Some of you are too young to remember this (myself included), but in 1976, a brazen and cold kidnapping was committed in the small Northern California town of Chowchilla. It was the biggest mass kidnapping in US history.
Three young men, Frederick Newhall Woods IV, James Schoenfeld, and Richard Schoenfeld hatched a plan to kidnap a bus full of school children, bury them alive underground in a quarry, and give the state limited time to come up with $5,000,000, worth $25m today.
They executed the plan, forced the bus driver and the kids at gunpoint into a large van, and drove them 100 miles away to the quarry owned by Woods' father. Everyone was buried underground in a moving truck with very limited food and water. A ransom note for $5,000,000 was written. It is not clear if they would allow the kids to die if the money wasn't paid, but that's what the note threatened. Nobody could have survived very long under there, given the limited water.
Unfortunately for the three, the 55-year-old bus driver and the oldest boy, who was 14, were able to stack mattresses in the truck and force open the top of the truck, which had been weighted down with hundreds of pounds of objects. They then dug their way out of the quarry, and the entire group of 26 kids and the driver escaped. This all occurred while the kidnappers were sleeping, who were planning to deliver the ransom note upon waking.
The three were sentenced to 27 life sentences without the possibility of parole. However, an appeals board overturned the "no parole" part, due to the fact that nobody had significant physical harm.
Fred Newhall Woods is on the left, the two brothers James and Richard are on the right:
Here's a good summary of the story on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_C...lla_kidnapping
The two brothers were paroled in 2012 and 2015.
Woods was the only one remaining in prison, as he did not show any remorse for what he did, and also was caught several times conducting unauthorized business from prison. However, he was just granted parole. It will be reviewed by the full parole board prior to becoming official, but right now it's looking like he will be a mostly free man again.
The strangest part? Woods didn't need the money -- at least not long term. He was the heir of two super rich families, and had a trust fund. Most notably, he was a descendant of Henry Mayo Newhall, who is considered the father of southern California's Santa Clarita Valley, as he owned all of the land there at one point. The town of Newhall, CA (part of Santa Clarita) is named after him, and so are a local high school, several roads, and a hospital. Fred Newhall Woods is his great-great-grandson, but Woods' father is also from a very rich family. Despite his horrendous crime, Woods was not cut off by his family, and still has a ton of money to this day. He was later sued for what he did, but only had to pay out a small percentage of his fortune.
Now he'll get to walk out of prison at age 70, and live out his golden years in the lap of luxury. In the meantime, most of the kids, now in their 50s, remain traumatized to this day.
2019 parole denial article: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/08/us/ch...rnd/index.html
2022 parole approval article: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/28/us/ch...ole/index.html
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