The 67-year-old inmate sat in a small conference room in San Luis Obispo, California, this week, hopeful that a parole board would finally grant him a release date. Frederick Newhall Woods, now a bit frail, has been incarcerated 43 years for helping commit one of California's most shocking crimes.
It was back in July 1976, when three young men from wealthy families kidnapped a school bus full of children in the Central Valley town of Chowchilla. Twenty-six children ages 5 through 14 and their driver were taken at gunpoint, driven in two locked and darkened vans for over 100 miles before being buried alive in an underground prison. It remains what is reported as the largest kidnapping ever in the United States. The children were buried under dirt and rocks in a quarry — inside an old moving van with makeshift ventilation, toilets, some food and water. The kidnappers left to call in their ransom demand — $5 million, which they expected the state would pay from a recently announced budget surplus.
But the phone lines to Chowchilla were jammed with anxious parents calling and press inquiries pouring in from around the world. The kidnappers could not get through. They took a break and they napped. Meantime the children brought the kidnapping to an end when they and the driver managed to dig their way out. Their ordeal had lasted 28 hours.
Although their physical injuries were limited to cuts and bruises, the children were deeply scarred by their experience, says Dr. Lenore Terr, a San Francisco psychiatrist who described their trauma in her book, "Too Scared to Cry.