Richard Schoenfeld

Richard Schoenfeld was 22 years old when he and two other young men held 26 Chowchilla schoolchildren and their bus driver captive in a buried moving van before the captives made a daring escape. Now, nearly 36 years later, the convicted kidnapper has been granted parole.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced Friday it has been ordered by the court to release Schoenfeld, 57, from state prison immediately. The California Supreme Court on Thursday declined to review an appellate court order granting Schoenfeld parole.

"As such, CDCR does not have any legal option other than to release inmate Schoenfeld and will do so," said state prison system spokesman Luis Patino.

Exactly when and where he will be freed has not been made public. His two accomplices in the mass kidnapping - older brother James Schoenfeld and their friend Frederick Woods, both now 60 - remain behind bars at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo. There is no certainty that they ever will be paroled.

Richard Schoenfeld is the youngest of the three and had also been held at the Men's Colony. He had been up for parole numerous times and last year was granted a date of 2021. Seeking earlier release, he successfully appealed the 2021 date, because the parole board had deemed him eligible, to a state appellate court over the objections of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The Supreme Court declined to intervene.

Among those backing his release were the lead prosecutor and the lead sheriff's detective assigned to the kidnapping case. Both are now retired.

Wealthy backgrounds

The kidnappers, who grew up in wealthy families on the Peninsula - the Schoenfelds in Atherton, Woods in Portola Valley - were sentenced to life in prison. They pleaded guilty to the kidnapping-for-ransom scheme that stunned the nation for both its audacity and potentially tragic outcome.

They set up a roadblock, where they stopped a school bus from the San Joaquin Valley town of Chowchilla at gunpoint. With their faces covered in stocking masks, they transferred their captives to vans and drove about 100 miles northeast to Livermore, where they buried them in a moving van in a rock quarry with little air and little to eat and demanded $5 million ransom. The children ranged in age from 5 to 14.

After 16 hours underground, the captives dug themselves out when their captors fell asleep. Richard Schoenfeld turned himself in eight days later. The other two kidnappers were captured less than a week after that.

The school bus driver who led the children to their freedom, Ed Ray, died last month at 91.

A victim remembers

Jennifer Hyde, one of the victims, was 9 years old at the time of kidnapping. Now the mother of two boys, 10 and 13, she can't sleep without a nightlight. And when a tornado warning sounds in the Tennessee town where she lives, she's supposed to head down into a storm shelter, but she can't go. Her boys wondered why their mother kept such close tabs on them until Hyde finally shared her past with them.

Not surprised at release

When told by a reporter that Schoenfeld's release was imminent, she said she wasn't surprised. "I knew he would be the first to be let go," she said by phone. Not only was he the youngest, but he seemed to be the follower, not the leader, of the crime, she said.

A deeply religious woman steeped in her Christian values, Hyde said she has struggled with her feelings knowing that Schoenfeld probably wouldn't be in prison forever.

"I don't know if I've forgiven him," she said. "But I have moved past my anger and hate.