Features

Parole hearing put off for Chowchilla busnapper

The Associated Press
Tuesday October 16, 2001

SAN LUIS OBISPO — A parole hearing for one of the men who kidnapped and buried a busload of school children 25 years ago was postponed Monday. 

Richard Allen Schoenfeld requested his parole hearing be put off because his father recently died and he didn’t have time to prepare, according to Denise Schmidt, a spokeswoman for the Board of Prison Terms. 

The hearing has not been rescheduled, she said. 

Schoenfeld was arrested about two weeks after he, his brother James and Frederick N. Woods, all scions of wealthy San Francisco Peninsula families, commandeered the bus on July 15, 1976, near Chowchilla in the San Joaquin Valley. 

They transferred their hostages to two vans, drove about 100 miles north and put them in a moving van they had buried in a quarry owned by the Woods family in Livermore. 

While they were trying to arrange for the ransom, bus driver Ed Ray and some of the older boys dug their way out of the truck and summoned help. 

Richard Schoenfeld turned himself in six days after the kidnapping. He has been denied parole 16 times.