Escape from an Earthen Cell

In 90DEG heat one afternoon last week, the yellow school bus lumbered along the flat roads near the small San Joaquin Valley farm community of Chowchilla, 150 miles southeast of San Francisco. At the Dairyland Union School, Driver Frank Edward Ray Jr., 55, picked up 31 children who had just finished their six-week summer program. Ray dropped off five of them and still had several stops to go when he noticed a white van on the road ahead and slowed down to swing around it.

Three white men wearing nylon stocking masks leaped out, one of them waving two guns, and ordered Ray to stop. Two of them boarded the bus, drove it into Berenda Slough, a dry ditch off the road, and steered it into a thicket of bamboo. The gunmen then herded the driver and the 26 children--aged 5 to 14--into two vans. When that was done, the three men drove off with their terrified captives. Thus began a bizarre and, at week's end, still unexplained kidnaping that riveted the nation's attention for 36 hours.

Chilling Theories. The abduction was staged at 4:15 p.m., and it was shortly afterward that Dairyland Superintendent Lee Roy Tatom began receiving calls from parents saying, "Hey, the little guy isn't home yet." Assuming that the bus had broken down, Tatom sent people out to check the route. They found nothing, and Tatom, now thoroughly concerned, called police. Not until 7:30 did a local pilot sight the bus, hidden in the slough. Police sped to the site and found the bus deserted; the only real clues were two extra sets of tire tread marks near by. Concern turned to alarm.

In the next hours, local and state police scoured the area. FBI agents, alerted to a possible kidnaping, began pouring in, interviewing the parents of the 19 girls and seven boys who had vanished. Two California highway patrol helicopters joined the biggest search in the state's history.

As the hours ticked by with no leads, two chilling theories were formulated. Reporters wondered if the infamous Zodiac killer, who has claimed responsibility for 37 unsolved California murders and is still loose, might be involved. The other notion was that somebody had been inspired by a thriller written 18 years ago by Hugh Pentecost, The Day the Children Vanished. Pentecost's tale describes the disappearance of a station wagon full of pupils. In his story, kidnapers load the wagon onto a large truck and take the children to a remote barn. The abduction is a ruse to draw people away from the local bank.

California authorities quickly rejected several other suggested motives for the bus hijacking. They found it inconceivable that Ed Ray, a kindly, well-liked man who had been driving buses in Chowchilla for 26 years and had hauled many of the parents of the missing children, could be involved. Police also discarded the notion that a lone psychopath could control 27 captives. There was nothing to indicate that somebody bearing a grudge was responsible. Finally, police concluded that no ransom demand was likely to be received. In Chowchilla, a town of 4,550 in the midst of citrus orchards, dairy farms and fields of grain and cotton, the average income is $9,000 and few can be considered wealthy. That left only one reasonable theory: a terrorist organization had seized the bus to publicize its demands.

Around 7:30 the following evening, 24 hours after the empty bus had been found, a startled watchman at a gravel quarry near Livermore, 100 miles northwest of Chowchilla, saw a bedraggled group--all in their underwear--approaching him. The kidnaping victims had been found, and all were well.

The tale they told offered no clues to a motive for the crime. The three kidnapers had driven their captives for some eleven hours, arriving at 3:30 a.m. at the quarry. Throughout the trip the men rarely spoke. At the quarry, the men backed their vans up to a 3-ft.-wide opening in the ground. Covering both the hole and the back of the vans with a tarp, they ordered the children to descend into the entryway, asking each of them his name and age and taking a trinket or a piece of clothing from each as they passed into the darkened entrance. The narrow tunnel led down to an old moving van buried six feet under the ground as part of a landfill project after World War II; it was 25 ft. long, 8 ft. wide, 6 ft. high, and had two white plastic ventilation pipes coming out of its sides and up to the ground. The prisoners found the subterranean chamber had been stocked with mattresses, bedspreads, Cheerios, potato chips and water.

Cries for Mama. The men gave Ray a flashlight, then sealed off the entry hole with two steel plates. The air quickly grew fetid and hot, and suffocation became a real possibility. "There was a lot of crying and calling for Mama," Ray recalled afterward. Desperate, Ray and the seven boys piled up mattresses and, with great effort, pushed away the steel plates. Sixteen hours after first entering the pit, they squeezed out. Two hundred yards away they found the watchman, who alerted the police.

At 3:55 the next morning, a red, white and blue Greyhound bus escorted by two highway patrol cars wheeled into Chowchilla with the 26 weary pupils and their driver. A couple of hundred joyous parents, friends and reporters greeted them with cheers, whistles and applause. Meanwhile, the police issued bulletins for three white males traveling in two vans.

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