Relevant text:

On July 15, 1976, twenty-six children and their bus driver were kidnapped in Chowchilla, California by armed men blocking the highway around 4 p.m. The students, who were attending Dairyland Elementary School for summer school were being dropped off on their way back from a field trip at the Chowchilla fairgrounds' swimming pool. The kidnappers hid the bus in a drainage slough and drove the children and bus driver around in two vans for 11 hours, eventually taking them to a quarry in Livermore, California. There they were imprisoned inside a buried moving van containing a small amount of food and water and a number of mattresses.

After many hours, bus driver Frank Edward "Ed" Ray and the children stacked the mattresses, enabling some of them to reach the opening at the top of the truck, which had been covered with a metal plate and weighed down with two 100–pound industrial batteries. They wedged the lid open with a stick, Ray moved the batteries, and they removed the remainder of the debris blocking the entrance. After 16 hours underground, they emerged and walked to the quarry's guard shack. All were in good condition. Investigation and arrests

The truck was registered to the quarry owner's son, Frederick Newhall Woods IV, and under hypnosis the bus driver was able to remember the license number of one of the vans. Woods and his accomplices, Richard and James Schoenfeld, were arrested as they attempted to flee to Canada.

The kidnappers had been unable to deliver their ransom demand because phone lines were tied up by families searching for their children. A draft ransom note was also found. Some details of the crime corresponded to details in "The Day the Children Vanished", a story written by Hugh Pentecost and published in Alfred Hitchcock's Daring Detectives (1969). A copy of this book was in the Chowchilla public library, and police theorized it had been the kidnappers' inspiration.

All three were sentenced to life in prison. Richard Schoenfeld was released in 2012. James Schoenfeld was granted parole in 2015 without a parole date being set. Frederick Woods remains in prison; his next possible parole hearing will be in the fall of 2015.