When Frederick Newhall Woods and two other gunmen hijacked the school bus in Chowchilla, California, it was considered the biggest kidnapping in US history.
After hijacking the bus, which returning from a summer field trip at the Chowchilla fairgrounds swimming pool, Woods and his friends James and Richard Schoenfeld transferred the 26 children and their driver into vans and drove them 12 hours away in the dark to a location where, CBS News reported, they were held captive underground in a truck trailer.
Woods and the Schoenfelds wanted a $5m ransom for the safe return of the children to their families, but their plan quickly went awry. First, jammed phone lines meant that the kidnappers couldn’t communicate their ransom demand. Then, after some 16 hours, bus driver Ed Ray and some of the older children in the group dug their way out of the trailer while the kidnappers slept and led the group to safety.