried them alive in the back of a moving van they had buried in a rock quarry owned by the father of one of the kidnappers.

The kidnappers had placed a couple of hundred-pound truck batteries on top of a metal plate they used to cover the opening on the roof of the buried van. The bus driver and the 14-year-old boy managed remove the batteries then dig through the rest of the debris covering the hole. They had been locked down there for sixteen hours when they managed to escape.

The kidnappers had carefully planned everything but couldn't figure out how to deliver the ransom note. The moving van the victims were buried in was registered to one of the kidnappers, it was on property owned by his father and the three kidnappers had all been arrested together a few years earlier.

I didn't realize it was 1993 before they did a made-for-TV movie about it, They've Taken Our Children: The Chowchilla Kidnapping. I saw it at the time. Starring Karl Malden. It's available free on Amazon Prime.

Years later, I read an article in Psychology Today about the children. They had panic attacks, nightmares and developed phobias. One shot a Japanese tourist with a BB gun when the man's car broke down in front of their house. They still had signs of trauma twenty-five years later.

The kidnappers were sentenced to life in prison. Two were paroled a few years ago. One is still on prison.