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I Wish You Were Here

Buried Alive: The Chowchilla School Bus Kidnapping

I Wish You Were Here

Michelle Cuervo

True Crime

4.91.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Three school bus hijackers. Twenty-six kidnapped children. A buried moving truck. In this episode, we dive into the unbelievable 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping and the daring escape that shocked the nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Riddle me this. If you are going to plan out a kidnapping, right, of 26 children, you and your

0:06.3

little buddies are planning how you're going to bury these kids alive, you would think that

0:10.7

a little bit more thought would go into it and that maybe possibly you wouldn't fall asleep

0:16.4

in the middle of the plan. You would think that, would you not? One of the largest mass kidnapping

0:22.2

in U.S. history is the Chow Chila kidnapping, the driver of a school bus, and the 26 children

0:28.7

on it that were aged from five all the way up to 14 years old, were kidnapped by three of the most

0:35.6

idiotic men to ever walk this world, and then they were buried alive.

0:40.3

And this story from start to finish, jaw on the floor, your jaw will be on the floor.

0:45.1

So let's just get straight into it.

0:47.1

Welcome to this episode of I Wish You Were Here.

0:52.9

Today's story takes us to Chow Chila, California, a small farming town.

0:57.0

But before we get into exactly what took place in the events of the day, we first unfortunately

1:02.6

have to talk about the three perpetrators in this case. James Schoenfeld, age 24, his brother,

1:10.1

Richard Schoenfeld, age 22, and Frederick Newhall, age 24.

1:15.6

Frederick, who we're going to be referring to as Fred for the entirety of this video,

1:19.9

born in race in California, and his family came from money, and I'm talking old money.

1:25.9

Everything that Fred wanted, he had, and it was served to him

1:28.9

on a silver platter. There was no lack of anything for Fred while he was growing up because his

1:35.1

family was the type of family that could afford anything they wanted. He never had to work.

1:40.1

He didn't know struggle. He was just raised getting pretty much every single thing in his life handed to him.

1:45.7

And the older that he got, the more that this reflected on the kind of person that he grew up to be.

1:50.6

Because, I mean, just imagine the kind of person that literally never in his entire life had to work for anything.

...

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