Editing 1976 Chowchilla kidnappers (section)

== Kidnapping ==
On Thursday, July 15, 1976 at around 4 p.m., school bus driver Frank Edward "Ed" Ray was transporting 26 students from the Dairyland Elementary School home from a summer class trip to the Chowchilla fairgrounds swimming pool when a van blocked the road ahead of the bus. Ray stopped the bus and was confronted by three armed men with nylon stockings covering their faces. One of the men held a gun on Ray while another drove the bus; the third man followed in the van.

The kidnappers hid the bus in the Berenda Slough, a shallow branch of the Chowchilla River, where a second van had been stashed. Both vans had the windows in the back painted black and interiors reinforced with paneling. Ray and the children were herded into the two vans at gunpoint and then driven around for 11 hours before eventually being taken to a quarry in Livermore, California. There, in the early morning hours of July 16, the kidnappers forced the victims to climb down a ladder into a buried moving truck that they had stocked with a small amount of food and water and a number of mattresses.

Bus driver Ray and the older children eventually stacked the mattresses, enabling some of them to reach the opening at the top of the truck, which had been covered with a heavy sheet of metal and further weighed down with two 100-pound industrial batteries. After hours of effort, Ray and the oldest boy, 14-year-old Michael Marshall, managed to wedge the lid open with a piece of wood and move the batteries; they then dug away the remainder of the debris blocking the entrance. Sixteen hours after they had been forced inside the buried truck, the group emerged and walked to the quarry's guard shack near the Shadow Cliffs East Bay Regional Park.